Issue #2 - The Inner Weather
Understanding the emotional pattern inside Stage 2 of transition
Newcomer Transition Briefing is a public PDF series documenting Stage 2 migration: the prolonged middle between arrival and stability.
This series does not offer advice, motivation, or a formula for success. It provides language for transition conditions that are often experienced privately yet are structurally shaped.
Part 1 — The Periodization Frame
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Before I came to Canada, I spent ten years as a personal trainer and gym owner in the Philippines. I specialized in two groups: women and fitness beginners. These people are often told to just start and left to figure out what starting actually requires on their own.
What I learned in that work is that strength is not built by trying harder. It is built by following a method. In strength and conditioning, that method is called periodization.
A periodization plan starts by reading the baseline—what the body in front of you can actually do today, not what it should be able to do. From that baseline, the plan lays out the phases the body will move through: early adaptation, the honeymoon when everything feels good, the moment the honeymoon ends and work gets hard, the plateau, the doubt, and the recovery.
A good plan names these before the client lives them. So when soreness arrives, or the dread of the door, or the “why am I even doing this,” the client knows it is part of the process. They don’t misread fatigue as “I don’t have discipline” or the need for rest as “I’m making excuses.” They know it is the phase doing what the phase does, not a sign they are failing.
The other thing a good plan includes is people. A training partner, a community at the gym, a coach who has been there — someone who already knows what you are inside. Strength is rarely built in isolation. The people around you are part of the program, not a bonus.
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When I moved to Canada, I looked into the migration periodization plan. The map. The phases. The expected difficulties are named in advance. The people who already knew what I was inside.
I could not find it.
There weThere were timelines for paperwork. There were deadlines, document checklists, integration program brochures, "stay positive" advice, and success stories of people who had made it through. None of that was a plan. None of it told me what the psychological phases of adjustment actually look like, why they happen, when to expect them, what is normal inside them, or what it means when the honeymoon ends and the long middle begins. over 100 books. I went to more than 70 events. I kept blaming myself for not being tough enough, grateful enough, working hard enough, or keeping up with IRCC changes. [P] It took me years to learn that the confusion was not a flaw in me. It was the absence of a map.
NTB is the map I wish someone had handed me.
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If you are reading this somewhere in the long middle between arrival and stability, called Stage 2 of transition, the Neutral Zone.
in this series, here is what this PDF is built to do for you:
Give you a map of the phases. Not advice. A picture of the terrain to help you locate yourself inside it.
Name the difficulties that are predictable, not personal. The soreness of migration has equivalents in strength training. Most of what feels like failure is actually the phase of doing what it does.
Bust the myths. Just be positive. Just network more. Just integrate. You chose this. These are the migration versions of no pain, no gain. They sound like coaching but are not.
Show you the research plainly. Peer-reviewed sources on transition, stress, precarious status, social capital, and newcomer mental health. You should not have to take my word for this. The receipts are at the bottom of every issue.
Make the social silences speakable. Many parts of migration are lived privately because there is no shared language for them. NTB tries to give you that language so you can recognize what you are inside and, if you want, share it with someone experiencing the same thing.
NTB will not tell you how to win the citizenship game, network your way into belonging, or become resilient. Other people are already doing that work.
This series does one job. It hands you the periodization plan for the psychological process of migration. Whatever you do with that plan after—apply it, argue with it, share it, ignore parts of it, or build on it—is yours.
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My name is Ma. Anne Gail Manigsaca. I came to Canada in December 2021 as an international student. I work as a janitorial services manager in a family-owned business that my mother started over fifteen years ago. I founded Kingston NetworkBuddy (KNB) in 2023, a peer gathering for international students and newcomers in cultural transition. KNB has reached more than 500 people. My work on KNB led to a 2024 CBIE North Star Award nomination for supporting newcomers and international students in Kingston and was featured in St. Lawrence College's Voyageur alumni magazine in 2026.
