Moving, emigration, adaptation

How long it lasts and when it gets easier

This is the first question almost everyone asks: how much longer will it be like this. Nobody has an exact answer, but adaptation has a recognisable sequence. The timings below are a guide, not a schedule: for some people everything shifts by months, and a forced departure changes the picture most of all.

The first weeks — mobilisation. Many things to do and little time for feelings: documents, housing, school, bank, doctor. The body runs in emergency mode, and this can feel almost like elation. Many people later remember this period as the easiest — and are surprised by that.

Three to six months — the first drop. The urgent part is over, the novelty has passed. Fatigue appears that sleep does not remove, irritation at everyday trifles, longing for what was familiar. Usually this is also when it becomes obvious that language, work and a circle of friends rebuild far more slowly than it seemed at the start.

From six to eighteen months — the hardest stretch. This is when people most often seek help. On the outside everything has settled — which is why the heaviness feels inexplicable and shameful: “I have a flat, I have a job, what else do I need.” Emergency mode switches off, and with it goes the fuel a person was running on; everything that was postponed arrives at once.

One to two years and beyond — levelling out. The new stops requiring constant effort: routes become familiar, the language moves into the background, your own people and places appear. The longing does not disappear entirely, but it stops filling all the space. That is adaptation — not “forgetting your former life”, but ceasing to live in two places at once.

Why it gets hardest once everything has settled

Often the hardest period comes not in the first months but later. While urgent tasks are being dealt with — documents, housing, work, school — the body runs on mobilisation. When the acute phase ends, what was postponed arrives: grief for the loss of a familiar life, exhaustion, loss of meaning.

This is not a sign of weakness and does not mean the decision was wrong. It is how adaptation works.

Several processes happen at once, each of them hard on its own:

• Loss of environment. Not only places and people have gone, but automatic routines: clear rules, language, familiar routes. Everything requires conscious effort.
• Loss of status. Professional experience does not always convert. Someone who was a competent specialist becomes the person who cannot explain a simple thing at an office counter.
• Guilt. Towards those who stayed, towards family, towards yourself — for leaving, or for “not being happy enough”.
• Uncertainty. Planning is impossible, while the brain demands certainty and fills the gaps with worst-case scenarios.

How hard adaptation differs from depression

Everyone finds it hard at times, and that in itself is not an illness. But adaptation has a line beyond which help is needed — and it is worth knowing it in advance, so as not to wait for years.

It looks like ordinary adaptation if:

• the heaviness comes in waves — there are days and weeks when it is easier;
• joy is available: a meeting, good news or a trip changes your state;
• energy goes into concrete things — the language, documents, looking for work;
• you miss your former life while still taking steps in the new one;
• sleep and appetite go off in hard periods and recover in calm ones.

It looks like depression if:

• low mood persists almost constantly for two weeks or longer, without breaks;
• the ability to enjoy what used to be enjoyable has gone — not “no time for it”, but “it does not register”;
• sleep and appetite are persistently disturbed, weight has changed noticeably;
• fatigue does not lift after rest, simple tasks take enormous effort;
• thoughts of worthlessness and guilt have appeared, a sense of being a burden;
• thoughts have appeared that it would be better not to be here.

This is a guide, not a diagnosis: other conditions produce a similar picture, and some symptoms are explained by exhaustion or physical causes. Sorting this out is a specialist’s job, not a matter of checking yourself against a list.

If thoughts of suicide appear, do not wait for an appointment: contact emergency services on 112.

Another frequent story is not depression but anxiety that does not let go: it rests on uncertainty, and in emigration uncertainty can last for years. That state also responds to work, and there is no need to wait “until everything is settled”.

What therapy does

We separate what can be changed from what cannot. A substantial part of post-move anxiety is tied to circumstances that are not under your control. CBT helps you stop spending resources on trying to control the uncontrollable and direct them where they produce a result.

We work with grief. The loss of a familiar life is a real loss, and it needs to be lived through rather than “pulled together”.

We restore direction. Tools from acceptance and commitment therapy help you lean on values when goals and plans have been reset to zero: not “what will I achieve” but “how do I want to live now, in these conditions”.

We rebuild your supports. Concretely and step by step: routine, physical activity, social connections, small sources of pleasure. This is not a platitude — these are exactly the things that disappear first and come back last.

We work with traumatic experience if the move was forced and involved danger. Trauma-focused methods are used here, including EMDR.

If you had to leave rather than chose to

A forced departure is a separate story. When someone left in order to escape, adaptation is laid over unprocessed traumatic experience, and the usual explanations stop working: things get worse precisely when it has become safe. While the threat lasted, the mind postponed processing; “later” arrives in a quiet rented flat in a new country.

Signs often mistaken for “just nerves”: intrusive memories, sharp reactions to sounds and news, an inability to relax, a sense of detachment from what is happening. This is the territory of work with the consequences of trauma, and it differs from work with adaptation.

A note on families

Family members go through adaptation at different speeds and in different ways. One wants to talk, the other closes up; one is already making plans, the other has not let go of the past. This is a frequent cause of conflicts that are experienced as a problem in the relationship, when the cause is the different pace of adaptation.

It is particularly hard for the partner who followed and did not make the decision: the loss is the same, but without the sense of having chosen it. More about this on the page about difficulties in relationships.

What you can do before therapy starts

This does not replace work with a specialist, but everything else rests on these things — and they are the first to disappear after a move.

• Restore a routine. Sleep at the same times, meals not on the run. It sounds dull, but an exhausted nervous system recovers this way, not through willpower.
• Keep one familiar activity. Something you did before: running, drawing, cooking, music. Continuity matters more than content — it restores the sense that you are still you.
• Limit the news. Not ban it, but give it a time and a boundary. Reading feeds around the clock sustains anxiety and does not affect events.
• Do not postpone contact until “when I’ve learned the language”. One or two regular contacts are enough to keep loneliness from amplifying everything else.
• Count steps, not results. A CV sent and an exercise done are already a result, even with no reply. In emigration feedback arrives with a long delay, and relying on it alone is a way of discounting everything you do.

In Russian, from any country

Therapy in a non-native language is possible but harder: precision of phrasing matters here. In a foreign language feelings are spoken about more poorly and more “cleverly” than they are experienced, and part of the work goes into translation instead of therapy.

All the centre’s specialists work in Russian. Sessions are held online — from Poland, Germany, Spain, Lithuania, Czechia, the Netherlands and anywhere else you live now — and in person in Warsaw.

How the work is arranged is described on the page How therapy works; who sees clients — on the specialists page.