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When Home Is More Than One Place: Intercultural Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Belonging
- Alan Archibald
- Jun 29
- 13 min read
Moving to another country can look like a practical decision from the outside.
There are forms to complete, boxes to pack, jobs to find, schools to choose, accents to understand and unfamiliar systems to
navigate. Friends may tell you that it is exciting. Family members may remind you how fortunate you are. You may even agree with them.
Yet something less visible can be happening underneath.
You may no longer feel entirely at home in the country you left, but may not feel fully at home in the country where you now live. You may speak differently at work than you do with your family. You may become used to explaining your name, food, faith, humour or family expectations.
Over time, you may begin to wonder which parts of you are genuinely yours and which parts have been adapted to help you fit in.
This is often where questions about identity and belonging become more than abstract ideas. They can begin to affect relationships, confidence, mood, parenting, work and the way you feel inside yourself.
Intercultural psychodynamic psychotherapy offers a place to think about these experiences properly. It does not ask you to choose one culture over another. It does not treat culture as an interesting detail added to the end of your story.
Instead, it begins with the understanding that culture, family, language, migration, race, religion and belonging may be woven through the whole of your emotional life.
You can be grateful and still find it difficult
One of the most common tensions I hear when working with people who have moved country is the feeling that they should be grateful.
Perhaps you moved for safety, education, love, work or the hope of creating a better future for your children. Perhaps the move was your decision. Perhaps other people made sacrifices to help you leave. Perhaps your life now contains opportunities that were not previously available to you.
All of that can be true, and the move can still have cost you something.
You may miss a version of yourself that existed more easily in your first language. You may miss being understood without having to explain yourself. You may miss familiar streets, everyday rituals, family noise, particular foods, a climate, a landscape, or the feeling that your way of doing things was ordinary rather than different.
People sometimes dismiss this as homesickness, but it can be much more complicated.
Leaving a country can involve grief, even when the move is wanted and life has improved. You may be grieving people, places, status, confidence, community and a former sense of who you were.
My article, Grief Does Not Only Take a Person, The Secondary Losses in Grief, explores how loss can alter much more than the absence of one person. Migration can have a similar effect. It can change your place within your family, your relationship with language, your social standing and the future you had once imagined.
Recognising this does not mean that moving was a mistake. It means allowing the full truth of the experience to exist.
You can appreciate the opportunities that came with moving and still mourn what was left behind.
The strain of living between cultures
Living between cultures can create a particular kind of watchfulness.
You may find yourself constantly judging how much of yourself it is safe to show. At work, you might soften your accent, avoid mentioning your background or laugh at a joke that you do not find funny. Within your family, you may return to another version of yourself, one that feels familiar but may also feel restrictive.
You may be praised in one setting for being independent, then criticised in another for becoming selfish or distant.
Over time, this constant adjustment can become tiring.
Some people describe this as code switching, changing your speech, behaviour or presentation according to the cultural setting. At times, this is simply a useful human ability. Most of us behave slightly differently at work, at home and with friends.
The difficulty comes when adapting begins to feel like disappearing.
You may begin to ask yourself:
Who am I when no one is expecting anything from me?
Which values do I genuinely hold?
Why do I feel guilty when I make choices that suit me?
Why do I sometimes feel embarrassed by parts of my family or background?
Why do I feel like a visitor wherever I go?
These questions do not always have straightforward answers.
In therapy, the aim is not to produce a final statement about your identity. It is to understand how different parts of your history live alongside one another, where they come into conflict, and why some parts of you may have had to remain hidden.
What makes psychotherapy intercultural?
The word intercultural can sound formal, but the idea behind it is quite straightforward.
Intercultural psychotherapy takes seriously the fact that no one develops outside culture.
The way we understand family, love, duty, privacy, success, emotion, gender, authority and independence is shaped by the world in which we grew up. These influences can feel like common sense until we meet people who live according to a different set of assumptions.
In some families, independence is viewed as a sign of healthy adulthood. In others, family loyalty and interdependence are considered far more important. In one culture, speaking openly about feelings may be encouraged. In another, private pain may be carried quietly so that the family is not burdened or exposed.
Neither way of living can be understood properly without considering the context surrounding it.
An intercultural approach also recognises that the therapist has a culture.
I do not sit outside the room as a completely neutral person with no history, values or assumptions of my own. Differences between us may matter. Similarities may matter too.
There may be moments when you wonder whether I can understand something about your experience. You may worry that you will be judged, misunderstood or expected to make your story more familiar to me.
These feelings can be spoken about.
No therapist can know every culture from the inside, and it would be unhelpful to pretend otherwise. What matters is a willingness to listen carefully, remain curious, notice assumptions and avoid reducing you to a cultural label.
Your background may help us understand you, but it does not completely define you.
What does psychodynamic mean in ordinary language?
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is interested in the parts of our lives that repeat, particularly when we do not fully understand why.
You may know that a family expectation is unreasonable, yet feel intense guilt when you resist it. You may have left an oppressive environment, but find yourself entering relationships that carry some of the same emotional pressures.