I write this from inside Stage 2, not from above it.
I design tools and spaces for people stuck in the middle of systems that assume they've already arrived.
My work asks: What can you build when you're still mid-crossing — when systems assume you've already arrived, even though you haven't?
For 15 years in the Philippines and now as an immigrant in Canada, I naturally spot gaps in transition. I don't build from arrival. I build from lived experience, creating infrastructure as I navigate the transition myself.
I am also writing a parallel series called Exhausted Bodies about what manual labour does to bodies that public health surveys miss. I know this work from the inside as a janitorial services manager doing thousands of high-repetition movements per shift. Both projects come from the same pattern: I notice when systems fail at the entry point. They are designed for people who already belong, not those trying to get in. Whether it's workplace expectations, strength training, social integration, or occupational wellness, the gap is always at the entry.
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When I trained clients in the Philippines, I pre-printed a short document and handed it to them at the start of every program. It listed things that would derail them along the way: tiredness, family obligations, work emergencies, the dread of the door, the plateau, and the moment they would want to quit. I named these before they happened so that even if a client missed the conversation, they knew they had been informed. That, for me, was a caring thing to do. Not to scare them. To prepare them. So when one of those things arrived, they did not interpret it as a personal failing or as evidence to stop. They could recognize it as part of what I had already told them to expect.
NTB is that pre-printed program insert, written for Stage 2 migration. Each issue names one thing that will derail you along the way — phases, inner weather, thin support, isolation inside community, public myths, precarious work, racialized ideas, the trap of being praised for surviving — so when it arrives, you already have language for it. You are not hearing about it for the first time inside the harm. You are hearing about it now, while you still have some distance, so later you can recognize it for what it is.
I did one more thing in my training programs that I want to name here because it is the second half of the same ethic. There are hundreds of versions of a squat or a hip hinge online — different stances, cues, names, gurus. A new client can easily feel lost or misinformed. So in my programs, I anchored every exercise to a small number of basic human movements — squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, rotate, and gait. Once a client knew those, they could see any exercise anywhere — in a YouTube video, another gym, or a friend's program — and locate it. They would not be misinformed because they had a signpost.
NTB does the same thing for Stage 2. Out in the world, you will encounter hundreds of versions of migration advice, integration talk, resilience workshops, success stories, and immigration updates. Most will look unrelated, contradictory, or overwhelming. The series gives you a small number of underlying movements to anchor everything else against: the phase you are in, the inner weather of the phase, the roots holding you, the recognition that can form sideways with others in the phase, the public myths shaping how you read yourself, the precarious work and status conditions, the chain of ideas behind both, and the trap of being praised for surviving. Once those are named, you will be able to locate almost anything you encounter outside this document on the same map.
A signpost and a warning. That is the design.
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IEach issue stands alone. You can pick up Issue 4 or Issue 8 without having read the others — every issue includes a quick orientation. [P]
One thing this PDF is not. In strength training, a coach can do two things. One is to teach you how to move — how to squat, brace, and lift. The other is to orient you to the program — what phase you are in, what to expect, and why this week feels different from last week. NTB is the second. It will not tell you how to belong, network, integrate, or be a better newcomer. The internet and institutions are already flooded with that. This series only orients you to where you are in the process. What you do from there is up to you.
🔍 Sidebar — The three levels NTB moves between
NTB borrows a structure used in two fields. In strength training, a program is built in micro-cycles (a week), meso-cycles (a training block of several weeks), and macro-cycles (a full season or year).
Migration works the same way. What feels like one private struggle is usually a chain across three levels: [P]
MICRO — you. Your thinking, body, moods, and sense of self.
MESO — around you. Workplace, friendships, services, networks.
MACRO — above all of it. Policy, labour markets, the rules someone else writes.
What feels personal often started elsewhere. Every issue follows the chain.
You don't have to agree with everything or do all the reflection. Take what helps and leave the rest. Come back later. If something here lands, share it, or talk about it with someone in the same phase. Your experience can help create better paths for those who come after.
