Seven Faces of Male Grief – Part 4
This is the fourth in my Seven Faces of Male Grief series, where I explore the hidden ways grief shows up in modern men’s lives — often masked as ambition, withdrawal, rage, or numbness. This article explores how migration and grief intertwine in men’s inner world.
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” — Maya Angelou
Migration unsettles that ache in ways both visible and hidden. For some men, leaving home means a raw, bone-deep homesickness—the grief of a displaced soul carrying the weight of what was left behind while trying to build something new with hands that still remember another soil.
For others, migration brings safety and relief: the gay man who no longer fears persecution, the refugee who finally sleeps without the constant threat of violence. And yet, even for those who find freedom, grief remains—the scents of familiar cooking, the rhythm of a mother tongue, the memory of rain on warm earth.
Migration and grief are never straightforward. It is complex and conflicting. It can encompass sadness and security, rupture and liberation, longing and obligation. To acknowledge this pain is not to reduce it to homesickness or heroism but to honour the various truths carried inside the migrant body and soul.
Migration and Grief – The Ache of Displacement
Visible Losses – What Men Leave Behind
Visible losses include the father’s village in Punjab, the mother’s kitchen in Guadalajara, and the pub in County Cork. These are losses that society often recognises. For many men, another rupture is the loss of their network of friends—the mates who knew them without needing explanation, the neighbours who nodded without words, and the community where history was shared rather than spoken.
Migration pulls away this web of recognition, leaving men dislocated not only from place but also from the simple human act of being known.
Invisible Losses – Belonging Without Recognition
Invisible losses run deep: the erosion of cultural fluency, where jokes no longer land, where gestures go unrecognised, and silence is misread. The loss of masculine identity markers follows closely — the respect once instinctively given, the professional status once held, the communal role once grounded.
It is not just that a man changes countries; it is that his ways of belonging — of being understood, valued, and mirrored — quietly fade away. Moreover, often, it is not named as grief.
These invisible losses reveal how deeply migration and grief shape masculine identity.
Ambiguous Loss and the Migrant Soul
Migration and grief are rarely simple. It takes many shapes, depending on a man’s story, his reasons for leaving, and the expectations placed upon him in the new land. Some losses are shaped by economics, while others are driven by violence or generational inheritance — and each carries its own weight.
Economic, Refugee, and Generational Grief
Contemporary research highlights distinct nuances:
- Economic migrants carry family expectations, their grief complicated by pressure to succeed (Carling, 2008).
- Refugees bear trauma and survivor’s guilt (Papadopoulos, 2002).
- Generational migrants grieve places they never lived but inherited a longing for.
Between Safety and Exile
In the tension between safety and exile, migration and grief become quiet companions. This is the architecture of displacement: seen, unseen, and always shadowed by expectation.
In practice, it might mean sitting in a room full of people and feeling alone because no one shares your memories. It could mean carrying the pressure to succeed for the family back home while grieving the loss of status in the new country. It may involve laughing at jokes you do not fully understand or staying silent when words fail you—all the while missing the comfort of being truly known.
Trauma and Complicated Grief
For refugee men, migration and grief often coexist with trauma.
Survivor’s Guilt and Stoicism
Not all migration grief is just sadness. Displacement often involves trauma—war, persecution, political violence. Judith Herman (1992) reminds us that trauma destroys the fundamental trust that makes belonging possible.
For refugee and asylum-seeking men, grief becomes complicated, entwined with trauma memories, survivor’s guilt, and the masculine pressure to “toughen up.” Survival demands often silence mourning.
In high-trauma settings — war, displacement, forced migration — grief is frequently swallowed by necessity. There is no space to collapse when survival is on the line. For many men, especially those raised on stoicism and self-containment, grief becomes something to outrun, not metabolise. Mourning is miscast as weakness; endurance becomes the only currency of worth.
Hybrid Identity – Loss and Creativity
Nevertheless, displacement is not just rupture. For some men, it becomes a space of hybrid identity—where loss and creativity coexist. You become both insider and outsider — everywhere. You speak the language, pick up the cues, can pass — and yet, you carry a quiet feeling of unbelonging in every room. You are never quite enough of one thing to be claimed, never quite removed enough to reject either side entirely. It is not just cultural; it is existential.
It seems like mourning the loss of the language you can no longer speak fluently, while creating new ways to express humour in a second tongue.
It appears to reflect the sadness of no longer hearing a mother’s recipes in her own voice, alongside the pride of teaching children to cook those meals with new ingredients. It encapsulates carrying the ache of being a stranger, even as you weave fragments of two cultures into a life unmistakably your own.
