Immigration Trauma
Immigration can cause trauma.
The reality is that most immigrants are leaving their home country due to traumatic experiences such as war, poverty, or natural disasters, and the violence endured during the journey to come to a new country is also often traumatizing.
Immersing in a different culture, language, and way of living comes both with grief and joy.
In this new country, acculturation is necessary for immigrants to access society, institutions, and new and better opportunities. All these might come along with the assimilation of the new culture. In parallel, there is grief for the loss of identity, heritage, and familiarity for the pressure that comes with belonging.
Children of immigrant parents, for example, deal with the stress and trauma caused by the pressure of making their parents’ sacrifice worthwhile. They are constantly trying to prove themselves, pushing themselves to work harder. These children might act as their parents' caregivers, helping them move through the system and across cultural and language barriers that are not easy to overcome.
As adults, they may find difficulty asking for help and setting boundaries since they have carried this burden from such a young age. Depression, anxiety, insomnia, somatic pain, or impostor syndrome are not uncommon in these situations. Adding to this situation, first-generation stress or trauma can come from code-switching, meaning having to deal with two versions of yourself, one at work or at school and another at home, trapping them in the dichotomy of never being “American enough” outside of the home and never being enough of their parent’s culture of origin inside their homes.
As psychotherapists, we learn to understand mental health from a cultural and identity lens. As a Colombian woman myself, who is providing therapy in the United States, I need to understand how that feeds my way of showing up in the therapeutic relationship. It is a process of constant learning and unlearning, knowing that I might share personal experiences with my immigrant clients and that we all have our own unique paths. I am constantly moving back and forth between the collective, systemic, familiar, cultural, and individual experiences in the therapeutic space.
I keep myself informed about the ethnicity and culture of my patients, and I believe openness, compassion, and curiosity are my greatest tools as a practitioner. I understand how overwhelming it can be to have to explain yourself, as we have to do constantly as a minority outside of the microcosmos of therapy, so I am humble and I use culturally appropriate tools to help everyone feel seen and safe with someone that can relate to their experience.
Mental health issues are filled with stigma and prejudice for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous People of Color). There is a lack of education about what it means to go to therapy. For example, in the Latinx community, people often would rather rely on religion than therapy when they are dealing with difficulties.
In the current political climate, my duty as an immigrant psychotherapist is to provide a safe space for immigrants and BICOP.
I consider myself privileged to be able to provide therapy in Spanish and English because I know the language barrier might be one of many barriers to accessing mental health care. I also offer sliding scale services in select cases. I want to be able to give immigrants and BIPOC some faith in the system that constantly marginalizes them, so they can feel they are not alone and that there are more professionals in the mental health community with whom they share identities. Above all, I want to be part of the collective mobilization to eliminate stigmas in the community around being “dramatic” or “crazy” for seeking therapy. We can reframe that as an act of courage.