Part 2 — The Map
Issue 1, The Map, named Stage 2 as its own terrain: the prolonged middle between arrival and stability. It described William Bridges' three phases of transition — an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning — and located Stage 2 within the neutral zone, the extended period during which most transition work actually takes place. (1)
This issue stays inside that neutral zone and looks at what it feels like from within.
Most newcomers in Stage 2 do not describe the difficulty as a single bad day. They describe a pattern: a mood that lifts and falls in a week, confidence that arrives on Monday and is gone by Thursday, energy that lasts through a shift and then collapses on the couch. Days when the future feels possible are followed by days when it feels closed. Outwardly, the person looks consistent. Inwardly, the weather keeps changing.
That weather is the subject of this issue.
It is rarely named in settlement programs, success stories, or family conversations. The person carrying it often concludes that something is wrong with them personally—that they are weaker, less grateful, less disciplined, or less ready than other newcomers seem to be.
This issue argues something different. The shifting weather inside Stage 2 is not a personal flaw. It is a documented pattern of how people move through major transitions, especially when conditions remain unstable. There are names for it and research behind it. Once a person sees the pattern, the weather does not stop, but stops being read as a verdict on the self.
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The previous issue described William Bridges’ three stages of transition: the ending, the neutral zone, and the new beginning. This briefing remains with Stage 2, the neutral zone. This is the extended period between arrival and stability, where most transition work takes place. (1)
Nancy K. Schlossberg’s work on adult transitions adds another layer. Bridges names the larger middle stage. Schlossberg asks what counts as a transition in a person’s life. She describes transition as an event or non-event that changes roles, routines, relationships, or assumptions. (2)
In Stage 2 migration, newcomers rarely face a single transition. Expected changes, unexpected changes, and things that did not happen can overlap across work, family, status, community, and identity.
Adjustment is shaped by context, impact, culture, history, and social position, not only by emotion.
This issue looks at how emotional life unfolds during this stage as it appears in daily routines and decisions, not as theory or abstraction.
During this stage, emotional patterns can shift within a day or week. Functioning continues, but confidence and energy fluctuate. Outwardly, this can seem inconsistent. Internally, it is common to question whether something is wrong on a personal level. Over time, it becomes clearer that these shifts are shaped by ongoing demands and uncertainty, not only by individual effort.
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What Adams, Hayes, and Hopson found
In the 1970s, John Adams, John Hayes, and Barrie Hopson studied how people move through major life transitions. Their transition model is often presented as a curve showing shifts in self-esteem, morale, and emotional adjustment during transition. The pattern is often called the transition curve. (3)
The curve is not a straight line or a fixed timeline. It is not a measure of whether someone is adjusting correctly. Adams, Hayes, and Hopson describe transition as a cycle of experiencing disruption, gradually acknowledging reality, testing oneself in the changed situation, seeking meaning, and incorporating new understandings into behaviour. Self-esteem can rise, fall, and rise again through this cycle. (3)
In NTB, this is read as a map of shifts in sense of self, morale, and emotional steadiness that can repeat, overlap, and return when conditions change.
Here are the seven stages in ordinary language.
1. Immobilization
Immobilization often appears as an internal pause. People may continue daily routines, but decision-making, planning, and clear thinking become difficult. The amount of new information, paperwork, and uncertainty can exceed what is manageable. Outward activity continues, but internally, things slow down.
2. Minimization
Minimization can involve downplaying the situation. People may compare themselves to others or insist that things are manageable. This sometimes helps avoid the full impact of what is happening. It is not always failure to face reality. In the original framework, denial or minimization can temporarily protect the person from a change that is too overwhelming to absorb all at once.
3. Depression / Self-doubt
This stage is often marked by low mood, self-doubt, and a clearer awareness of what the change is asking of the person. People may question their decisions or wonder if things will improve. It can feel like personal failure, but the transition curve shows it as a common response to major disruption.
