On uncertainty, memory, and the quiet fear of losing home again, as some of my clients, Russian emigrants in Serbia, describe it.
This is a text about inner experience, not about politics.
This article explores how some of my clients, Russian emigrants in Serbia, describe their inner experience of political uncertainty. It is written from the perspective of psychotherapy, not politics. It offers no analysis of any government, no forecast, and no position on current events. The examples come from my practice, but they are composites: details have been changed, combined, and invented, so no real person can be recognised.
Why I am writing about Russian emigrants in Serbia
Sometimes it begins on an ordinary evening. Someone sits on a balcony in Belgrade, a cup of tea slowly going cold, and scrolls through the news. Nothing in the room has changed. The neighbours are talking downstairs, a dog barks somewhere, the city lights come on. And yet the body suddenly remembers another city, another winter, and another evening spent reading the news and wondering whether to stay.
Much of my work as a psychotherapist takes place in Belgrade, and some of my clients are Russian emigrants in Serbia who moved here after 2022. In our sessions, a quiet question sometimes appears. It is not a political question, but a deeply personal one: is it safe to feel at home here? I am writing this text for people who carry that question, and also for their partners, friends, and colleagues, who may not understand why the news affects them so strongly.
For some of them, the political tensions in their new country touch something much more personal than the news. They describe it as memories returning, memories of a history they hoped they had left behind. This is their lived experience, and it deserves to be heard on its own terms.
My clients have rebuilt their lives with real effort. They found apartments, made friends, enrolled their children in schools, and slowly began to imagine a future here. Most of them never planned to become emigrants. As they tell it, they left because the future they could picture for themselves and their families had changed.
Now, some of them notice a frightening question appearing inside: what if it happens again?
“This has happened before”: the fear Russian emigrants in Serbia bring to therapy
A sentence I hear in my practice sounds simple: «Это уже было», “this has already happened”. When someone says it in a session, they usually do not claim to know the future. Rather, they explain why the present feels so heavy in their body.
Some of them remember the large demonstrations in Russia in 2011 and 2012. For them, those years first carried hope, and later disappointment. Others speak about 2022, about mobilisation, and about the moment they decided to leave. For people who lived through this, political change is not an abstract process. It is a memory of conversations, of trusted faces, and of the quiet day when they stopped believing things would get better.
So when they follow the news, certain images can feel familiar. Yet recognition is not prediction. Serbia and Russia have different histories, institutions, and circumstances, and they often know this very well. The difficulty is that knowing something with the mind does not always calm the nervous system.
Why this is not a political article
As a psychotherapist, I do not evaluate whose reading of events is correct. People around the same table can see the same news very differently, and each of them may have good reasons. My task is to understand what a particular situation means to a particular person, and how their history colours what they notice.
For this reason, every observation in this text describes inner experience. It does not describe Serbia, Russia, or any institution.
Sitting on suitcases: the books that stay in Russia
Russian has an expression for this state: «сидеть на чемоданах», literally “to sit on suitcases”. It describes a life lived in readiness to leave. In my practice, this readiness often shows up through very ordinary decisions, not through dramatic words.
One client postpones buying an apartment. Another avoids painting the walls or buying a proper bookshelf. A third has lived in Belgrade for three years, while her books still wait in Moscow. When asked about them, she answers briefly: «Книги пока подождут», “the books can wait for now”.
She arrived in Belgrade in the autumn of 2022 with two suitcases and a laptop. The first months were about survival: documents, a flat, a school for her son. By the third spring, she had a favourite bakery, a neighbour who waved from the balcony, and a Serbian word she loved saying out loud. Her books, though, stayed on the shelves of her mother's flat in Moscow.
In one session she mentioned them almost in passing. When I asked what it would be like to see them here, on her own shelf, she was quiet for a long time. Then she smiled a little and said that the books could wait. We did not try to change her answer. Instead, we stayed with everything that one sentence was holding: tenderness for an old life, fear of losing a new one, and a small, careful hope.
A composite story: details are changed and combined.
What the books may hold
There may be practical reasons for this, of course. For some people, though, there may also be a deeper conflict. What the books mean is different for each person, and only that person can truly know it. For one, bringing them may mean letting the new home hold their history and identity. If this home must be left too, the loss may then feel even bigger. Remaining partly unpacked can therefore feel like protection: if you never fully settle, perhaps leaving again will hurt less.
Books are rarely just objects. A collection can hold years of interests, questions, and memories, a quiet continuity between who someone has been and who they are becoming. Bringing them into a new home can mean more than arranging them on shelves. So an inner negotiation may begin:
If I bring everything here, am I finally admitting that this is my home?
And if I let myself feel at home, what happens if I lose it?
The cost of this protection, though, can be high. A person may spend years in a place without allowing themselves to experience it as home.
“Other people are building homes. Why can't I?”
People I work with sometimes compare themselves with friends who arrived at the same time. One friend bought a flat, opened a business, and decorated every room. Watching her can bring joy and sadness at once, together with a quiet question: why can she trust this new beginning while I still feel temporary? It can be tempting to read this difference as a personal failure. However, such differences rarely mean that one person adapted better. Even people who left the same city in the same month may carry very different experiences.
