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Introduction

On December 11th, we organized an interesting symposium entitled “Intercultural aspects in therapy” at our Musiktherapiezentrum at the University of Berlin. We had about 40 external participants additionally to our 35 master students. All four presentations treated the phenomena of immigration and discussed the importance of “intercultural awareness” of therapists. The lecturers, Sladjana Kosijer‐Kappenberg, Dorothee Storz, Verena Heidenreich and the author of this column, presented a rich and diverse theoretical framework concerning the social, emotional and cognitive impact of immigration in a person and the impact on society as a whole.

At the same time we discussed the significance of intercultural psycho- and music therapy. Finally, each of us included some personal experiences and reflections from one’s own work: as an immigrant-therapist in Germany with immigrants (Kosijer-Kappenberg), as a supervisor in a foreign country (Storz), as a local therapist with immigrants in Germany (Heidenreich) and as an immigrant-therapist with conational immigrant patients in Chile (Bauer).

In this column, which is a personal post elaboration of the symposium, I want to reflect on different situations and feelings as an immigrant and remigrant in the course of my life, related to the life cycle.

Strong feelings and process of change

It is almost impossible to imagine the life without emotions. Emotions connect us with the reality as well as with the fantasy, they are indicators of relationships and we need them to regulate and guide our way of thinking and doing. Most people are able to feel emotions and try to evoke them regularly, e.g. by listening to music, watching a football match or having religious experiences. We can experience a low or a high emotional arousal; emotions will always make us feel alive. From people who have difficulties to feel his or her emotions we know that they develop physical symptoms, which is the case in psychosomatic patients. His or her emotional disconnection generally has its origin in early traumatic life experiences or/ and in a lack of attachment.

What is up to strong feelings, they are important too, and many people like them, as long as they can manage and integrate them in their daily rhythm of life. We can accept them and even like them as long as they will not upset us, make us suffer or unable us to function “as usual”. When I talk about “strong feelings” I do not refer to one singular emotional highlight or experience, but to an emotional state, which longs for days, weeks or months. Strong feelings arise when a person is confronted with unknown situations and when he or she feels overwhelmed by an unexpected and new sensation. Both, unknown situations and sensations bring up emotional conflicts which need to be resolved by a decision, e.g. the decision between “keep going on like always” or “changing”. This may be the case in each period of our life cycle with its particular challenges. Every time we change from one period to the other, we will lose parts of our former identity in order to develop new aspects of our personality and our role within our family and other social groups around us. Each period goes along with strong feelings: a six year old girl who starts her school life, an eighteen year old young man who leaves his family in order to begin with high school, a young couple who gets married, the birth of a child and the old age of the parents, and so on.

Like the mentioned periods of the life cycle, immigration is an emotional challenge, too. Machleidt (Machleidt 2007 in Machleidt & Heinz 2010) compared the immigration process with the adolescence process and concludes that both wake up the most complex and oscillating feelings. Immigration as well as adolescence are critical life moments, both go ahead with separation and loss, leaving places and people, building up new relations and finding a new identity. As a way of solving his or her ambivalent and contradictorily feelings, the adolescent and the immigrant share the same omnipotential fantasies and both will spend quite a time learning to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The author therefore introduced the concept of “cultural adolescence” (ibd.), in order to describe the psychological factors in the situation of immigration. When immigration falls together with a critical period of the life cycle, a person and his or her family have quite a lot of emotional work to do. For example, the old aged parents wake up strong feelings in a daughter who, as an immigrant, is living in a foreign country and cannot fulfill her task and natural desire of parental care.

Immigration

The word “Immigration” describes the objective and the visible geographic displacement of a person from one place to another. We say “international immigration” when a person moves from one country to another, and “inland immigration” when he or she moves inside the same country, e.g., from one region to another. The word “immigration” also describes the very complex internal and subjective process of change (Sieben & Straub 2000). A person who immigrates must learn to separate and dispense with many things; he or she will leave a familiar place and get to an unfamiliar one. He or she must learn to handle with unexpected, unusual and new situations and sensations. These impressions will impact on his or her way of feeling, thinking and doing (Bauer, 2006).

