Therapy for Immigrants and Adult Children of Immigrants
“And I. I gather my resentment, my fury that there’s nowhere in the world that’s magically free of racism and Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia. I take that burning question and channel it toward new different questions: How can I fight injustices in this place where I have community, where I’m choosing to stay? How can I build a life here that feels, rooted in my principles, even if it will never be perfect?”
As an immigrant or an adult child of immigrants, you may be holding so much on your shoulders without even realizing. Being used to these feelings does not make the weight any less heavy.
You worry about losing a language, a home, a history. You worry about forgetting, being forgotten, misremembering, never knowing it at all. You feel like you’re constantly translating yourself, but somehow never enough to feel seen. No matter how much you look for that sense of belonging, there are parts of you that feel like they just don’t fit. Sometimes you feel like you’re losing who you are.
Your family, your culture, your country: that history lives in your body even if you didn’t directly experience it. Sometimes there are burdens that we inherit from the ones that came before us, and parts of you might be carrying fears, survival instincts, and undigested and unprocessed grief that just keeps going on and on, generation after generation.
You fear for your family and friends and grieve the moments you miss out on being away from them. You grieve a life where you could have stayed, a life path is so easy to imagine, and at the same time so hard to visualize. You get overwhelmed watching the news and navigating all the paperwork, dealing with visas and status adjustments, navigating anxiety and depression while you wait. Your sense of safety and belonging feels shattered at times, like it could be taken away from you at any point.
You feel guilty and frustrated with your family’s expectations of you, you always thinking about their experience and their emotions, them somehow never thinking about yours. That is another act of translating, another act of shutting away parts of yourself. You feel guilty and frustrated with yourself, thinking what other people would do in your place, feeling like it all had to have been “worth it”, feeling like you need to just “toughen up” and “get over it”.
You find yourself replaying family narratives of sacrifice and loss, and struggling to separate away to find your identity away from the expectations and stories you grew up with.