The psychology of migration: loss, grief, and the reorganization of identity

After moving to another country, a person may begin to behave in ways they hardly recognize. Someone sociable becomes quiet. An experienced professional hesitates over a simple explanation. A joke occurs to them, but by the time they find the words, the conversation has moved on. Then they speak to someone at home and recover something of their old ease. They wonder: Have I changed, or is it harder to be myself here?

How we experience who we are is, in a sense, also bound to our relationships. Other people know our work, understand our humor and remember what we have been through. We do not have to explain everything. Our name means something to them. In a new country, we carry a history that the people around us have yet to learn.

What happens to our sense of self when we leave the familiar world that knew us?

I want to approach this question through the losses involved in leaving, the feelings that sometimes accompany a better life, and the gradual work of finding a place for oneself again. A psychodynamic perspective invites us to consider meanings that are difficult to recognize or admit. The same behavior can serve different purposes in different people. Understanding it requires attention to the particular life in which it occurs.

The circumstances of leaving

A student leaving Azerbaijan, a parent working abroad to support a family, someone joining a partner and someone seeking safety may have very different experiences of migration. One can return whenever they wish; another cannot safely return at all. One arrives with a job and somewhere to live, while another has neither. Even members of the same family experience the same move differently. A decision to leave is sometimes made under considerable pressure. A person who wants to stay finds that work, family responsibilities or safety make leaving necessary. Someone else arrives in a country they have long wanted to live in and is surprised by the sadness they feel. Having chosen the move, they believe they have forfeited the right to grieve. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2025) describes migrants’ mental health as shaped by experiences before departure, during the journey and after arrival, including the conditions in which people live and work.

When someone left matters, too. Moving between Soviet republics, leaving during the upheavals of the 1990s and moving abroad for work or education today involve different political and economic circumstances. Forced displacement raises further questions about danger, choice and return. These experiences cannot simply be treated as equivalent to a planned move for education or employment. An Azerbaijani perspective therefore needs to begin with the person whose experience we are trying to understand. Azerbaijani citizenship does not tell us someone’s ethnicity, first language or family circumstances. The country’s ethnic and linguistic diversity is documented by the Council of Europe’s Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (ACFC, 2024). Where a person grew up, the languages spoken at home, their financial circumstances, religion and sense of belonging all deserve attention.

Losing the world that knew us

Before migration, much of a person’s life is often understood without explanation. Colleagues know their work. Friends know the disappointments behind a particular decision. Someone close hears the hurt in an otherwise ordinary sentence. Relationships in a new country need time to acquire that depth.

One loss, I think, is the ease of being known. A new acquaintance may encounter us mainly as someone who struggles with the language, needs help or is looking for work. We know ourselves as a very different person. Someone whom others once consulted now needs assistance understanding a letter. The experience is painful when it seems that a whole previous life has ceased to count. Salman Akhtar’s (1995) psychoanalytic review, “A Third Individuation: Immigration, Identity, and the Psychoanalytic Process,” examines the relationship between immigration and changes in identity. The question I want to explore here is how our relationship with ourselves changes when it becomes harder to make ourselves known to others.

Homesickness sometimes includes missing the person we were able to be at home. A remembered street or meal brings back the ease of speaking freely, having a joke understood or knowing how to behave without rehearsing every step. Alongside asking what someone misses about a place, I would want to ask how they felt about themselves there.

Being known can also feel restrictive. Some people feel confined by a family reputation, expectations about gender, a past relationship or a version of themselves that others refuse to reconsider. The relative anonymity of a new country offers room to live differently. The same familiar world contains people we miss and expectations we are relieved to escape. Both deserve a place in our understanding of the grief of leaving.

Living in another language

Knowing a language and feeling at ease in it are different experiences. Someone can arrange appointments, complete forms and do their work, yet struggle to express hurt, affection or humor. Having to prepare a sentence changes how they participate in a conversation. A person who seems withdrawn may have a great deal to say.

For people from Azerbaijan, this is not always a straightforward move from a mother tongue into a foreign language. Azerbaijani, Russian, Talysh, Lezgi and other languages form part of the country’s linguistic landscape (ACFC, 2024). They occupy different places in people’s family lives, education and work. A language that means home to one person means school or official encounters to another. Its emotional significance needs to be understood within that person’s history.

In clinical work, I try to understand which people and relationships are associated with each language. In which language was someone comforted? In which did they learn to defend themselves? What happens when they describe the same experience in another language? For one person, a familiar language brings a feeling closer. For another, a language learned later provides enough emotional distance to speak about something painful. These are possibilities to explore together.