4. Accepting reality / Letting go
At this point, there is often clearer recognition of the current reality and of what has been lost. This includes not only the idea of what was left behind but also concrete things like professional status, social networks, and the familiarity of being understood without explanation. In the framework, this phase involves unhooking from the pre-transition situation so the person can begin to respond to the situation as it is.
5. Testing
Testing often involves small attempts at new routines or interactions. This might mean trying a different approach to job searching or starting a new social connection. These efforts are usually tentative at first, but they can also carry bursts of energy, irritability, or urgency as the person tries to work out what belongs in the new situation.
6. Seeking meaning
In the seeking meaning stage, questions about values and direction often surface. People may reflect on what the experience means for their identity or future. In the original framework, this is a more reflective and cognitive phase that can come after activity, testing, frustration, or anger. Answers are not always immediate. Sometimes these questions signal that the experience is being processed rather than just endured.
7. Internalization
Over time, new meanings and behaviours can start to become part of ordinary life. It is not always fully settled, but it becomes less unfamiliar. This shift happens gradually, sometimes before there is language to describe it.
View the diagram of the transition curve: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ls7SV55dPzX-l3uppCbvoKQEIBPLJg5g/view?usp=sharing
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The curve is a map, not a timeline
Adams, Hayes, and Hopson caution that people rarely move neatly from one phase to the next. (3) It is common to move between two or three phases, sometimes within the same week. Testing new approaches can alternate with withdrawal or renewed self-doubt. This pattern is not regression. It often unfolds when external conditions remain unstable.
For newcomers, Stage 2 is rarely a single disruption followed by straightforward recovery. It involves a series of partial adjustments over time. One area of life may stabilize while another becomes uncertain again. A delayed document, a rent increase, a change in work hours, or a shift in a key relationship can disrupt the whole arrangement and pull the inner weather back into earlier phases.
Outwardly, people may appear to function. Internally, they may move between effort, withdrawal, uncertainty, testing, and brief clarity. The curve offers a way to describe this movement. It is not a diagnosis or judgment. It is a map.
The phase has many other names
This experience is often called by other names.
Depression. Laziness. Ingratitude. A bad attitude. A phase. A personality flaw. Something to push through.
These labels are common and often seem convincing when the experience is private and unfolds during ordinary days. The pattern is not always visible as theory. It appears in routines and small decisions. A person might wake up feeling fine, then question past decisions by midday. By evening, things may seem manageable again. The next morning, it can be hard to move or explain what changed.
This is not always random instability. It is often part of a larger pattern moving through daily life, the curve repeating across weeks and months in response to conditions that have not yet stabilized.
Once the phase has a name, the labels lose some of their weight. The person is no longer being lazy. They may be in immobilization, after several weeks of accumulated paperwork and uncertainty. They are no longer being ungrateful. They may be in depression and self-doubt, with a clearer awareness of what they have lost. They are no longer failing to integrate. They may be in testing, trying small things tentatively, with bursts of frustration that mark the work itself, not a flaw in their character.
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The transition curve names the shape of the inner weather. Other research helps explain why the weather can stay heavy so long inside Stage 2, and why the body, attention, and capacity for planning are part of the picture.
Chronic stress and the body
In Behave, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky describes how prolonged uncertainty gradually changes how people plan, regulate emotions, and respond to situations. Under chronic stress, the body does not treat difficulty as temporary. It keeps threat management systems active for longer periods. (4)
Sapolsky outlines how stress affects the prefrontal cortex, involved in planning and decision-making, and the amygdala, involved in detecting threat. (4) Over time, this can make it harder to plan ahead, hold focus, or respond calmly to new information. Reactions may become quicker. Managing uncertainty takes more effort. Paperwork that felt routine in month three may feel impossible by month eighteen, even though it has not changed.
