Identity is often understood, particularly in psychological discourse, as something internal and relatively stable. Yet clinical and psychosocial research has long shown that identity is largely relational and context-dependent. Who a person is does not emerge in isolation but through recognition, roles, language and continuity within a social world.
Migration profoundly disrupts this relational ground. It is not only a physical movement from one place to another but a rupture in the contexts that sustain identity on an everyday level. Professional roles, social status, linguistic confidence and even modes of self-expression may lose their validity in a new environment. This experience is frequently described as an “identity loss,” yet what is more often observed in practice is a state of identity suspension rather than disappearance.
In migration contexts, identity crisis rarely appears as an overt psychological breakdown. More often, it unfolds quietly. Individuals remain functional; they work, manage daily life and fulfill responsibilities. At the same time, their relationship to themselves becomes less coherent. Indecisiveness, weakened feelings of belonging and difficulty answering the question “who am I here?” are common manifestations. Because these experiences do not always resemble clinical symptoms, they often remain unrecognized for extended periods.
From a psychological perspective, identity also has a temporal dimension. It is shaped not only by past experiences, but by imagined futures. Migration frequently destabilizes this orientation toward the future, particularly under conditions of legal uncertainty, temporary status, or precarious employment. When the future becomes difficult to anticipate, identity loses direction. Individuals may find themselves suspending not only who they are, but who they might become.
This has important implications for psychosocial support. Approaches that focus too quickly on “adaptation” or “reconstruction” risk overlooking the lived experience of disintegration. Psychosocial work begins by acknowledging suspension as a legitimate response to contextual disruption. When this state is named and normalized, individuals are less likely to internalize it as personal failure or inadequacy.
In clinical and psychosocial settings, a recurring question often emerges implicitly: “Who am I allowed to be here?”
This question captures the core of migration-related identity distress. Psychosocial support does not provide ready-made answers to it. Instead, it creates space for the question to be held, revisited and slowly reworked over time. Identity in a new context is not rebuilt through effort alone but through recognition, relationships and duration.
Framing identity crisis in migration as an individual vulnerability obscures the structural conditions that shape it. More often than not, what is experienced as an internal struggle reflects prolonged uncertainty and social liminality. Identity does not vanish through migration but it may temporarily lose its place.
The task of psychosocial work is not to restore identity quickly but to accompany individuals while this suspension is lived through. This process is gradual and often quiet. Yet it is within this quietness that identity begins to reorganize not as a return to what was but as something shaped by new conditions of recognition and belonging.