I’m an immigrant. I’ve lived in the UK nearly twenty years.
I still notice small things. The way people ask, “You alright?” and expect a breezy, “Yeah, you?” rather than a moment of real connection. The comfort of tea offered at the worst moments. The long vowels that slip back into my voice when I’m tired, the slight pause when someone asks me to repeat my surname. Some days I feel at home in two places. Some days I feel I’m visiting both.
Cross-cultural life isn’t a single story. Some of us moved for work or study, some for love, some because a parent packed a suitcase and said it would be better this way. Some found the marriage didn’t hold. Some are raising children who look like both grandmothers and neither at once. Many of us live in a language that isn’t our first. We hold rituals that have no day off here. We learn to cook the foods that smell of home and then apologise for the smell in rented kitchens.
What binds these lives isn’t a headline. It’s the steady work of marrying up different maps of meaning. How family should function. What respect looks like. Who gets to speak first at dinner. How to disagree without losing face. Whether love equals duty, or choice, or both.
The ordinary places where culture meets you
Culture doesn’t only arrive through big events. It shows up in the queue at Boots, when you say “sorry” for being bumped. It shows up in HR forms that don’t fit your name. It shows up when your child asks which holidays you celebrate and why their classmates don’t. It shows up in your partner’s family kitchen when the rules for praise, help, and privacy aren’t spoken but very much enforced. And while I don’t carry the added weight of microaggressions tied to skin colour, for many the complexity of cross-cultural life is compounded by racism.
It’s in the wedding you attend where your side expects elders to speak, and your partner’s side expects brevity and wine. In the WhatsApp group that runs on your mother tongue and the work meeting that runs on jargon. In the pull to send money home and the push to keep savings here. In the moment you laugh too loudly at a joke to prove you belong, then go quiet because you don’t.
The loyalties that split and braid
Many clients describe a double wish. To stay loyal to the people and values that raised them. To live freely in the life they’ve built now. That wish doesn’t cancel itself out. It makes a braid. Some strands sit easily. Some pull.
“I’m raising my children here in London,” Sita (not her real name), mother of Indian heritage, told me. “Part of me wants to pass on everything I grew up with, our food, our language, our respect for elders. But then I see how easily my kids question me, how quickly they push back. Sometimes it makes me doubt myself, as if tradition makes me not just old-fashioned but wrong. How do you know which voice to trust: mine, or the one they’re learning here.”
There can be guilt. For wanting something your parents didn’t have. For not passing on a language. For choosing a partner your family struggles to recognise as “one of us”. There can be pride too. In being able to translate two worlds. In knowing when to be direct and when to be delicate. In teaching children that their identity is bigger than a form.
The body keeps score of belonging
This is not just an idea. The nervous system tracks safety, inclusion, exclusion long before we have words for it. If you spend long periods code-switching, smoothing edges, smiling through confusion, your body logs it as work. You might notice tension at family gatherings, a rise in heart rate before you speak up at work, a flatness when you leave a phone call with home and realise you are running out of shared references. None of this means you are failing at culture. It means you are human.
Love across maps
Many couples only discover cultural differences when life asks for a decision. Where to live. How to handle money. How to raise children. Whether elders have a bedroom in your home. How often you see family. Who makes the plan and who defers. The early glow of falling in love lets us imagine we mean the same things by “respect” or “support.” Later, the details matter.
I’ve sat with pairs who love one another and still end up in loops. One partner calls frequent check-ins “care,” the other hears “control.” One believes family decisions must be collective, the other believes partnership is two people in a room. Neither is wrong. Both are simply shaped.
As a Nigerian client once said to me: “I married an Englishwoman who says she loves how close I am with my family. But when my cousins arrive and stay three weeks, she looks at me like I’ve broken a rule no one told me about.”
What helps is naming the maps. Not to win, but to see. “In my family, advice is love.” “In mine, advice is criticism.” “In my home, guests drop in.” “In mine, you ask first.” Once spoken, differences stop being personal flaws. They become logistics two people can work with.
The second generation question
If you grew up with parents who carried a whole country in their pockets, you may have learned to be grateful, to minimise struggle because someone else had it worse. Clients often ask a quiet question: am I allowed to find this hard when my parents faced far more?
The answer is yes. Hard is not a competition. Your parents’ resilience doesn’t cancel your feelings. They can be heroes and you can still feel lost. You can honour their story and write your own.
Naming losses without apology
Leaving a place, even for good reasons, comes with grief. Not only for people or landscapes, but for ways of being that don’t translate. The pleasure of speaking without thinking about grammar. The humour that relies on references no one here shares. The easy, cheap hairdresser who knew your style. The music that swings you in a particular rhythm. The season that smells of a distinctive fruit.
You don’t have to justify that grief. You don’t have to earn the right to miss what made you. Naming loss is not betrayal. It is part of integration.
Anyone who has tried to feel in a language learned later knows the strange distance it brings, how words can clarify and thin emotion at the same time.
A closing thought
Most of us who cross cultures learn to carry a small museum inside. Objects, tastes, stories, rules. If you’re reading this and feeling the tug of not quite belonging anywhere, of being caught between cultures, languages, or expectations, know this: you’re not alone. Your confusion is valid. Your longing is human. And your ability to live fully between worlds has not expired.
The task isn’t to pack the museum away. It’s to curate it. To let it breathe in the home you have now. To invite people you love to visit. To take them by the hand and say: this piece shaped me, that one too, and here is the room I’m still arranging. If you recognise yourself in this, you’re not alone. There is nothing wrong with wanting roots and room in the same breath. That’s not a contradiction. That’s a life.
This article was written by Veronika Kloucek, Senior Psychotherapist, Trainer, Supervisor with support from AI tools for spelling and grammar clarity. All ideas and editorial choices remain fully human and authored.
If this article resonates and you would like to find out how I can help you, contact me to schedule a confidential enquiry call today. I work in private practice and head up The Village Clinic.
References & Further Reading
Berry, J. W. (1997). Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 46(1), 5 to 34.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994/2004). The location of culture. Routledge.
Dewaele, J.-M. (2010). Emotions in multiple languages. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hoffman, E. (1990). Lost in translation: A life in a new language. Penguin.
Iyer, P. (2000). The global soul: Jet lag, shopping malls, and the search for home. Knopf.
Lahiri, J. (2016). In other words (A. Goldstein, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 2015 in Italian)
Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge University Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
