The Psychology of Migration: Grief, Identity, and Building a Life Away From Home

I was seventeen years old when I left Dominica. What I remember most clearly is that I did not understand I was leaving in the way I understand leaving now.

Just a few months earlier, I had graduated from high school. I had a plan. I was going to become a nurse. It was not some vague childhood dream. For two summers, I had already volunteered as a hospital ward helper because I wanted to begin learning the world I hoped to enter. I could see the path ahead of me. I would study, I would train, and I would become a nurse. And I imagined doing it at home.

Home, at that time, was busy and loud. I lived in Roseau, the capital of Dominica. Space was tight. The streets were crowded. It was not idyllic in the way people sometimes romanticize Caribbean life, but it was familiar. More than that, it was my neighborhood.

I walked to school. My friends lived within walking distance. I went to Pentecostal church every Sunday. My mother cooked. My sister went almost everywhere with me. At seventeen, I would never have considered any of those things psychologically important.

Now I understand that this is often what home is made of. Not geography alone, but predictability, people, rhythm, language, familiar streets, and the ability to move through your day without having to think about how to belong in it.

I Thought I Was Going Back Home

My father had access to the United States and had wanted to file immigration papers for me for years. My mother had always refused. Her reasoning was very much my mother. Before I left her house, she believed I needed to know how to take care of myself. In her words, I needed to be able to "wash my own underwear."

It makes me laugh now, but underneath it was something serious. If I was going to leave home, I needed to know how to survive without her. At seventeen, she decided I was ready.

So I traveled to Barbados for my U.S. immigration processing. I remember the morning at the airport. My stomach was in knots. My mind felt unsettled, but I could not identify one particular thought causing it. I simply felt sick. I boarded the plane, went through the process in Barbados, and waited to find out whether everything would be approved. Strangely, during that waiting period, I remember hoping it would all work out quickly so I could go back home.

Because in my mind, that was what came next. Go to Barbados. Get the paperwork. Return to Dominica. See my friends. Sleep in my bed. Say goodbye properly. Then leave. Plans are oh so good.

Everything was approved. I received my green card, and that same day arrangements were made for me to travel directly to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

I would not be going back to Dominica first. There would be no last walk through the neighborhood. No final evening with my friends. No sitting in my room and understanding that this was the last night of the life I knew. No real goodbye.

My old life did not gradually end. It stopped. And my new one began that weekend.

Moving Countries Changes More Than Geography

The flight to St. Thomas was only several hours, but I remember being intensely alert. I did not sleep. My body seemed to understand that something important was happening before my mind did.

I also had an image in my head of what St. Thomas would look like. No one had shown me pictures. I had not researched it. Somewhere in my imagination, I had created something that looked more like Florida.

Then the plane began to descend. Another island. Hills everywhere. Homes climbing the hillsides. Smaller than Dominica. Beautiful in its own way, yes, but not what I had imagined. And somehow, that mattered.

When I walked out of the airport, I felt as if I were floating. I moved through the airport. I entered my father's home. We drove around the island. People spoke to me, and I answered them. I saw the roads, the houses, the water. I was physically there, but I did not feel fully inside my own life.

Years later, after becoming a psychiatric clinician, I would learn more about experiences such as depersonalization and dissociation, those strange states in which a person can feel detached from herself or from the world around her. I cannot diagnose the seventeen-year-old version of myself from one period of my life, and I do not need to. I can simply tell you what I felt. I felt absent while physically present. I was there, but some part of me had not arrived.

I remember standing outside beneath the Caribbean sun and thinking: This is not the sun I know.

Of course, it was the same Caribbean sun. But psychologically, it was not.

The streets were different. The hills were different. The houses were different. The air belonged to a place where I did not yet know who I was. For almost three weeks, I cried. I had difficulty eating. My sleep was disrupted. My concentration suffered. I became quiet around family members and people I was meeting for the first time.

And everyone seemed to expect me to be happy. I had received a green card. I had arrived in America. I had opportunity. I was fortunate. Why would I be sad? But sadness was almost all I had available.

