Migratory Grief: What No One Prepared You For Abroad
On losses abroad that don't have a name — and why they're harder to carry.
Nobody tells you about this part before you move abroad…
They tell you about the adventure. The reinvention. The broadened perspective and the passport stamps and the version of yourself that emerges when you’re no longer surrounded by people who knew you before. They tell you about the hard parts too, sometimes — the loneliness, the paperwork, the cultural friction — because those have a shape that’s easy to describe.
What they don’t tell you is that alongside the gratitude, there’s grief.
Not the grief of losing someone. Not the acute, recognizable kind that comes with an event and a timeline and other people around you who understand what happened. The other kind. The quieter kind. The kind that doesn’t have a funeral and doesn’t have a name and doesn’t announce itself until you’re in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and something catches — a song, a smell, a particular quality of afternoon light — and for a moment you feel the weight of everything you’ve left behind.
Here is what I’ve come to understand about this kind of grief: it accumulates rather than arrives.
It isn’t one loss. It’s hundreds of small ones, spread across years, none of them large enough on their own to justify the word grief. The version of yourself that only existed in one city. The friendships that didn’t survive the distance — not because anyone was unkind, but because proximity had been doing most of the work and neither of you knew it. The family moments you were present for only through a screen, slightly out of sync with the time zone. The mundane continuity of life in one place that you traded for something else, and which quietly disappeared while you were busy adjusting to wherever you’d arrived.
Nobody holds a service for any of this. There’s no moment when the people around you pause and say: this is a loss, and you’re allowed to grieve it.
Most of the time, the people around you are busy celebrating. You made a brave choice. You built a life somewhere new. Look at everything you’ve gained. And they’re not wrong — the gains are real. That’s part of what makes this grief so difficult to hold: it sits right next to genuine gratitude, and the two don’t cancel each other out.
You can love the life you’ve built and still mourn the life you didn’t.
What the research calls this type of grief
In the clinical literature, this has a name: migratory grief.
Spanish psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui describes it as a partial, recurrent, multiple grief — not one loss, but a cluster of them that stay active over time. He talks about at least seven areas that migration can cut into: family, language, culture, land, social status, group belonging, and even a sense of physical safety.1
When someone dies, there’s a clear before and after; in migration, the people and places you love still exist, but at a distance you can’t close on an ordinary day. That’s part of why this grief is “partial” and “recurrent” — it flares each time you brush up against what you no longer have regular access to.2
At its most extreme, when those losses are layered on top of forced separation, danger, and a hostile environment, Achotegui links migratory grief to what he calls the “Ulysses Syndrome”: the stress of migration exceeding what a human nervous system can reasonably be asked to hold. It’s important that he frames this not as a mental disorder, but as a human response to very real, ongoing stressors.
More recent research has started to catch up to what many migrants and long‑term expats have felt in their bodies for years. A 2024 systematic review found consistent links between migratory grief and higher levels of psychological distress and depression symptoms in migrants and refugees. Clinicians writing about “migratory depression” describe how unresolved grief for homeland, status, and social identity can linger for 10–15 years after departure.3
Migration itself isn’t an illness. But the kind of grief it brings — especially when it stays unnamed and unsupported — has consequences.
How migratory grief shows up in real life
In the conversations I’ve been having with long‑term expats and returnees for my pre‑licensure counselling practice, nobody opens a call by saying, “I think I’m experiencing migratory grief.”
They say things like: the hum, the low‑grade ache, a fraction of myself, trying to stay afloat, grief measured daily… without calling it grief. They talk about feeling like a backpacker in their own hometown, or like their friendship quota is maxed out across too many time zones.
Across nearly 30 conversations, the pattern is consistent enough to not treat it like a one-off. People I’ve spoken to describe:
Non‑belonging that feels sharpest on trips home, not abroad.
Loneliness that almost no one names as loneliness.
Grief for a country that has changed so much it no longer feels returnable — or isn’t safe to return to at all.
Only later, when I share the clinical term next to their lived experience — migratory grief — does something click. The word doesn’t fix anything. But it gives the feeling edges. Something in them breathes a bit easier, simply knowing what they’re living has a name.
The phases that don’t look like phases
I’ve noticed this grief shows up differently depending on where someone is in their time abroad.
