“Life must be remembered backward, but lived forward.”-Soren Kierkegaard
My goal is to provide my patients with a witness to their story. When stories are told, articulated, processed, and known they no longer haunt us. Instead, they come to inform our understanding of who we are, where we come from, and how we perceive the world around us.
My goal is to provide my patients with a witness to their story. When stories are told, articulated, processed, and known they no longer haunt us. Instead, they come to inform our understanding of who we are, where we come from, and how we perceive the world around us.
Ana's Story: A Narrative of Immigration
Fragment extracted from my Doctoral Thesis: “A Proposed Integrative Model for Treatment of Identity Disruptions in Romanian Female Expatriates”
I imagine Ana, a young woman in her early thirties who lives with her family in a small city in Washington State. Two years ago, she emigrated from Romania
with her husband and their one-year-old son. Her husband is a high-tech
engineer, whose U.S. job opportunity—a position of challenge and distinction—was
the motivation for their immigration. At first, Ana resented the idea, mostly
because it meant leaving behind her relatively large extended family with whom
she enjoyed warm and close relationships.
Counterbalancing Ana’s resentment was the realization that this was an
excellent opportunity for her husband as well as her son. Furthermore, she was
surrounded by a surging tide of professionals leaving Romania for good jobs
abroad. This trend which legitimized and validated her husband’s plan encouraged
Ana to embrace the decision to emigrate.
Although marriage was central in Ana’s life goals, she also greatly valued her
career, which she’d been able to develop in Romania. Emigrating would require a
sacrifice of this value as well, or at least a significant delay of advancement.
Despite the loss of her family and postponement of her career, Ana and her
husband decided to move to the United States. The difficulty of life in Romania
made them view relocation as an opportunity for growth and change. They wanted
to escape the difficult circumstances the forty-plus years of communism
created.
As discussed in the previous chapters of this dissertation, Romanian women
historically are responsible for taking care of the home and children and for
keeping the family together. They often feel obligated to sacrifice themselves
in order to accomplish this goal, relying on other women within the extended
family for support and strength. This sacrificial role is reinforced by the
admiration and recognition given by the society at large to women. The ideal
Romanian wife, an ideal developed and reinforced over centuries, is
self-effacing and husband-serving; she is nourished by his approval, sheltered
by his earnings, enhanced by his accomplishments. Having been immersed in this
cultural milieu, Ana knew that wherever her husband went, she would follow, as
was simply the expected behavior of a married couple.
The traditions of Eastern Europe also contributed to the close knit and
enmeshed nature of Romanian families that emphasize closeness, intimacy, and
family centeredness. Under Communist rule, the Romanian family provided a place
where ideology could be left behind, a refuge where people could express genuine
views about current events. In addition to its importance as the locus of
nurturance, the Romanian family was also a fundamental source of economic well
being.
During her upbringing, Ana’s extended family provided an environment for many
important family relationships. She was able to learn about and adapt to her
world through these relationships. Ana shared many interests with her mother and
other women in the family, with whom she developed very deep relationships. When
she married, Ana’s family continued to be involved in her life, and by
extension, the life of the couple. Ana’s mother and sometimes her grandmother
helped her at home, making it easier for her to go to school or work. In return,
there was the expectation that she would take care of her parents, especially in
old age.
For all these reasons, Ana made it a priority to maintain close connections with her
family. When she went away to a conference in another city, she called home
every day. When her elderly parents were sick, she would drop anything to handle
every small event. Her parents were devoted to her for so many years, and she
felt in turn that she should be devoted to them when they needed her- that was
the expectation, and one with which she fully concurred.
Ana’s family of origin and community were geographically stable; moving away
from family was not a common occurrence. Her parents were accomplished
professionals, with role divisions within the family along traditional lines
(her father was the head of the family). Ana experienced both her parents as
perfectionistic, imposing very high standards concerning behavior and academic
and social success. They created an environment that supported Ana’s further
education and career involvement. Education was considered very important and
graduate studies were highly encouraged. At the time of emigration Ana had
completed a master’s degree and held a job of which she was proud of.
With an interlude for advanced education and brief experience in the work
place, Ana passed from being a daughter to a wife. Ana was 18 and Paul, 19 when
they met. They talked endlessly, sharing their ideas and life dreams, and knew
each other deeply when they married after graduation from college. The religious
ceremony was a very important event, attended by the extended
family.
Marriage was central in Ana’s life goals and so was a professional
life-messages reinforced within her family of origin as well as by the larger
culture.
Although Ana shared a more egalitarian relationship with her husband than
couples from previous eras, her life had been deeply intertwined with her
husband’s. Ana lived the illusion of merging with her partner into oneness, into
a protective cocoon; hatching out of that cocoon was scary for her.
One day her husband told her that a large U.S. software company was
organizing hiring interviews in a nearby country, and he had been invited to
interview. A few of Paul’s’ acquaintances and co-workers had recently been hired
by this company. Proud of her husband, Ana supported his decision to interview.
A couple of weeks later, her husband had an offer for more in-depth interviews
and thus, and then he was invited to visit company quarters in Washington State.
Shortly after, he was hired and asked to relocate to the United States. The news
was just exhilarating!
Despite their plans to immigrate, Ana and Paul knew very little about the
country to which they were moving. For many Romanians, including Ana and Paul,
their only understanding of American life was derived from rock music, movies,
and sensational literature. Word-of-mouth reports from Romanians already in the
United States, often second- or third-hand, were similarly rose-colored: they
often portrayed the ease with which consumer goods, such as cars, food and
houses, could be acquired. Thus, Ana and Paul acquired the impression from the
Romanians who already were living in Seattle that their co-nationals, being
skilled and highly educated, were well-equipped for the task of adjusting to
American life. What else could be needed besides intelligence and
willingness?
In their flood of enthusiasm, they allowed images to serve as realities. Ana
and Paul imagined they would buy a beautiful house and would not have to worry
about financial struggles, and, more importantly, they would provide their
children with a more secure future than they might have had in their homeland.
