Migrating is not only about changing countries. It means leaving behind a home, a language, a landscape, a way of greeting people, and a network of people who knew who you were without needing an explanation. That set of losses is known as migratory grief, and it is often carried in silence while daily life demands that you keep functioning.
In episode #8 of Impacto Migrante, Carla Parola talks with Liliana Baylon, a bicultural and bilingual therapist specializing in trauma, identity, and multicultural relationships, and founder of Healing Relationships Counseling Services. Together they explore something that rarely makes it into the conversation: what happens when migratory grief is not carried by one person alone, but by an entire family across several generations at once.
This article walks through the core ideas of that conversation: what migratory grief is, why it sometimes becomes extreme, how it is passed down between generations, and what tools can help.
In this context, psychological evaluations for immigration can help document the emotional impact that certain immigration experiences may have on a person or their family. These evaluations do not replace the work of an immigration attorney, but they can provide relevant clinical information in cases shaped by fear, separation, trauma, or uncertainty.
Also, if you need legal guidance, you can contact our team. We would be happy to share information about immigration attorneys we work with who may be able to support you through your process.
Important note: this is not legal advice. For specific decisions, it is best to coordinate with your immigration attorney.
Listen to the full episode – Impacto Migrante #8
What is migratory grief?
Migratory grief is the emotional process a person goes through after leaving their country of origin. It resembles other kinds of grief because it involves loss, but it has one feature that makes it more complex: it is a partial and recurring grief.
When someone dies, the loss is final. In migration, what was left behind still exists: the house is still standing, your mother is still alive on the other end of the phone, the neighborhood is still there. That keeps the grief open. A video call can bring joy and, five minutes later, an overwhelming sadness.
This is why many immigrants describe a feeling that is hard to name: they are not depressed, but they are not quite well either. They are processing losses that never fully close.
Ulysses syndrome: when migratory grief becomes extreme
In 2002, psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui named the most intense version of this process: Ulysses syndrome, or the immigrant syndrome with chronic and multiple stress. The name comes from the Greek hero who spent years far from home, facing one hardship after another.
One clarification matters here: Ulysses syndrome is not a mental disorder. It is a stress reaction to objectively harsh conditions. The person is not ill; they are responding in an expected way to a situation that overwhelms them.
Achotegui describes four triggering factors: forced loneliness caused by family separation, sustained fear, a sense of hopelessness when the migration project fails, and the daily struggle for survival.
Common symptoms include sadness and crying, anxiety, insomnia, irritability, headaches, digestive discomfort, muscle tension, fatigue, and difficulties with memory and concentration. It is common for people to first see a primary care doctor because of the physical symptoms, without connecting them to what is happening emotionally.
The seven griefs of migration
Achotegui identifies seven losses that migration puts into play. Naming them helps explain why migrating is so exhausting, even when the project goes well:
- Family and loved ones: the relationships left on the other side.
- Language: speaking all day in a language that is not your own is draining, and it often makes it impossible to express the nuances of what you feel.
- Culture: customs, social codes, humor, food, ways of raising children.
- Land: the landscape, the weather, the smells, the light.
- Social status: professionals who practiced a career back home and start from zero here.
- Belonging group: going from being part of the majority to being perceived as different.
- Physical safety: the risks of the migration journey and of life without documents.
Almost no one goes through only one of these. Most people live all of them at once, and that is why the wear accumulates.
When grief crosses generations: the wounds that get inherited
One of the strongest points in the conversation with Liliana Baylon is that migratory grief does not stop with the person who migrated. It gets passed down.
Children of immigrants often carry stories they did not live through directly, but that they breathed at home: the silence around certain topics, the pressure to perform and not disappoint, the feeling of owing something to their parents’ sacrifice, the difficulty of feeling fully from one place or the other. This is known as intergenerational trauma.
And there is something specific to immigrant families: different generations may be going through different griefs at the same time. Grandparents may miss the country they left. Parents may be fighting to gain stability. Children may be trying to fit in at school. Each one is in a different process, and often they cannot support each other because they do not even share the same emotional language.
