Healing Your Immigration Trauma

The problem with psychological trauma is that we often have no idea that we have it.

If we suffered physical trauma, like a broken arm, it’s so obvious that we need to treat the injury ASAP. There’s bruising, blood, and possibly a bone sticking out.

But an invisible psychological trauma that neither we nor others can see? It’s like cancer that’s growing undetected. 

Over time, like cancer, psychological trauma results in symptoms, such as anger issues, addiction, anxiety, and depression, and spreads into all areas of our lives: relationships, health, work, and so on.

If you are an immigrant, have you ever considered you may be struggling with psychological trauma?

In this article, I discuss how the difficulties of being an immigrant shape our view of ourselves and the world, why this holds us back, and how to heal and change our beliefs.

I’m blessed to be living in such a diverse, multicultural city as Toronto, Canada. In Toronto, almost half of the population are immigrants and visible minorities. I am an immigrant. I came to Canada alone when I was 12 for better education.

Immigrants and refugees are courageous. They are the ones who didn’t settle for a life that wasn’t aligned with their values, hopes, and dreams. They were willing to uproot their lives and risk what they already have to take their chances at a brighter future. This deserves a lot of respect.

The life of an immigrant, especially the first few years, is far from easy. Most people struggle. Immigrants have to learn a new language and cultural customs.

They often experience embarrassment and shame from making social blunders which are inevitable as things are done differently than in their home countries.

Some people make fun of their accents and poor grammar. Some may make faces in disgust as they eat their ethnic food. Unfortunately, not everyone is kind.

Immigrants also have to build social networks from scratch. There are no longer old classmates, colleagues, supervisors, and mentors who can vouch for them and help them find work, housing, new friends, and other opportunities.

They are alone and need to somehow make things happen, to get themselves going. They often have to settle for jobs that they are overqualified for. Their self-esteem may take a further hit.

When you come to a new country at a young age, people might think that it’s easier. The answer is yes and no. Yes, kids can learn the language faster and start to build a social network more easily since they go to school.

But other kids can be cruel and lack the filters that adults have. I happened to grow up in a generally racist town where discrimination and bullying, for no reason other than I was a visible minority, were my daily experience.

Thankfully, many immigrants, despite all the challenges and hardship, go on to settle and become successful in their new home countries.

They become professionals like doctors, lawyers, accountants (for some reason, the three most desirable professions in the East Asian culture), scientists, and engineers.

They become successful business people and business owners. They become leaders and caring individuals liked and respected by many. They build wealth and own properties.

But what happens to the wounds inside that happened years ago?

Just because they are well-adjusted and successful now doesn’t mean the inner wounds heal on their own. At least it wasn’t the case for myself and many others I have counselled.

From the experiences of all the rejection and embarrassment, we may develop an underlying sense of shame.

Shame can be defined as feeling bad for who we are, like there is something wrong with us. This can manifest in a constant need to achieve and prove our worth, chronic anxiety, competitiveness, and self-criticism that borders self-abuse.

We may also develop a sense that we are unsafe, i.e., society or the world is unfriendly and dangerous. When we have this worldview, our minds are busy looking for signs that things are going wrong and people don’t like us or disrespect us.

In other words, we are hypervigilant. Some of us become preoccupied with building material wealth and status and saving up for the rainy day.

Related to the feeling of being unsafe is the belief that we are essentially alone: there is no one we can truly trust and rely on to pull us out during hardship.

The experience of having had to do it all alone shapes how we see the world and the people around us. This makes us feel lonely, isolated, and burdened.

In his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith names 21 career-stalling habits that successful people struggle with.

Among the bad habits are expressing constant negativity, blaming others, and behaviours arising from the need to compete and be superior. Goldsmith states that these habits are what keep people stuck in their current level of success and prevent them from going to their desired level.

In my view, these bad habits are rooted in unaddressed wounds from past trauma.

Success doesn’t have to be measured by career status and material wealth. But Goldsmith’s proposition can be easily applied to other important areas of life such as relationships, health, and a general sense of wellbeing and fulfillment.

Bad habits that helped us thus far cope with shame, environmental threats, and loneliness won’t help us get to where we want to be in life.

Unhealed wounds not only take away from our happiness in the present but also prevent us from reaching our potential and living our lives to the fullest.

The good news is we CAN change the past. More precisely, we can change the unhelpful ways our minds had processed the past.

For example, if some difficult or traumatic past incidents taught you to believe that I’m alone and will always be alone or life is about suffering, we can go back, re-examine the incidents from a higher perspective, and learn more helpful lessons that replace our current unhelpful beliefs.

Our lives are shaped by our beliefs, and our beliefs are shaped by our past experiences. If we want our lives to be better, we need to start examining our beliefs and ask ourselves: Is this belief serving me? Is this how I want to live my life?

If the answer is no, it’s time to get to work and start changing it.

Too often, we think in terms of what we don’t want, e.g., “I don’t want to feel anxious and helpless” and “I don’t want to be rejected.”

If this is a mental habit you often fall into, start thinking in terms of what you want instead. This could be “I want to be calm, confident, and self-assured” and “I want to experience connection and belonging.”

Then, based on what you want, try on a new belief that serves you. If your old belief was that “I’m not smart and have to work extra hard to make things happen,” a more helpful belief might be “I’m hardworking and capable of achieving greatness.”

Write down your new belief and see how it feels. If you don’t like it, try on a new one by modifying it or writing another one from scratch.

It’s a myth that our beliefs are hardwired and difficult to change. Since overcoming depression, I’ve kept a habit of not taking my beliefs too seriously.

After all, beliefs are just accumulated thoughts that we’ve had over and over again, like how sand turns into stone with time and pressure. And just like stones, beliefs can be easily broken down with the help of tools.

So go ahead and examine from a higher perspective how your experience as an immigrant or a visible minority may have shaped your beliefs.

What is one belief you’d like to change? What’s a new belief you’d like instead?