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The part of migratory grief almost no one talks about

Soraya Mohamedi Mohamed · Psychologist, specialist in Migration and Social Inclusion · Founder and chair of Ubuntu Canarias

Sometimes it's not just a country you lose. It's also part of who you were.

If you've migrated, you've probably felt something hard to explain at some point. It's not just sadness about what you left behind. It's more the sense of not quite fitting in anywhere: not in the place you came from, because you no longer live there and things keep changing without you, and not in the place you're in now, because you still don't feel recognised. That has a name: migratory grief. And although it sounds technical, it actually describes something very simple: losing important parts of your life — your everyday language, your status, your people, the way you used to move through the world without thinking — and having to rebuild them somewhere else, almost always starting from less.

It's not just nostalgia

Many people think migratory grief simply means missing your home country. But it's usually deeper than that. It has to do with who you were there and who you're allowed to be here. Maybe in your country you were someone known in your neighbourhood, with a recognised trade, with a routine you knew by heart. And here, suddenly, you have to prove who you are all over again, even though you've already proven it before, in another language, in front of people who don't know your story. That contrast is exhausting. And feeling that way isn't weakness: it's a natural response to a real loss.

How it shows up, even if you don't call it grief

Not everyone experiences it the same way, or with the same intensity. But there are signs that come up again and again: tiredness that isn't explained just by work or a new language, wanting to withdraw even when people are around you, feeling like you're “too much” in conversations even when you understand what's being said, moments of irritability with no clear cause, or the suspicion that something in you isn't working properly, when what's actually happening is that you're carrying a loss nobody has helped you name. It's easy to mistake all this for “not adapting” or “not trying hard enough.” But often it isn't that. It's unprocessed grief, disguised as tiredness.

Does it have stages? Yes, but not like a manual

Migratory grief is sometimes explained as if it had fixed stages, one after another, like a staircase. The reality is messier. Even so, there are patterns that repeat in many cases, and knowing them can help you understand what's happening to you.

At first, when everything is new, there's usually a mix of relief and euphoria: you managed to leave, you've arrived, there's a sense of achievement. It's common at this stage for a person to downplay what they've left behind, almost as a way of being able to keep going. Over time, once the novelty wears off and everyday difficulties begin — the language, the paperwork, the job that doesn't come or isn't what you expected — a harder stage tends to appear, where tiredness builds up and many people start wondering whether it was worth it. Later, if there's time and some support, a settling-in stage usually arrives: it doesn't mean the grief disappears, but that the person finds a way to live with both parts of their story without being paralysed by them.

And there's a part that's almost never told: this process isn't linear. You can be in the settling-in stage for months and then, suddenly, a particular date, a phone call, a song, can bring back the weight of the beginning. That's not a setback or a failure. It's part of how grief works.

An example, to make it easier to understand

Let's imagine, purely as a hypothetical example, a woman who was a nurse in her home country. Here, while she waits for her qualification to be recognised, she cleans houses. The job lets her get by, but every day she notices that no one around her knows she once knew how to place an IV line or calm down a frightened patient. Over time, she starts to feel that part of her is fading away. It's not that she's stopped being a nurse. It's that, in her day-to-day life, no one sees her as one. That kind of silent loss is much more common than it seems, even though it's almost never talked about openly.

It shows in the body too

Migratory grief doesn't stay only in the mind. Many people notice they sleep worse, get headaches or stomach aches with no clear medical cause, or feel more tired than their routine would explain. This doesn't mean they're ill. It means the body is also processing a loss, even if the mind hasn't named it yet. If this sounds familiar, it doesn't hurt to mention it to a health professional, if only to rule out other causes and to stop carrying, alone, the suspicion that “something isn't right” without knowing what it is.

When the family lives it too, each in their own way

If you migrated with children, or if you have family born here, you've probably noticed that everyone carries this differently. Children who grow up in the host country tend to have a different relationship with the country of origin: they know it through your stories, maybe through a visit, but not the way you lived it. This can create a certain distance within the family itself, even when the love is the same. It's not unusual for a parent to feel their story is fading with each generation, while their children feel they're expected to represent a culture they only partly know. Neither is wrong: they're simply two different ways of inhabiting the same migration story.

What can help from the outside: recognition

One of the things that eases this kind of grief the most is feeling recognised for who you were, not only for what you do now. It doesn't take a big gesture: sometimes it's enough for someone to ask what you used to do, or to let you describe what your life was like there, without rushing and without judging. That recognition doesn't sort out your papers or get you the job you're looking for, but it does remind you that who you were still counts, even if it doesn't show up on your CV here yet. If you work or collaborate with migrants, keep this in mind: before talking about employment, there's often a need for a space to talk about the loss first. That's not an unnecessary extra step. It's part of the process.

What you can do, if you're going through this

There's no formula that works the same for everyone, but there are things that tend to help: naming what you feel, even if it's hard — saying “this is grief, it's not that I'm failing” already changes something; looking, even in small ways, for ways to keep alive the part of yourself you left behind, like speaking your language with someone, cooking what you used to cook there, or staying symbolically connected to your trade while you wait to practise it fully; and talking about your past life with someone who wants to listen, without feeling you have to sum it up in one sentence to make it fit. And also, if you can, seeking professional support when you need it. Asking for help to get through grief isn't a sign of weakness. It's actually a way of taking care of yourself while you rebuild your life somewhere else.

There's something else that tends to help, even if it's hard at first: allowing yourself to feel both things at once. You can be grateful for the opportunities here and, at the same time, deeply miss what you had there. These aren't contradictory feelings, even though it can sometimes feel like you have to choose one. Accepting that both fit is part of making peace with your own story. It also helps not to compare your process with that of other migrants you know: every path depends on different reasons for migrating, on administrative status, on the support available, even on the stage of life when the change happened. Someone else “doing better” or seeming to have gotten over it sooner says nothing about what you have to live through, or how much time you need. And if you have children, telling them about your migration story, including the hard parts, tends to be more helpful than shielding them from it.

A final thought

Migratory grief doesn't disappear overnight, and it doesn't necessarily have to disappear completely. Over time, many people learn to live with both parts of their story, the one from there and the one from here, without one having to erase the other. If you're in that process, you're not failing. You're going through something real, something that has a name, and that many other people have also lived through.

Soraya Mohamedi Mohamed · Psychologist, specialist in Migration and Social Inclusion