Culture & Belonging
A fifteen-year-old girl fleeing war in Congo arrives in Texas alone. Her mother was with her when they left. Her mother did not make it.
A family from Angola settles in Portland, Maine. They are here. They are together — almost. Somewhere on the journey north, their two-year-old slid into a ditch. There was no time to stop. The smuggler kept moving. They kept moving. That child did not make it to Portland.
These are not distant stories. These are people living among us — in our schools, our shelters, our communities. People who arrived carrying both profound loss and profound resilience. What happens next depends, in large part, on who shows up to meet them.
Many immigrants and refugees fleeing to the United States have survived what most of us will never face. Gang violence. Domestic violence. Sexual violence. Persecution that made staying impossible and leaving the only option.
The journey itself adds another layer of trauma. Extreme terrain and weather. Starvation and thirst. The vulnerability of depending on smugglers — people who sometimes became perpetrators. Women sexually assaulted on the road. Parents watching children die. Families forced to make impossible choices and keep walking.
By the time they reach U.S. soil, many have already experienced more loss than most people accumulate in a lifetime.
Arriving does not mean the hard part is over. Navigating an unfamiliar immigration system is disorienting and exhausting. Many are placed in temporary housing while their cases process — unable to work, trying to enroll children in school without records, learning a new language while managing grief they have not yet had space to feel.
Some wear ankle monitoring bracelets as a condition of their release from detention. They wear them into stores, into schools, into ordinary spaces — and people who do not understand the context make assumptions. These are not criminals. These are people the system has not yet found a permanent place for.
Families navigating all of this also face language barriers, cultural unfamiliarity, and the weight of identity questions — who am I here, what do I hold onto, what do I let go? For parents, watching their children adapt to a new world while carrying the old one is its own kind of grief.
If you work with immigrants and refugees, the most important thing you can bring into the room is context — not assumptions, not checklists, but genuine curiosity about the full arc of someone’s experience.
Trauma for this population is layered: what happened before migration, during the journey, and after arrival. All three chapters matter. A provider who only sees the present moment misses most of the story.
Know the barriers that make care hard to access — cost, transportation, language, scheduling, and above all, fear. Fear that what is shared in a session might be used against them. That fear is not irrational. It is earned. The best thing a provider can do is be consistent, transparent, and patient in building trust.
Let the conversation breathe. Narrative therapy and trauma-informed approaches work because they follow the person’s lead rather than forcing a structure. And consider where services are delivered — community centers, schools, shelters, and faith communities are often more accessible than traditional office settings for this population.
It would be easy to read this and see only suffering. But the fifteen-year-old from Congo and the family from Angola who now call Portland home did not arrive broken. They arrived with extraordinary reserves of strength, adaptability, and love — love that carried them through terrain no child should ever have to cross.
Cultural competence means holding both. The grief and the resilience. The trauma and the wholeness. It means approaching each person not as a problem to be solved but as a full human being whose story deserves to be understood.
That is not a clinical skill. It is a human one. And it is something all of us — clinicians, neighbors, community members — can practice.
Nuna Gleason is the founder of Wounded Healers International and principal consultant at Nuna Cultural Consulting, working at the intersection of culture, trauma, and community healing.
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