Migration has become one of the defining experiences of our age. Yet for many who accompany migrants professionally, migration is not merely an object of study or a social phenomenon. It is fundamentally a lived experience. Therapists, pastoral workers, educators and chaplains increasingly find themselves accompanying stories that, in different ways, resonate with their own. What ethical implications arise when the one who listens has also crossed borders, lost familiar worlds, and searched for belonging?
Working primarily with refugees and people with migration backgrounds, I repeatedly encountered a paradox. The stories brought by clients often resonated with my own memories of adjustment, language, distance from home and the gradual reconstruction of life in another country. Shared experiences of migration created trust and understanding. Yet they also raised ethical questions. How does one remain present without taking ownership of the other’s suffering? How does one distinguish empathy from identification? How can personal memories become a source of hospitality rather than a lens through which the client’s experience is unconsciously filtered?
Modern healthcare often expects clinicians to embody professional neutrality. Yet human encounters rarely occur between detached observers. We always listen from somewhere. We hear through our histories, our wounds, our hopes and our memories. For those who have themselves experienced migration, displacement or estrangement, the stories of others may resonate with particular intensity. Such resonance, however, does not diminish ethical responsibility; it deepens it.
Emmanuel Levinas famously argued that ethics begins not with principles but with the face of the Other[1]. Before knowledge, before understanding, before any attempt to explain suffering, one is already called into responsibility. The vulnerability of the other person interrupts the sovereignty of the self. The face of the Other speaks. Silently but insistently. And so responsibility does not arise from similarity or choice. It precedes both.
This insight has profound implications for therapeutic and pastoral accompaniment. The suffering person sitting in front of us is never simply a case, a representative of a social category or an object of intervention. Nor are they an extension of our own experiences. They remain irreducibly other. They are a person whose vulnerability calls me into relationship. Their suffering cannot simply be observed from a safe distance. Nor can it be appropriated into my own narrative. The ethical challenge lies precisely here: to allow oneself to be touched without seeking ownership, to recognise echoes without collapsing difference, and to receive another person’s suffering without reducing it to experiences familiar to oneself.
For those who have themselves crossed borders, this responsibility acquires a particular texture. As a transcultural therapist with a migration background, I increasingly realised that ethical listening requires an inner hospitality. Shared language, similar memories and common cultural references may facilitate trust, but they also carry risks. Some stories evoke memories one never entirely leaves behind. A sentence, an accent, a silence or an expression of longing may suddenly uncover familiar grief. Their fears resemble familiar anxieties. Their longing for home touches places that remain tender. In such moments, the temptation is not indifference but over-identification. Yet responsibility does not mean fusion. The Other always exceeds my understanding. Respecting this excess is itself an act of love.
Hospitality therefore begins with restraint. To accompany another ethically means resisting the temptation to assume that because something feels familiar, it is therefore understood. Genuine hospitality does not assimilate the stranger into oneself. It creates space for alterity. In this sense, listening becomes a spiritual practice of making room for another person’s irreducible mystery.
This is where Henri Nouwen’s image of the “wounded healer” becomes particularly meaningful[2]. The wounded healer is not someone who uses their own pain to interpret or possess the pain of another. Nor is it someone who stands above suffering from a position of untouched competence. Rather, Nouwen helps us see that one’s own vulnerability can become a place of solidarity, provided it remains disciplined by humility. Such solidarity does not say, “I know exactly how you feel.” It says, more quietly: “I know something of what it means to suffer, and therefore I will not turn away from your suffering.”
For a migrant therapist, this distinction is essential. Personal experiences of loss, displacement or re-rooting may open a deeper sensitivity to the client’s story, but they do not grant automatic understanding. My wounds do not become a key to another person’s interior world. At most, they may make me less afraid of entering spaces where grief, uncertainty and longing are present. They may help me remain near another person’s pain without immediately trying to explain it, resolve it or protect myself from it.
