Your Story Matters: Immigration, Trauma, and the Journey Toward Healing
Imagine stepping into a country where the language feels like a locked door and the culture an ever-shifting landscape. It’s the late 1950s. A young man arrives in New York City - not with a visa, but by quietly choosing not to return to the cargo ship that brought him here. He rents a room in the Lower East Side, leaves home only at night, and tucks a newspaper under his arm to appear fluent in a language he cannot read. He takes whatever work he can find. He meets someone. He becomes a husband. A father. A provider.
Was this your father’s story? Your grandmother’s? Is it your own?
It’s Latino Heritage Month for Afro-Latinos too
As an Afro-Latino therapist, I often witness the mental health challenges of those that struggle to navigate multiple cultural identities. While it is glorious to be a blend of the diaspora, at times it can feel difficult for some to find themselves between the pressure to preserve a heritage and step into whatever society might deem more of value. I get it, I’ve been there. There is also a generational impact of these struggles. For those of us with parents or grandparents who immigrated, we often inherit their trauma without fully understanding it. There’s a lot of unspoken grief passed down from one generation to the next—their sacrifices, the pain they endured to give us a better life. We carry their stories with us—their survival, their loss—and sometimes that shows up in our own mental health without us even realizing it. It can manifest as anxiety, perfectionism, or the constant fear of failure because we feel we ‘owe it to them’ to succeed. And if we struggle, it can feel like we’re letting down generations of family, which only adds to our emotional and psychological load.