Overview

When my Iranian-Canadian clients first sit down with me, almost none of them describe what they are carrying as grief. They describe it as exhaustion. Anxiety. A vague flatness. Something they cannot put into words. They have come because of work stress, or marriage trouble, or a child who is struggling at school, or a body that has stopped sleeping. They have not come for grief, because grief is what you feel when someone dies, and no one has died.

Then, somewhere in the second or third session, the actual material starts to surface. The mother they have not seen in seven years. The Tehran they cannot return to. The professional life that ended at the airport.

Evidence summary

The friends whose children are now adults they have never met. The version of themselves who existed in Persian and has slowly faded in English. The quiet, persistent ache that has been there since the immigration and has not been called by its right name. This is immigration grief. It is real, layered, and clinically significant — and most of the immigrants I work with have been carrying it, unnamed, for a decade or more.

What immigration actually severs We talk about immigration as though it were primarily a geographic move — leaving one country, arriving in another, adjusting to new weather and food and social codes. The geographic move is the easy part.

Care considerations

What immigration actually severs is much more complicated. You leave your country, but you also leave:

• The version of yourself that existed in your home language. Bilingual immigrants often describe their two languages as housing different selves. The Farsi self is connected to childhood, to family humour, to subtle emotional registers that don't translate. Living mostly in English thins that self over time, sometimes nearly to disappearance.

Next steps

Your professional identity, often. The physician who is now studying for re-credentialing. The architect whose Iranian portfolio doesn't transfer. The high school teacher whose certification no longer applies. The dentist starting over at forty-five.

Years of work erased at a border.