IMMIGRATION GRIEF
Immigration Grief Counselling in Edmonton
Support for immigrants, refugees, and children of immigrants navigating loss, identity, belonging and cultural transition.
You don’t have to carry this alone
Immigration can bring opportunity, safety, and new beginnings, and it can also carry a kind of grief that often goes unnamed. Many people move through complex emotional stages of immigration that include excitement, fear, hope, disorientation, and loss.
You might miss your homeland, your language, or a version of yourself that felt more grounded before everything changed. Many people feel pressure to adapt quickly while quietly living with mourning from immigration, grieving what was left behind and existing in an in-between space that doesn’t fully feel like here or there.
These experiences are part of the emotional and psychological impact often described as the trauma of immigration. Moving to a new city or country often raises questions about how immigration affects culture, especially as people adapt to new values while preserving traditions, language, and intergenerational connections.
Whether you arrived by choice, necessity, or survival, these experiences can shape your nervous system, your identity, and how you move through the world. We offer culturally informed individual therapy for adults, children, and teens, providing support that makes space for both resilience and grief across different stages of life.
We Offer Individual Therapy for Immigration-Related Concerns, Including:
Immigration grief and cultural bereavement
Identity and belonging
Intergenerational and racialized trauma
Acculturation and assimilation stress
Loss of language, culture, or community
Racism, discrimination, and microaggressions
Refugee and forced migration experiences
Grief related to family separation
Shame, guilt, anger, and internalized oppression
Emotional challenges connected to the stages of immigration
OUR APPROACH TO IMMIGRATION GRIEF IN EDMONTON
Immigration grief is deeply connected to history, systems, racism, colonization, and intergenerational trauma, and healing requires care that recognizes all of these layers.
Our therapists work from an approach that is:
Culturally informed and intersectional
Anti-oppressive and social justice oriented
Compassionate, client-centred, and non-pathologizing
Attentive to both personal experience and systemic realities
We value storytelling as a powerful form of healing and recognize that many communities of colour have carried wisdom and resilience through oral traditions for generations.
Therapeutic approaches may include:
Trauma-informed talk therapy
Emotion-Focused Therapy
Narrative and storytelling-based work
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Person-Centred Therapy
Mindfulness-based practices
Your therapy is always shaped around your lived experience, cultural context, and values.
HEALING MIGRATORY GRIEF IS POSSIBLE
Therapy can help you name and validate your grief, create space for emotions that were never safe to express, and reconnect with identity, culture, or lineage in meaningful ways. Understanding the stages of immigration can help normalize your reactions and reduce self-blame. Over time, many people experience less shame, more self-compassion, and a stronger sense of belonging.
Healing doesn’t mean forgetting where you came from.
It means learning how to carry your story with care.
If you’re living with immigration grief or cultural bereavement, you deserve support that understands the full context of your experience.
EMOTIONAL STAGES OF IMMIGRATION
Immigration is not a single event, it is an emotional process that unfolds over time. While every experience is unique, people move through these stages differently.The process is not linear, and you may recognize yourself in more than one at the same time.
Hope, Relief, or Survival Mode: Early stages of immigration may involve hope, urgency, or survival. Some feel relief at reaching safety or opportunity, while others focus on adapting quickly and meeting basic needs, often pushing emotions aside to function.
Disorientation and Culture Shock: As life settles, confusion, exhaustion, or overwhelm may emerge. Differences in language, weather, social norms, systems, and expectations can lead to feeling constantly “on guard”, along with loneliness or self-doubt.
Grief, Loss, and Longing: Over time, grief often becomes more visible. This may include missing family, homeland, language, culture, or a former sense of self, even when immigration brought positive change.
Identity Strain and In-Between-ness: Many people struggle with belonging at this stage. You may feel pressure to assimilate while fearing cultural loss, leading to shame, guilt, or confusion about identity.
Meaning-Making and Integration: With time and support, some begin to integrate their experiences with more care. This stage focuses on holding multiple identities and histories, and redefining connection to culture, values, or lineage.
Featured Therapist
Language plays a powerful role in how we experience and express emotion. For many speaking about grief, identity, and cultural loss can feel more natural, and more accurate, in a first or heritage language.
Having access to a multilingual therapist can reduce the pressure to translate your thoughts or emotions and allow your story to unfold more freely. Clients are welcome to speak in the language that feels most comfortable to them, or to move between languages during sessions as needed.
Offering therapy in more than one language is part of creating culturally responsive care that honours identity, lived experience, and emotional safety.
Simarjit Gil
Speaks Hindi and Punjabi
Additional Support
If you are seeking therapy in a language not offered here, our sister organization, Insight Psychological, has therapists who provide counselling in additional languages. We are happy to support you in exploring options that feel like the right fit for your needs.
Extra resources
BIPOC Grief Recovery Support Group
We also offer a BIPOC Grief Recovery Support Group for people of colour experiencing grief, including immigration grief and cultural bereavement. This group creates space for shared understanding, cultural connection, and healing in community.
This group offers:
Shared understanding and community
A culturally grounded space to explore grief
Gentle reflection on beliefs around loss
Support for moving forward with hope
Blog
You’re also welcome to explore our blog, where we share reflections, resources, and writing related to grief, identity, cultural identity shifts, and healing from the trauma of immigration.
Our blog is meant to offer understanding and companionship for experiences that are often difficult to name, whether you’re beginning your healing journey or looking for ongoing support between sessions.