Learning a new language sometimes changes roles within a family. In some households, a child becomes more fluent in the language used at school than a parent and takes on everyday interpreting. Alongside the child’s growing competence, we need to notice the responsibility they are being asked to carry. For a parent, being able to manage an appointment or a conversation independently is a meaningful change. It matters to their sense of competence as both an adult and a parent.

Work, family and changing roles

An increase in income does not necessarily bring an immediate improvement in self-esteem. Someone who worked in their profession in Azerbaijan might earn more abroad while grieving the loss of that work. Their qualifications are not recognized, language requirements restrict their opportunities or a suitable job is difficult to find. Comparing salaries alone tells us little about what the change means to them.

In psychodynamic language, a hurt to one’s sense of worth is sometimes described as a narcissistic injury. Here, the term concerns self-esteem; it does not imply a personality disorder. An urgent need to prove oneself, relentless work or withdrawal from others are among the responses whose possible connection to that hurt deserves attention.

Nancy McWilliams’s (1999) approach to case formulation considers defenses, feelings, recurring relationship patterns and the ways people maintain self-esteem. Applying that approach to migration, I would ask what a particular behavior does for this particular person. With someone who works to exhaustion, for example, I would want to understand what they hope to achieve and what they fear they might feel if they stopped.

Migration also changes some couples’ familiar arrangements. For example, the partner who previously provided most of the income might be temporarily unable to work, while the other learns the language or finds employment sooner. In such circumstances, questions about dependence, authority and asking for help enter everyday decisions. Gratitude and resentment sometimes sit close together. Tensions that remained unspoken before the move become harder to avoid. Some couples, meanwhile, discover that they can rely on each other in ways they had not previously needed to.

Relations with family in Azerbaijan deserve the same attention to detail. Who looks after an aging parent each day? What financial contribution is expected from the person abroad? What responsibilities have other relatives taken on? Who had the freedom to leave, and who stayed because someone needed care? Describing a culture as family-oriented cannot answer these questions. We need to understand the family’s actual resources, agreements and relationships.

Age, gender, sexual orientation, health, disability and religion also matter to what a move makes possible or difficult. One person finds greater freedom to live openly; another deeply misses a community they relied on. The destination matters, as do the relationships available there. Familiarity with a language or culture can help without settling every question of belonging.

The guilt of living better

One experience has particularly held my attention while thinking about this subject: a person’s circumstances improve, yet it becomes difficult to enjoy the improvement.

A person moves to a country that offers a safer or more comfortable life, or possibilities they did not have before. One might expect relief. Instead, even the most ordinary pleasures can bring sadness: a good meal, a beautiful place, a quiet weekend. Not because they are not enjoyable, but because enjoying them can feel strangely disloyal to the people who stayed behind.

It can also become difficult to tell loved ones about the good parts. The person speaks more easily about the cold, the loneliness, the bureaucracy, everything that is wrong. These difficulties are often real. But complaint can also protect against more troubling thoughts: Do I deserve to live well when they cannot? If I love my new life, does that confirm that I have left them behind?

Some migrants, I think, allow themselves to leave but not quite to prosper. They improve their circumstances and then go on living as though they owe a debt for having done so. Within this conflict, unhappiness can feel like a way of remaining loyal, even without the person quite knowing why: If I do not enjoy this life too much, perhaps I have not abandoned you.

One possible meaning of a complaint, then, is a wish to protect the relationship. A person tries to avoid hurting someone, make the difference between their lives feel smaller or reassure a loved one that their bond continues. Concealing good news sometimes reflects a fear of appearing boastful, facing further requests for money or discovering that one is no longer understood. We would have to listen carefully to know which of these meanings, if any, is present.

Guilt sometimes concerns real responsibilities. A broken promise, an unfair division of care or a neglected need deserves attention. Denying oneself pleasure does little to meet those obligations. Supporting a loved one and allowing some enjoyment in one’s own life are compatible. Part of the psychological work is to understand why, for this person, they have come to feel otherwise.

Complaint, longing and the need for protection

Sometimes, seeing everything in the new country as bad and everything left behind as good makes conflicting feelings easier to bear. If there is nothing to love here, the gains of leaving need not be acknowledged. Dismissing the old life as worthless offers another possible protection: there seems to be less to mourn. These are possible defensive meanings to explore.

The person’s actual living conditions remain central to any such interpretation. Discrimination, insecure employment and uncertainty about the right to remain in a country are substantial reasons for distress. Criticism of the new country is not, by itself, evidence of a defense. The WHO (2025) identifies income, housing, legal status, discrimination and community support among the conditions relevant to migrants’ mental health.