Belonging may not be recovered, but it can be reimagined. To name migration grief without naming this possibility risks over-pathologising exile.
The Body Remembers Migration
The body becomes a map of migration and grief, holding memories that cannot be spoken.
Somatic Symptoms of Displacement
Migration grief is profoundly physical. Shoulders carry the weight from another land. Sleep follows circadian rhythms set thousands of miles away. Digestive systems resist unfamiliar foods and the stress of feeling like a stranger.
Masculine socialisation reinforces this. Many men push on, medicate with work or alcohol, or dismiss physical symptoms as unrelated. Yet the body keeps score (van der Kolk, 2014). Displacement often shows up through pain, autoimmune reactions, and cardiovascular strain.
Embodied Healing Practices for Men
Somatic practices—such as breathwork, grounding, and mindful walking—provide anchors. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (1997) illustrates how trauma can be released through body awareness rather than just through words. For migrant men, embodied practices reconnect them both to ancestral rhythms and the landscapes where they now reside.
The Silence That Speaks
Silence becomes an additional layer of loss — a grief men bear without acknowledgment or consent.
Disenfranchised Male Grief
Disenfranchised grief—sorrow that society does not recognise—manifests in specific ways for migrant men (Doka, 2002). While women’s grief over family separation is often acknowledged, men’s feelings of displacement are overshadowed by myths of resilience as breadwinners.
The truth is: resilience is not always a badge of honour. Too often, it turns into cultural gaslighting, dismissing grief while praising stoicism.
Friendship Networks and Professional Identity Loss
One of the most overlooked aspects is the loss of friendship networks. Many men rely less on direct emotional conversations and more on side-by-side connection—the camaraderie at the worksite, the familiar faces at the pub, the mates who recall shared mistakes. Migration dismantles these webs of recognition.
Moving to a new country is not just about being a stranger, but about losing the comfort of being known without having to explain. For some men, this absence cuts deeper than physical separation from family.
Intersectional Layers of Migration Grief
Intersectional factors deepen the silence. A white expatriate’s homesickness may be mistaken for nostalgia, while a Somali refugee’s longing is seen as a burden. A tech worker adapting to cultural quirks might receive sympathy, whereas a construction worker’s isolation is ignored. Class, race, and immigration status create hierarchies that determine whose grief is recognised.
Language loss also causes deep sorrow. Pavlenko (2004) describes how migrants see themselves as “children again,” losing the ability to express subtlety, humour, or authority in a second language. This loss is not just practical but also existential—men mourn not only the words but also the sense of self that those words once conveyed.
Professional identity bears similar wounds: the engineer who became a taxi driver, the doctor who turned into an orderly. Their grief is not only economic but also existential—the mourning of unrecognised skills, the loss of status, and the erosion of masculine pride.
However, some men rediscover their dignity—not through regained status, but through a renewed sense of meaning. Like the former professor who now volunteers at a community garden, trading titles for touch and theory for presence. Or the tradesman who mentors newly arrived boys, passing on not a résumé but a rhythm of care.
In these quiet acts, value is redefined—not by what the world sees, but by what the soul understands.
Generational Fractures and Inherited Longing
These fractures are not only personal but also generational, manifesting in the way families navigate between worlds.
Transnational Simultaneity
Migration disrupts family routines. Children often adapt faster, leaving fathers feeling left behind in their own homes. Daughters confront norms that challenge traditional values. Sons juggle between integration and loyalty.
This is grief not only for what is lost but also for what is inherited. Children and grandchildren often mourn places they have never lived in, longing for a homeland they know only through stories. Scholars refer to this phenomenon as transnational simultaneity—living in two worlds at once (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004).
Shadow Emotions in Migrant Families
Shadow emotions muddy the picture: anger at the homeland that failed, resentment at the adopted country’s conditional acceptance, survivor’s guilt, shame for missing a place that no longer exists. These often show as irritability, rigidity, or withdrawal.
Mapping Migration and Grief
To make sense of this complexity, migration grief can be mapped across layers that reveal its depth.
Visible, Invisible, and Shadowed Dimensions
To hold the complexity, migration grief can be seen in layers:
- Visible Losses — family, culture, language, professional roles.
- Invisible Losses — subtle displacements of humour, authority, bodily rhythms.
- Shadow Dimensions — shame, guilt, anger, resentment, silence.
Pathways of Healing and Homecoming
Healing from migration and grief begins by reclaiming a sense of belonging through small practices that reconnect men to their bodies, memories, and communities.