This matters in Stage 2 because pressures rarely end cleanly. They do not arrive, resolve, and leave. They become tensions: competing demands are active at the same time.
Dilemmas, tensions, and paradoxes
In Both/And Thinking, organizational scholars Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis distinguish between three different kinds of problems. (5)
A dilemma has a solution. A choice is made, and one path is left behind.
A tension involves competing demands that are both present and real. They cannot be solved by choosing one. They have to be carried at the same time.
A paradox is different. It involves opposing forces that are interdependent and persistent — forces that return even after a person tries to resolve them. Smith and Lewis note that people encounter more tensions and paradoxes in settings marked by faster change, greater plurality, and more scarcity.(5)
Stage 2 migration often contains all three. Some feelings in this phase are closer to paradox than dilemma. The pull between wanting stability and not being able to count on it. The pull between adapting to a new place and staying connected to who they were. The pull between planning ahead and living in changing conditions. The pull between sending money home and saving for one's own future.
These are not simple problems with clean endings. The body may not get a clear signal that the difficult period is over because the situation remains unresolved. The inner weather keeps moving because the outer weather does.
Planning versus preparing
Management scholar Rebecca Homkes draws a distinction useful here. In Survive, Reset, Thrive, written for leaders working in volatile environments, she distinguishes between planning and preparing. (6)
Planning, in her framing, assumes a relatively stable context with a known destination and clear steps: finishing a program by a certain date, applying before a deadline, and receiving an offer on a specific timeline. Preparing works differently. It focuses on building capacity to respond when conditions change, rather than committing to a precise path that the environment may not support. (6)
In prolonged Stage 2, where timelines shift and information is incomplete, preparing often becomes more possible than detailed planning. This can mean keeping a skill current without knowing when it will be needed. Maintaining a relationship without a specific outcome. Staying oriented to a general direction—stable work, legal status, family reunification—without naming an exact arrival point.
The difficulty of making long, fixed plans inside Stage 2 is not only personal. It is also a feature of a situation that is still changing.
Scarcity and the narrowing of attention
Behavioural scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir's work on scarcity helps explain why focus becomes harder under pressure. In Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives, the authors describe how a lack of money, time, or other resources can consume mental bandwidth and create tunnelling, where attention narrows to the most urgent problem. (7)
Scarcity here does not only mean lack of money. It can also mean lack of time, options, certainty, or room to recover. In Stage 2, this explains why immediate pressures occupy so much mental space that longer-term planning, emotional regulation, or wider perspective becomes harder to sustain.
Taken together, Sapolsky, Smith, Lewis, Homkes, and Mullainathan and Shafir point to different parts of the same problem.
Stress affects the body and attention. (4) Tensions and paradoxes do not resolve cleanly. (5) Volatility weakens the usefulness of fixed plans. (6) Scarcity narrows what a person can hold in view. Scarcity and the narrowing of attention
The result can appear, from the outside, as poor planning, low motivation, or inconsistent effort — even when the person is responding accurately to changing conditions.
This does not mean every reaction is only biological. It means the body is part of the picture. Stage 2 is not only mental. It is also administrative, social, financial, relational, and physical. The nervous system is involved in settlement, even if this is rarely mentioned in public discussions.
These writers were not writing migration guides. NTB uses their frameworks more narrowly, as tools for naming parts of what can happen when a person lives inside a prolonged transition. Their original fields remain visible, but the centre of the interpretation remains Stage 2 migration.
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The curve and related research help name what often goes unnamed in Stage 2. They do not eliminate the difficulty but make it legible.
A newcomer can appear functional on the outside but feel unstable inside. They can go to work, answer messages, attend appointments, care for children, send money, manage forms, and still feel scattered. They can perform settlement tasks before feeling settled.
This is where many experiences become psychologically privatized. A structural condition is carried as a private flaw. In that frame, the person reads repeated, structurally shaped pressure as evidence of individual failure rather than a predictable response to prolonged instability. They ask why they are not stronger, more consistent, more grateful, more disciplined, or more settled by now. The broader terrain disappears, and only the self remains to be blamed. When wider conditions are invisible, the only explanation left is the self, and every difficulty is seen through that lens.