The time a person needs to feel integrated and adapted differs a lot. Each person goes through his or her own personal process, which depends on a great number of circumstances: on whether immigration is one’s own decision or another person’s decision, that means, if a person immigrates voluntarily or if he or she is obliged to leave his or her country; it depends on if the period of time the person will go to spend out of his or her country is short or long, limited or unlimited; there is a difference, when a person is allowed to return to his or her country, whenever he or she wants to, or if he or she cannot do that; it depends on if a person speaks the language of the new country or not; if he or she immigrates with the whole family, with part of the family or on his or her own. The adaptation process also depends on the age and on the personality traits of a person: the more flexible and open minded a person is, the easier he or she can accept a new situation; young people generally adapt easier than elder people. And, of course, it also depends on the new country, it’s culture, the social rules, the political system, the climate, the landscape and so on (Sieben & Straub 2000). Thinking immigration as a process of acculturation, Berry (Berry 2005 in Sieben & Straub 2010) found out four strategies of the cultural adaptation: marginalization, separation, assimilation and integration. Marginalization means isolation and no contact to people from neither of the two countries. Separation means meeting people only from the own country and culture. Assimilation is the over adaptation to the new country and culture and the negation of the own one. Integration means to be able to lead simultaneously with both cultures.

Experiences of immigration and remigration

I now want to share with the lector my own “emotional trip” through life in the last thirty years, which meant three immigration and two remigration situations to me and my family.

First step: Immigration to Austria - Period of life cycle: leaving home

At the age of 19, I went to Vienna, where I wanted to study music therapy with Alfred Schmölz: no doubt about leaving my family and my home country and going to what was the “sacred place” for music therapy at that time. The aim was very clear and the motivation high. There were no language problems (in spite of the strong Austrian dialect) and no political or other restriction of going back to my home country. It was a typical adolescence and post adolescence situation with a mild separating conflict and a predominant wish to discovering as many things as possible. The omnipotential fantasies were almost concerning the power of music therapy and my own capacity to help almost everybody. As time went on, fortunately, through self reflection and confrontation, the so called principle of reality began to work and I got a better estimation of my own personal and professional possibilities.

Second step: Immigration to Italy – period of life cycle: affective relationship, marriage and birth of two children

After four years I moved to Italy. New country, new culture, new language, new climate and new personal situation: consolidation of a relationship with my Chilean boyfriend, who was at the same time the reason for the immigration. In Italy, I was no longer an “invisible stranger” like in Austria and an exclamation like: “Tedesca? Hitler?” was not rare at that time. This time, I needed almost two years to settle down emotionally, elaborate ambivalent feelings and accept the new situation. The immigration strategy was complicated, as I was living between the Italian and the Chilean community in Rome. I had almost no contact with Germans except from a female student, who I got to know after two years at the University where I studied psychology. The first two years also implicated physical symptoms and doubts about my capacity to live with the situation. Today I think, that my integration in Italy went very slow as I had to handle with three cultures at the same time: the German, the Italian and the Chilean. The Chileans, by the way, were living in exile, so they had their own difficulties of integration and I was part of this community. Finally, I advanced from separation (sense of belonging to the Chilean group) to a partially succeeded strategy of integration after two years. I learned the language perfectly and I liked it very much; I wrote my thesis in Italian and did no more get confused between Spanish and Italian language. I spent more time with Italian people, appreciated the Italian way of cooking and their way of communicating. I could not agree so much with the Italian way of educating their children and after the birth of the first and the second son I realized how German I still was. Rome as a city was not child friendly at all, too much cars and too many dangers for little children, no chance for them to develop autonomy while they were small. So I could separate easily and start in a new place again after seven years.

Third step: Remigration to Germany –period of life cycle: family with little children

We moved back to Germany, to a tiny little place with 2000 habitants. I swore to myself, that I would never ever move from there, as it seemed so idyllic for the children and for me. Lovely landscape, lots of animals, snow in the winter and so on. I started with euphoric feelings and saw the word through rose-colored glasses. German language, German culture, everything seemed easy. I needed a few months to realize that I had quite a lot of cultural problems, due to the very different mentality of Germans living in a rural catholic region in the South of Germany, whereas I grew up in big city (Berlin) with a protestant education. Additionally, our Chilean-Italian-child- friendly- attitude did not help so much to get a lot of friends, as we were used to let them play, shout and laugh passed eight o´clock in the evening outside on the street. This time, I felt somehow like an “invisible foreigner” and had to revise my initial thoughts about staying there for the rest of my life. Anyway, in this situation, integration was possible for me and my children, but not for my husband and our bi-cultural family system, because of the prejudges of people living close to us.