That is where tensions come from, and they are usually misread as personality clashes or lack of respect, when they are really mismatched griefs.
Living on alert: when fear settles into the home
Today, migratory grief is intensified by an additional factor: uncertainty about immigration status and the ongoing fear of family separation.
A recent Brookings Institution study estimated that around 146,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since January 2025, and that more than 22,000 saw every adult they lived with detained. Pediatricians, therapists, and teachers report the same pattern: developmental regression, children who stop eating, stomachaches with no medical cause, sleep problems, school absences, and falling grades.
In Minnesota, after immigration operations in the Minneapolis area, there are families who have not left their homes in months, unable to work, with neighbors organizing to look after the children. In Arizona, health organizations in the Phoenix area report an increase in consultations for anxiety, insomnia, and emotional crises among Latino families.
When adults live in a permanent state of alert, the body does not distinguish between a present threat and an anticipated one: the nervous system stays switched on all the time. And even if no one says it out loud, children pick up on it. Kids read the emotional climate of a home long before they understand the words.
This also interrupts grief. It is very hard to process what was lost when all your energy goes into surviving the day.
Children grieve too: how to talk with them
A strong theme in the episode is that silence does not protect. When adults avoid the topic so as not to frighten them, children still sense that something is wrong, and they fill the gap with their own explanations, almost always worse than reality. Many conclude that it is their fault.
Some general guidelines that tend to help:
- Name what is happening in age-appropriate language, without details beyond what they can process.
- Validate the emotion before explaining it: “it makes sense that you feel sad” opens more doors than “it’s nothing”.
- Keep routines and give advance notice of changes. Predictability is what regulates a child most in uncertain contexts.
- Let them miss what they lost and make room for it: photos, food, music, video calls with family.
- Do not promise what cannot be guaranteed. “I don’t know what will happen, but you won’t be alone” is better than a promise that may not hold.
- Caring for the adult is also caring for the child. A regulated caregiver is the best emotional resource a child can have.
Therapeutic tools: EMDR, play therapy, and body-based work
In the episode, Liliana Baylon shares her perspective on some approaches commonly used to support processes of trauma, distance, and interrupted grief.
EMDR
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) works on memories that got “stuck” and keep triggering the same alarm response every time they surface. It does not erase what happened: it helps the memory stop invading the present with the same intensity.
Play therapy
Young children do not describe what is happening to them in words, because they do not yet have that resource. They show it through play. Play therapy uses that natural language so they can express and process experiences of fear, separation, or uprooting.
Body-based work
Trauma and grief do not live only in thoughts: they register in the body as tension, insomnia, pain, or difficulty breathing deeply. Somatic approaches work with those signals to help the nervous system come out of its alert state.
Bilingual and culturally sensitive therapy
Being able to speak in the language in which things happened changes the process. Many people can name in their mother tongue what becomes inaccessible in English. And working with someone who understands the cultural codes of your background means not having to translate and explain context in every session.
When a psychological evaluation for immigration can help
Beyond therapeutic support, in some cases the emotional impact of these experiences can be documented professionally. A psychological evaluation for immigration puts in writing, with clinical criteria, how fear, family separation, violence, persecution, or uncertainty affected a person or their family.
This type of evaluation may be useful in processes such as asylum, VAWA, U Visa, T Visa, cancellation of removal, or extreme hardship waivers, among other cases where psychological impact is relevant to the legal strategy. Whether it applies, and when to submit it, is always determined by your immigration attorney.
Migratory grief is not weakness, nor a lack of gratitude for new opportunities. It is the expected response to having left behind an entire life. And when it can be named, shared, and processed, it stops being passed down in silence to the next generation.
At Carla Parola Counseling we support immigrant individuals and families with a professional, bilingual, and culturally sensitive approach, and we provide psychological evaluations for immigration centered on each person’s story.
Because behind every immigration process there is more than paperwork. There is a story, a family, an identity, and a future that deserve to be understood with care.
