Letters from readers – Immigration

“Hello, my dear Mindspa team!  I hope I am not too late for “Dear therapist” column. I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, just couldn’t put my thoughts into words. 

So, I’ll try. I don’t think you’ve seen a case like this before. 

“Immigration malady”. I moved to another country after I finished college. Alone. No connections, no acquaintances. I wasn’t planning on it, but my friend told me “give it a try”. I didn’t have problems with the language. I got immigration papers, started earning good money, but this is not my dream job. 

While I was waiting for my papers, I’ve been working in bars and restaurants. Today, I am 33, I don’t have a husband or a boyfriend. And I don’t have experience of working in any other profession. So, I don’t know what to do. Especially, now, in this situation. My profession no longer inspires me. I know that I can do more. But what? 

My psychological slide downhill started right after I moved. I am sliding towards being a helpless child. I’ve always been brave, never afraid of anything. I would always take chances, ahead of everyone else. I’ve had 4 jobs and a college. But here… At the age of 20 I had to start from scratch. Career, friends, relationships (mentality is different here). I started running into sadists and narcissists. My self-esteem is getting worse and worse, every year. I don’t feel at home neither at my birthplace nor here, nowhere. I am stuck in the mental state of a teen. I am not able to “grow up” – it is too scary. I am trying to look for support, but I am not able to find it here. My ties with the Russian community didn’t develop, from the very beginning. Gossip, rumors, whispering behind your back – this was too suffocating for me. I feel like I am being drained by all thеse hardships, and my fixations and psychological traumas are resurfacing.  

I would like to know how to support myself among strangers, in a different culture. How can I support myself and stop feeling helpless?” 

• Hello K.!  There are a lot of questions in your letter, so I will select a few topics. 

1. Your profession doesn’t inspire you, but you don’t know what else to do. 

This is truly a very important question. When you feel like you are in your place, you will find internal support, confidence, and energy. 

How can you find your career? We have a course “Compass”. It covers this topic and significantly helps in such situations. If you are not able to take this course, you can try free career aptitude tests. They may point you in the right direction. 

2. “Helpless child. I’ve always been brave, never afraid of anything.” 

There is a contradiction here. You are writing that you’ve always been brave, but for whatever reason, you are sliding towards helpless childhood. 

If you were brave in some period of your life, your courage must have been based on something. Perhaps, it seemed like the whole life is ahead of you, or you were receiving support from your family. Everything that a person experiences has its own logic. 

Try to remember – what helped you to be brave then? Can you recreate such conditions now, only if partially?  

3. Helplessness – is a way of life.  

There are moments when we experience this feeling. Partially, it happens because we are not able to gain something that we want. But helplessness is an illusion, to some extent. Even a sick bed-ridden person is not completely helpless, and they can always do something. 

Think about it – where exactly do you feel helpless now? What can you do for yourself, so that you wouldn’t feel helpless? Write down 3-5 new approaches rather than choosing inaction.  

4. You are writing that you have not succeeded at something, that something didn’t work out.  

But what good do you have in your life? What do you already have that is important and dear to you? Often, when we don’t achieve many goals, we start thinking in patterns that are focused on failures and difficulties.  

Asking questions about what good you have, what good happened in any particular situation can help you to see something else, rather than failures and difficulties. While focusing on good things, you will start receiving positive resources and emotions. 

5. You really need support.

Friends, relatives, people who like you – they would be a great source of support from time to time. But if you don’t have such people, or if their support is not helping you in solving your problems, you can find yourself a psychologist. You can find support not only in kind words, in the love of your friends and relatives, but also in a new decision that you make.  

6. You can also look for something that inspires you.

Something that you like. Some goals, some activity, meeting people, hobbies, etc. Such crises sometimes promote self-discovery and finding your true desires.  

But to be honest, the first thing that I want to recommend for you is to visit a psychologist. Since you have been “sliding” for a long time towards helplessness, it is hard for you to grow up, and you are afraid of everything, you need to start climbing out of this state. For now, you have not been successful on your own. 

The phrase that concerns me the most is “My self-esteem is getting worse and worse, every year”. It tells me that this process has been going on for years, it didn’t happen suddenly. Perhaps, there are different reasons for this, and these reasons need to be identified. Time showed that your problems didn’t resolve by themselves. Perhaps, they are accumulating and making your situation even more difficult.  

If something is “broken”, you can fix it and move forward. I wish that everything would get better in your life. It is quite possible if you want it. 

Take care of yourself,  Minspa Consulting Psychologist