What Is Identity Migration — And Why I Built Parenting Unpacked Around It?
There is a French word — dépaysement — for the specific feeling of being somewhere you chose but do not quite belong yet. Closer to disorientation than homesickness. The feeling of being slightly outside the life you are standing in.
I describe it in the introduction to Parenting Unpacked as the moment I stood in a Swiss supermarket with my hand on a shopping cart, my daughter crying in the stroller, unable to read the labels on a pack of diapers. I was not panicking. I just could not find the edge of the feeling.
I had moved countries. What else moved was harder to name.
That harder-to-name thing is what Parenting Unpacked maps. And identity migration is the framework I built to describe it.
What identity migration actually means?
People confuse identity migration with culture shock. Culture shock is the friction of encountering difference — the new language, the unfamiliar system, the social rules nobody wrote down. Identity migration is what happens underneath all of that. The movement of the self through a transition so significant that the person who arrives on the other side is not quite the same as the one who left.
Wait. One dash remaining. Clean version of that paragraph:
People confuse identity migration with culture shock. Culture shock is the friction of encountering difference, the new language, the unfamiliar system, the social rules nobody wrote down. Identity migration is what happens underneath all of that. The movement of the self through a transition so significant that the person who arrives on the other side is not quite the same as the one who left.
It happens in three recognisable stages, which I describe in the book as the invisible layers that disappear one by one.
The first is the loss of felt competence. The ability itself stays. What disappears is the invisible layer of knowing that lets you move through ordinary life without thinking, the layer that meant I never had to decide how to catch a train, read a label, or navigate a system. When that layer disappeared, even choosing a pack of diapers felt like standing in the wrong country. I was still capable. I just no longer felt it.
The second is the inherited scorecard. Long before the disruption arrived, I had absorbed a set of standards without noticing. What good parenting looks like, what success looks like, what kind of life is considered worth wanting. Those standards surface loudest in exactly the conditions where they no longer apply. The scorecard I inherited was the voice that told me I was failing, even when I was not.
The third is the slow rebuild. Not recovering who I was but becoming someone coherent again in the life I was actually living. I call this arc Leave, Adapt, Anchor, Thrive, a landscape you move through in more than one direction, not a ladder you climb once. If you want to understand each stage in detail, the four stages post goes deep on what each one actually looks like from the inside.
Why this matters for parents specifically?
Parenting already asks you to lose yourself, your sleep, your time, your previous priorities all at once. When you do that in a country that is not yours, in a language you are still learning, without your village anywhere nearby, the loss compounds in ways nobody prepares you for.
The parent who held everything together and somewhere in the middle of doing everything right stopped recognising herself is the person this book is for. The identity migration is already happening. The book gives it a map.
This experience does not exist in isolation from the research. Karina Lagarrigue, a PhD researcher whose work on sensory processing sensitivity and maternal adjustment in expatriate contexts was published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2025, found significant overlap between her research and the lived experience I mapped in Maternity Abroad. Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids, endorsed Parenting Unpacked before it launched. Her foundational framework for global family identity is the academic bedrock this work builds on. They arrived at the same territory by different roads.
If you want to understand the specific concept of ambiguous loss, the grief of a life that is still there but no longer yours to live, that post connects the research directly to the expat parenting experience. And if you are looking for the entry point into all of this, the Identity Void post is where to start.
The introduction of Parenting Unpacked ends with this:
"I hope it is the company you needed when you were standing in the baby aisle, hand on the cart, not knowing what game was being played."
That is the whole book in one sentence.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
FAQ
What is identity migration?
It is the movement of the self through a significant life transition. Culture shock is about adjusting to a new place. Identity migration is about what happens to who you are underneath that adjustment. I use it to describe what happens when you move abroad, become a parent, and somewhere in the middle of holding everything together you stop recognising yourself.
What is the loss of felt competence?
The ability itself stays. What disappears is the invisible layer of confidence that meant you never had to think before acting. In a new country, in a new language, that layer is gone. Small tasks carry weight they never held before. I stood in a Swiss supermarket unable to choose a pack of diapers. That is what the loss of felt competence feels like from the inside.
What is the inherited scorecard?
It is the set of standards you absorbed without realising it. What a good parent looks like, what success looks like, what kind of life is worth wanting. You built that scorecard in a specific context. When the context changes the scorecard does not update automatically and it surfaces loudest exactly when it no longer applies.
How is identity migration different from culture shock?
Culture shock is external. The new language, the unfamiliar system, the different social rules. Identity migration is what happens internally underneath all of that. You can navigate the culture shock completely and still be deep inside the identity migration. They are not the same process and treating them as the same is one of the reasons so many expat parents feel like they are doing something wrong when they are actually doing something hard.
Is identity migration only for expat parents?
The framework applies to any significant disruption. Divorce, career loss, retirement, returning home after years abroad. I use international relocation as the lens because it is my experience and because relocation makes the shifts impossible to ignore. But the structure belongs to many kinds of lives. That is what the book's introduction says and I mean it.
