One in every seventy people alive today has been forced from home. Research and policy tend to meet displacement through the lens of trauma — what was broken and how it might be treated — while the question of belonging waits underneath, largely unexplored.

My research turns toward that question. What might the narratives of forcibly displaced persons who resettle elsewhere reveal about the psychology of rupture and the recreation of home? I wanted to know what happens inside a person when Home breaks, and what the psyche does next.

The Question

“The dynamic psyche is always at work creating home.”

By Home, I mean something larger than a house or an address. Home is an archetype — a living pattern in the psyche that organizes our sense of place and belonging. When displacement severs a person from the outer conditions of home, the archetype keeps working. What I found, again and again, is that Home is an ongoing process within the psyche, assembled from what remains and what emerges after rupture. The journey between rupture and repair is an imaginal one: it moves through memory, image, body, and story as much as through paperwork and shelter.

Home as a Living Process

The study used Imaginal Inquiry, a participatory methodology developed at Meridian University that moves through four phases: evoking, expressing, interpreting, and integrating experience. Seven resettled forcibly displaced persons engaged in sessions that evoked their lived experience between displacement and belonging, expressed through narrative, writing, and image.

The approach is phenomenological and depth-psychological, rooted in Jung's understanding of the archetypal psyche. Participants were co-inquirers; their images and stories carried the findings.

How the Research Was Done

Displacement is geographic by nature and can cause the rupture of Home. However, the most complex harm often arrives later, through misrecognition — being unseen or misunderstood as the person you were known to be before displacement. When identity goes unrecognized, the rupture deepens and fractures. When a person can be seen again, repair begins.

Home rests on interweaving conditions, such as stable shelter, work, language, community, legal status, a felt sense of safety. When one or more condition is out of reach, the psyche recruits others, weaving a provisional container in which belonging can begin again. Belonging, it turns out, is constantly being assembled with what is available.

When Home has ruptured and other repairs have stalled, physical objects can step in as symbolic containers. The things people carry hold memory and lineage in trust, maintaining a person's relationship to Home by providing continuity until life can hold it again.

The body is the final threshold. Inner Home must be felt — in the breath, in the ground under one's feet, in the very soul — before a person can wholly inhabit the experience of once again being Home.

The findings speak first to the displaced and to those who walk alongside them — therapists, resettlement workers, chaplains, community builders — offering a map of repair that begins where logistics end.

And then the pattern reaches wider. Anyone who has crossed a great physical or internal rupture — migration, loss, divorce, the upheaval of a workplace or a country — travels some version of this arc. The research offers language and imagery for that journey, and the conviction underneath it emerges from the work itself: everyone carries the capacity to
re-member and recreate Home.

Why This Work Matters