The LAW Way

People often imagine migration as a fresh start, a courageous leap into a better life. For those who choose to move, perhaps that is true. But for millions of Venezuelans—including me—migration was not a choice. It was a matter of survival. And surviving an experience you did not choose transforms you in ways that remain invisible, even to yourself.

As I approach ten years in the United States, I have finally been able to articulate something that lived quietly inside me all this time: I migrated with trauma. For an entire decade, I carried trauma without knowing it. Responsibility, adaptation, and the pressure to rebuild a life from nothing kept me moving, producing, and enduring. There was no room to pause long enough to understand what was happening internally. Only now, with distance, safety, and education, can I name what I lived.

This narrative is based on my experience and on the work of Venezuelan psychologists who have studied the psychological, emotional, and neurobiological effects of forced migration. Their insights not only explain what happens inside a migrant’s mind and body—they explain me.

I wrote this in English for the people in my life who have never migrated. They care about me, they interact with me every day, but they cannot fully grasp what migration does to a person. My hope is that these words give shape to what is often unseen.

1. What Is Migration Trauma? A Clear, Human Explanation

Trauma does not only arise from violent or catastrophic events. Trauma is the internal impact—on the brain, the nervous system, and the psyche—of circumstances that feel overwhelmingly unsafe, unpredictable, uncontrollable, or chronically distressing. Forced migration meets all of these conditions.

Psychologist Vivian Khedari explains that the unpredictability, instability, and perceived lack of control that migrants experience activate the same neurobiological mechanisms as life-threatening events.¹ In Venezuela, the collapse of institutions, political persecution, social instability, and the erosion of daily life forced many of us into decisions rooted in survival. Those conditions placed the body and mind into a persistent state of alarm.

Khedari further notes that the prolonged uncertainty migrants face—especially regarding legal status, housing, employment, and stability—intensifies the trauma, because the nervous system remains “stuck” in survival mode.²

Migration was not an adventure. It was an escape. And escaping shapes the mind in the same way danger does.

2. Why Migrants Don’t Realize They’re Traumatized

One of the most misunderstood aspects of trauma is that it does not always feel like pain. Often, it feels like detachment.

Khedari describes how, when faced with chronic overwhelm, the brain may shut down emotional responses to allow the person to function.² This explains why so many migrants appear strong, calm, resilient, or “used to it” when internally they are disconnected from their emotional reality.

Psychologist David Ephraim explains that trauma tends to manifest in two primary ways: intrusive memories or complete avoidance.³ Without knowing it, I chose avoidance. For many years, I distanced myself from the Venezuelan community. I avoided Venezuelan gatherings, accents, foods, and spaces. It was a protective mechanism. Venezuelans reminded me of the life I lost, the identity I abandoned, and the memories I could not face.

As Ephraim notes, when recollection feels threatening, the nervous system suppresses it by avoiding anything associated with that pain.⁴ My avoidance was not rejection. It was survival.

3. Trauma Shows Up When the Body Finally Feels Safe

Something surprising happens with migration trauma: it often does not surface during the migration, but years later—once the person is stable enough to feel.

Ephraim explains that symptoms frequently emerge when the nervous system perceives safety for the first time.⁴ Many Venezuelans report experiencing emotional breakdowns not during the initial years of migration, but long after: five, seven, or ten years later. Once housing, employment, legal status, or a sense of order are finally secured, the body allows emotions that were previously suppressed to come forward.

This is why the sadness, confusion, homesickness, fatigue, irritability, and tearfulness migrants feel later on are not signs of weakness but signs that the emergency has passed. The delayed arrival of emotion is evidence that the nervous system has finally found room to breathe.

4. Healing Through Community: What I Learned When I Reconnected with Venezuelans

For nearly a decade, I avoided my own people. I never lived in Venezuelan neighborhoods, never attended Venezuelan events, and never sought out Venezuelan gatherings. In reality, I was avoiding the version of myself I had left behind.

Recently, through my children’s musical activities in Doral, I began interacting with Venezuelan parents again. Without expecting it, I felt something shift. Speaking in my natural rhythm, using my cultural expressions, laughing at things only Venezuelans understand, and sharing unspoken grief created an emotional safety I had not felt in years. It felt like returning to a part of myself I had buried.