As time passed, Ana began to fear the big unknown she faced. Ana’s worry was
aroused when she realized that moving would rupture a tapestry of sustaining
personal connections. She worried that she might have trouble making friends and
laying down new roots in an unfamiliar place.
Ana would have felt disappointed in herself if she hadn’t supported her
husband in this decision. Ana always expected accomplishment of herself as a
good wife, a good mother, and a good daughter. She felt it was up to her to make
the transition work for her family. Ana saw herself as more resilient and her
husband more fragile. Echoing in her mind was a phrase her grandmother had told
her many times: “When the wife is not at her best, the husband is lost.”
As they prepared for the move, Ana sometimes felt powerful and heroic,
and other times she felt helpless. Motivated by heady feelings of great courage
and power, she discounted her apprehensions and imagined herself capable of
overcoming whatever frustrations and challenges she might encounter. Both states
contributed to unrealistic evaluations of what she had to face. Ana was
enthusiastic about the relocation and yet she was bewildered and dismayed when
she realized that her pleasure was intermingled with, or overshadowed by,
unforeseen sadness. She had never left her hometown, much less settled in a
foreign country.
The unexpected upwelling of pain became a source of anxiety and shame.
Ana perceived her husband as so self absorbed with arranging the complex moving
process to as to have little ability to understand or empathize with her
distress. Unknowingly, she cut herself off from a potential source of support.
It was easier to be silent, feeling the pressure of the cultural expectation:
since the dream of betterment through immigration has always been a cherished
dream by Romanians, family, friends, and neighbors disregarded any signs of
Ana’s distress and urged her to see the very bright side of their new future.
But contrary to what was expected of Ana, her distress grew as the moving
date approached. She struggled with intense feelings of sadness and loss. To
leave Romania meant detaching from a spectrum of roles, meanings, and
affiliations. It meant losing home, family, neighborhood, friends, work—myriad
strands of connection and identity. Ana was surprised and upset at the intensity
of her sadness. Her greatest fear was being nobody in the new country, having no
one close to her.
The preparation time between the job offer and the actual departure was
three months. As she packed for their move, Ana could only tolerate thinking of
the hastening time in small doses. At times, sorting through her belongings
thoughts of the approaching separation became unbearable. Ana had never realized
how much things meant when she had to start making choices about what to take
with her to her new home and what to leave behind. Leaving behind the old
chair in which her son was soothed to sleep, a mural that recorded family
travels, all the embodiments of special memories and experiences, felt like an
amputation. Ana felt at one with her home, which she now had to sell. This home
had always been the center of her life, but she could no longer rely on the
comfort and solace of that center.
A couple of months later, Ana, Paul and their son sat on a plane, waving
good-bye to their families. When they landed in the United States, Ana was
overwhelmed with the size of the airport and the multicultural crowd swarming
through the terminal. Everything looked strange. All the signs were in English.
A Romanian friend was waiting for them at the airport and Ana felt relieved
because she could speak in Romanian and could ask questions about the new place.
A little surprising was that the friend readily began to share about the
difficulties he and his and family had to go through in the process of
relocating. Then the friend dropped them in the front of the condominium that
the company had rented for them. As the rain poured down and Ana struggled
to balance her exhausted son on her hip, she looked up at the gray building and
couldn’t imagine that this was to be her new home.
Days later, Ana and her family were welcomed by her husband’s Romanian
colleagues. She had imagined that these first gestures would lead to wider
connections and then to the friendships she longed for. Instead she found little
in common with her husband’s new colleagues, whose focus and interests seemed
far removed from hers.
The company also assigned a “relocation specialist” to support each newly
arrived family, acquaint it with services in the community and provide local
business with new customers. Although the female relocator was warm and kind,
the process was not intended to initiate a personal relationship. This
professional warmth shocked and confused Ana, who was conditioned to see these
overtures as a foundation for friendship, not simply a professional attitude.
During her first days in the new country, Ana’s emotions oscillated
between relief and excitement, fear and trepidation. At first, she tried to deny
her difficult emotions and plunged into a kind of euphoria. She played at being
tourist and let herself be mesmerized by the beautiful sights of Seattle and
Mount Rainer.
She also tried to incorporate some familiar rituals to give herself a
sense of grounding and familiarity in her new home. Religious experience had
been important in Ana and Paul’s life and they were happy to discover that the
Romanian Orthodox Church in Seattle held weekly religious services, conducted in
Romanian, that were well attended by the Romanian faithful. The Orthodox Church
represented to the faithful a spiritual cocoon, a sanctuary composed of
like-minded believers bound together by common religious beliefs. This cocoon
both sustained and protected its members from the alien and hostile world of a
new country. Ana was looking at her church community to provide a safe context
and a place to ground her.
Yet, to make contact that can relieve loneliness and ignite purpose, a
newcomer must mobilize energies that were already sapped by the other tasks of
moving. For Ana the work of making new friends involved more narcissistic risk,
ruptures, and wounds to her sense of self. Since Ana had a difficult time
mastering the pain of separation, to avoid further loss, she began avoiding
further attachment(s). Withdrawn and lonely, without intimate friends, she could
only cling to her family of origin that, from the far distance, was unable to
supply the nourishment she needed.
Another isolating factor was the legal status of her immigration
situation: only her husband was eligible to work, her dependent visa prohibited
her from seeking employment.
Paul and Ana settled in a middle-class suburban neighborhood, rather than the
inner city enclave. As soon as they settled in their new home she had a few
tasks: find the doctor, shops, daycare facilities, and make friends. Even the
most basic necessities were unfamiliar to her. Ana remembered that everything in
her country was predictable; she knew where she was going; she knew what she
could find in almost every store and now she was living the adventure of
discovering a new and very different place.
