Losing your homeland: moving abroad and quiet grief

“It’s not that I’m unhappy. I’ve got a good job, a nice flat, friends. It’s just that sometimes in the supermarket I pick up a jar of pickled gherkins that are almost like the ones at home, and I have to stand by the shelf for a minute to pull myself together.”

You might hear a sentence like this from someone living in Graz, Munich, Dublin or Melbourne. They say it almost apologetically, as if something were wrong with them for feeling a pang over a jar of gherkins. After all, they chose to go. It was their decision. They are doing well. So where does the lump in the throat come from?

In this post I want to write about a loss that is rarely spoken about out loud: the loss of your homeland when you move abroad. About why we can call it grief, even though nobody has died and even though leaving is often voluntary. About why this loss has no clear ending. And about what happens when someone returns after years away — and discovers that home is no longer home either.

You chose to go — and you grieve anyway

One of the most common obstacles to this grief is the very feeling that you have no right to it. Anyone who moves for a better job, for study, for love or simply out of curiosity often hears (and tells themselves): you wanted this. And someone who wanted something is not supposed to be sad when they get it.

But choice and loss do not cancel each other out. Even with a good change, we leave something behind. I wrote about why change throws us off balance even when it is good in Why change knocks us off balance, even when it is good change. With a move abroad, that “something” is very large: the language you dreamt in, the people who have always known you, the places that spoke to you without words, and the sense of understanding the rules of the game without having to think about them.

Because the people around you usually do not see this as a loss, it is often disenfranchised grief — grief that others do not recognise, and that the grieving person therefore finds hard to admit as well. I wrote about this kind of grief in The grief nobody acknowledges.

How many of us live elsewhere

According to a report by the International Organization for Migration, around 281 million people were living outside the country they were born in in 2020 — roughly 3.6 per cent of the world’s population. Behind each of those numbers is someone who had to find a new doctor somewhere, learn how to greet a neighbour in a new place, and work out whom they could tell that they were struggling.

Slovenia, too, has always known emigration — from those who left for America and Argentina to the zdomci, the guest workers who went to Germany and Austria in the second half of the last century. Today the story is different, but it has not gone away: young people leave to study and work abroad, and many work across the border and drive home at weekends. Almost every Slovenian family has someone living elsewhere. And every one of these departures happens in a family, not only in an individual — those who stay lose something too.

Ambiguous loss: the homeland is there, but you are not

In the 1970s the American family therapist Pauline Boss began researching losses that have no clear ending. She called them ambiguous loss. She described two forms: when someone is physically absent but psychologically present (a missing person, for example), and when someone is physically present but psychologically absent (a person with dementia, for example). I wrote about the second form in Grieving someone who is still alive.

Boss herself pointed out that migration also carries a layer of ambiguous loss — and it does fit remarkably well. Your homeland exists. You can call it, see it on a video call, visit at Christmas. But you live somewhere else. Your parents are growing old without you, your nieces and nephews are growing up in photographs, your friends meet for coffee you cannot come to. The homeland is physically absent and psychologically present all the time.

It is exactly this ambiguity that makes it so hard. After a death, grief at least has a clear starting point: someone is gone. With ambiguous loss, there is no moment when you can say: now it is over. Grief cannot come to a close, because the loss never fully happened — and at the same time it is happening every day.

Everything you lose when you lose your homeland

In the early 1990s the psychiatrist Maurice Eisenbruch introduced the term cultural bereavement to describe the experience of refugees. He used it to capture the fact that, in moving, a person loses not only people but a whole cultural world: customs, rituals, values, the way a community knows who you are. Dinesh Bhugra and Matthew Becker later argued that the concept applies to other migrants too, not only to refugees.