Such presence is ethically costly. To listen deeply is to allow oneself to be affected. It means accepting that the suffering of the Other may disturb one’s own carefully built sense of stability. Yet this vulnerability is not simply a professional risk to be managed; it may also be the very place where responsibility begins. If Levinas reminds us that the face of the Other calls us before we choose to respond, Nouwen reminds us that this response is never made from a place of invulnerability. We respond as wounded, historical and unfinished human beings.
This recognition transformed my understanding of reflexivity. In psychology, reflexivity is often discussed as a professional competence. Yet perhaps it should also be understood as a moral and spiritual practice. To become aware of resonance, countertransference, and identification is not merely a technical necessity; it is an expression of humility. It acknowledges that the therapist is also situated, vulnerable and shaped by history. Reflexivity protects the client from being absorbed into the therapist’s story, but it also protects the therapist from confusing compassion with possession.
Such humility also requires cultivating an internal safe space. Throughout my work, I became increasingly aware that safety is not something created only for clients. Therapists also need an inner space sufficiently large to encounter suffering without becoming engulfed by it. This inner space allows memories, emotions and personal resonances to be recognised without allowing them to dominate the encounter. Reflexivity, in this sense, becomes a form of ethical discipline.
Simone Weil once wrote that rootedness is perhaps the deepest and least recognised need of the human soul[3]. Migration often unsettles this rootedness. It confronts people with profound questions of identity, belonging and continuity. Yet migration also reveals something important about the human person. Identity is neither fixed nor infinitely malleable. It unfolds within relationships, memories and communities. We do not simply leave ourselves behind and become someone else. Rather, fragments of past, present and future seek a new configuration through the encounters we make.
This process affects therapists no less than clients. Accompanying people through experiences of loss and reconstruction has repeatedly confronted me with my own questions of belonging. Who am I without familiar certainties? What remains when external roles change? What does it mean to be at home?
These questions have no definitive answers. Perhaps this is why Levinas insists that ethics precedes knowledge. We do not begin with certainty. We begin with responsibility.
Therapeutic and pastoral work often unfolds in spaces of uncertainty. Clients living with migration histories frequently describe themselves as “neither here nor there.” Initially, such expressions appear to speak of geographical dislocation. Gradually, however, one realises that they point toward something much deeper: an existential in-between where old identities no longer fully fit and new ones are not yet secure.
The temptation, both personally and professionally, is to resolve this tension too quickly. Yet healing rarely consists in returning to what once was. Nor is it achieved by abandoning the past in favour of an entirely new self. Healing often means learning to inhabit this in-between with greater trust.
Perhaps the ethical task of pastoral care and accompaniment lies precisely here. Not in offering immediate answers, neither in asking the ‘right questions’, but in remaining present long enough for hope to become imaginable again. Therapeutic and spiritual accompaniment is, at its core, an act of shared humanity. It is the willingness to sit with another person in the midst of uncertainty, to witness their pain without turning away, and to celebrate the fragile moments of faith and hope that appear along the way.
In transcultural work, we are always navigating multiple worlds — geographic, linguistic, emotional, temporal, physical, spiritual — and that our task is not to resolve these worlds into a single narrative but to honour their coexistence, gently watching which one asks for more attention at the moment. The experience of being a migrant therapist has reinforced the belief that listening is not merely an essential clinical skill, but rather an ethical posture. It asks us to encounter the face of the Other with humility, responsibility and reverence. To listen more slowly, to leave space for what cannot yet be said, and to trust the pace at which meaning emerges. To hold complexity without rushing toward closure, and to recognise that healing often takes the form of learning to live with contradictions rather than eliminating them. And perhaps, in doing so, we discover that home itself is less a place than a relationship — a place created whenever one human being receives another without claiming to possess their story.
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[1] Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Duquesne University Press, 1969. Levinas, E. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. Martinus Nijhoff, 1981
[2] Nouwen, H. J. M. The Wounded Healer. Ministry in Contemporary Society. Image Books, 1979
[3] Weil, S. The Need for Roots. Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. Routledge, 1952.