It starts with an image. A city not yet lived in, a university not yet entered, a version of oneself imagined as waiting somewhere on the other side of the border.
Some of my clients describe spending years planning to go: learning the language, choosing the university, making visits to the destination city more than once. Everything was ready. Then at the last moment something shifted inside them, and they stayed. Not necessarily from fear. Sometimes simply because the future they had constructed no longer looked like them.
For others, the leaving actually happens. They arrive in a new country, work, study, and build a life. Belonging, though, does not step off the plane with them. It can take years before a particular street, a café, or the daily route to work slowly acquires the quality of home.
Then sometimes another opportunity appears: a different country, a better position, a more prestigious institution. On paper everything looks right. But real life rarely maps onto the image we hold of it. One person says: "I liked the work, but every single day I felt that city wasn't mine." Another: "Everything was good, but I had lost myself inside that life."
And sometimes the return happens.
What return actually is
What I hear repeatedly is that returning is not, necessarily, returning to the past. The person comes back to a city they know, but they are no longer the same person who left. Small details suddenly acquire a weight they didn't have before: the sound of the street, afternoon light through a particular window, trees on a university campus, the architecture of a building, the language of people walking past.
At that moment, the question stops being "where do I have the better opportunity?" Something deeper takes its place:
Where does something in me resonate with this space? And what have I carried from wherever I have been into the next place?
What the decision doesn't resolve
In clinical work, I sit with people who have taken every possible version of the migration decision. Those who left and built something real. Those who left and never quite arrived. Those who stayed and spent years half-leaving in their minds. Those who returned and found that the home held in memory no longer exists in the form they had preserved it.
Across all of these, the same thing keeps appearing: the decision itself, however consequential, does not resolve the question underneath it. The question is not "where should I be?" It is: what am I carrying, and does it still belong to me?
Travel does not produce insight on its own. But displacement carries a particular pressure, and under that pressure, things that had always been known but kept in their usual place suddenly find they have nothing to lean against. They show up in forms they hadn't before.
Some experience this as release. Some find it intolerable. Most experience both, at different points.
What we carry
What we hold inside is not always as much within our control as choosing what to put in a suitcase.
Sometimes it is an unmourned grief: for a relationship that never reached completion, or for a country as it existed at a particular moment and then changed, or perhaps as it never quite existed in the way we remember it. Sometimes it is a loyalty so old and so deep that we no longer recognise it as a choice. We simply live it, the way we hold our bodies: so habitual that someone has to point it out before we notice.
Sometimes it is the self that formed under particular conditions of pressure, limitation, or expectation. That self accompanies us to the new place, and we continue operating as if the original conditions still govern. The context has changed. The internal arrangement has not.
This is, essentially, what ISTDP addresses. Not migration specifically, but the continuation of internal patterns beyond the conditions that produced them. A feeling that was suppressed. A grief that became something else and was carried forward. An anxiety that no longer relates to any current threat but simply persists, because it was never resolved.
A loss with no clear object
Among the more disorienting experiences I hear described is this: someone who has lived outside Iran for ten or twenty years returns to family, to the city where they grew up, and finds that neither the city nor they themselves are as they were. Both have changed. And the relationship between them, carefully held in memory, does not match the reality they find.
This is not a failure of memory. It is the ordinary consequence of time. But it becomes a particular kind of loss that is difficult to grieve, because it has no clear object. We cannot mourn something we did not know had remained alive in us.
What migration teaches about identity
From our migrations, we learn something no other path could have taught us: that identity is not a stable object, transferred intact from one place to another. It is something tested in context, made visible under pressure, most clearly itself at borders.
Many of my clients tell me they did not understand what in them was specifically Iranian until they lived outside it. They did not understand what was distinctly their own, as distinct from what culture had bequeathed, until they sat inside a particular experience and felt, with unusual clarity, that something was off.
These are not comfortable recognitions. But they are among the most useful things that have emerged in the room, and they have changed what I can offer.
The essential question is not where we should be. It is: what have we been carrying, and have we ever had the opportunity to set it down and look at it steadily?
The answers tend to be more interesting than we expect.