The creation of a new home was critical to Ana. Home was the place she could
return at the end of the day, a place where she could express her taste, style,
and values in pictures and furnishings and the food she cooked, in contrast to
the world outside those walls, which was chosen for her. Home meant fitting in,
knowing what to do, belonging, recognizing, and being recognized.
As they looked for a more permanent dwelling, Ana and Paul were disappointed
in the residences they could afford. They had to rent because buying was too
costly in locations close to Paul’s workplace. Ana’s desire to decorate was
stifled by limitations in the rental agreement, they felt further restrained by
their sense of transience, knowing they would soon have to move on. The fact
that they were forced to compromise and give up their dreams about a new home of
their own was yet another loss. However, in spite of the fact that their
apartment was small, they decorated it with care, using many Romanian
artifacts.
Because she had no work permit, much of Ana’s focus was on supporting her
husband and raising their son. After working for several years prior to
relocating, she had found the transition to housewife uneasy.
Ana became entirely dependent of her husband and his income. As most social
engagement was with his social connections, she was socially dependent on him as
well. The issue of identity also arose for, increasingly in the contemporary
world, both partners in a union are also defined in terms of their profession.
As time passed, Ana began to experience sudden panic attacks and was filled
with panicky questions while walking in the neighborhood ”What am I doing here?
How did it occur to me to come here? I have to go back right away.” Ana began to
experience disconcerting anxieties and depression. She became obsessed with her
departure from Romania, began to remembering the passivity with which she
accepted to move to the United States. Could she have said “No” to her husband?
Would she or her family have had to suffer financial hardship had she stayed? It
was hard for Ana to escape the doubts and the deep sadness of feeling adrift,
cut off from her dear family and friends.
Ana began to experience sleep, attention and concentration disturbances and
came to see herself as absolutely incapable of speaking English (despite the
intensive language courses she took in Romania through ten years of school). Ana
often thought that there were beautiful ideas and values, ways of seeing the
world in her native language that were impossible to translate into English. She
thought about how much she missed her country and family, the quality of
longing. There seemed to be no English equivalent for the Romanian word “dor”,
which so perfectly captured her feelings. She remembered her high-school
Humanities teacher explaining that “dor” cannot be translated in any other
language, that the essence behind the word cannot be matched in any other
tongue. Ana believed its tremendous warmth, rhythm, and significance only
sparked and came alive in the Romanian language.
Moreover, Americans’ ignorance of Romania and its native’s categorizations of
Romanian ethnicity, both contributed to a new consciousness of what it means to
be Romanian. One of the first things that Ana learned to say after she arrived
in the United States was: “I am not Russian, and I do not speak Russian.”
Ana came to see that, while in Romania, she had always experienced a sense of
comfort from never having to define or prove who she was, since her sense of
cultural identity was never questioned there.
As months passed in the new country, Ana became teary as she remembered
people, places, and connections to her native country that she felt so
emotionally close to. She longed for the beauty and the soothing effect of the
geographical and environmental surroundings where she grew up and felt she
belonged. Worst was the guilt she suffered. Ana was concerned that her parents’
health wasn’t in the best shape and worried that if something bad happened to
them, she would not be able to help or even visit them. She felt the need to
constantly call her parents and check on them, but she was careful about making
the phone call when she wasn’t feeling depressed, so they wouldn’t worry about
her. Increasingly, Ana felt helpless and futile, almost like a baby at the
absence or loss of the parent, who is needed to help manage frustration anxiety,
loneliness, and fears of separation. Ana also worried about her son, ruminating
about the fact that if she were back in Romania, her parents could have taken
care of her son and she wouldn’t have to ask a stranger to watch him. Moreover,
she felt guilty because her son would likely never get to know his grandparents
and wouldn’t have a chance to have a close relationship with them. Ana
remembered well that in Romania one has much more help, more support with
children. In Romania, she recalled friendships being more spontaneous. She was
able to see people more often, people were very friendly and they visited each
other and had more time for social interactions. Ana had grown up in a community
where she was among friends from the time of her birth. She recalled spending
time together throughout those years with the same group of people, everybody
together. The emotional ties ran so deep in these friendships that it felt like
she was able to share everything with them. It seemed to her that Romanian
people had more time for each other and that, too, had been lost. Ana lost the
kind of support she had once received on a daily basis.
Ana’s social relationships in her new country were primarily with Romanian
people who worked with her husband. However, she felt the choice of friends was
somewhat imposed and that she could not connect with some of these people; thus
feelings of isolation and regret arose. Ana thought if she had stayed in
Romania, she wouldn’t have had to socialize and become friends with people with
whom she shared little besides a common language. But now she had to be friendly
with them because she had no choice.
At the same time, Ana’s husband became assimilated into his own workplace and concerned
about demonstrating his own competence, and be became less available than usual
to her, both physically and emotionally. As Paul’s focus on work occurred during
the same time that Ana was grieving for her lost home, friends, and workplace
Paul’s unavailability heightened her already anxious sense of disconnection. Her
need for him was likely to be increased and perhaps more intense than he felt
able to absorb. In the past, she had handled her husband’s absence by turning
toward a female friend, but now no such a friend was available.
Ana’s state of invisibility felt unbearable particularly compared to
Paul’s state of fulfillment. While Ana was losing, her mate seemed to be
gaining. While she was trying to reconstruct her identity, her husband was
enjoying the continuity of his own. Her husband was entering a challenging
workplace that enhanced his self-esteem (by affirming his identity and value), a
workplace that enhanced his sense of mastery (by structuring his time, energy,
and skill), a workplace that provided nurturance (through those persons
available to inform, support, and facilitate). Ana began to feel surges of
anger, resentment, and envy, when her husband came home emanating excitement and
feelings of accomplishment while she was experiencing her own life as
kaleidoscopic confusion.
