How to tell your immigrant story in a way that boosts you

The story you tell about yourself determines your satisfaction with life, and your eventual happiness and success.

This year I had the opportunity to help foster mental well-being among immigrants and expats residing in Sweden, and I noticed a pattern: Each time I listened to the way they described their journey in Sweden, it felt like looking in the mirror and listening to myself. All expats, including myself, told their story in the same way – it was filled with feelings of disappointment and grief over feeling neither seen nor included, and the major source of this grief was the fact that all of these people felt like they were given a chance to only use a fraction of their professional capacities. Some of them – not even a fraction.

The realization about the power of how we tell our story came to me when I got to know a lady from the Balkans who is working as a cleaner in Sweden.

She started by apologizing for her Swedish, saying that her grammar was not so great and that she had been living in Sweden for four years. I told her: “I’ve taught Swedish to more than a hundred immigrants. I’m actually quite impressed by your Swedish. You are doing great!” and I meant it. In that very instant I could tell she had a negative self-image and was using self-criticism as a defense mechanism. This also told me that she held high standards and was demanding towards herself. And.. I could already relate to her.

Then came the next part. She had a bachelor’s degree and had worked within the insurance industry in her country. And what really caught my attention was this: “I even studied at a special kind of gymnasium. It seems to only exist in the Balkans. I studied five years at the gymnasium level”. She said this with pride that has been bitten, with the implication of “I have spent so many years studying but all I get to work with here is cleaning”. It was in this moment that I saw myself most clearly in her words. The way I have many times formulated my story is “I’ve studied at so many universities but still I can’t get a job that corresponds to my level of education” or “I had such a soaring career back home, and here I became a nobody that had to start from zero”.

You see that these two different journeys are told in a similar way – bitten by the inadequacy of your current state versus your previous achievements and efforts. You sort of brag about your previous status and achievements to communicate the unfairness you are facing - in the (pre-conscious) hopes that you will somehow soothe your ego “I’m not that worthless. I’ve studied and held excellent positions, you know.” This lady too used the words “I started everything from zero”.

When I went home after that chat with the lady, it dawned on me:

If I want to write the kind of life I envision, I need to change the way I tell my story. From now on, my story will not be a sob story filled with complaints, resentment and disappointment. It will be a story of resilience, strength, exploration, joy and victory.

Why does it matter HOW you tell your story?

The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus said: “A human is not tormented by the thing itself but by how he/she perceives the thing”. In other words, the problem is not the life happenings themselves but the way we interpret them and think about them.

According to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), language can serve as a barrier and actually be the cause of a mental illness. Words and thoughts can have a destructive power in that they can give rise to negative emotions and dysfunctional behaviours.

If you tell yourself that you are worthless, you gradually start to believe that this is objective truth.

Steven Heyes, who is the developer of ACT, has dedicated his career to analysing the nature of human language and cognition and applying this to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. According to Heyes, through language, we fuse ourselves with the descriptions of ourselves and our experienced reality, even if these descriptions do not match with the objective reality. We use language to form negative sterotypes, to experience memories once again or to fantasize about uncomfortable future challenges. Heyes encourages us to see thoughts exactly as thoughts and not as factual realities.

For immigrants, this means that if you keep thinking about a time when you were treated like an outsider in Sweden and if you call yourself an outisder enough times, it will affect your feelings and behavior in a way that will only confirm and reinforce this feeling so that you think you being an outsider is an objective truth.

How then can you start telling your story in a way that boosts you instead of hindering you?

Cognitive Schemas - You start telling a story of empowerment only when you get to know yourself for real

The way we perceive and interpret things have more to do with our past experiences - especially childhood experiences and effects of interactions with significant persons - than what is objectively happening in our adult life right now. For instance, how you experience and interpret the fact that your Swedish classmates are always sitting together and you and your Japanese classmate – together (an excerpt from my university times) has a lot more to do with what past experiences you carry with you than you think. You don’t even realize how those past experiences are affecting how you are interpreting this new situation in Sweden. ?

These past experiences make up our cognitive schemas. Schemas are like nailed-down “individual truth statements” that may sound like this: “I’m a loser”, “Others are right and I am wrong”, “I am stupid”, “Life is difficult”, etc.

What schemas do is that they filter all our daily experiences and, through selective perception, only let in the kind of experiences that confirm our negative – distorted truths about ourselves, life and our surroundings, and thereby reinforce those distorted truths.

