07/10/2020
Family system crisis as a result of moving to the other country
Moving from one country to another, is a complex and multifaceted psychosocial process with significant and long-lasting effects on a human's personality and identity and on the moving to the other country family in overall total. Dynamic shifts and changes resulting from a mixture of “cultural shock” and mourning over the losses inherent in resettlement are gradually giving way to structural changes in human’s mind and the emergence of so-called “hybrid identity”.
Farewell to one country implies great opportunities and simultaneously great losses for all the family members. Often people have to give up familiar food, national music, undoubted social customs and even their own language.
The new country offers food that tastes as if strange, new melodies, different political opinions, unfamiliar language, dull holidays (not still endowed with personal meaning), unfamiliar historical and cultural characters and visually unusual landscapes. However, along with various losses, there is a renewed opportunity for psychological, personal growth and positive changes in family system. The new channels of self-expression and of building up social connections are becoming available. The new models for self-identification, new expectations for oneselves and the others, the new ways of behaviour appear gradually. And this is a huge resource for those who changes the place of living in a huge scale.
One thing about resettlement is understandable: the result of immigration is an abrupt change from an “average expected environment” to an environment and circumstances that are strange and unpredictable. And it takes a considerable amount of time to adapt to the new sociocultural environment and feel at ease. According the profound investigation conducted by Salman Akhtar, an Indian-American psychoanalyst, the duration of the adaptation process is the age of the immigrant (at the time of resettlement), divided by 4. So if the person moved to the other country when his|her age was 28 – relatively the period of sociocultural adjustment will last about 7 years. We can easily calculate, that the length of corresponding period in case with little children is way more short. Partly that means that children as if help their parents during this adaptation to the living in the new country.
The anxiety and fears accompanying cultural shock challenge the stability of the “newcomer's” mental organization. Another threat to emotional stability is posed by the process of grieving over the losses inherent in resettlement. The coexistence and interaction of culture shock and the process of nostalgia causes a serious shake-up of identity. This state of constant mental changes is alike the "process of rebirth of personality" in adolescence. Parafrasing it, adults as if turn into adolescents, who feel unsecure, suppressed, dependent, depressed and doubting their own self-worth. In this case it’s important for the family members to be conscious about Scylla and Charybdis of the moving to the other country in order to take care of the family social and psychological well-being.
The transformation of the immigrant's self-identity can be called the third birth of the personality, after early childhood and adolescence, respectively. Thus, mastering a new, unfamiliar language is an important part in shaping a new identity and activity, which might reunite all the family members in order to continue happy and emotionally healthy life together.
Written by Valeriya Paramonova
Volunteer at Turun Kriisikeskus and Sateenkaari Koto ry, Turku