Ana’s feelings of inferiority and helplessness were contrasted with
fantasies of fearlessness and power, especially in the expectations she held for
herself. Moreover, there was a fluidity of boundaries as she thought: “when
things don’t go right for my husband and son, their pain is my pain.” Feeling no
assurance about her capacity to fulfill new roles, she felt profoundly anxious
about the loss of familiar ones. Ana felt her husband was expecting her to be
able to explore and creatively immerse in the new environment, but she did not
seem to be able to take the next step.
She experienced a narcissistic collapse. She was a child of the middle
class; as an adult she had built a professional life, and fulfilled a role
valued by herself and her community. In Romania she was somebody; she was
recognized as a specific individual with a specific status in the social group
age. The disruption of this place in the world, which she had taken for granted,
was devastating. She lost the many-sided mirror in which she has created and
nurtured her own image; in the new country, she no longer existed. No one knew
her, no one recognized her. She felt as she was a stranger, a foreigner in a
strange land. The sensation of being lost was horrible. She felt as she was
falling in a bottomless hole with no walls to hold on to.
As time passed, Ana noticed that most of her newly acquired Romanian
friends did not remain the same, they distanced more and more from their common
Romanian heritage and started projecting outwardly, almost like a mask they came
to believe in, a sense of content with the new environment. They were working
long hours, sending their children to the best private schools from insanely
early ages, and buying homes and cars that demonstrated their material success.
Ana thought that resuming the work she had left behind in Romania might
help mitigate the need to complain about each thing she encountered. She
realized that her ability to adapt in the new country was dependent on the
possibility of maintaining continuity with her former work. Ana felt an urgent
wish for a profession, for accomplishment and recognition. She decided that, if
she were not to be accepted in graduate school, she would indeed go back to
Romania. In spite of Ana and Paul’s awareness of each other’s needs, the urgency
of her need to resume work and to experience herself once again as competent
brought their relationship to a state of crisis. There was no immediate
precipitant to this crisis in the marriage. Rather it seemed that the strains of
moving had been eroding it silently but seriously. Having lost her familiar
pathways to achievement, her familiar sources of approval and encouragement,
employers, colleague, relatives, and friends, Ana was sad, lonely, anxious, and
homesick. She could not, as she wanted, take care of her marriage. Nor could the
marriage take care of her.
Paul was having troubles of his own. Communication between Paul and Ana
had been very poor as he had been working 10 hours a day, and he was concerned
with his performance at work. In contrast, Ana recalled the period in their
family life when he came home from work in the early afternoon and they sat down
for lots of hours eating, chatting, and strolling the city streets together.
Moreover, there was a keen awareness of the difference between his status and
her own, an awareness that bruised her self-esteem. Family in Romania was
putting so much focus on Paul, the engineer: he was put on a pedestal. In the
meantime, Ana was receiving mixed signals from some members of the family in
Romania: she perceived expectations to acculturate and adapt to American norms
and yet remain an appropriate traditional Romanian woman. The double bind
confused and frustrated her. She was expected to “get over” her depression and
continue to function as a wife, a mother, who will keep ‘everything and everyone
together’.
At the outset of their migration, Ana had felt that she and Paul were
sharing an adventurous journey. Once they arrived in the United States, she
found herself mostly staying alone at home with the young baby while Paul was at
work. Working full-time for the three years before relocating to the United
States, Ana experienced a cultural clash as she gained experience with the new
gender roles and expectations that are associated with married expatriate
mothers.
Now, Ana realized how difficult it was to be supportive and perceived
that her husband’s work commitments conflicted with her own need for him to
contribute more to family life. However, Ana expressed much deeper
disappointment with the emotional asymmetry of the relationship than with the
inequalities related to domestic tasks.
Ana described her struggling with her feelings of separation from her
husband and herself and explained that the emotional strain of trying to cope
with the gender roles and expectations of expatriates seemed to irreparably
damage their intimacy.
Moreover, Ana observed that her husband’s work
environment exacerbated a culture that thrived on higher responsibilities, long
working hours, high remuneration, and possibly the feeling of being the sole
breadwinner, which was not the case in their home environment.
Soon, Ana became engrossed in the process of undergoing the additional
training necessary to work in the United States, but the unpredictability of her
new life seemed to last forever. Ana’s wish for professional work was not
primarily financial. Because immigration destroyed the delicate fabric of her
own internal structure, Ana needed to look for an external structure and a sense
of validation she could not find elsewhere around her.
For several years after her relocation, she continued to live the
Romanian way and played the role defined for her by her culture of origin. She
focused on raising her son and wanted to provide for her child the nurturance
she had experienced as a child. She recalled the warmth of enjoying a mother’s
presence when she got home from school- and wanted to reproduce that presence to
her own child. But, Ana as other at-home-mothers echoed a wish for “something
more”, as well as relief from childcare that at times felt frustrating,
fragmenting and depleting.
The inner drive for personal development and acquiring more education
continued to live in her. Ana knew that because her baby was very young she
could not leave him and take the responsibility of a full-time demanding program
in graduate school, but continued to prepare the foundation for future learning.
While at home, raising her son, she studied for the GRE and TOEFEL, learned to
drive and continued to prepare herself. Her determination and eagerness for
learning, pursuing more education and reinventing herself as a professional
never weakened or disappeared, it just went underground for a time. However, Ana
could not decide whether or not she should apply to graduate school and
postponed the application process for a couple of years. She began to experience
debilitating headaches, crying spells, and conflicted relationship with her
husband and family in Romania. Ana was feeling so desperate that she felt like
“jumping out of her skin.” She experienced a constant sense of missing something
in her life. At this point in her life, Ana decided to see a therapist.
There are many women similar to Ana who live in cities throughout the
United States, struggling with the same problems and issues. Many of them are
able to regain their sense of competence and agency. Clearly, immigrating can
stimulate personal growth. It can enhance confidence to explore new realms of
experience and can contribute to a richer inner life and a clear sense of self.