For example, if your schema has to do with “I am impossible to love/There’s something wrong with me/My needs are shameful – all underlying patterns of a negative self-esteem – your mind will only be noticing experiences that confirm that you are indeed impossible to like or that there’s something wrong with you. The terrifying thing about schemas is that a seemingly normal life event might occur in your adult life but if somehow you experience it as similar in nature to an original trauma that formed the respective schema during your childhood or adolescenece, the pain you experience as an adult will be far more intense than it would have been if you did not have the respective schema.

To give you an example, one of my schemas has to do with abandonment. At the age of 21, I was abandoned by my entire family and left on my own, no-one calling or asking how I was despite knowing that I wasn’t well – Neither my parents, nor siblings or relatives - for a few months… I survived that time, and my family and I never talked about it. But it is my life’s biggest trauma, and in 2023 when I was let go from a job in which I had poured my heart, by a manager that I had worked hard for and, that I, unfortunately, saw a little bit as a mother figure, I felt abandoned again, and my adolescence trauma was activated – to such an extent that this new experience of abandonment became very difficult to handle. That’s how schemas keep you in their claws unless you identify them and work on them.

Why am I telling you about cognitive schemas?

The feeling of “There’s something wrong with me” or “I am impossible to like” likely becomes activated when you are an immigrant who gets rejected repeatedly. Alternatively, when you finally land an opportunity of becoming an insider instead of an outsider (in your perception) but become let go from the job after some time, your negative self-image “provides you with evidence” that you are indeed impossible to like.

I have realized that true integration as an immigrant starts with getting to know yourself. As the psychotherapist Marta Cullberg Weston writes in her book Sj?lvk?nsla p? djupet, “we react out of things that we haven’t processed within ourselves” (2007, p. 61). Starting to understand ourselves by processing things we haven’t processed until now, is the first big step towards writing a story of our happy selves that experience life satisfaction even with an immigrant status.

Two ways of telling your story – which one do you choose?

I realized that when you tell your story, you have two ways of telling it: Either you maximize the loss - “I left all my successful career behind me and started from zero” or you maximize the opportunity – “I left my country because of love/because of a war/because of searching for my potential… and although my new life has been challenging, it has taught me things about myself that I didn’t know”.

When you maximize the loss, you become so fixated on that loss that you forget to see the opportunities that are presented to you. It prevents you from appreciating what you have versus what you don’t have.

When you maximize the opportunity, you see your immigrant life as an exploration of the maximum potential you have inside you. You start thinking of immigration as your second life.

Maslow wrote: “…the human goal…is ultimately the self-actualization of a person, the becoming fully human, the development of the fullest height…that the particular individual can come to. (…) it is helping the person to become the best that he is able to become” (1971, 168-169).

I used to be very fixated on what I lost and left behind. A thriving career. But recently, I sat down and thought: Would I have been this wise if I had stayed back home? Would I have found my real calling – psychology and psychotherapy – if I had stayed? Would I have had the courage to just go for it, change careers and start from zero back home? Or most importantly, would I have a chance at becoming a great psychologist without seeing what life can be – that is, without the struggles I have experienced as an immigrant? I doubt it. Being an immigrant has made me a more complete version of myself. And that is the story I intend to tell myself!

Base your story in self-compassion

There is a reason you left your country. Keeping that reason in mind helps put things in perspective and helps us go easy on ourselves. For instance, if you escaped a war, you have a massive reason to be easy on yourself and practice gratitude and patience – you are alive and free to choose what you want to do with your second chance at life! Focusing on the loss will only rub you off of all joy and happiness.

There is a difference between acknowledging a loss and working your way through it as opposed to reminiscing over a loss in a never-ending pity-cycle. You might think that there is a fine line between self-pity and self-compassion but there is actually a big difference. The immigrants I have spoken with, including myself, either resort to self-pity or self-criticism.

The new way I am proposing for telling our story is based in self-compassion. When you tell your story with self-compassion, your story will be imbued with acceptance and warm awareness that allows you to be at peace with how things are right now. It allows you to be moved by your suffering and direct your awareness towards what can help you. Your story will not be judgmental and self-critical as it might be right now. Non-judgment will, in and of itself, help you approach your difficulties with the kind of awareness that seeks to understand the experience at hand – what it is that you are going through and how it is affecting you. You will have a strong willigness to tolerate the distress and discomfort. Instead of overlooking everything you have successfully taken yourself through, you will feel proud of who you have become through the journey you have taken. And eventually, you will tell a story of a resilient, adventurous, fighting and victorious soul that is accepting, embracing and flourishing through the journey.??

Lastly, I want to leave you with this beautiful quote and a question:

?Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness, therefore, is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain: happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak" (Ben-Shahar, 2007, p.27).

What destination do you deem valuable to journey to?

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