How can bereavement psychologically destabilize a migrant?

This is how migratory grief affects the emotions of those who leave their country.

Migrating to another country is almost always a challenge, but normally, the emphasis is placed on the material difficulties that everyone must overcome to adapt to that new environment: getting the necessary documentation, finding a job that allows one to meet the expenses, understanding the taxation of that State, etc.

But having only these types of problems in mind means overlooking another of the difficulties that many migrants face. another of the difficulties that many migrants have to overcome: migratory mourning.. Here we will see what this psychological phenomenon consists of and how it affects migrants.

The psychological implications of migration

Migrating is much more than changing place of residence.. It implies, among other things, detaching oneself from the social context in which one has become accustomed to living and having to adapt to a new one, and often this is compounded by the challenge of crossing cultural, linguistic and even administrative barriers.

As a consequence of this, any migratory process has a psychological impact, for better and for worse.

The change of environment to which a person is exposed brings with it changes in the way he or she thinks, feels and interacts with the world and with others. Y When these changes are very profound and affect the migrant's sense of identity in a significant way, it can also be said that the person is a "migrant".In this case, it can also be said that the person is experiencing a bereavement, in a similar way to that felt by someone who loses a loved one. Let's see why.

Why do we talk about migratory grief?

In psychology, bereavement 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 affective bond. We usually talk about bereavement 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 cause us to grieve if we know that we will be left with after-effects (we "say goodbye" to our body as we knew it), and the same happens with closing the business we have been running for years, or after a break-up with a partner, etc.

In short, grief is the product of the tension that exists between the expectations, memories and elements of identity to which we were attached in the past, and those that we feel the need to embrace in the present, after having lost something important to us.

Whoever has lost a family member must not assume that part of the positive experiences of their daily life will come from the physical presence of that person; whoever loses an object of sentimental value must give up the idea of being able to keep it and pass it on 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 raison d'être, and we must accept that we are giving them up.

Considering all of the above, it is not surprising that the fact of migrating goes hand in hand with a grieving process. In fact, is characterized by many different mourning processes.. Those who go to live in another country must assume that they will miss many of the important events for their social circle of reference (friends, relatives...), that some of their skills will be less valuable in the new place of residence (and that they will have to learn others), that they will probably not buy the house in which to "settle down" in the place they had imagined all their lives, etc.

In many cases, the migrant even suffers the loss of a good part of his identity. For example, he/she may notice how in this new country he/she is perceived on the basis of racial parameters to which he/she was not subject before, so that he/she is no longer "an average citizen". She may also notice that everything is more difficult for her and that she needs to seek help, so she loses much of the autonomy she had gained when she entered 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 often come as a surprise: being such subtle psychological processes based on abstract thinking, they are often overshadowed by the material and administrative challenges of moving to another country (getting a visa, getting an official apartment rental, getting clarified with the public health system...). However, in the medium and long term, they can become as or more important for the individual than the latter.

That is why many people who move to another country find that they need to go to psychotherapy.. Even if they have not developed a diagnosable psychopathology, the discomfort they feel significantly detracts from 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 the new city. Fortunately, in therapy it is possible to overcome these grief 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 in the care of adults, couples, families and adolescents, and I currently offer online therapy sessions by video call.