But relocating to another culture can also disempower women and impair their
resiliency to grieve for their losses, their capacity to endure intervals of
depression and anxiety, their courage to reexamine their unrevealed identities
and make new choices. It is hoped that those women who are not able to “find
themselves” in a new environment will be able to receive professional help from
someone who can relate to their problems and can understand their situation.
The question of how to address these issues in therapy will be explored
in the section detailing the Intervention Process.
Fragment extracted from my Doctoral Thesis: “A Proposed Integrative Model for Treatment of Identity Disruptions in Romanian Female Expatriates”
I imagine Ana, a young woman in her early thirties who lives with her family in a small city in Washington State. Two years ago, she emigrated from Romania
with her husband and their one-year-old son. Her husband is a high-tech
engineer, whose U.S. job opportunity—a position of challenge and distinction—was
the motivation for their immigration. At first, Ana resented the idea, mostly
because it meant leaving behind her relatively large extended family with whom
she enjoyed warm and close relationships.
Counterbalancing Ana’s resentment was the realization that this was an
excellent opportunity for her husband as well as her son. Furthermore, she was
surrounded by a surging tide of professionals leaving Romania for good jobs
abroad. This trend which legitimized and validated her husband’s plan encouraged
Ana to embrace the decision to emigrate.
Although marriage was central in Ana’s life goals, she also greatly valued her
career, which she’d been able to develop in Romania. Emigrating would require a
sacrifice of this value as well, or at least a significant delay of advancement.
Despite the loss of her family and postponement of her career, Ana and her
husband decided to move to the United States. The difficulty of life in Romania
made them view relocation as an opportunity for growth and change. They wanted
to escape the difficult circumstances the forty-plus years of communism
created.
As discussed in the previous chapters of this dissertation, Romanian women
historically are responsible for taking care of the home and children and for
keeping the family together. They often feel obligated to sacrifice themselves
in order to accomplish this goal, relying on other women within the extended
family for support and strength. This sacrificial role is reinforced by the
admiration and recognition given by the society at large to women. The ideal
Romanian wife, an ideal developed and reinforced over centuries, is
self-effacing and husband-serving; she is nourished by his approval, sheltered
by his earnings, enhanced by his accomplishments. Having been immersed in this
cultural milieu, Ana knew that wherever her husband went, she would follow, as
was simply the expected behavior of a married couple.
The traditions of Eastern Europe also contributed to the close knit and
enmeshed nature of Romanian families that emphasize closeness, intimacy, and
family centeredness. Under Communist rule, the Romanian family provided a place
where ideology could be left behind, a refuge where people could express genuine
views about current events. In addition to its importance as the locus of
nurturance, the Romanian family was also a fundamental source of economic well
being.
During her upbringing, Ana’s extended family provided an environment for many
important family relationships. She was able to learn about and adapt to her
world through these relationships. Ana shared many interests with her mother and
other women in the family, with whom she developed very deep relationships. When
she married, Ana’s family continued to be involved in her life, and by
extension, the life of the couple. Ana’s mother and sometimes her grandmother
helped her at home, making it easier for her to go to school or work. In return,
there was the expectation that she would take care of her parents, especially in
old age.
For all these reasons, Ana made it a priority to maintain close connections with her
family. When she went away to a conference in another city, she called home
every day. When her elderly parents were sick, she would drop anything to handle
every small event. Her parents were devoted to her for so many years, and she
felt in turn that she should be devoted to them when they needed her- that was
the expectation, and one with which she fully concurred.
Ana’s family of origin and community were geographically stable; moving away
from family was not a common occurrence. Her parents were accomplished
professionals, with role divisions within the family along traditional lines
(her father was the head of the family). Ana experienced both her parents as
perfectionistic, imposing very high standards concerning behavior and academic
and social success. They created an environment that supported Ana’s further
education and career involvement. Education was considered very important and
graduate studies were highly encouraged. At the time of emigration Ana had
completed a master’s degree and held a job of which she was proud of.
With an interlude for advanced education and brief experience in the work
place, Ana passed from being a daughter to a wife. Ana was 18 and Paul, 19 when
they met. They talked endlessly, sharing their ideas and life dreams, and knew
each other deeply when they married after graduation from college. The religious
ceremony was a very important event, attended by the extended
family.
Marriage was central in Ana’s life goals and so was a professional
life-messages reinforced within her family of origin as well as by the larger
culture.
Although Ana shared a more egalitarian relationship with her husband than
couples from previous eras, her life had been deeply intertwined with her
husband’s. Ana lived the illusion of merging with her partner into oneness, into
a protective cocoon; hatching out of that cocoon was scary for her.
One day her husband told her that a large U.S. software company was
organizing hiring interviews in a nearby country, and he had been invited to
interview. A few of Paul’s’ acquaintances and co-workers had recently been hired
by this company. Proud of her husband, Ana supported his decision to interview.
A couple of weeks later, her husband had an offer for more in-depth interviews
and thus, and then he was invited to visit company quarters in Washington State.
Shortly after, he was hired and asked to relocate to the United States. The news
was just exhilarating!
Despite their plans to immigrate, Ana and Paul knew very little about the
country to which they were moving. For many Romanians, including Ana and Paul,
their only understanding of American life was derived from rock music, movies,
and sensational literature. Word-of-mouth reports from Romanians already in the
United States, often second- or third-hand, were similarly rose-colored: they
often portrayed the ease with which consumer goods, such as cars, food and
houses, could be acquired. Thus, Ana and Paul acquired the impression from the
Romanians who already were living in Seattle that their co-nationals, being
skilled and highly educated, were well-equipped for the task of adjusting to
American life. What else could be needed besides intelligence and
willingness?
In their flood of enthusiasm, they allowed images to serve as realities. Ana
and Paul imagined they would buy a beautiful house and would not have to worry
about financial struggles, and, more importantly, they would provide their
children with a more secure future than they might have had in their homeland.
As time passed, Ana began to fear the big unknown she faced. Ana’s worry was
aroused when she realized that moving would rupture a tapestry of sustaining
personal connections. She worried that she might have trouble making friends and
laying down new roots in an unfamiliar place.
