Stages of Acculturation

Acculturation is the process of adapting to living in a new culture. It's something all immigrants go through, and though most writers on the subject seem to think the stages last for weeks or months, I know from experience that it can take place over years. It has taken me ten years to proceed through them, and in the disorienting wilderness of the middle stages, it would have been helpful to have had a description of the process, as a map to guide me toward home.

Stage 1: Euphoria
In this stage, a person is full of excitement at their new surroundings. I remember sitting happily under the grapefruit tree in my tiny backyard during my first long California summer, smelling the jasmine and orange blossom, and living off corn tortillas and avocados. I loved racoons, NPR, all the ethnic food I could get so easily in California, and the natural beauty of the area. This stage lasted several years for me.

Stage 2: Culture Shock and Alienation
In this stage, a person becomes keenly aware of the cultural differences between him/her and the host culture. They feel the loss of aspects of home. Feelings range from irritability to panic. A person can feel deeply lonely and sad, homesick and confused, or angry and hostile at people who do not understand them, and customs that seem wrong. Immigrants in this stage seek out compatriots, and often complain about the local people, culture and customs.
I was filled with a feeling of homesickness in this stage, longing for Europe, seeking out French food, movies and books, and feeling lost in the US. I felt confused about where I ought to be, and found myself often despising the way things were done in America, while trying to hide my prejudices and judgements from my close US friends. It would have been very helpful to me at this stage to have known that it was a phase in a gradual process of settling in, rather than a sign that I had made a big mistake in relocating to the US.

Stage 3: Anomie, or Culture Stress
In this stage, a person gradually restabilises. Some of the stresses of culture shock are solved, and some continue. A person in this stage may experience an identity crisis, feeling at home neither in their home culture, nor in their new culture. In this stage, I used to joke ruefully that I was stuck in the middle of the Atlantic. I knew that there were many things about California that I loved and appreciated, but I still felt confused about my feelings of homesickness for Europe.

Stage 4: Assimilation or Adaptation
In this final stage, a person either assimilates or acculturates.
Acculturation permits a person to find value and meaning in both cultures and identify with both. An acculturated person accepts the new culture, and feels able to negotiate it and live within it, without compromising who they are. They are able to feel similarity with the people of the host culture, as well as identity with their own culture and language.
Assimilation means that a person's old cultural values and beliefs are replaced by the new culture. They leave behind the culture of their parents, for example, and take on "American ways".
As I acculturated to California, I began to take walks around the little Northern California town I live in, smiling at its beauty. I relished soy chai and Thai food, and local farmer's markets. I loved the vast computer-linked library system, the local geeks, quaint wooden cottages, and bay trees. I felt fully myself, with all of my European-ness, living in California, and I began to deepen my relationships with American friends. I decided to apply for citizenship.

All immigrants negotiate these stages differently. Our reasons for coming here make a difference to our acculturation process. For example, did we choose to come, or were we forced to leave our home as refugees, or political exiles? How much trauma and loss were involved? What and whom did we leave behind? What were we able to bring, and what were we able to recreate once we got here? Can we exercise our profession, or did we lose our socio-economic status and earning power when we took up residence here? Is our kind accepted here? Is our being here a matter of struggling to survive, or does it represent an opportunity to thrive?

Finding The Feet: Connecting Immigrant Children With Their Lineage

Much of the work I do with elementary school children who are immigrants to the US is an attempt to help them reconnect with their lineage, healing the internal split between them and their ancestral culture, in order to forge a positive bi-cultural identity.

In doing this I am drawing not only on theoretical work, such as Tobie Nathan's ethnopsychiatry or the writings of Gloria Anzaldua on bilinguality/biculturality. But also, and more profoundly, on my own experience as a multiply-dislocated and bilingual child--experience which informs the field of the therapy, as well as the narrative of my life.

While I lived in France, as a bilingual adult, I had several experiences where a bilingual child between the ages of about five and nine, whose parents were both monolingual, would be introduced to me in either French or English. The child would politely ignore me, as children do grown ups, until at some point I spoke equally fluently in the other language. Suddenly the child would become very animated, want to talk to me, and in some cases literally follow me around for the rest of the day. After this happened a few times, I realised these children were the only bilingual people in their family. Bilingual-bicultural children need bilingual-bicultural role models so they can integrate the dual self into a unified bilingual-bicultural identity.

Children of immigrants are not only living between and across two cultures, but are also coping, to a greater or lesser extent, with the trauma of dislocation. Working with this trauma takes many forms. Usually I begin by simply opening a space to talk about where their grandparents are, how their parents came to this country, and the fact that they themselves have two cultures and languages inside them--framing all of this in an unambiguously positive light. For example, talking about how brave their parents were to walk all that way.

Case example
For a while I was seeing a five year old girl from El Salvador*, who was referred following a series of tantrums during which she threatened to call the police, so they would take her away from her home.

In our first session the client drew her family in the US, with great care, and with a lot of very carefully shaded colours. The people were perfectly drawn, with smiling faces, but they had no feet. Their unfinished legs hovered above the carefully drawn green line of the ground.

I asked where her grandparents were, and she said, "El Salvador". I acknowledged that El Salvador was far away, and asked if they were here in her heart, and she said yes. So I suggested she might want to add them to the picture too. She drew them in the top right hand corner, and I was astonished to see that they had feet, connecting directly to a new green grounding line.

