Identity and Belonging

Questions of identity and belonging often surface after migration, or when you've grown up between cultures. You might feel too foreign for home and too "other" for where you live now. That in-between place is common and it can be lonely. Identity crisis counselling offers time to explore who you are across all of your contexts, without having to pick one.

What does an identity crisis after migration feel like?

It can be small things. Someone asks where you're from and you hesitate, because the honest answer is a paragraph. You laugh at a joke in one language and miss it in another. Your parents call you westernised; your colleagues call you exotic.

You might notice you're a slightly different person in different rooms. More reserved with family, louder with friends, careful at work. That switching can be a skill. It can also be exhausting, especially when no single room sees all of you.

For some people, migration brings sudden visibility. You become "the Indian one" or "the foreigner" for the first time, or you meet racism you hadn't had to name before. For others it's the opposite: you return to a home country and realise you've changed, while everyone expects the person who left. That jolt has a name, reverse culture shock.

Grief is often part of it. Grief for a language that's fading, for grandparents you see once a year, for the version of yourself who would have stayed. When someone back home dies, that grief can sharpen, which the page on grief far from home looks at.

Why does identity shift when you migrate?

The psychologist John Berry described acculturation as a process in which people work out two things: how much of their heritage culture to keep, and how much contact to have with the new one (Berry, 1997). People combine these in different ways, and families often combine them differently from one generation to the next. The strain this can bring is known as acculturative stress.

Children who grow up moving between countries are sometimes called third culture kids, a term associated with David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken. Many describe belonging most easily with other people who've moved around, rather than with any single nation.

Minority stress matters too. Research with South Asian service users in the UK found that some felt mental health services posed a threat to their cultural identity, because their values and ways of understanding distress weren't heard (Prajapati and Liebling, 2021). When the wider world keeps questioning where you belong, it's harder to feel settled inside.

Growing up as a child of immigrants

If you're the second generation, the questions can be different. You may never have chosen to move, yet you grew up translating: forms for your parents, jokes for your friends, your own feelings into words that would be acceptable at home.

Many children of immigrants describe holding two sets of rules. At home, duty, respect and family come first. At school or work, independence and speaking up are rewarded. Switching between them can feel normal until a big decision, like who to marry or where to live, forces the two to meet. The duty and self reflection tool is one quiet way to start sorting out which expectations feel like yours.

How does your sense of self change after a move?

Carl Rogers used the term self-concept for the picture we hold of who we are. He suggested that distress grows when our experience doesn't fit that picture and we can't let it in (Rogers, 1959).

Migration puts a lot of new experience in front of you at once. "I'm confident" may not fit the person struggling at the bank. "I'm a good daughter" may not fit the person who lives eight hours away. When the picture and the experience pull apart, people often feel anxious, flat or unreal. Over time, the self-concept can widen to include more of who you actually are now.

How can identity crisis counselling help?

A person-centred counsellor won't hand you a new identity or tell you which culture to choose. The work is to understand your world as you experience it.

That might include:

• Telling the whole story. Including the parts that don't fit neatly, like loving a country that hasn't always welcomed you.
• Noticing the different selves. Not to merge them into one, but to see what each one protects and what each one costs.
• Grieving what was lost. Moving can be the right choice and still involve real loss.
• Naming racism and exclusion when they're part of your experience, rather than treating them as your private problem.
• Letting the answer stay open. "I don't know where home is" can be an honest place to rest for a while.

My own interest is in culture, migration and how families shape who we're allowed to become. You don't need to explain your background before we can begin. My page on counselling for immigrants says more about how I work with migration and bicultural identity.

What do people bring to counselling about belonging?

You don't need a clear question to start. Still, these are the kinds of things people say when identity and belonging are on their mind:

• "I feel like a guest in both countries."
• "My parents think I've lost my culture, and I'm scared they're right."
• "I'm tired of explaining where I'm from."
• "I don't know which parts of me are me, and which parts are just adapting."
• "My children feel at home here, and I don't."

Each of these deserves time. None of them has a single right answer, and counselling doesn't need to find one quickly.

When to get other or urgent help

If questions of identity have led to persistent low mood, panic or thoughts of not wanting to be alive, please speak to a doctor where you live as well as, or instead of, counselling. The page on low mood abroad describes the signs to watch for, and the living abroad and migration resources list trusted reading and support.

If you're in immediate danger, or worried you might act on thoughts of harming yourself, please get help now:

• UK: call 999 or go to A&E. For urgent help that isn't an emergency, call NHS 111 and choose the mental health option. Samaritans are free on 116 123, 24 hours a day.
• EU: call 112.
• Sri Lanka: the National Institute of Mental Health runs the National Mental Health Helpline on 1926. For an ambulance, call 1990.

Related reading

• Expat loneliness, for when belonging is also about having people nearby.
• Family duty and the self, for when identity and family expectations collide.
• Online therapy for expats, covering culture shock and moving again.
• My page on counselling for South Asian women and families.

I'm a trainee person-centred counsellor and BACP student member, working under supervision. When you're ready, you can book a session.