People carry different histories, resources, and responsibilities.
For one person, buying a home restores a sense of agency. For another, keeping commitments small preserves a sense of control. What matters is something else: whether the way a person lives still reflects their present needs and choices, or whether earlier experiences of danger have begun to limit the life they would otherwise want.
Two needs pulling in different directions
From an attachment perspective, home is not simply an address. It means predictability, familiarity, connection, and the feeling of having somewhere to return to. When we feel safe enough, we invest in relationships, build routines, and imagine a future without constantly preparing for its disruption.
When stability has been lost before, belonging becomes more complicated. The wish to belong may live right next to the fear of becoming attached, because attachment always carries some vulnerability: we can lose what matters to us.
In many people I work with, I meet two parts. One longs to settle. The other insists on staying ready to leave. Neither part is irrational. The first is oriented towards connection and continuity, while the second has learned that circumstances can change and that being unprepared may have serious consequences. The difficulty is not simply fear. It is that the need for a home and the need to remain able to escape pull in different directions.
Ambiguous loss: the grief Russian emigrants in Serbia bring to my practice
Migration is usually described with the language of adaptation: a new language, new friends, new work. Yet for people who left under pressure, there is also grief. It is grief for the world they grew up in: the familiar streets, a language spoken without effort, friendships of many decades, and family members who stayed.
Family therapist Pauline Boss described a kind of grief she called ambiguous loss. It appears when something is gone and still present at the same time. For many people I work with, a home country can become exactly that. It still exists, parents still live there, and the phone still rings. However, the life a person imagined there is no longer available.
Ambiguous loss is hard because it offers no clear ending and no ritual of farewell. Consequently, people often feel they have no right to grieve. In therapy, simply naming this grief can bring some relief. It allows clients to stop treating their sadness as a weakness or as ingratitude toward the new country.
Losing an expected life
Some losses are even harder to name. Someone may have expected to grow older in familiar surroundings, to raise children near their grandparents, and to live in a culture they understood without having to explain themselves. There is also the loss of an assumption most people never question: that home will always remain available.
Who am I in a country where nobody knows my history?
Where is home when the place I come from no longer feels safe?
How do I become attached to another country when I know that circumstances beyond my control can change everything?
These are not only questions of adaptation. They touch identity, attachment, loss, and the ability to imagine a future.
Gratitude and fear can live together
Many of them feel deep gratitude toward Serbia. They have Serbian friends, colleagues, neighbours, and partners, and they genuinely love living here.
Paradoxically, this attachment makes uncertainty more painful, because now there is something to lose.
What frightens them most is often not the news itself. It is the possibility of having to repeat a life-changing decision they hoped never to face again.
A person can miss home without wanting to live there again. They can feel grateful to the country that welcomed them while still grieving the life they lost, and they can begin to love a new home while being afraid of losing it too. These feelings do not cancel each other out. Together, they are part of the emotional complexity of migration.
When the body remembers: Russian emigrants in Serbia and the nervous system
Earlier experiences of prolonged uncertainty shape what we notice and how quickly our body reacts. This does not mean that every concern is a trauma response. Treating realistic concerns as mere projection would be clinically inaccurate and dismissive.
Still, many describe familiar bodily patterns. They check the news again and again, struggle to relax, and sleep lightly. Some quietly research other countries or calculate how fast they could move. Such preparation can bring short relief. Over time, however, it can keep the whole nervous system organised around expected danger.
Sometimes this readiness is so familiar that a person does not experience it as anxiety at all. It simply feels like being realistic. And perhaps, at one point in their life, being prepared really was essential. The challenge is that strategies developed for surviving uncertainty can keep shaping life long after circumstances have changed. A person may then stay organised around the possibility of leaving, rather than around the experience of living.
In body psychotherapy, we notice what happens in the body when someone speaks about leaving again. Does the breath become shallow? Do the shoulders rise? Is there an urge to act right now, or does everything freeze? Somatic work can help a person notice when they are responding to something happening now, and when the body is carrying a sense of threat from earlier experiences.
We are not trying to convince the body that all is safe. Instead, we help it find a little more room, so that realistic alertness and the capacity to live can exist side by side.
Service (in Serbian)Body psychotherapy: how we workA small moment of orientation
One simple practice from Somatic Experiencing is orientation. After reading the news, slowly let your eyes move around the room you are in right now. Notice one object that you like, perhaps a plant, a cup, or the light on the wall. Then notice your feet on the floor.
This does not solve anything outside. Even so, it reminds the body that, in this very moment, it is here.
Read more (in Serbian)Somatic Experiencing therapyThe fear of having to start over again
There is something particularly exhausting about the possibility of moving again. The first move required enormous effort: finding a flat, learning how institutions work, understanding a new healthcare system, building friendships, and supporting children through a new school and a new language. Underneath all of it, there was a quiet task, which was to make everyday life feel ordinary again.