You may want closeness, then pull away when someone becomes important. You may feel angry with your parents, then quickly become ashamed of the anger.
Rather than telling you what decision to make, psychodynamic psychotherapy helps us think about what gives these feelings their power.
We may consider early relationships, family roles, losses, unspoken rules and the ways you learned to protect yourself. We also pay attention to what happens within the therapy itself.
You may worry about disappointing me in the same way that you fear disappointing your family. You may agree with something I say while privately feeling misunderstood. You may hesitate to correct me because challenging an authority figure has never felt safe.
These moments are not failures in the therapy. They can help us see an emotional pattern as it happens, then begin to understand it differently.
For a fuller introduction, you may find Thinking About Psychodynamic Therapy, Here’s What You Need to Know Before You Start helpful.
When family loyalty and personal freedom collide
Migration often changes family relationships.
Parents may have sacrificed a great deal for their children. Adult children may feel that they owe them success, obedience or closeness in return.
A person who moves away may become the family’s hope, financial support or proof that years of sacrifice were worthwhile. Another person may be accused of forgetting where they came from.
This can make ordinary adult choices feel morally loaded.
Choosing a partner, setting boundaries, changing religion, ending a marriage, pursuing a different career, or raising your children differently may feel like more than a personal decision. It can feel like a betrayal of your family, history and culture.
The conflict is rarely solved by simply being told that you need stronger boundaries.
Boundaries may be important, but advice alone can miss the emotional reality. Guilt may be connected to love. Obedience may once have protected your sense of belonging. Silence may have helped the family survive periods of hardship. A parent’s controlling behaviour may also contain fear about losing a child to another country or culture.
Understanding these layers does not mean accepting behaviour that is harmful or intrusive.
It can help you respond with more freedom and less confusion. Therapy can make room for anger without forcing you to reject your family, and make room for loyalty without requiring you to give up your own life.
Children of migrants and the question of where they belong
You do not need to have moved country yourself to experience migration deeply.
Children of migrants may grow up within a family shaped by another country, while school, friendships and the outside world operate according to different rules.
You may have learned very early which parts of your family life could be mentioned and which should remain private. You may have become skilled at presenting one version of yourself at home and another outside it.
You may also have become a translator, not only of language, but of systems, manners and expectations.
Perhaps you helped your parents understand letters, complete forms, attend appointments or manage official conversations before you were emotionally ready to carry that responsibility.
This can produce a highly capable adult who reads rooms well and anticipates what other people need, while remaining uncertain about their own needs.
You may admire your parents’ courage and still feel burdened by what their struggles required from you.
Intercultural psychotherapy offers a place where these mixed feelings can be held together. You do not need to turn your parents into heroes or villains.
You can love them, understand their circumstances and still speak honestly about the effect your family life had on you.
When identity does not fit into one box
If you are of mixed heritage, internationally adopted, raised across several countries, or part of a family where different languages, religions and cultural traditions meet, other people may want a simple answer to a complicated question.
They may ask where you are really from.
You may be treated as belonging to one group in one setting and another group elsewhere. You may be told, directly or indirectly, that you are not truly part of either.
Perhaps you feel pressure to prove your loyalty, knowledge or authenticity. You may worry that you do not know enough about one part of your background. You may feel fraudulent in spaces that are supposedly yours.
The problem is not necessarily that your identity is confused.
Sometimes the problem is that the world demands a simplicity that does not fit your experience.
Therapy can help you live more comfortably with complexity, rather than forcing yourself into a category that leaves important parts of you out.
Language changes what can be said
Language carries memory, intimacy, humour, shame and belonging.
Some feelings may be easier to express in your first language. Other experiences may only feel possible to speak about in a later language because it provides emotional distance.
You may describe events from childhood fluently in English, yet feel strangely disconnected from them while speaking. A memory may feel emotionally different when spoken in the language in which it originally occurred.
An accent can also affect confidence.
Someone who felt articulate, respected and professionally established in one country may feel diminished when speaking more slowly in another. Other people may mistake an accent for a lack of intelligence, education or knowledge.
You may begin to speak less, even when you have something important to say.
In therapy, these changes can be noticed without being treated as problems that need correcting. You may use words from another language when English does not contain the exact meaning.
We can remain interested in what changes when a story is told in one language rather than another. Sometimes the space between languages tells us something important.
Racism, prejudice and the pressure to doubt yourself
Not every intercultural difficulty comes from within the family. Some distress develops as a response to the way a person has been treated.
Racism can be obvious, but it can also appear through repeated smaller encounters. This may include assumptions about intelligence or character, exclusion, jokes, suspiciousness, hostility towards an accent, or being treated as permanently foreign.
Religious prejudice, discrimination connected to immigration status and hostility towards cultural difference can have a similar cumulative effect.
One of the most damaging aspects can be the pressure to question your own perception.
Did that really happen?
Am I being too sensitive?
Should I have said something?
Would speaking up have made the situation worse?
When an experience is repeatedly denied or minimised, people can lose confidence in their own emotional responses. Anger may turn inward and become shame, anxiety or depression.
You may try harder to become acceptable, less difficult, more successful or beyond criticism.
