The Grief That Arrives Before You Do: On Transgenerational Displacement and Inherited Grief

There is a question that surfaces, in different forms, in the consulting room with expat families. Sometimes it is spoken directly. Sometimes it lives in the ether, unasked but ever present in session. When will we feel like we belong?

It is not only a practical question. Underneath it sits something older and harder to name. A grief that did not necessarily begin with the person sitting across from me, and will not necessarily end with them either.

This piece builds on what relocation does to individual identity and the self, widening the lens. While displacement can be an individual experience, it is more often than not a family one, whether a family moves together, or builds a life with loved ones away from their home country. And the psychological consequences of that do not stay contained within a single generation. They travel. Often silently. Often without anyone knowing they are carrying something that was never originally theirs.

In This Piece:

• Why displacement does not end with the generation that moved

• How unprocessed parental grief is transmitted to children without words

• What Winnicott, Kohut, Fraiberg and Freud offer us in understanding inherited loss

• Why growing up between two cultural worlds creates a particular kind of rootlessness

• What genuine psychological integration requires, and why symptom management falls short

• Why the internal experience of belonging cannot be obtained by passing a citizenship test

You Cannot Take the Country Out of Them

There is something I find myself saying, in various forms, to families navigating this territory. You can take an immigrant out of their home country. But you cannot take the home country out of them. And you cannot take it out of the children they raise in its absence.

Parents who immigrate often sacrifice enormously. The decision is almost always driven by love. Safety, security, better options, futures that the home country could no longer reliably offer. That sacrifice is real and it deserves acknowledgement. But sacrifice of that magnitude carries a psychological weight that does not simply dissolve once the passports are secured and the children are enrolled in school.

What happens instead is that the weight gets redistributed. Often, quietly, onto the child.

The Parentified Child

In communities built around migrant labour, a particular family dynamic is common. The Gulf region offers a clear example. A breadwinner travels extensively for work, rotating between Dubai, Riyadh, Bahrain, Qatar. The parent at home is isolated, displaced, navigating a culture not entirely their own, without the extended family network that would ordinarily provide support. Into that gap steps the child. Not by choice. By relational necessity.

The child becomes confidant, emotional support, stabilising presence. They learn, very early, to read the parent’s distress and respond to it. To manage their own needs quietly so as not to add to an already burdened household. To be, in Winnicott’s terms, what the environment requires rather than what they actually are.

Winnicott described this as the development of a false self. A self built in response to the environment’s demands rather than from the inside out. The false self is not dishonest exactly. It is adaptive and can help keep the family system functioning. But it does so at the cost of the child’s access to their own genuine needs, desires, and emotional experience. The true self goes underground. And it tends to stay there until something, often a significant life transition, forces it back to the surface.

When the child’s own pain cannot be held and processed, it finds another route. It may turn inward, as depression, anxiety, a quiet collapse of the self. Or it may turn outward, as rage, self-harm, substances, promiscuity. These are not failures of character. They are communications and the enactment of something that could not be spoken.

Often because the parent needed the child to be fine, and the child, sensing this, could not afford not to be.

What Gets Transmitted Without Words

Selma Fraiberg wrote about ghosts in the nursery. The unresolved grief, fear, and conflict of the parent that enters the relational field between parent and child before the child has language to name it. The child does not receive the story of the parent’s displacement. They receive the weather of it. This may be the anxiety, the longing, the hopefulness, the overwhelm. In many instances, there is a particular quality of grief that lives in a household where something important has been left behind and cannot be spoken of directly.

Kohut too presents an interesting idea of how things in our environment, people, places, even memories, are used to perform psychological functions we cannot yet do for ourselves. This can be strength, coherence, a sense of being real and continuous. For the displaced parent, the homeland can often function as an idealised stabilising force in absentia. It can come to hold the projection of everything good, everything that would have prevented this hardship. In a way, it can be everything the new country has so far failed to provide.

I can’t help but muse that Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia has a place here. In ordinary grief, we gradually withdraw our emotional investment from what has been lost and, over time, reinvest elsewhere. In melancholia, the lost object is incorporated into the self and the grief turns inward, circulating without resolution. The homeland that still exists but is no longer reachable, or no longer recognisable, is almost impossible to mourn in the ordinary sense. It has not been cleanly lost. And so the grief persists, idealised, unresolved, and quietly transmitted to the next generation.

The Dual World: Expat Identity Between Two Cultures

The child of displacement does not simply grow up between two cultures. They grow up between two internal worlds. The world of the parents, with its particular emotional atmosphere, its references, its grief, its idealised elsewhere, and the world outside the front door, which offers no reflection of any of that.

The proximal distance between these worlds varies enormously. An Arab child growing up in Dubai, for example, exists within a cultural surround that partially mirrors the parental internal world. The gap is navigable. The same family in Europe faces a much more complete translation, not just of language but of self, every time they move between home and outside.

What Fraiberg called ghosts in the nursery means the child is vulnerable to becoming the projection. To inhabiting the role the parent’s unconscious has assigned them. The one who will validate the enormous sacrifice. The one who must succeed because the cost of failure makes the cost of leaving even more unbearable. The one who must not struggle, because the parent’s guilt cannot bear it.

You Can Pass the Test, But Does That Make You a Citizen?

Splitting is the psychological mechanism that makes unprocessed displacement so enduring. The homeland becomes all good, the new country all bad, or the reverse. The past or imagined future becomes idealised, the present persecutory. What is almost never available, without conscious and supported psychological work, is the capacity to hold both as real. Both as flawed. Both as containing loss and possibility simultaneously.

Kleinian thinking urges us to hold onto this ambivalence and uncertainty without being destroyed by it. Feeling genuinely sad rather than dividing things into good and bad. Mourning what was lost rather than enshrining it. In this, we come to recognise that genuine integration requires bearing the full weight of a complex reality that is inherently ambiguous and paradoxical.

You can sit an exam and receive citizenship. But that does not make you a citizen internally. Internal belonging, a coherent and continuous sense of self that does not fragment across cultural contexts, requires the capacity to hold the tension. To grieve the homeland without idealising it. To inhabit the new country without disowning what came before. And possibly to be realistic that the future too will hold the good with the bad.

Approaches that focus on symptom management tend to work at the surface of this. They teach the person to manage the division rather than integrate it. Managing a split, over time, reinforces it. The relief is real. The underlying fragmentation remains.

What depth psychodynamic work offers instead is the possibility of genuine integration. Not resolution in the sense of the pain disappearing. But the capacity to hold the hopefulness and dread of experiences simultaneously. The wound and the faith. The loss and the possibility. The country left behind and the self being slowly, imperfectly, built in the new one.

What I Know From the Inside

I trained in Johannesburg, a city that is itself built on displacement and migrant labour. I have worked clinically in South Africa, in Dubai, and in the United Kingdom. Each of those contexts has its own particular version of this material. Its own ghosts. Its own inherited grief. Its own version of the question underneath the question.

As I sit with these ideas, Kohut’s notion of vicarious introspection comes to mind. He questioned empathy, suggesting that genuine empathic attunement is knowing from the inside rather than observing from the outside. There is a version of warmth in clinical work that remains at the level of witness. Compassionate, well-intentioned, and ultimately exterior to the experience it is trying to hold.

And then there is something else. The recognition that passes between people who have crossed the same water.`

Written by Kirstan Lloyd, Clinical Psychologist

Kirstan Lloyd is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, and founder of Helix Centre. She works with expats, internationally mobile adults and people navigating identity transition. This article was written by Kirstan with the support of AI research tools and is grounded in literature from psychology, neuroscience, and trauma-informed care.