Here is some of what can be lost:

• Language. Not just words, but being able to be funny, tender or angry in it without thinking. In a foreign language you are often a little less yourself.
• Status and professional identity. Many people abroad start lower than they were at home. An engineer works in a warehouse, a doctor waits for their degree to be recognised. That cuts deep.
• A social network. People who have known you for more than five years, who help you move house, who bring you soup when you are ill.
• The unspoken code. Knowing when “yes” means “no”, what kind of humour fits, how long to stay when you visit.
• The world of the senses. The light, the smell of cut grass, the sound of church bells, the taste of bread. The body misses things the mind does not even know it misses.

All of this happens at once. And all of it happens without a ritual. There is no funeral for a language you no longer speak every day.

Acculturative stress and four ways of adapting

The psychologist John W. Berry spent decades researching what happens to a person who lives between two cultures. He called the tension that arises acculturative stress: anxiety, a sense of being pushed to the margins, confusion about your own identity, sometimes physical symptoms too. Acculturative stress is not an illness. It is an understandable response to the demand to learn to live by new rules while the old ones still run through your veins.

Berry described how we adapt to a new culture depending on two questions: how much we keep of our culture of origin, and how much we connect with the new one. From these come four ways of adapting.

Research by Berry and his colleagues generally shows that people who manage integration fare best — keeping in touch with where they come from while also building relationships in the new place. It is hardest for those who end up marginalised: cut off from home and not accepted in the new place either. It is important to know that the choice is not always in the individual’s hands. If the people around you do not accept you because you speak with a foreign accent or have the “wrong” name, integration is not just a matter of will.

Double belonging: not quite here, no longer quite there

Many people who have lived abroad for a long time describe a feeling of being somewhere in between. At home they are “the one who left”. In the new place they are “the one from somewhere else”. This position can be a source of richness — two languages, two ways of seeing the world, the ability to notice things locals do not. But it can also be a source of quiet loneliness, because nowhere do you feel fully understood. You will find a short explanation of Belonging in the knowledge base.

In relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, we also see a move abroad as an event in the family system. When someone leaves, roles in the family are redistributed. Who will look after the parents now? Who will carry the news? Who “betrayed” the family by going? Often the one who left feels guilty, while those who stayed are quietly angry or sad but do not say so. A short conversation of the kind that might happen during a Sunday phone call (composite, not a real person):

“When are you coming home?”
“Mum, I was there two months ago.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that your dad was asking again.”
“What was he asking?”
“Nothing. Just whether you’ll ever come back. You know what he’s like.”
(silence)
“I don’t know, Mum. I don’t know if I will.”

There is no argument in this short conversation. But there is a great deal left unsaid: the mother’s sadness hiding behind the father’s question, the daughter’s guilt hiding behind a practical answer. When this can be put into words in a family — “we miss you”, “it’s hard for me too” — there is often relief on both sides. A loss you carry alone is heavier than one you can share.

Returnees: when home is no longer home either

Many people think that going home is the end of the story. Those who have gone back often find it is not. The phenomenon is called reverse culture shock, and researchers describe it as surprisingly common and often even harder than the original adjustment — precisely because people do not expect it.

Meanwhile, everything at home has changed. Friends have built lives in which there is no longer a taken-for-granted place for you. Your favourite inn has closed. People ask how it was, but lose interest after two sentences. And you yourself have changed: habits you brought back from elsewhere seem odd at home, and things that once seemed normal now bother you. The homeland you missed was partly a memory — and a memory does not come back.

For a long time it was believed that adjusting to a new culture follows a U shape: first enthusiasm, then a dip, then gradual recovery. The idea was described in 1955 by the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard. More recent research, including a longitudinal study by Colleen Ward and her colleagues in 1998, did not confirm the curve: difficulties were greatest right at the beginning, not after a honeymoon phase. For returnees this carries something comforting: if it is hard straight after you come back, nothing is wrong with you. It is often like that.

Exercise: two suitcases

This exercise is for people living abroad and for those who have returned. It takes about half an hour. You need a sheet of paper divided into two columns.