Fourth step: Immigration to Chile – period of life cycle: family with school aged children

Three years later: Santiago de Chile. At that moment of my life, with a good job and two children going to a German school, I had rather moved to a bigger city in Germany than going to Chile. But going to Chile was a promise I had given to my husband, once the ban to go back to Chile was lifted and the exile had come to an end. So, my husband re-migrated andme and my children immigrated to Chile. I knew a lot about Chile and their customs, I spoke the language fluidly, had two Chilean-German sons, so the adaptation seemed not difficult at all. As a German friendly and child friendly country, with a democratic government, there were no real obstacles. With two hundred years of European immigration, my German face was not so surprising and I did not feel too different to other Germans who had Chilean nationality. I felt completely integrated, although I never negated my German roots and my German identity, and people perceived me as a completely integrated person, too.

Life went on, the children grow up and I felt that a new life cycle was going to start soon. I became conscious about the situation at the moment when I felt my soul mourning. It seemed to me, that my soul was telling me that it was not happy and that it wanted to turn back to its roots. Once the idea and the feeling were settled, it was very difficult to oppress it and voluntarily stop it. It became part of my life and interrupted my thinking whenever it wanted. In the beginning I did not really understand why things were happening to me like that, as Chile had not done me any harm. I had a very good work and a happy family – but my soul kept on mourning and crying. At the same time questions like “where do you want to pass your old age?”, or “where would you want to die or to be buried?” rose up in my mind. I then knew the answer to the questions was not a foreign country, but my country and that this place should be close to my original family.

Fifth step: Remigration to Germany – period of life cycle: family with adult children

Last round: back to Germany after nineteen years in Chile, and, even more: back to Berlin after more than thirty years. The most difficult part of this last step was the preparation: you have to get in touch with this profound feeling of homesickness and convince yourself from an idea which is based “only” on feelings; you have to take a decision and struggle against all kind of ambivalent feelings and answer the question if your idea is reasonable or not. Then, you must try to convince your family and finally go and speak with your friends. The process and elaboration of separation is still ongoing after one year since I and one of my sons arrived. I have still put on my rose-colored glasses, which helps to deal with this very complex situation.

My personal conclusion: you may learn a lot when you move into a foreign country with a foreign language and people who feel and live in a different way than you do. The process of learning may be long and difficult and to be an open minded person is not always as easy as it looks like or as you thought it would be. Everybody has to deal with prejudges, his or her own ones and the ones of other people. Not because you are a wonderful music therapist, you will save from this part of human nature.

From my own history I can guess and feel what other people who are living far away from their countries, feel; I can see and I can understand how complex a situation of immigration is and what it means to the whole family system. Still I know that each one makes his or her owns experience and that we cannot generalize.

I learned and experienced from other immigrants, that there is no recipe how to behave when the idea of going back comes into your mind - I just feel that I had so much luck and I feel privileged and happy.

Life goes along with separation and loss - but also with finding, retrieving, discovering and rediscovering.

References

Bauer S. (2006): Fremdes im Eigenen, Eigenes im Fremden - Musiktherapie in Chile. Gedanken einer deutschen Musiktherapeutin im Ausland. In: Jahrbuch Musiktherapie Band 2 (Music Therapy Annual Vol.2). p. 67-85. Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden.

Sieben, A., Straub, J. (2010): Migration, Kultur und Identität. In: Machleidt u. Heinz (ed.), Praxis der interkulturellen Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie. Migration und psychische Gesundheit. Urban & Fischer München.

Machleidt, W., Heinz, A. (2010): Dynamische Modelle der Migration. In: Machleidt u. Heinz (ed.), Praxis der interkulturellen Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie. Migration und psychische Gesundheit. Urban & Fischer München.

How to cite this page

Bauer, Susanne (2011). Reflections about Immigration and Remigration. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 08, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2011-reflections-about-immigration-and-remigration