Ana would have felt disappointed in herself if she hadn’t supported her
husband in this decision. Ana always expected accomplishment of herself as a
good wife, a good mother, and a good daughter. She felt it was up to her to make
the transition work for her family. Ana saw herself as more resilient and her
husband more fragile. Echoing in her mind was a phrase her grandmother had told
her many times: “When the wife is not at her best, the husband is lost.”
As they prepared for the move, Ana sometimes felt powerful and heroic,
and other times she felt helpless. Motivated by heady feelings of great courage
and power, she discounted her apprehensions and imagined herself capable of
overcoming whatever frustrations and challenges she might encounter. Both states
contributed to unrealistic evaluations of what she had to face. Ana was
enthusiastic about the relocation and yet she was bewildered and dismayed when
she realized that her pleasure was intermingled with, or overshadowed by,
unforeseen sadness. She had never left her hometown, much less settled in a
foreign country.
The unexpected upwelling of pain became a source of anxiety and shame.
Ana perceived her husband as so self absorbed with arranging the complex moving
process to as to have little ability to understand or empathize with her
distress. Unknowingly, she cut herself off from a potential source of support.
It was easier to be silent, feeling the pressure of the cultural expectation:
since the dream of betterment through immigration has always been a cherished
dream by Romanians, family, friends, and neighbors disregarded any signs of
Ana’s distress and urged her to see the very bright side of their new future.
But contrary to what was expected of Ana, her distress grew as the moving
date approached. She struggled with intense feelings of sadness and loss. To
leave Romania meant detaching from a spectrum of roles, meanings, and
affiliations. It meant losing home, family, neighborhood, friends, work—myriad
strands of connection and identity. Ana was surprised and upset at the intensity
of her sadness. Her greatest fear was being nobody in the new country, having no
one close to her.
The preparation time between the job offer and the actual departure was
three months. As she packed for their move, Ana could only tolerate thinking of
the hastening time in small doses. At times, sorting through her belongings
thoughts of the approaching separation became unbearable. Ana had never realized
how much things meant when she had to start making choices about what to take
with her to her new home and what to leave behind. Leaving behind the old
chair in which her son was soothed to sleep, a mural that recorded family
travels, all the embodiments of special memories and experiences, felt like an
amputation. Ana felt at one with her home, which she now had to sell. This home
had always been the center of her life, but she could no longer rely on the
comfort and solace of that center.
A couple of months later, Ana, Paul and their son sat on a plane, waving
good-bye to their families. When they landed in the United States, Ana was
overwhelmed with the size of the airport and the multicultural crowd swarming
through the terminal. Everything looked strange. All the signs were in English.
A Romanian friend was waiting for them at the airport and Ana felt relieved
because she could speak in Romanian and could ask questions about the new place.
A little surprising was that the friend readily began to share about the
difficulties he and his and family had to go through in the process of
relocating. Then the friend dropped them in the front of the condominium that
the company had rented for them. As the rain poured down and Ana struggled
to balance her exhausted son on her hip, she looked up at the gray building and
couldn’t imagine that this was to be her new home.
Days later, Ana and her family were welcomed by her husband’s Romanian
colleagues. She had imagined that these first gestures would lead to wider
connections and then to the friendships she longed for. Instead she found little
in common with her husband’s new colleagues, whose focus and interests seemed
far removed from hers.
The company also assigned a “relocation specialist” to support each newly
arrived family, acquaint it with services in the community and provide local
business with new customers. Although the female relocator was warm and kind,
the process was not intended to initiate a personal relationship. This
professional warmth shocked and confused Ana, who was conditioned to see these
overtures as a foundation for friendship, not simply a professional attitude.
During her first days in the new country, Ana’s emotions oscillated
between relief and excitement, fear and trepidation. At first, she tried to deny
her difficult emotions and plunged into a kind of euphoria. She played at being
tourist and let herself be mesmerized by the beautiful sights of Seattle and
Mount Rainer.
She also tried to incorporate some familiar rituals to give herself a
sense of grounding and familiarity in her new home. Religious experience had
been important in Ana and Paul’s life and they were happy to discover that the
Romanian Orthodox Church in Seattle held weekly religious services, conducted in
Romanian, that were well attended by the Romanian faithful. The Orthodox Church
represented to the faithful a spiritual cocoon, a sanctuary composed of
like-minded believers bound together by common religious beliefs. This cocoon
both sustained and protected its members from the alien and hostile world of a
new country. Ana was looking at her church community to provide a safe context
and a place to ground her.
Yet, to make contact that can relieve loneliness and ignite purpose, a
newcomer must mobilize energies that were already sapped by the other tasks of
moving. For Ana the work of making new friends involved more narcissistic risk,
ruptures, and wounds to her sense of self. Since Ana had a difficult time
mastering the pain of separation, to avoid further loss, she began avoiding
further attachment(s). Withdrawn and lonely, without intimate friends, she could
only cling to her family of origin that, from the far distance, was unable to
supply the nourishment she needed.
Another isolating factor was the legal status of her immigration
situation: only her husband was eligible to work, her dependent visa prohibited
her from seeking employment.
Paul and Ana settled in a middle-class suburban neighborhood, rather than the
inner city enclave. As soon as they settled in their new home she had a few
tasks: find the doctor, shops, daycare facilities, and make friends. Even the
most basic necessities were unfamiliar to her. Ana remembered that everything in
her country was predictable; she knew where she was going; she knew what she
could find in almost every store and now she was living the adventure of
discovering a new and very different place.
The creation of a new home was critical to Ana. Home was the place she could
return at the end of the day, a place where she could express her taste, style,
and values in pictures and furnishings and the food she cooked, in contrast to
the world outside those walls, which was chosen for her. Home meant fitting in,
knowing what to do, belonging, recognizing, and being recognized.