Embodied Memory Practices
Some forms of healing do not come through words alone. They live in embodied memory — the smell of a homeland dish simmering on the stove, the fabric of a childhood shirt, the music that once filled ancestral streets.
They emerge through somatic grounding: the slow rhythm of breath, the crunch of gravel underfoot during mindful walks, the quiet practice of letting the body remember its place in the world.
Storytelling, Mentorship, and Rituals
Others come through storytelling — not as performance, but as shared reckoning. When men gather not just to speak but to be witnessed, isolation gives way to collective wisdom. Some choose to document legacy — recording their migration stories so sons and grandsons will not inherit only silence.
There is medicine, too, in rituals that mark the seasons of grief — the anniversaries, the sensory echoes of loss, the return of certain winds.
In third spaces, men shape new identities where old and new selves can meet without shame; furthermore, perhaps most powerfully, in mentorship, where older migrant men turn their wounds into maps, guiding others not away from pain, but through it.
Professional Support and Collective Belonging
Professional intervention may be needed when grief becomes complicated: persistent depression, substance abuse, isolation, or impaired functioning (Bhugra & Becker, 2005). Access to culturally competent support is essential.
Conclusion – The Homecoming That Never Comes
Perhaps grief does not need to be solved — only held, tended, witnessed.
Imagine this: a man sits alone in a foreign park, the sun warming his back just like it did on his grandmother’s verandah. The smell from a nearby food stall stirs something ancient in his chest. His body recognises it before his mind does: he is not just a stranger here. He is a bridge between places, between selves, between generations.
Migration and grief are not flaws to fix. It is a story to carry — with breath, with memory, with others who know.
This is the core of my mentoring work: walking beside men who are learning to name what was lost, to listen to what still lives, and to build a home they can belong to from the inside out.
If you are carrying quiet sorrows you have never named, or if you are ready to stop doing it alone, walk with me.
Recommended Reading:
Explore more reflections on men’s grief and belonging:
A foundational post exploring how men process grief and rebuild meaning.
Examines cultural silence around masculine grief in the Australian context.
For men grieving the life paths that never came to be.
For men who want to reclaim the life they thought they had lost.
Explore fatherhood, loss and unspoken emotional burdens.
Key Takeaways
- Migration and grief carry both visible and invisible losses from community and culture to masculine identity.
- Men often mask grief through stoicism, work, or silence, confusing endurance with strength.
- Displacement reshapes identity, yet it can also spark creativity and redefinition.
- The body remembers exile; healing begins through grounding, rituals, and embodied practices.
- Connection, mentoring and storytelling transform grief from isolation into belonging.
FAQs
- What is migration grief?
Migration grief is the emotional response to losing one’s home, culture, and familiar identity when moving to another country. It can involve sadness, disconnection, and longing, often without being recognised as grief. - How does migration and grief affect men differently?
Many men carry the grief of migration in silence. Cultural expectations about masculinity can discourage emotional expression, leading to isolation, overwork, or physical symptoms instead of visible grieving. - What are Invisible losses in migration?
Invisible losses include language fluency, professional identity, humour, and belonging. They are often subtle but deeply affect how men feel seen, valued, and connected. - How can men begin to heal from the experience of migration and grief?
Healing begins by naming losses, reconnecting with the body, and finding safe relational spaces through mentoring, storytelling or community rituals to honour what was lost and rebuild meaning. - When should professional support be sought?
If grief develops into depression, withdrawal, or substance use, culturally competent counselling can help integrate the experiences rather than suppress them.
About the Author
David Kernohan is the founder of Mentoring Through The Maze, a Perth-based mentoring practice that helps men navigate grief, identity loss, and life transitions.
Drawing on over 30 years in mental health, law, and leadership, David supports men in rebuilding a sense of strength and belonging through reflection, courage, and grounded action.
Visit Mentoring Through The Maze to learn more or book a session.
References
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Boss, P. (2006). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. W. W. Norton.
Doka, K. J. (2002). Disenfranchised grief: New directions, challenges, and strategies for practice. Research Press.
Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.
Levant, R. F. (1996). The new psychology of men. Basic Books.
Papadopoulos, R. K. (2002). Refugees, home and trauma. In R. K. Papadopoulos (Ed.), Therapeutic care for refugees: No place like home (pp. 9–39). Karnac Books.
Pavlenko, A. (2004). “‘Stop doing that, ia komu skazano!’: Language loss and identity construction in the context of migration.” The Modern Language Journal, 88(2), 178–199.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
One Response