How Can Grief Psychologically Destabilize A Person Who Migrates?
Immigrating to another country is almost always a challenge, but normally, emphasis is placed on the material difficulties that everyone must overcome to adapt to that new environment: obtaining the necessary documentation, finding a job that allows them to cover the expenses, understanding the taxation of that State, etc.
But keeping in mind only those types of problems means overlooking another of the difficulties that many migrants must overcome: migratory grief. Here we will see what this psychological phenomenon consists of and how it affects migrants.
Migrating is much more than changing your place of residence. It implies, among other things, breaking away from the social context in which one has become accustomed to living and having to adapt to a new one, and often to this we must add the challenge of crossing cultural, linguistic and even administrative barriers.
As a consequence of this, any migration process has a psychological impact, for better and worse.
The change in environment to which a person is exposed brings with it changes in their way of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world and with others. AND when these changes are very profound and significantly affect the migrant’s sense of identity, it can also be said that this person experiences grief, in a similar way to how someone who loses a loved one feels. Let’s see why.
Why is there talk of migratory grief?
In psychology, grief is considered a process of adaptation to a new reality in which day-to-day life can no longer offer contact with something or someone with whom the person has established an emotional bond. Normally we talk about mourning when a loved one dies and we feel very sad and melancholic, but in reality This psychological phenomenon also encompasses other types of experiences.
For example, suffering a major injury can also make us go through grief if we know that we will have consequences (we “say goodbye” to our body as we knew it), and the same thing happens with closing the business that we have been running for years, or after a breakup, etc.
In short, grief is the product of the tension that exists between the expectations, memories and elements of identity to which we ascribed in the past, and those that we see the need to embrace in the present, after having lost something important to us.
Anyone who has lost a family member finds it necessary not to assume that part of the positive experiences of their daily life will come from the physical presence of that person; Anyone who loses an object with sentimental value must give up the idea of being able to keep it and give it to future generations, etc.
Thus, grief appears when the emotional inertias that had been part of our life and had given it meaning suddenly lose their reason for being, and we must accept that we renounce them.
Seeing all of the above, it is not surprising that the fact of migrating goes hand in hand with a grieving process. In fact, It is characterized by containing many different grieving processes. Anyone who is going to live in another country must assume that they are going to miss many of the important events for their social circle of reference (friends, family…), that some of their skills are going to have less value in the new place of residence ( and that at the same time he is going to have to learn others), that he will surely not buy the house in which to “settle down” in the place that he had imagined all his life, etc.
In many cases, the migrant even suffers the loss of a good part of his or her identity. For example, you may notice how in that new country she is perceived based on racial parameters to which she was not subject before, so she is no longer “an average citizen.” She may also notice that everything is more difficult for her and she needs to seek help, so she loses much of the autonomy that she had gained with entering adulthood.
Thus, the fact of emigrating comes with various types of renunciations of elements that one took for granted until that moment, and many of these losses usually come by surprise: since they are such subtle psychological processes based on abstract thought, they tend to be overshadowed by the material and administrative challenges that moving to another country entails (getting a visa, renting an official apartment, getting clear with the public health system…). However, in the medium and long term, they can become as or more important to the person than the latter.
That is why many people who move to another country notice that they need to go to psychotherapy. Even if they have not developed a diagnosable psychopathology, the discomfort they feel significantly erodes their quality of life, which is especially hard if they do not yet have a group of friends or if there are no relatives living in that new city. Luckily, in therapy it is possible to overcome these grieving processes through personalized intervention programs that help to properly manage emotions.
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I am a psychologist with more than 10 years of professional experience caring for adults, couples, families and adolescents, and I currently offer online therapy sessions by video call.
