Between Worlds: Identity, Immigration, and Belonging

For many who have grown up in immigrant families, identity is not a simple question of where you come from or where you live. It is layered, complex, and often shaped by both presence and absence, the presence of multiple cultures, languages, and traditions, and the absence of a clear sense of “home.”

Identity forms through early relationships and the cultural environments we inhabit. When families migrate, the rupture from homeland, community, and cultural familiarity leaves a mark not only on the parents but also on the children who grow up navigating two (or more) worlds. These experiences often live unconsciously, surfacing in subtle feelings of not quite belonging anywhere.

The Therapeutic Lens

Psychoanalytic writers have long explored the themes of exile, loss, and displacement. The unconscious absorbs not only the parent’s story but also the emotional atmosphere that surrounds it. Children of immigrants may feel a sense of responsibility to carry their parents’ sacrifices, or an unspoken pressure to succeed in the “new world” while remaining loyal to their cultural roots. These inner conflicts can create feelings of fragmentation, guilt, or alienation.

Gabor Maté reminds us that “children don’t experience the world; they experience their parents’ nervous systems.” (The Myth of Normal, 2022). When parents live with the grief of displacement, the vigilance of survival, or the pain of marginalisation, children often absorb these emotional currents as part of their own identity. This transmission is rarely conscious yet it profoundly shapes a child’s sense of safety, self-worth, and belonging.

The Challenge of Belonging

Belonging is not only about where we are, but about whether we feel accepted and seen in the world we inhabit. For many who straddle cultures, belonging may be fractured:

• At home, expectations may be tied to tradition, heritage, and duty.

• In society, pressures may push toward assimilation, often at the cost of authenticity.

• Internally, the individual may feel “in-between” never fully enough of one culture or the other.

  
  

These dynamics can contribute to identity struggles, feelings of inferiority, and a search for a secure base. In psychodynamic therapy, clients often uncover the impact of being “the other” both in their families and in wider society and begin to recognise how these experiences echo in their relationships, self-esteem, and emotional life.

Towards Integration

Therapy provides a space where identity conflicts can be explored with compassion. By giving language to experiences of displacement, loss, and cultural conflict, clients can begin to integrate the parts of themselves that once felt divided.

As Maté notes, “healing is not about erasing the past, but about reclaiming it.” When individuals make sense of their story, they can move from fragmentation to wholeness, from surviving in-between to belonging within themselves.

For immigrants and their children, integration does not mean choosing one identity over another. It means honouring the richness of multiple worlds while creating a self that feels authentic, grounded, and whole.