Psychologist Edith Shiro describes healing as something that happens in connection—through shared recognition, through someone saying “this happened to me too.”⁵ Carolina Izquiel highlights the protective emotional qualities Venezuelans bring with them: warmth, relational closeness, humor, and resilience.⁶ Julieta Casó explains that wherever Venezuelans gather, there is a recognizable emotional environment—one that feels like home.⁷

What I experienced was not coincidence. It was the healing power of reconnection. The community I avoided for years became the community that helped me understand what I had lived.

5. The Invisible Losses of Migration (What Non-Migrants Don’t See)

Migration is not only about crossing a border or starting a new life. It is the loss of an entire emotional ecosystem.

Psychologist Karen Garber calls this “silent grief”—the invisible losses that migrants carry alone.⁸ Migrants lose more than a place. They lose extended family, childhood environments, professional identities, friendships, language cues, traditions, rituals, shared history, and the feeling of belonging to a collective memory.

These losses are profound because they cannot be formally mourned. Nothing is buried. Nothing ends with ceremony. The grief accumulates quietly, internally, without societal acknowledgment.

This grief shapes the migrant’s identity and their relationships with their children, their past, and themselves.

6. Forced Return and Re-Traumatization: The Psychology Behind Going Back

For those who have never migrated, it may seem that returning to one’s country is simply “going back.” But for Venezuelans who left under conditions of fear, collapse, or instability, returning is not a homecoming. It is retraumatization.

Ephraim explains that re-exposure to the place or conditions that triggered the initial trauma activates the same neurological response.⁹ Even the threat of deportation or forced return can produce anxiety and emotional destabilization. Khedari notes that anticipation of danger triggers the brain as strongly as actual danger.¹⁰

Psychologist Martín La Roche adds that any policy that destabilizes housing, legal status, or employment directly impacts the mental health of migrants.¹¹ Stability is not a luxury for migrants—it is the foundation of psychological safety.

And as Casó notes, the Venezuela many of us hold in our hearts is not the Venezuela that exists today. What remains is the memory of home, not the reality of the country.¹²

A forced return would not return migrants to the life they left. It would return them to the conditions that forced them to flee. It would mean a second displacement.

7. How Migrants Heal: Evidence-Based Understanding

The psychologists interviewed in the Ida y Vuelta project agree on key principles of healing. Migrants heal through:

• connection with community,
• psychoeducation and understanding of their emotional processes,
• rebuilding trusting relationships,
• allowing themselves to feel what was silenced by survival,
• and telling their story as a way to organize, integrate, and transform their experience.

Healing does not erase the trauma of migration. It integrates it.

8. Closing Words

As I look back on my ten years in the United States, I can finally name what lived inside me for so long: I survived, but I did not heal—not at first. Survival kept me moving, but healing is bringing me back to myself.

My voice is returning. My identity is re-emerging. My community, once avoided, now feels like a lifeline. The pain I carried without name is now understood, contextualized, and held with compassion.

Migration saved my life, but healing is what is allowing me to live it fully.

This narrative is for every migrant who has felt something they could not describe and for every non-migrant who wants to understand. What we feel is not exaggeration or weakness. It is human. It is trauma. And it can be healed.

Footnotes

(All interviews published by Ida y Vuelta website)

1. Vivian Khedari, La comprensión del trauma para poblaciones en crisis: conversación con la Dra. Vivian Khedari, https://www.idayvueltareacin.org/general-6-1 (last visited Nov. 20, 2025).
2. Id.
3. David Ephraim, La evaluación del trauma: conversación con el Dr. David Ephraim,  https://www.idayvueltareacin.org/general-6-1 (last visited Nov. 20, 2025).
4. Id.
5. Edith Shiro, Crecimiento postraumático: conversación con Edith Shiro, https://www.idayvueltareacin.org/general-6-1 (last visited Nov. 20, 2025).
6. Carolina Izquiel, Las fortalezas del migrante: conversación con Carolina Izquiel, https://www.idayvueltareacin.org/general-6-1 (last visited Nov. 20, 2025).
7. Julieta Casó, Distinto pero no ajeno: conversación con Julieta Casó,  https://www.idayvueltareacin.org/general-6-1 (last visited Nov. 20, 2025).
8. Karen Garber, Fantasmas en la cuna: conversación con Karen Garber,  https://www.idayvueltareacin.org/general-6-1 (last visited Nov. 20, 2025).
9. Ephraim, supra note 3.
10. Khedari, supra note 1.
11. Martín La Roche, Consideraciones sobre el trauma migratorio y cómo atenderlo: conversación con Martín La Roche, https://www.idayvueltareacin.org/general-6-1 (last visited Nov. 20, 2025).
12. Casó, supra note 7.