As they looked for a more permanent dwelling, Ana and Paul were disappointed
in the residences they could afford. They had to rent because buying was too
costly in locations close to Paul’s workplace. Ana’s desire to decorate was
stifled by limitations in the rental agreement, they felt further restrained by
their sense of transience, knowing they would soon have to move on. The fact
that they were forced to compromise and give up their dreams about a new home of
their own was yet another loss. However, in spite of the fact that their
apartment was small, they decorated it with care, using many Romanian
artifacts.
Because she had no work permit, much of Ana’s focus was on supporting her
husband and raising their son. After working for several years prior to
relocating, she had found the transition to housewife uneasy.
Ana became entirely dependent of her husband and his income. As most social
engagement was with his social connections, she was socially dependent on him as
well. The issue of identity also arose for, increasingly in the contemporary
world, both partners in a union are also defined in terms of their profession.
As time passed, Ana began to experience sudden panic attacks and was filled
with panicky questions while walking in the neighborhood ”What am I doing here?
How did it occur to me to come here? I have to go back right away.” Ana began to
experience disconcerting anxieties and depression. She became obsessed with her
departure from Romania, began to remembering the passivity with which she
accepted to move to the United States. Could she have said “No” to her husband?
Would she or her family have had to suffer financial hardship had she stayed? It
was hard for Ana to escape the doubts and the deep sadness of feeling adrift,
cut off from her dear family and friends.
Ana began to experience sleep, attention and concentration disturbances and
came to see herself as absolutely incapable of speaking English (despite the
intensive language courses she took in Romania through ten years of school). Ana
often thought that there were beautiful ideas and values, ways of seeing the
world in her native language that were impossible to translate into English. She
thought about how much she missed her country and family, the quality of
longing. There seemed to be no English equivalent for the Romanian word “dor”,
which so perfectly captured her feelings. She remembered her high-school
Humanities teacher explaining that “dor” cannot be translated in any other
language, that the essence behind the word cannot be matched in any other
tongue. Ana believed its tremendous warmth, rhythm, and significance only
sparked and came alive in the Romanian language.
Moreover, Americans’ ignorance of Romania and its native’s categorizations of
Romanian ethnicity, both contributed to a new consciousness of what it means to
be Romanian. One of the first things that Ana learned to say after she arrived
in the United States was: “I am not Russian, and I do not speak Russian.”
Ana came to see that, while in Romania, she had always experienced a sense of
comfort from never having to define or prove who she was, since her sense of
cultural identity was never questioned there.
As months passed in the new country, Ana became teary as she remembered
people, places, and connections to her native country that she felt so
emotionally close to. She longed for the beauty and the soothing effect of the
geographical and environmental surroundings where she grew up and felt she
belonged. Worst was the guilt she suffered. Ana was concerned that her parents’
health wasn’t in the best shape and worried that if something bad happened to
them, she would not be able to help or even visit them. She felt the need to
constantly call her parents and check on them, but she was careful about making
the phone call when she wasn’t feeling depressed, so they wouldn’t worry about
her. Increasingly, Ana felt helpless and futile, almost like a baby at the
absence or loss of the parent, who is needed to help manage frustration anxiety,
loneliness, and fears of separation. Ana also worried about her son, ruminating
about the fact that if she were back in Romania, her parents could have taken
care of her son and she wouldn’t have to ask a stranger to watch him. Moreover,
she felt guilty because her son would likely never get to know his grandparents
and wouldn’t have a chance to have a close relationship with them. Ana
remembered well that in Romania one has much more help, more support with
children. In Romania, she recalled friendships being more spontaneous. She was
able to see people more often, people were very friendly and they visited each
other and had more time for social interactions. Ana had grown up in a community
where she was among friends from the time of her birth. She recalled spending
time together throughout those years with the same group of people, everybody
together. The emotional ties ran so deep in these friendships that it felt like
she was able to share everything with them. It seemed to her that Romanian
people had more time for each other and that, too, had been lost. Ana lost the
kind of support she had once received on a daily basis.
Ana’s social relationships in her new country were primarily with Romanian
people who worked with her husband. However, she felt the choice of friends was
somewhat imposed and that she could not connect with some of these people; thus
feelings of isolation and regret arose. Ana thought if she had stayed in
Romania, she wouldn’t have had to socialize and become friends with people with
whom she shared little besides a common language. But now she had to be friendly
with them because she had no choice.
At the same time, Ana’s husband became assimilated into his own workplace and concerned
about demonstrating his own competence, and be became less available than usual
to her, both physically and emotionally. As Paul’s focus on work occurred during
the same time that Ana was grieving for her lost home, friends, and workplace
Paul’s unavailability heightened her already anxious sense of disconnection. Her
need for him was likely to be increased and perhaps more intense than he felt
able to absorb. In the past, she had handled her husband’s absence by turning
toward a female friend, but now no such a friend was available.
Ana’s state of invisibility felt unbearable particularly compared to
Paul’s state of fulfillment. While Ana was losing, her mate seemed to be
gaining. While she was trying to reconstruct her identity, her husband was
enjoying the continuity of his own. Her husband was entering a challenging
workplace that enhanced his self-esteem (by affirming his identity and value), a
workplace that enhanced his sense of mastery (by structuring his time, energy,
and skill), a workplace that provided nurturance (through those persons
available to inform, support, and facilitate). Ana began to feel surges of
anger, resentment, and envy, when her husband came home emanating excitement and
feelings of accomplishment while she was experiencing her own life as
kaleidoscopic confusion.
Ana’s feelings of inferiority and helplessness were contrasted with
fantasies of fearlessness and power, especially in the expectations she held for
herself. Moreover, there was a fluidity of boundaries as she thought: “when
things don’t go right for my husband and son, their pain is my pain.” Feeling no
assurance about her capacity to fulfill new roles, she felt profoundly anxious
about the loss of familiar ones. Ana felt her husband was expecting her to be
able to explore and creatively immerse in the new environment, but she did not
seem to be able to take the next step.