Politics enters personal life through the reasons for leaving, the possibility of returning and the safety of speaking openly. The Advisory Committee’s 2024 report on Azerbaijan documented restrictions on freedom of expression and association and their consequences for people belonging to national minorities (ACFC, 2024). Where fear of speaking openly has been part of someone’s life, caution and silence deserve to be understood in that context. We need to listen to establish what these experiences have meant to that person. Understanding a defense includes understanding when it became necessary. In the first months after a move, setting feelings aside sometimes helps a person find housing, secure work and keep a family going. If setting feelings aside becomes a rigid habit, it can also restrict affection, curiosity or pleasure. Something that once helped the person cope now limits their life.

Grieving the life left behind

Migration can involve mourning a daily life we no longer share with people we love. They are still alive, and the places we miss still exist, but our participation in that life has changed. Visiting during an illness, hearing news in person or meeting without much planning becomes more difficult. A telephone call preserves contact without fully replacing the experience of being together. Pauline Boss’s (1999) concept of ambiguous loss concerns losses in which absence and presence are difficult to reconcile. A loved one is physically absent but remains psychologically present, or is physically present but no longer psychologically available in the same way. In her conversation with Krista Tippett, Boss discusses migration and the continuing attachment to people and places from which one is physically separated (Tippett, 2020). Applied here, the concept draws attention to the experience of being apart while remaining deeply connected. It helps explain why the grief sometimes returns even after a person has built a satisfying life elsewhere.

A wedding, a funeral, a parent’s aging or a child’s growth sometimes brings the distance into focus again, renewing a familiar homesickness. This does not, by itself, mean that the person has failed to adapt. Persistent hopelessness, an inability to experience pleasure or serious difficulty managing everyday life, however, deserve individual assessment. Grief, depression and traumatic stress can coexist. Understanding their relationship requires attention to what the person has experienced and how they are living now. Calling all migration traumatic obscures differences that matter. War, violence, persecution and threats to life can profoundly disturb a person’s sense of safety. The losses of a voluntary move need not involve such experiences, although choosing to leave does not rule out a history of trauma. Neither migrant status nor displacement alone establishes a trauma-related diagnosis.

Finding a place for oneself again

Migration also opens possibilities. Some people find greater freedom to speak, pursue work that matters to them or form relationships beyond familiar expectations. Their attachment to home continues. At times, however, the freedom itself feels like disloyalty to the life and people they left.

Part of the psychological work, as I see it, is making room for conflicting feelings about both places. A person loves Azerbaijan and is unhappy with conditions there. They feel more at ease in the new country and miss their family intensely. They want to return and they want to stay. Insisting that one feeling must cancel the other keeps them in a prolonged argument with themselves.

Returning sometimes requires its own adjustment. Life at home has continued during the person’s absence. Relationships, routines and expectations have changed, as have some of their own habits and boundaries. Becoming close again involves recognizing those changes. Expecting return to restore everything as it was leaves little room for the people they have become.

In therapy, I try to understand what a person has lost, what they have gained, what feels difficult to admit and whom they imagine they might hurt by being content. I remain open to answers I do not expect. Their work, housing, legal security and available support belong in this conversation, too. Therapy cannot decide in advance whether they should stay, return or feel at home.

Sometimes, a person notices that they are finding a place for themselves through ordinary moments. A conversation with a new friend feels easier. They trust their competence at work again. They tell someone at home about a good experience without immediately adding a complaint. They miss their old life without taking that feeling, each time, as evidence that leaving was a mistake. How does a person come to know themselves away from the world that knew them? Part of the answer, I think, lies in relationships where more of their history becomes known, in finding ways to use their abilities and in allowing themselves mixed feelings about the life they left. Each person finds their way through this differently.

Perhaps part of migration is not only grieving what was lost. It is also learning that one does not have to remain unhappy in order to remain connected.

References:

1. Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. (2024). Fifth opinion on Azerbaijan (ACFC/OP/V(2024)1). Council of Europe. https://rm.coe.int/5th-op-azerbaijan-en/1680b267a1

2. Akhtar, S. (1995). A third individuation: Immigration, identity, and the psychoanalytic process. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 43(4), 1051–1084. https://doi.org/10.1177/000306519504300406

3. Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjhzrh4

4. McWilliams, N. (1999). Psychoanalytic case formulation. Guilford Press.

5. Tippett, K. (Host). (2020, July 16). Pauline Boss—Navigating loss without closure (No. 857) [Audio podcast transcript]. In On being with Krista Tippett. The On Being Project. https://onbeing.org/programs/pauline-boss-navigating-loss-without-closure/

6. World Health Organization. (2025, September 1). Refugee and migrant mental health [Fact sheet]. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/refugee-and-migrant-mental-health