Gratitude and Grief Can Exist Together

For a long time, I looked back at that girl and thought she had been ungrateful. My mother certainly tried to make sure I understood what had been given to me. Dominica, she told me, had little to offer me compared with what was now possible. I had an opportunity. I should not “form the fool.” I needed to become somebody. No one was coming to rescue me. Make something of what you have been given. And in many ways, she was right. My life expanded because of that opportunity. But age has allowed me to understand something that seventeen-year-old me could not explain.

Gratitude and grief are not opposites.

Both can be true. A person can receive an extraordinary opportunity and still mourn what that opportunity costs. I was not only leaving a country. I was leaving a future I had already imagined there. My grief was not simply, I miss my mother. It was also, I knew who I was becoming, and now I do not know where that person goes.

That is different.

And this is one of the places where the psychology of migration becomes so important to me.

Psychologists often use the word acculturation to describe the process of adapting to another cultural environment. It is a useful word, but the lived experience can be much bigger than learning new customs or becoming comfortable in a new place.

Migration can interrupt routines, relationships, language, identity, social roles, belonging, and the expectations we have for ourselves. It can even interrupt the story we had already begun writing about our future.

And sometimes the person leaving has very little time to psychologically prepare.

I had immigration documents. I had a plane ticket. I had somewhere to live. What I did not have was a conversation about what leaving might feel like.

Migration Is a Life Context, Not a Psychiatric Diagnosis

This distinction matters to me now as a psychiatric nurse practitioner.

Migration is not a mental illness. Homesickness is not major depressive disorder. Cultural grief is not PTSD. Feeling overwhelmed after moving to another country does not automatically mean someone has an anxiety disorder. Feeling detached for a period of time does not automatically mean someone has a dissociative disorder.

Human beings respond psychologically to major change.

That matters. But we also have to be careful not to explain every symptom by saying, “Well, she migrated.”

Major life transitions can become the context in which depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, sleep problems, ADHD difficulties, mood symptoms, or other psychiatric concerns emerge or become more visible.

So if someone who recently migrated came to me describing persistent crying, poor appetite, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, or feeling disconnected from life, I would want to understand the whole picture.

When did this begin? Is it getting better or worse? How much is the person struggling to function? What is happening with sleep? Are there moments of pleasure or connection? Are there panic symptoms? A trauma history? Previous episodes of depression? Changes in energy? Substance use? Medical contributors?

I would also want to know what support exists. What was lost? What remains familiar? What changed after migration?

And then there is another question I consider equally important:

What does this distress mean within the cultural world this person came from?

See, culture should help us understand suffering. It should not become the diagnosis. But diagnosis should not erase culture either. Both matter.

Sometimes We Grieve a Future

One of the losses of migration can be difficult to see because it is not always something we can point to. We understand losing a person, a home, a possession, or a relationship. But human beings also grieve futures.

At seventeen, I had already imagined mine. I had volunteered in the hospital. I had decided I would become a nurse. I knew where my mother was. I knew who my friends were. I knew the streets.

My life had continuity. Migration interrupted that continuity.

I still wanted to become a nurse, but almost every other part of the story had changed.

And perhaps this is one reason migration can feel so psychologically disorganizing even when the move brings opportunity. The person is not only asking,Where am I? She may also be asking, Who am I here? How do people understand me? How do I speak? What parts of myself still fit? What has to change? Who am I becoming now?

At seventeen, I had no language for any of this. So I did what many immigrants do. I adapted.

The Version of Me Who Adapted

My mother and I spoke several times a day. Those calls were my lifeline. I pleaded to come home. I was not angry with her. I missed her.

Eventually, things became easier. But something else happened during those years. I became extremely responsible. Guarded. Driven. Achievement-focused.

My mother's message about opportunity became deeply embedded in me: You have been given something. Do not waste it. Become somebody. No one is coming to save you. So I worked.

I found another path into nursing. I completed my BSN and became a registered nurse. Then my MSN. Then my psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner training and board certification. Now I am pursuing my doctorate. On paper, that is a story of successful adaptation. And it is. I am proud of that story. But adaptation usually has a story underneath it too.