This privatization shows up in daily planning. A person may write a reasonable plan but still be unable to follow it by the end of the day. The problem is not always the plan itself. It may be that the plan was made against whatever capacity remains after work, caregiving, paperwork, financial pressure, immigration uncertainty, and community obligations have taken their share. In precarious status or work, even essential commitments compete with survival tasks. No amount of goal-setting language overcomes a structure that leaves too little margin.
Philosopher Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco uses the term complicit suffering to describe situations in which people are harmed by forces beyond their control and, under such pressures, may behave in ways that make their suffering harder to escape. (8) NTB uses this idea cautiously. The point is not to blame the person for the structure. It is to name how structural pressure can enter behaviour—planning, urgency, overextension, self-judgment—and how the inner weather can begin to reinforce the conditions that produced it.
Naming these connected patterns does not resolve the condition or shorten the middle period. It does not remove uncertainty, reduce obligations, or create more margin. It can make the relationship between emotional shifts, planning difficulty, self-blame, and structural pressure easier to recognize.
This is the small but important difference the curve makes. It separates the effects of prolonged transition from assumptions about personal character.
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I want to describe what the curve can look like across a single week, not as a hypothetical, but in the detail that often goes unspoken. I am writing this from inside it because the inner weather of Stage 2 is something I am still moving through, not something I have moved past. If parts of this sound like your week, you are not alone in the way you have been told you are alone.
Monday. The week starts with something close to testing. There was rest on the weekend. A small piece of paperwork closed. A friend messaged. The body feels capable. A plan gets written down in the notes app. A list of small actions for the week. There is energy behind it. The plan looks reasonable.
Tuesday. The shift runs long. A piece of equipment breaks. A supply order is wrong. By the time the body gets home, it is too tired to do any items on the list. The plan is not abandoned, just deferred. The mind tells itself, I will catch up tomorrow.
Wednesday. An IRCC update appears. Or an email from a settlement worker. Or a message in a family group chat about someone else's PR approval. The body tightens. The plan from Monday is still in the notes app, but now looks like a plan written by someone else, someone with more time and a clearer future. The phase shifts. This is closer to immobilization. The forms that were going to be filled out tonight have not been filled out. The body sits on the couch for an hour without quite knowing why.
Thursday. The mood has dropped. This is the depression-and-self-doubt phase, although the person inside it rarely has that language. It feels like I have been here four years, and I am still working the same job, still doing this paperwork, and still tired in this exact way. A sentence runs underneath the day. Maybe I am not built for this. Maybe I should have stayed. The sentence is not new. It has run before. It will run again. Inside the curve, this is not pathology. It is the phase doing what the phase does. From inside, it is hard to tell the difference.
Friday. Something small shifts. A coworker says something kind. A message arrives from someone also in Stage 2. The body feels lighter without the mind explaining why. The plan from Monday is open again. Two items get done. They are small items. They count.
Saturday. Acceptance and letting go can show up here on a quiet morning when nothing urgent is asking the body for anything. The realization arrives in a low voice. The version of me that was supposed to be further along by now is not the version of me that exists. The version of me that exists is the one doing the work. This is not a defeat. It is a recognition. The phase has a name in the framework. From the inside, it just feels like a sentence finally landing without resistance.
Sunday. Seeking meaning sometimes. Not always. Sometimes Sunday is just laundry, a long phone call with family, and a feeling of being held by the small routines that have survived everything. The week ends. The plan from Monday is half done. Some of it has rolled into next week. Some of it never mattered.
That is one week. It is not a special week. It is many weeks. The curve moved through testing, immobilization, depression, acceptance, and a quiet edge of meaning in seven days. The conditions did not change. The status did not change. The job did not change. The weather still moved.
