When Starting Over Comes With More Than You Expected: Mental Health, Immigration, Identity & Belonging

Featuring Shishir Pandey, MSW, RSW — Registered Social Worker & Psychotherapist at Co & Associates

Starting over is often described as an opportunity.
A new country. A new career. A new chapter. A chance to build something different.
But starting over can also come with losses that are harder to name. You can be grateful for where you are and still miss where you came from. You can feel proud of what you have built and exhausted by what it took to build it. You can love your family and still feel weighed down by their expectations. You can appear successful while privately wondering where you belong.

And you can be remarkably resilient while still needing support.

For immigrants, newcomers, racialized adults, and people navigating life between cultures, mental health is rarely just about what is happening internally. Our emotional lives are also shaped by family, culture, migration, identity, relationships, work, community, and the systems we move through.

For Shishir Pandey, MSW, RSW, a Registered Social Worker and psychotherapist with Co & Associates, making room for that complexity is an important part of therapy.

As a first-generation immigrant to Canada from the Global South, Shishir brings both clinical training and lived understanding to his work with adults navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, stress and burnout, life transitions, cultural identity, immigration, and belonging.

Starting Over Can Involve Grief, Even When You Chose It

We often associate grief with death. But grief can also emerge when a life changes significantly—even when that change was wanted. Immigration can involve leaving behind familiar places, relationships, routines, languages, professional identities, social status, traditions, and a sense of knowing how the world around you works.

Some losses are obvious. Others are surprisingly subtle.

It might be realizing that the people who have known you the longest are now thousands of kilometres away. It might be missing the ease of speaking your first language. It might be discovering that your education or professional experience is valued differently in a new country. It might be watching important family moments happen through a screen.

Or it might simply be the exhaustion of having to consciously navigate things that once required very little thought. None of this means immigrating was the wrong decision.
Two things can be true at once:

You can be grateful for the life you are building and grieve parts of the life you left behind.

When Success Starts to Feel Like an Obligation

For some immigrants and children of immigrant families, achievement carries meaning beyond individual ambition. Success may represent sacrifice.

Security. Family responsibility. Opportunity. Survival.

Or proof that everything it took to get here was worthwhile. That can create a particular kind of psychological pressure. Rest may feel undeserved. Changing careers may feel irresponsible. Disappointing your family may feel unbearable.

Struggling emotionally may bring shame because you believe you are supposed to be grateful. And asking for help can become difficult when you have built an identity around being capable, dependable, or strong.

Sometimes the question isn't simply: “Why am I so stressed?”

It is: “What do I believe would happen if I stopped carrying all of this?”

That can be an important question to explore in therapy.

Living Between Cultures Can Complicate Identity

Culture influences far more than food, language, and traditions. It can shape our understanding of family, success, relationships, gender, responsibility, privacy, emotional expression, respect, independence, and what it means to be a “good” son, daughter, partner, parent, or community member. Living between cultures can therefore create tensions that aren't easily solved by generic advice.

You may value independence while also feeling deeply responsible for your family.
You may want stronger boundaries while experiencing intense guilt when you set them.
You may understand your parents' sacrifices while also recognizing the impact certain expectations have had on you.
You may behave differently at home, at work, with friends, and within your cultural community.
You may even find yourself wondering: Which version of me is actually me?

Therapy can provide a place to explore those questions without requiring you to reject one culture in order to embrace another.
The goal does not have to be choosing between identities. It can be developing a relationship with yourself that has enough room for complexity.

“Just Set Boundaries” Isn't Always Culturally Responsive Advice

Mental health language increasingly encourages people to set boundaries, prioritize themselves, leave unhealthy relationships, and stop taking responsibility for other people's emotions. Sometimes that advice is useful. But without cultural context, it can also oversimplify complicated relationships.

In cultures where family interdependence, collective responsibility, respect for elders, or caregiving are deeply valued, boundaries may carry consequences that aren't captured by simply saying: “You don't owe anyone anything.”