After a few years, a person may finally begin to feel connected to their surroundings. Then uncertainty appears, and the thought of moving again enters the room. What frightens them is not only another relocation. It is the image of dismantling everything that took years to build.
- Another goodbye.
- Another language.
- Another unfamiliar system.
- Another attempt to make somewhere feel like home.
This can bring emotional exhaustion long before any decision is needed. Some of my clients say they feel as if they are already preparing for a departure that has not happened.
Parents who have already emigrated once
For parents who have already moved once, the question of staying or leaving carries extra weight. Some families who left in 2022 did so with their children's future in mind. When uncertainty appears again, a parent may wonder whether their child will have to change schools, lose friends, and learn yet another language.
One father described a moment that surprised him. One evening, his daughter said “let's go home” and meant their flat in Novi Sad, not Moscow. He felt happy, and then frightened by his own happiness. Something in him whispered that getting attached was dangerous.
Many parents also carry a heavy belief: a good parent must always see danger coming. Leaving too early may mean abandoning a good life without need. Leaving too late may feel like an unacceptable risk. The painful truth is that there may never be a moment with all the information in hand. Living with that uncertainty is exhausting, and therapy can be a place where a parent does not have to carry it alone.
If you would like to talk about this, you can book a session or simply write to us.
How therapy can help
Psychotherapy cannot predict anything about the future of any country. It also should not try to persuade clients that their concerns are exaggerated. What it can offer is a space where external reality and personal history can meet without pressure.
Neither I nor my colleagues work from one fixed method. Together with each person, we choose what fits: sometimes more work with the body, sometimes more work with relationships, memories, or decisions. In the end, what matters most is not our training, but the person sitting across from us.
In therapy, we may explore what each person lived through before leaving, what they lost, and what they have rebuilt.
We may also notice relational patterns.
- Does someone feel responsible for spotting danger on behalf of the whole family?
- Has trusting their own judgement become hard?
- Do they seek reassurance from others, or have they learned that relying on reassurance is unsafe?
- Do they feel alone because people around them read the situation differently?
What settling down has come to mean
We can also become curious about what happens when someone begins to feel attached to a new place. Does closeness bring comfort, or does it also awaken fear? What happens inside when they imagine bringing the rest of their belongings, signing a long-term lease, or simply saying, “This is my home”? These questions are not meant to persuade anyone to settle down. Rather, they help us understand what settling down has come to mean.
Therapeutic work may involve grieving what has been lost, recognising what remains uncertain, and slowly building a greater sense of agency in the present. Not by denying the possibility of another loss, but by exploring whether preparing for it has become the organising principle of everyday life.
Questions that often come up in therapy
Can therapy help me decide whether to stay or leave?
Therapy does not make that decision for you, and a therapist should not push you in either direction. Nevertheless, it can help you see which part of the decision comes from your present wishes and which part comes from old fear. When those two become clearer, decisions usually feel less frantic.
Is my fear of leaving Serbia a trauma response?
Not necessarily. A concern can be completely realistic and still feel stronger because of what you lived through before. In therapy, we look at how your history and the present moment meet in your body and in your choices.
What is ambiguous loss?
Ambiguous loss is grief for something that is gone and still present at the same time. For many emigrants, the home country still exists, yet the life they imagined there is no longer possible. Because there is no clear farewell, this grief often goes unrecognised.
Can you build a home without being certain you will stay?
There is no simple answer. For some people, caution is practical and necessary. For others, a moment comes when they see how much of their life has been postponed: the decorated room, the bookshelf, the long-term plans, the feeling of belonging.
Perhaps the question is not whether there is a place where nothing ever changes. Perhaps it is whether we can let ourselves belong somewhere without absolute certainty that we will never have to leave. For someone who has already lost a home once, this is not a small question. It touches the meaning of safety, identity, attachment, and hope.
There is something deeply painful about having to leave a country once. There is another kind of pain in spending the following years afraid that history may repeat itself.
Maybe the books are not really about books
Belonging cannot be forced, and there is no reason to rush anyone into unpacking, decorating, or declaring that they have finally arrived. Still, it can be meaningful to ask what someone is waiting for before allowing themselves to feel at home. Greater political stability? Financial security? Reassurance that the family will be safe? Or perhaps a certainty that no country, relationship, or life can fully provide?
How much of my life am I keeping on hold because I am afraid I may have to leave again?
The answer may not be simple, and it does not need to be.
Not every unopened box means fear. Sometimes, though, behind the decision not to unpack, there is a whole history of leaving, and a quiet, deeply human wish that some of my clients put into words in their own language:
«Я не хочу опять начинать всё с нуля. Я просто хочу жить здесь.»I don't want to start over again. I just want to live here.
If this topic touches you
If something in this text feels familiar, you do not have to sort it out alone.
Literature and further reading
- 1Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ambiguous loss
- 2Boss, P. (2006). Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss. New York: W. W. Norton.
- 3Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. New York: Basic Books.
- 4Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
