The Psychological Implications of Migration

We understand the concept of migration as the change of residence from one place to another. This has always existed. Recently we can see through the media that it has intensified thanks to political, economic, social or environmental problems such as the fires that occurred in California.

There are different types of immigrants who are forced to leave their country. For example: deportations, political asylum, change of residence, job changes that require changing cities or countries, changing environments or trying “luck.” These may or may not be permanent.

The migratory grief

The immigrant may encounter serious internal obstacles to integrating into the new environment. It usually presents mechanisms of dissociation and idealization due to the new environment that is experienced and devaluation and persecutory anxieties due to the place and people and goods that have been left behind.

Dissociation serves to avoid grief, resentment, remorse and, above all, the depressive anxieties that become more acute when it comes to voluntary migration. The motivations for migration influence the internal conditions to face it, taking into account the previous personality of the individual and the vital moment in which they find themselves.

Migration is one of the most important experiences that cause stress, anxiety and depression, including dissociative or psychotic disorders due to the person’s adaptation changes; There are also feelings of excitement and hope. In any case, there is in the individual: frustration, uncertainty and even guilt.

But what is this frustration due to? This may occur because if the situation that caused your change of residence was forced, for example the displacement of towns at war, developing more emotional problems that you did not have with you; These people face such strong stress that they can feel fear, confusion, doubts and emotional pain. The individual migrant presents family strangeness and feels guilty for the family and friends he left behind in his place of origin. This affectation is influenced by age, sex, culture and by leaving their country of origin..

For example, there is a very strong impact on children as it creates feelings of insecurity, fear and nostalgia for the people they have left behind. To leave is to die a little and both those who leave and those who remain must grieve.

The stages of grief

Migration is like a death and that is why it has to go through the same stages as mourning:

There is a difference in the processing of grief in a normal or pathological way. There are two types of guilt, a persecutory one that can present with somatizations, melancholy and even psychosis; and another depressive that presents a true reparative tendency that allows the correct elaboration of grief.

The melancholy identification with the one who is leaving is similar to the process of mourning for the death of someone ambivalently loved or a place or home. Hypochondriacal symptoms and somatizations may appear when there is the departure of someone very important and significant to the person. This may occur due to the desire to control the absent object in the body..

An experience to grow

As we can imagine, this process is very similar to that of losing and acquiring new experiences. The way to deal with these stages is to talk about it, really accepting how you feel. When psychological pain is not tolerated as depressive suffering, it can become a persecutory feeling, so leaving is experienced as an “expulsion from home” even when it was one’s own decision.

Afterwards, the pain of separation can be experienced maniacally with feelings of guilt, but there can also be a feeling of success for abandoning those who remain.. On the other hand, people who remain experience feelings of abandonment and loss with feelings of anger towards the one who is migrating. This can occur due to various situations, from envy to feeling abandoned by the person.

The experience of insecurity felt by recently arrived immigrants is determined not only by uncertainty and anxieties in the face of the unknown, but also by the inevitable regression that these anxieties entail; It makes them feel helpless.

There are several losses that immigrants experience, such as their very important belongings, the temporary loss of ego capacities and their own identity; due to the impact of migration. It is crucial that there is a reliable figure who helps neutralize these anxieties and fears of the new that can be similar to when the baby feels alone when looking for the mother’s face. A reliable figure can be the fact of starting to make links with other people who have already experienced something similar or creating a community, for example, of the same language. If you do not establish these types of links, there is the probability of leisure, vices, addictions to “justify” your feelings or not feeling.

Bowlby (1960), when studying attachment theory, observed that by having reliable figures in children’s lives, separation anxiety calmed. When the person has internalized good objects, it is easier to adapt to the new environment, but they still need to find people with whom they feel well received and protected.

Persecutory reactions are related to these internal objects. The individual thus resorts to different defense mechanisms such as dissociation to counteract these persecutory and depressive anxieties; At the same time, also avoid feelings of confusion due to not having a clear distinction between the old and the new.

Another mechanism is the idealization of the new place you arrive at, which causes hypomanic states because they are transitory. In this mechanism we see depressive anxieties related to the feelings of loss of what is being left behind and the manic adaptation that achieves rapid identification of the new place by trying to forget one’s own..

Others, on the contrary, do not want to leave behind their customs or language and seek to relate to people who have the same place as their origin. The mother tongue becomes very important when migrating to a place where a language other than the mother tongue is spoken. The mother tongue is linked to childhood experiences, feelings related to the first object relationships, to parents.

Another important circumstance is that sometimes migration causes us to relive our Oedipal situation since they can symbolize the two places of parents in which an ambivalent feeling and conflicts of loyalties arise. Remember that if you need support or are in a similar situation, do not hesitate to ask for help.