You are in the middle of an ordinary day — making coffee, answering emails, folding laundry — when your phone lights up with a news alert, a family text, or a video you weren’t prepared to see. And just like that, the ordinary world cracks open.
For BIPOC people living in diaspora, this is a particular kind of rupture. The place that holds your roots, your language, your ancestors, your people — is suffering. And you are here, thousands of kilometres away, watching.
Right now, communities across the globe — including those with ties to Iran — are experiencing this in real time. But this experience is not new. It echoes through generations of diaspora: Sudanese, Yemeni, Congo, Salvadorean, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, Haitian, Afghan, Palestinian, Kurdish, and so many others who have learned to carry a homeland in their bodies while building a life far from it.
This post is for you — if you are holding that weight right now. It is not a guide to being okay. It is a guide to being held while you are not.
What You Might Be Feeling — And Why It Makes Sense
There is no single emotional response to watching your homeland suffer from afar. What many diaspora folks describe is something closer to a tangle of feelings that shift hourly, and that are often compounded by the isolating reality that the people around them may not understand, or may not be watching at all.
You might be experiencing:
- Grief without a “loss”. You may be mourning people, places, and futures that have not yet been formally lost — or that the dominant culture refuses to name as losses.
- Survivor’s guilt. The question of why you are here, safe, while others are not, can sit like a stone in the chest. This is especially common for those who immigrated by choice or circumstance while family members remained.
- Helplessness and hypervigilance. Compulsively checking news and social media is your nervous system trying to do something when there is nothing you can do. It is not weakness — it is an overwhelmed threat response.
- Rage. At governments. At media silence. At people in your life who keep talking about ordinary things. Anger is often grief’s loudest voice.
- Numbness or dissociation. When the pain is too much to process in real time, your body may move you out of it. Feeling nothing can feel shameful — it isn’t. It is protection.
- Guilt about functioning. Laughing at something, enjoying your meal, forgetting for a moment — and then the crash of guilt that follows. This is the impossible bind of diaspora grief: life keeps going, even when you wish it wouldn’t.
- Intergenerational echoes. If your family has survived displacement, war, or colonial violence before, this moment may be activating stored trauma that is not only yours — it belongs to the people who came before you.
None of these responses mean you are broken. They mean you are human, and that you love someone, somewhere, that the world is not protecting.
The Particular Weight of Watching From Afar
Diaspora grief is complicated by context in ways that are rarely named in mainstream mental health spaces. You are not just grieving — you are doing it while being politically othered, while managing the silence or discomfort of people around you, and often while holding up others in your community who are suffering too.
Western media and institutions often determine whose suffering counts, whose homelands are worth mourning publicly, and whose grief is permissable. When your community does not make the front page — or when it does, but only in dehumanizing ways — there is a secondary wound: the erasure of your grief’s legitimacy.
Anti-oppressive mental health care names this. It does not ask you to set aside the political context to focus on your feelings — because the political context is inseparable from your feelings.
Tools and Strategies That Can Help
There is no quick fix here, and we are not offering one. What follows are evidence-informed and community-grounded approaches that many diaspora folks have found genuinely helpful — not to stop feeling, but to survive feeling.
1. Regulate your nervous system first — then process.
When your body is in survival mode, talk therapy alone may not reach you. Grounding practices — slow breath, cold water on the wrists, feet on the floor, the names of five things you can see — help bring your nervous system out of crisis enough to process. This is not spiritual bypassing. It is biology.
2. Create boundaries with news and social media — without abandoning your people.
You do not need to be informed every hour to care deeply. Designated check-in times (twice a day, for example) can protect your nervous system without requiring you to look away. Curating your feed to centre community voices over algorithmic trauma-loops is also a legitimate act of self-preservation.
3. Move the grief through your body.
Somatic approaches recognize that grief lives in the body, not just the mind. Walking, dancing to music from your homeland, cooking ancestral food, weeping — these are not distractions. They are processing. Do not let anyone — including the most productive version of yourself — tell you they are indulgent.
4. Find your people — the ones who don’t need you to explain.
Grief shared with people who understand the specific texture of your loss is qualitatively different from grief managed alone or explained to those outside your community. Diaspora networks, cultural community organizations, and online spaces rooted in your community’s experience can offer the particular relief of being understood without translation.
5. Channel grief into action — in doses you can sustain.
Donating, organizing, writing, speaking, creating — these can transform helplessness into agency. The key word is sustainable. Burnout does not serve your community. Pace yourself the way you would ask others to.
6. Honour your cultural and spiritual practices.
Mainstream therapy often undervalues the healing embedded in ritual, prayer, communal mourning, ancestor acknowledgement, and cultural ceremony. Your traditions hold grief-processing wisdom that has survived far longer than any clinical model. Trust that.
Why Working With a BIPOC or Anti-Oppressive Therapist Matters
Not all therapy is created equally — especially for diaspora communities navigating racialized grief.
A therapist who does not understand the political and historical context of your community’s suffering may, however unintentionally, minimize your experience — focusing on your “thoughts about” events rather than the legitimate reality of those events. They may pathologize responses that are, in fact, entirely proportionate to what is happening.
An anti-oppressive therapist, by contrast, holds the systemic alongside the personal. They understand that your mental health does not exist in a vacuum separate from racism, colonialism, and geopolitical violence. They will not ask you to “reframe” injustice — they will help you carry it without it destroying you.
BIPOC therapists — particularly those who share your cultural background or have direct experience with diaspora — may offer an additional layer of understanding. They may not need you to explain what it means to have a homeland, to carry ancestors, to be perceived as other in the country where you live.
Therapeutic modalities that may be particularly supportive during these periods include somatic therapy, EMDR (especially for those with intergenerational or complex trauma), narrative therapy, and culturally-adapted grief work. The right fit matters more than any specific modality — and you are allowed to shop around.
You Are Allowed to Need Support Right Now
Diaspora communities are often extraordinarily resilient — and that resilience is real, and hard-won, and worth honouring. But resilience was never meant to mean doing it alone. It was never meant to mean not breaking. It was never meant to mean swallowing the grief so the people around you don’t have to witness it.
You are allowed to grieve loudly or quietly, collectively or privately. You are allowed to not be okay. And you are allowed to ask for help — not because you are weak, but because the weight is genuinely heavy.
At Healing in Colour, our therapists are experienced in supporting BIPOC individuals, including those navigating diaspora grief, intergenerational trauma, and the mental health impacts of global and political events. We offer anti-oppressive, culturally-responsive mental health care for people who have spent too long being unseen in traditional therapy spaces.
If you are ready — or even just curious — we are here.
Additional Resources
Find an anti-oppressive BIPOC therapist in Canada from your diaspora
- Find a therapist from your diaspora on our Therapist Directory
Related articles:
- First-Generation Immigrant Trauma: When Success Doesn’t Heal the Weight You Carry
- How BIPoC Communities In The Diaspora Can Experience Healing? | Iris Neuberg | TEDxDonauinselSalon
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About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour is a directory of BIPOC therapists and allied professionals across Canada who are committed to anti-oppressive values. We envision a world where BIPOC, in all our intersections, have access to therapy that supports our healing and liberation.
Learn more: About Us |Our Statement of Values