She experienced a narcissistic collapse. She was a child of the middle
class; as an adult she had built a professional life, and fulfilled a role
valued by herself and her community. In Romania she was somebody; she was
recognized as a specific individual with a specific status in the social group
age. The disruption of this place in the world, which she had taken for granted,
was devastating. She lost the many-sided mirror in which she has created and
nurtured her own image; in the new country, she no longer existed. No one knew
her, no one recognized her. She felt as she was a stranger, a foreigner in a
strange land. The sensation of being lost was horrible. She felt as she was
falling in a bottomless hole with no walls to hold on to.
As time passed, Ana noticed that most of her newly acquired Romanian
friends did not remain the same, they distanced more and more from their common
Romanian heritage and started projecting outwardly, almost like a mask they came
to believe in, a sense of content with the new environment. They were working
long hours, sending their children to the best private schools from insanely
early ages, and buying homes and cars that demonstrated their material success.
Ana thought that resuming the work she had left behind in Romania might
help mitigate the need to complain about each thing she encountered. She
realized that her ability to adapt in the new country was dependent on the
possibility of maintaining continuity with her former work. Ana felt an urgent
wish for a profession, for accomplishment and recognition. She decided that, if
she were not to be accepted in graduate school, she would indeed go back to
Romania. In spite of Ana and Paul’s awareness of each other’s needs, the urgency
of her need to resume work and to experience herself once again as competent
brought their relationship to a state of crisis. There was no immediate
precipitant to this crisis in the marriage. Rather it seemed that the strains of
moving had been eroding it silently but seriously. Having lost her familiar
pathways to achievement, her familiar sources of approval and encouragement,
employers, colleague, relatives, and friends, Ana was sad, lonely, anxious, and
homesick. She could not, as she wanted, take care of her marriage. Nor could the
marriage take care of her.
Paul was having troubles of his own. Communication between Paul and Ana
had been very poor as he had been working 10 hours a day, and he was concerned
with his performance at work. In contrast, Ana recalled the period in their
family life when he came home from work in the early afternoon and they sat down
for lots of hours eating, chatting, and strolling the city streets together.
Moreover, there was a keen awareness of the difference between his status and
her own, an awareness that bruised her self-esteem. Family in Romania was
putting so much focus on Paul, the engineer: he was put on a pedestal. In the
meantime, Ana was receiving mixed signals from some members of the family in
Romania: she perceived expectations to acculturate and adapt to American norms
and yet remain an appropriate traditional Romanian woman. The double bind
confused and frustrated her. She was expected to “get over” her depression and
continue to function as a wife, a mother, who will keep ‘everything and everyone
together’.
At the outset of their migration, Ana had felt that she and Paul were
sharing an adventurous journey. Once they arrived in the United States, she
found herself mostly staying alone at home with the young baby while Paul was at
work. Working full-time for the three years before relocating to the United
States, Ana experienced a cultural clash as she gained experience with the new
gender roles and expectations that are associated with married expatriate
mothers.
Now, Ana realized how difficult it was to be supportive and perceived
that her husband’s work commitments conflicted with her own need for him to
contribute more to family life. However, Ana expressed much deeper
disappointment with the emotional asymmetry of the relationship than with the
inequalities related to domestic tasks.
Ana described her struggling with her feelings of separation from her
husband and herself and explained that the emotional strain of trying to cope
with the gender roles and expectations of expatriates seemed to irreparably
damage their intimacy.
Moreover, Ana observed that her husband’s work
environment exacerbated a culture that thrived on higher responsibilities, long
working hours, high remuneration, and possibly the feeling of being the sole
breadwinner, which was not the case in their home environment.
Soon, Ana became engrossed in the process of undergoing the additional
training necessary to work in the United States, but the unpredictability of her
new life seemed to last forever. Ana’s wish for professional work was not
primarily financial. Because immigration destroyed the delicate fabric of her
own internal structure, Ana needed to look for an external structure and a sense
of validation she could not find elsewhere around her.
For several years after her relocation, she continued to live the
Romanian way and played the role defined for her by her culture of origin. She
focused on raising her son and wanted to provide for her child the nurturance
she had experienced as a child. She recalled the warmth of enjoying a mother’s
presence when she got home from school- and wanted to reproduce that presence to
her own child. But, Ana as other at-home-mothers echoed a wish for “something
more”, as well as relief from childcare that at times felt frustrating,
fragmenting and depleting.
The inner drive for personal development and acquiring more education
continued to live in her. Ana knew that because her baby was very young she
could not leave him and take the responsibility of a full-time demanding program
in graduate school, but continued to prepare the foundation for future learning.
While at home, raising her son, she studied for the GRE and TOEFEL, learned to
drive and continued to prepare herself. Her determination and eagerness for
learning, pursuing more education and reinventing herself as a professional
never weakened or disappeared, it just went underground for a time. However, Ana
could not decide whether or not she should apply to graduate school and
postponed the application process for a couple of years. She began to experience
debilitating headaches, crying spells, and conflicted relationship with her
husband and family in Romania. Ana was feeling so desperate that she felt like
“jumping out of her skin.” She experienced a constant sense of missing something
in her life. At this point in her life, Ana decided to see a therapist.
There are many women similar to Ana who live in cities throughout the
United States, struggling with the same problems and issues. Many of them are
able to regain their sense of competence and agency. Clearly, immigrating can
stimulate personal growth. It can enhance confidence to explore new realms of
experience and can contribute to a richer inner life and a clear sense of self.
But relocating to another culture can also disempower women and impair their
resiliency to grieve for their losses, their capacity to endure intervals of
depression and anxiety, their courage to reexamine their unrevealed identities
and make new choices. It is hoped that those women who are not able to “find
themselves” in a new environment will be able to receive professional help from
someone who can relate to their problems and can understand their situation.
The question of how to address these issues in therapy will be explored
in the section detailing the Intervention Process.