1. The first suitcase — what I left behind. In the left column, write down everything you have lost or left behind. Be specific: not “family” but “Sunday lunches at Grandma’s”. Not “language” but “jokes nobody here understands”.
2. The second suitcase — what I brought or gained. In the right column, write down what you took with you and what the new place has given you: values, skills, people, courage, a new perspective.
3. Choose one thing from the left column that you miss most. Stay with it for a moment. Let yourself feel sad. Do not try to fix the feeling.
4. Ask yourself whether you can bring part of it into the present. Not all of it, just a piece: a recipe you cook on Sundays, a Slovenian book before bed, a regular call with a friend at the same time each week.
5. Finally, write one sentence that connects the two suitcases. For example: “I am from there and I am from here. Both are mine.”

The exercise does not erase the sadness. But it helps the sadness stop being scattered through everyday life as a vague unease, and gives it a shape you can look at.

Many people doing this exercise discover that the right-hand column is longer than they expected. That does not mean the left one does not matter. It only means that a person can grieve and grow at the same time — and that one does not cancel out the other. You will find more about what happens in such turning points in the knowledge base under Transition and in New job, new city, new chapter.

Where this view falls short

It would not be honest to describe every move as grief. Looking through the lens of loss has its limits.

For some people, leaving is above all liberation. Someone who left a family in which they were abused, a place where they could not live openly because of their sexual orientation, or a town where they saw no future may feel not so much sadness as relief. That is genuine too. You do not have to grieve a homeland that was never a home to you. But sadness may still appear later — not for what was, but for what should have been.

Forced migration is something else. Refugees and people who had to flee war or persecution often carry trauma as well as loss. They may have post-traumatic symptoms that need different, specialised help. This post is mainly about voluntary moves and cannot describe the experience of being forced to leave.

Homesickness is not always just homesickness. Sometimes behind missing home lies a depression that would have appeared at home too, or a loneliness connected to something else. If for weeks you have noticed that nothing brings you joy, that you sleep badly, that you are withdrawing from people or losing your drive, it makes sense to see a doctor — where you live, or on a visit home. You will find a short explanation of Loneliness in the knowledge base.

The homeland is not always as we remember it. Homesickness likes to embellish. It helps to ask yourself now and then whether you miss the place as it was, or yourself as you were then.

When to seek help

Most people find their feet in a new place over time and find their own way of living with a double belonging. Talking to a therapist can make sense, though, when:

• months or years later you are still overwhelmed every day by sadness or anxiety connected with leaving;
• you feel that you belong nowhere and have nobody anywhere you could lean on;
• the move has strained relationships in your family — with a partner who came with you, or with parents who stayed at home;
• you are thinking about going back and the decision paralyses you, because it seems you will lose something either way;
• after returning you feel that you no longer recognise either yourself or home.

For many people, simply talking in their mother tongue is a relief — a space where you do not have to translate yourself. Therapy here does not mean someone deciding for you where you should live. It means a space where you can look at both sides together — what you have lost and what you have gained. If you ever find yourself thinking you no longer want to live, reach out for help straight away: in Slovenia, the mental health crisis line Klic v duševni stiski (01 520 99 00, from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline Zaupni telefon Samarijan (116 123, around the clock), and in an emergency anywhere in Europe, 112.

Because friendships often end with a move too, you might also read When a friendship ends: a loss without a ritual. A move rarely means only one loss — and each of them deserves to be seen.

What to remember

• Moving abroad can be a form of grief even when leaving was your own decision — choice and loss do not cancel each other out.
• Pauline Boss would call it an ambiguous loss: the homeland is physically absent and psychologically present, so grief has no clear ending.
• Acculturative stress is an understandable response to living between two cultures; we fare best when we manage to keep our own and build something new.
• Going back is an adjustment too — reverse culture shock is common and not a sign that something is wrong with you.
• A move happens in a family, not only in one person: those who stay grieve as well.