Therapy should not explain racism away as a misunderstanding or reduce it to individual sensitivity. At the same time, we can think about why particular experiences have affected you so deeply, what earlier wounds they may have touched, and how you have learned to survive them.
Where intercultural experiences overlap with frightening, overwhelming or repeated events, you may also find my page on online trauma therapy helpful.
Relationships across cultures
Love and family life can bring cultural differences very close.
Partners may hold different ideas about family involvement, money, privacy, conflict, religion, gender roles, childcare and care for ageing parents.
One person may experience frequent family contact as warm and loving. Another may experience the same level of involvement as intrusive or controlling.
One partner may value direct discussion, while the other experiences confrontation as disrespectful or dangerous. One may expect decisions to be made by the couple, while the other feels that parents and extended family should be consulted.
These differences can easily become personal.
Instead of recognising that each partner is carrying a different cultural understanding of family life, both may begin to believe that the other is uncaring, selfish, controlling or disloyal.
Therapy can provide a place to explore the meaning beneath these disagreements.
Parenting between cultures
Parenthood can intensify questions of identity and belonging.
You may want your child to know your language, food, faith and traditions, while also wanting to change parts of the upbringing you received.
You may find yourself repeating something your parents once said, even though you had promised yourself that you would parent differently.
A child answering in English when you speak another language may feel like more than a simple preference. It may feel as though a part of you, or a connection to your family history, is being refused.
You may also disagree with a partner about discipline, independence, sleeping arrangements, education, religion or the involvement of grandparents.
These disagreements often contain more than practical differences. They may involve grief, fear and questions about what will survive into the next generation.
Psychotherapy can help you consider what you want to carry forward, what you want to change and why apparently small disagreements have become so emotionally charged.
The loneliness that can follow migration
Moving country can produce a form of loneliness that is difficult to describe.
You may know people and still feel unknown.
Friendships built later in life do not always carry the shared history of older relationships. People in your new country may not understand the references, humour, memories or political events that shaped you.
At the same time, friends and relatives in the country you left may assume that your life is easier or more exciting than it feels. You may avoid speaking honestly because you do not want to sound ungrateful.
Returning to visit can also be complicated.
You may expect to feel at home, then discover that both you and the place have changed. Family members may treat you as though you are still the person who left. You may feel too foreign in your country of origin and not fully accepted in your new one.
This experience can leave you feeling suspended between places.
Psychotherapy cannot remove the realities of distance, but it can provide a relationship in which these feelings do not need to be reduced or quickly resolved.
My article, The Need for Space to Think in an Age That Won’t Stop Moving, considers why having somewhere to think slowly can be valuable when life demands constant adaptation.
How online intercultural psychotherapy can help
Online psychotherapy can be particularly useful for people whose lives cross countries and cultures.
You may travel for work, live far from a major city, or want to speak with a UK-trained psychotherapist who understands the cultural and emotional context of life in the UK.
I trained and worked for many years in the United Kingdom and am registered with UK professional bodies. I am now based in Canada and offer online psychodynamic psychotherapy to adults across the UK and, where appropriate, to people living internationally.
Being based in Canada also forms part of my own experience of migration and living between cultures. While my experience will not be the same as yours, I understand something of how moving country can unsettle ideas of identity, home and belonging.
Meeting online can offer continuity when location has already changed many times. It may also allow you to work with a therapist whose approach feels appropriate, rather than being limited only to the services available close to where you live.
I offer online psychodynamic psychotherapy in a thoughtful and unhurried way. We would begin by considering what has brought you to therapy, what is happening in your life now and what parts of your history may need more space.
You do not need to arrive with a clear explanation.
You may only know that you feel divided, lonely, guilty, angry, rootless or exhausted by continually adapting. That is enough to begin.
Intercultural psychotherapy may be helpful if you are struggling with:
Identity and belonging after moving country
Grief or homesickness connected to migration
Family expectations and personal choices
Mixed heritage or second-generation identity
Racism, prejudice or feeling culturally othered
Relationships and parenting across cultures
Language, accent and confidence
Anxiety, low mood or emotional isolation
The feeling that you are never fully at home
Guilt about building a life away from your family
The pressure to succeed after others have sacrificed for you
A place where you do not have to reduce yourself
The pressure to fit in often encourages people to tell a shortened version of their story.
Important parts may be left out because they take too long to explain. Contradictions are tidied away. Anger is softened. Grief is hidden behind gratitude.
Cultural difference may either be made central to everything or treated as though it should not matter at all.
In therapy, we can resist that pressure.
You can be attached to a culture and critical of it.
You can be grateful to your family and angry about what was expected of you.
You can build a life in a new country and continue to mourn what was left behind.
You can feel at home in more than one place, or not quite at home anywhere.
The aim is not to decide which version of you is the correct one. It is to make more room for the whole person you have become.
If this article speaks to something you have been carrying, you are welcome to contact me or arrange a free 20-minute introductory consultation.
The introductory conversation is simply an opportunity to meet, ask questions and consider whether working together might be useful. There is no obligation to continue.
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