In the early years, migratory grief is easy to mistake for adjustment. Something hurts, but it’s hard to separate from the general difficulty of being new somewhere. You assume it will pass once you settle in. Sometimes it does. Sometimes what felt like adjustment was actually loss, and it was just patient enough to wait.
In the middle years — the ones where you’re no longer new but not quite at home either — the grief tends to go quiet. You’ve built enough of a life that the losses recede into the background. They’re still there. They just stop demanding attention. The low-grade hum of them becomes the ambient sound of your days.
And then something shifts. A parent ages. A friend at home has a child you’ve never met. You realize that a decade has passed and the people you love most exist primarily in photographs and time zones. The grief surfaces again, older now, with more accumulated weight behind it.
It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been abroad, or how good the life you’ve built is, or how clearly you chose this. The losses are still losses. They simply don’t come with the social permission to be named as such.
The grief that doesn’t get witnessed
Grief, when it’s recognized, does something important: it lets other people witness it.
When we lose someone, the rituals around loss — the gathering, the acknowledgment, the time set aside — serve a function beyond ceremony. They tell us that what we’re carrying is real, and that we don’t have to carry it alone.
Migratory grief doesn’t come with those rituals. Which means it often doesn’t get witnessed at all. You learn to carry it quietly, because there’s no obvious moment to set it down. Because explaining it feels like complaining about a choice you made. Because the people who might understand are scattered across the same time zones that created the loss in the first place.
When we lose someone, the rituals around loss — the gathering, the acknowledgment, the time set aside — serve a function beyond ceremony. They tell us that what we’re carrying is real, and that we don’t have to carry it alone. Migratory grief doesn’t come with those rituals.
In my conversations, people rarely ask for solutions first. What they’re hungry for, almost every time, is recognition. Someone to say: this thing you’re carrying has a shape; you’re not imagining it; you’re not failing at expat life; your nervous system is responding to real, layered losses.
The research backs this up. Clinicians warn that if migratory grief is never acknowledged, people may end up being treated as if they’re simply depressed or “not adapting well”, rather than as humans responding to ongoing, structural losses.
Naming the grief doesn’t pathologize it; in many ways, it protects against the quiet self‑blame that grows when you think you’re the problem.
Why naming it still matters
Naming this experience doesn’t make the distance disappear. It doesn’t fix visa systems or time zones or geopolitical realities. It also doesn’t magically move you to the “final stage” of anything.
But I’ve found that having a word for it changes something — even slightly.
The grief doesn’t become less real. It becomes less confusing. You’re not falling apart over something small. You’re carrying something that is genuinely heavy, that has been heavy for a long time, and that most of the structures around you were never built to hold.
That’s not a character flaw or a reflection on your ability to “integrate”. It’s the specific weight of having lived across worlds.
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Grief that travels with you
I’ll say one more thing, and it’s this: migratory grief doesn’t only travel in one direction.
Most people assume the grief flows outward — away from home, toward the life you left behind. And it does. But it also travels with you in other ways, including back. The person who eventually returns somewhere — after years, after a whole other life — often finds that the grief is waiting for them there too, wearing a different face.
That’s a longer conversation, and it’s coming. But for now: if you’ve felt something that resembles what I’ve been describing here, I want you to know it has a name.
And it’s a reasonable response to a life lived the way you’ve been living it.
If this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:
And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:
I hold a small number of Expat Orientation Conversations each month — 60‑minute, one‑to‑one, non‑clinical sessions for sense‑making and orientation, not therapy or coaching.
Together we look at how long‑term life abroad may be shaping your inner experience, find language for what has been hard to name, and gently sort what’s contextual from what’s personal before you decide what, if anything, you want to do next.
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.
If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.
If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.
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Achotegui J. Immigrants living extreme migratory grief. the ulysses syndrome. Int J Fam Commun Med. 2022;6(6):303-305. DOI: 10.15406/ijfcm.2022.06.00295. Med Crave Online.
I found myself thinking about the phrase "the grief that doesn't get witnessed." What struck me is that many of the losses you describe are not hidden because they are insignificant, but because they don't fit the categories people usually recognize as grief. Naming them feels important for that reason alone.
This is poignant. Growing up abroad and then moving several times for jobs and changing jobs within the same city over the last 20 years, this very much reflects what I feel. I have friends everywhere but haven't really belonged anywhere for many years.
Perhaps oddly, it's my search for that sense of belonging that is provoking my move overseas. Expats are my peeps.