Between Two Worlds: The Immigrant Experience and the Self
Between Two Worlds: The Immigrant Experience and the Self
The Quiet Corner | FS Psychotherapy
The word immigrant is a strange one. It is a legal and administrative category that says something about where you were born and where you now live, but very little about the interior experience of what that actually means. It tells you nothing about the courage it took to leave, the grief of what was left behind, the daily effort of building a life in a place that didn’t start out as yours, or the slow and sometimes disorienting process of becoming someone who belongs, partially, to more than one world.
If you have made a life in a country that is not the one you grew up in, you will know that the immigrant experience is not a single thing. It is a whole landscape of experience, with its own particular joys, its own particular losses, and its own particular silences.
The Decision to Leave
For some people, the decision to emigrate is freely and enthusiastically made. An opportunity, an adventure, a deliberate choice to build something new somewhere else. For others, it is driven by necessity, by economic hardship, political instability, family circumstances, or the quiet impossibility of being fully yourself in the place where you were born.
Most people’s experience sits somewhere between these poles, a mixture of choice and constraint, of wanting and needing, of excitement and fear. And whatever brought you to where you are now, the experience of having left carries its own weight, one that doesn’t simply resolve once you have settled in.
The Labour of Belonging
Building a life in a new country is work. Practical work, certainly, navigating systems, learning or refining a language, establishing yourself professionally, finding your way around the bureaucratic and social structures of a place that wasn’t designed with you in mind. But it is also emotional and psychological work, much of which tends to happen quietly, without acknowledgement or support.
There is the work of learning a new social code, of understanding the unspoken rules about how people relate, what is considered polite or rude, how much of yourself it is appropriate to share and when. There is the work of managing the gap between how you are perceived and how you experience yourself, of being seen as foreign in your adopted country while feeling increasingly foreign in your country of origin too.
There is the work of building trust and intimacy across cultural difference, of finding people who can meet you fully rather than just partially. And there is the often invisible work of carrying your culture of origin inside you, maintaining connection to a language, a set of values, a way of being in the world, that the people around you may not share or fully understand.
Identity in Between
One of the deepest questions the immigrant experience raises is the question of identity. Who am I, when so much of what I thought defined me, my language, my landscape, my community, my cultural reference points, is no longer the water I swim in?
For some people, emigration prompts a flowering of identity, a liberation from constraints that felt limiting at home, and a freedom to become more fully themselves in a new context. For others, it produces a more unsettling sense of fragmentation, of not quite knowing which version of themselves is the real one, or of feeling that they are always translating themselves for an audience that can only partially receive them.
Many people experience both of these things at different times, and in different measures. Identity is not fixed, and the experience of living across cultures tends to make that very visible.
What Gets Left Unsaid
There are things that immigrants often carry that are hard to voice, partly because there is little cultural space for them, and partly because naming them can feel like ingratitude or complaint.
The grief of missing people who are ageing and unreachable day to day. The guilt of not being present for family milestones, or for the slow emergencies of parents growing older. The complicated feelings about a country of origin that may have changed, or that you may have idealised in your absence. The anger at being treated as other in a place you have made your home. The exhaustion of always being slightly on, slightly visible, slightly aware of your difference in a way that people who have never emigrated rarely have to be.
These things deserve to be said. And they deserve to be heard by someone who can hold them without minimising or resolving them too quickly.
Therapy and the Immigrant Experience
In my practice, I work with adults who have made their lives across cultures, and I have a deep personal and professional interest in what that experience involves. I understand something of the landscape from the inside, of what it means to carry more than one cultural self, to belong partially to more than one world, and to navigate the particular emotional terrain that comes with that.
Sessions are available online across the UK and internationally, in English or Italian, wherever you are in the world, with the exception of USA and Canada. If any of this has resonated, I’d warmly invite you to reach out for a free 20-minute consultation, a gentle, no-obligation conversation to see whether working together might feel right.
Federica Savoré is a BACP Accredited psychotherapist and COSCA Practitioner offering counselling, supervision and training in Aberdeen and online across the UK. To get in touch, visit https://www.fspsychotherapy.com/contact-me
