How can grief destabilize a person who migrates?

Migrating 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: get the necessary documentation, find a job that allows you to meet expenses, understand the taxation of that State, etc.

But keeping in mind with only those kinds of problems means overlooking Another of the difficulties that many migrants must overcome: the migratory grief. Here we will see what this psychological phenomenon consists of and how it affects migrants.

• Related article: "Grief and sadness: how to deal with them?"

The psychological implications of migration

Migrating is much more than changing your 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 many times to this must be added the challenge of crossing cultural, linguistic and even administrative.

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

The change of environment to which a person is exposed brings with it modifications 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 identityIt can also be said that that person experiences a grief, in a similar way to how someone who loses a loved one feels. Let's see why.

• You may be interested in: "Ulysses syndrome: chronic stress in immigrants"

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 can no longer offer to be in contact with something or someone with whom the person has established a bond affective. Usually we speak of grief when a loved one dies and we feel very sad and melancholic, but actually This psychological phenomenon also includes other types of experiences.

For example, suffering a major injury can also make us go through a duel if we know that we will have sequelae (we "say goodbye" to our body as we knew it), and the same goes for closing the business that we have been running for years, or after a breakdown of partner, etc.

Ultimately, grief is the product of the tension that exists between expectations, memories, and elements of identity to which we ascribed ourselves in the past, and those that we find ourselves in the need to embrace in the Present, after having lost something important to us.

Whoever has lost a relative finds it necessary not to assume that part of the positive experiences of their day to day will come from the physical presence of that person; whoever 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, the duel 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.

Looking at all of the above, it is not surprising that migrating goes hand in hand with a grieving process. In fact, is characterized by containing many different grieving processes. Those who are 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 ...), which part of their skills will have less value in the new place of residence (and which at the same time will have to learn others), that surely he will 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 person even suffers the loss of a good part of their identity. For example, you may notice how in that new country it is perceived from racial parameters to which it was not subject before, so it ceases to be “an average citizen”. He may also come to notice that everything costs him more and he needs to seek help, so he loses much of the autonomy that he had gained with entering adulthood.

Thus, the fact of emigrating comes with various types of renunciation of elements that one took for granted until that moment, and many of these losses tend to come by surprise: being so subtle psychological processes and based on abstract thinking, they are usually overshadowed by challenges of the type material and administrative that involves moving to another country (obtaining a visa, obtaining an official apartment rental, clarifying with the public system of health…). 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 find that they need to go to psychotherapy. Even if they have not developed a diagnosable psychopathology, that discomfort they feel erodes their quality of life in a way. meaningful, which is especially hard if you don't have a group of friends yet or if there are no family members in that new city living. Fortunately, in therapy it is possible to overcome these grieving processes through personalized intervention programs that help to properly manage emotions.

• Related article: "What is Cultural Psychology?"

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