A culturally responsive approach can ask different questions.
What does this relationship mean to you?
Which responsibilities reflect your values, and which ones feel driven primarily by fear or guilt?
What would a sustainable relationship with your family look like?
How can you protect your well-being without requiring yourself to abandon parts of your culture that matter to you?

There may not be one universally “healthy” answer. The work is often about discovering what is healthy and sustainable for you.

Racialized Experiences Can Affect Mental Health Too

Not every source of anxiety, exhaustion, self-doubt, or distress originates within the individual. Racism, discrimination, exclusion, immigration systems, workplace inequities, financial pressures, language barriers, and other systemic experiences can have real psychological effects. Repeatedly having to assess whether something was discriminatory can itself be exhausting.

So can feeling pressure to prove your competence.
Code-switching.
Being one of very few racialized people in a workplace.
Having your name repeatedly mispronounced.
Encountering assumptions about your intelligence, accent, culture, qualifications, or background.

Or learning that credentials and experience you worked hard to obtain are not recognized in the same way after immigrating.
Therapy shouldn't automatically turn every response to a difficult environment into an individual problem that needs to be “fixed. Sometimes distress is also information about what a person has been navigating.

When Being “The Strong One” Becomes Exhausting

Many people who eventually come to therapy are remarkably good at functioning. They go to work. Take care of their families. Solve problems. Meet deadlines. Support other people. Keep moving.

And because they are functioning, other people may not realize how much they are carrying.

Sometimes they don't realize it themselves.

This can be especially relevant for men, caregivers, healthcare professionals, helping professionals, immigrants, and people whose lives have required them to become highly self-reliant.

Strength is valuable.

But strength doesn't have to mean having nowhere to put down what you carry. You do not have to reach a crisis before your experience deserves attention.

Therapy That Makes Room for Context

Shishir's approach to therapy is collaborative, trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and grounded in anti-oppressive practice.
He works with adults experiencing concerns including:

• Anxiety and overthinking

• Depression and low mood

• Trauma and difficult life experiences

• Stress, burnout, and emotional overload

• Self-esteem and self-worth

• Life transitions and adjustment

• Immigration, migration, and newcomer experiences

• Cultural identity and belonging

• Family and cultural expectations

• Racialized experiences and systemic stress

• Men's mental health

• Healthcare and helping-professional burnout

His work draws from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Narrative Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, and Strength-Based approaches. But therapy is not about fitting every person into a particular model. It begins with understanding the person sitting in front of you.

Meet Shishir Pandey, MSW, RSW

Shishir Pandey is a Registered Social Worker and psychotherapist with Co & Associates who provides virtual therapy to adults across Ontario.

His educational background includes a Master of Social Work in the Health and Mental Health Stream from the University of Toronto, a Bachelor of Social Work from York University, a Diploma in Nursing from Seneca College, and a Master of Education from Tribhuvan University in Nepal.

His combined background in social work, mental health, healthcare, and education contributes to a perspective that considers not only symptoms, but also the broader experiences shaping a person's well-being.

As a non-white, first-generation immigrant to Canada from the Global South, Shishir also understands personally that conversations about mental health can intersect with culture, migration, family, identity, belonging, and systemic barriers.

That doesn't mean assuming that two people with similar cultural identities will have the same experience.

It means being curious about the context that makes your experience uniquely yours.

You Don't Have to Leave Parts of Yourself Outside the Therapy Room

Perhaps you're struggling with anxiety but also with expectations you don't know how to explain. Perhaps you're exhausted but feel guilty admitting it. Perhaps you're questioning where you belong. Perhaps you're carrying experiences from the past while trying to build a different future.

Or perhaps you're simply tired of being the person who always seems to manage. Therapy can be a place where those experiences don't have to be separated into neat categories.

You can talk about anxiety and immigration. Family and boundaries. Racism and self-doubt. Achievement and exhaustion. Gratitude and grief. Strength and vulnerability.

Because mental health is rarely only about what is happening inside of us. It is also about what has happened to us, around us, between us, and within the worlds we have learned to navigate.

Shishir Pandey, MSW, RSW is currently accepting new clients for virtual psychotherapy across Ontario through Co & Associates.

Therapy is available in English, Nepali, and Hindi.