Even now, I sometimes wonder how much of that relentless drive began with a seventeen-year-old girl trying to tell her mother:

I understand what you gave me. I did not waste it. Thank you.

That does not make ambition pathological. Achievement can be meaningful, joyful, and deeply chosen. But sometimes migration attaches additional meaning to achievement. Success can become gratitude. Security. Repayment. Proof. Survival.

And if we never examine what achievement means to us, we may not notice when something that once helped us survive becomes difficult to put down.

Migration, Code-Switching, and the Work of Speaking

Migration also changed how I use my voice. Years later, I am still aware of my accent. I code-switch. I change how I pronounce certain words so I will not be misunderstood. Sometimes I am thinking about how I am speaking while I am speaking. It works. It helps me communicate across different cultural spaces. It is adaptive. But adaptation takes energy. Sometimes I do not want to calculate how I should sound. I do not want to translate myself before another person has even had the chance to misunderstand me. Sometimes I simply want to speak. To exist without editing. To sound like myself.

This, too, belongs in conversations about migration and mental health.

Not because code-switching is inherently unhealthy. It can be an intelligent, sophisticated social skill. But when we move between cultural worlds, ordinary things that once required no thought can become conscious tasks.

Speech. Dress. Humor. Food. Parenting. Manners. How much emotion we show. What counts as respectful. What counts as assertive. What success should look like. The immigrant is not only learning another place. Sometimes she is learning another version of herself.

When Does a New Place Become Home?

St. Thomas eventually became familiar. But it took years. More than ten. I have now lived there longer than I lived in Dominica, and still there are moments when I hesitate to call it home. That fascinates me. What makes a place psychologically home? Time alone does not seem to do it. Neither does citizenship. Or a job. Or knowing the roads.

Perhaps home has something to do with the places where we can exist without translating ourselves. Where our memories make sense. Where our body recognizes the rhythm around us. Where people understand the references we do not need to explain. Where our past self and present self can exist in the same room.

For immigrants and bicultural people, home may eventually become plural. Complicated. Portable. Or something we slowly learn to carry within ourselves.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me at Seventeen

If I could sit beside the seventeen-year-old version of myself at that airport, I would not try to convince her to be excited. I would not tell her how lucky she was. She heard enough of that.

I would tell her that this was going to be hard for a while. You may miss home so much that your body hurts. You may wonder whether you made a mistake. You may cry. You may feel strange in your own skin. You may look at people who think you should be happy and wonder why you cannot feel what they expect you to feel.

That does not mean you made the wrong decision. And it does not mean you are ungrateful.

Something important has changed.

I would tell her that her mother will still answer the phone. Her father will support her. The people she loves do not disappear because an ocean sits between them.

I would tell her she will go home again. She will walk those streets again. She will hear familiar voices again. And I would tell her something she could not yet believe: It will get better.

Not because Dominica becomes less important. Not because she forgets where she came from. Not because she becomes someone entirely new. It gets better because human beings slowly learn how to carry more than one world.

The Psychology of Migration Is the Question I Keep Returning To

For years, I understood my migration as a practical event. Dominica to St. Thomas. Green card. School. Nursing. Career. Opportunity.

Today, I understand it differently.

Migration changed the geography of my life in a single day. Psychologically, I was migrating for years.

It changed the future I expected. It changed what responsibility meant. It changed the way I spoke. It changed what achievement meant. It changed my relationship with belonging. And now, as both an immigrant and a psychiatric clinician, I keep returning to one question: What happens inside us when we build a life away from home?

Not only what disorders can emerge. Not only whether we assimilate successfully. I am interested in the quieter things too. Grief. Identity. Memory. Ambition. Code-switching. Family expectation. Belonging. The parts of ourselves we preserve. The parts we change. The parts we leave behind without realizing it. And the parts that somehow find their way back to us.

At seventeen, I stood beneath the sun in St. Thomas and thought: This is not the sun I know.

Maybe what I was noticing was something much bigger. My geography had changed faster than my understanding of home.

The plane had already landed. The rest of me was still trying to arrive.