The contrast between the US family, who were 'ungrounded', and the family members in El Salvador, who had a connection, quite literally, with the land, was striking. I felt that this marked a dislocation-related trauma, and that this was probably linked to the theme of being taken away, as evidenced in the child's threats to her parents. In control mastery terms, this child was trying to control who would be taken away and when.

In subsequent sessions of undirected play the client chose to draw her grandmother's house in El Salvador, and then to make a meal of tortillas out of Play Doh. "My mom taught me to make tortillas", she told me. "And her mom taught her."

I repeated this. "Your grandma taught your mom, and then your mom taught you." And then added that when she had a little girl, she could teach her too, and then her daughter could teach her daughter--marking the thread of her lineage and the possibility of its continuation in this new country.

Whatever the client chose to draw, we would label, and whenever we labelled anything, I would do the writing in both English and Spanish, always asking the client what the Spanish word was. For example, we wrote 'Grandma" and then we wrote "Abuelita". Every time I did this the client seemed surprised and delighted. My Spanish is rudimentary, but this was less important than my openness (particularly as a representative of the host culture) to the fact that there were two languages in our shared field, and that their worldviews are equally true and valid.

Conclusion
This work was all about creating feet--establishing a connection backwards to the land that had been lost, which in turn would enable a more grounded existence per se.

It's noteworthy that the immigration trauma was announced and investigated within the child's own self-directed play, and that she used the play to re-connect to her lineage and integrate the split within her internalised family.

Six weeks after the start of therapy, the teacher reported that the child's family had called to tell her the child's tantrums had stopped.

*Details have been changed to protect the client's confidentiality.

Loss of the World: The Trauma of Dislocation

In this video, Dr Salman Akhtar discusses the trauma of dislocation suffered by immigrants and exiles, and defenses we use to cope with it.

Surprisingly (but immediately it rings true), he says it is not the loss of human relationships that creates the trauma--those we can, and will replace--instead, it's the loss of the world itself. The loss of the way the world looks: the shapes of houses, the lay of the land, the way the everyday objects are designed. And more subtly, the way time is constructed, and the cultural ways we conceive of our lives within the world--ways we don't realise are culturally specific until we find ourselves in a different culture. ("When I was living in India, I was not living in India, I was just living. I didn't realise I had been living in India until I left and came to the US.")

These dislocations cause the immigrant to continually be subliminally looking for aspects of home, however banal--the colour of mailboxes, or the flash of bouganvilea--which feel somehow more trustworthy than the equivalents in the new country. The sudden flash of 'home', and the happiness of recognition of an aspect of home, reveals that we have been missing a feeling of home all this time. Furthermore, without the subtle triggering of memories implicitly evoked by familiar objects and surroundings, we are psychically impoverished.

The clinical situation
In a clinical situation, Akhtar says, it is vital to validate the fact of immigration in the client's identity from the start, showing interest so that this material is flagged as important, and psychic space is opened for its exploration.

People with migration trauma, he says, can take a while to settle into the physical surroundings of the office. The physical surroundings can be crucial to them--being transitional and also totemic objects. These clients bring things in, and want to borrow things, very often. This is all about the trauma of loss.

Defenses
The immigrant defends against the dislocation trauma through several means:
1. Denial, subtly repudiating the host country. "I am not really here."
2. The fantasy of return. "I'm here for a little while but I'll go back." This return is continually deferred, sometimes to the point of "I want to be buried at home when I die."
3. Minimisation, via the fantasy of replication. "I'll re-create my country right here." Home can become a shrine for the immigrant, who owns more cultural artifacts than they would if they were living in their home country.
4. Idealisation of the home country (aka lost and idealised object). This in turn causes wounding if you do return--you can never find what you are looking for when you go back, because it has changed, and no longer the ideal, lost object.
5. Reparation--this is the key to healing. It involves the awareness that I was the one who left, thereby attacking my good internal object. So I have fix it. With this awareness comes altruism, philanthropy and creativity.

Nostalgia for home
The client's nostalgia for home must be analysed. It can often serve to mask aggression and frustration in the now: "Bombay was so lovely" can hide the fact that life right now here seems intolerable. On the other hand, nostalgia can be acting as a method for displacement of transference love: "Bombay was so lovely" can indicate that the client is also happy to be here in your office.

Exiles may never show nostalgia, never mentioning their home country, or only negatively. It's like a bad divorce. They spread the trauma backwards, spoiling the good memories. Here the crucial thing is to analyse the defenses against nostalgia. Even though there was trauma, "there were also trees, and birds, and lollipops..."

Space has to be provided for the migrant to elaborate on the nostalgia. Then it will be easier to analyse its defensive functions.

Non-human transferences
When working with migrants remember and note the issue of non-human transferences. The relationship with objects and places around the child (chair, rain, moon,...). These are not merely symbolic of human relationships, they are important in themselves, particularly for immigrants, because they mediate our difference, and the difference between our worlds, old and new. Environment can be mother, reversing Winnicott's "mother as environment".

Conclusion
Finally, Akhtar reminds us that none of this is the main work in the analysis, but rather it sets a crucial background to the work, with immigrant and exiled clients. Analysis of the immigration trauma allows resumption of development, the search for new objects, and the internal journey of self actualisation.

On a personal note, Akhtar mentions bouganvilea several times. This touched me, because bouganvilea is important to my internal landscape also. Its bright splash serves me as a transitional object, linking me to external landscapes I have lost, and symbolising aspects of myself which I am still seeking to integrate in a new country.