What I have learned to see inside that week
The first time I lived a week like this, I read it as evidence about myself. I am not consistent enough. I am not disciplined enough. I am not strategic enough. I should be able to hold a plan for five days. Other people do.
It took me years to learn that the week was not measuring my character. It was measuring the interaction among a body, unstable conditions, and a transition phase, with documented research to support it.
What I see now is different.
I see that Monday's energy was not lying. It was real, and it was the testing phase of the curve.
I see that Tuesday's collapse was not a discipline failure. It was a capacity match. The plan was made in one version of my capacity, the day was lived in another. (4,7)
I see that Wednesday's tightening was not random. It was the predictable response of a nervous system that has been on for years to a piece of information that touched an unresolved area of my life. (4)
I see that Thursday's sentence — maybe I am not built for this — is the depression-and-self-doubt phase of the Adams, Hayes, and Hopson curve. (3) It is not new. It is not a verdict. It is a phase.
I see that Friday's lift was communitas — a topic Issue 4 takes up directly. One small recognition from someone else moving through the same phase, and the body lightens.
I see that Saturday's quiet realization is acceptance and letting go. It is not the end of wanting. It is the relaxing of the grip on a version of me that was supposed to have arrived by now.
I see that Sunday is the part of the curve the literature does not have a clean name for — the small re-stitching of meaning through routine, food, family, and the kind of rest that does not produce anything.
None of this erases the difficulty. The work is still the work. The paperwork is still the paperwork. The status is still what it is. The difference is that the week is no longer being read as a measurement of my worth. It is being read as a phase doing what the phase does, inside conditions that have not yet stabilized.
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The settlement system was not built to see the inner weather. It is usually organized around visible indicators: housing, work, language, paperwork, access to services, education, and participation. These indicators matter, but show only part of the settlement.
Migration research uses different languages to refer to parts of the same terrain. Work on acculturative stress and post-migration stress describes pressures linked to language barriers, legal status, discrimination, socioeconomic strain, family separation, and limited access to services. (9) These are not identical to the transition curve but point in the same direction. Emotional strain after migration is shaped by the conditions surrounding the person, not only by private resilience.
In the Canadian context, Mental Health Research Canada points to the same. Their newcomer analysis describes higher anxiety and depression in newcomers compared with the general population. Anxiety runs at roughly 26 percent among newcomers, compared with 22 percent among non-newcomers. Depression runs at 20 percent among newcomers, compared with 14 percent among non-newcomers. Housing-related anxiety is especially severe for newcomers in their first five years, at 39 percent compared with 22 percent for the general population. (10) Newcomers are also significantly less likely than non-newcomers to seek help for these challenges. (10)
Canadian policy research on migrant workers points to similar structural pressures. Delphine Nakache and Leanne Dixon-Perera's IRPP study on migrant workers transitioning to permanent residence describes obstacles such as immigration program complexity, employer-driven streams, stringent language requirements, prolonged family separation, and limited access to settlement services. (11) These are not just administrative details but part of the environment where emotional and cognitive strain accumulate.
This is relevant to the long middle of the settlement, which is often hard to recognize from the outside. Outwardly, a person may appear settled and no longer in urgent need. Inwardly, they may still be living with ongoing instability, mental fatigue, and unresolved pressure. The visible markers — a job, an address, a SIN number, a routine — can be present long before the inner weather has steadied.
Most settlement frameworks have responded with services, programs, and referrals. These are valuable and often necessary. What they often miss is language for the phase a person is currently inside — the curve, the tensions, the paradox of living in unstable conditions for years.
Naming this is not the same as solving it. But it changes the explanation. A newcomer whose mood and energy keep shifting inside Stage 2 is not necessarily failing to adjust. They may be moving accurately through a documented pattern of human response to prolonged transition, inside conditions that have not yet stopped changing.
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This issue does not ask anyone to diagnose themselves. It offers a map for noticing what is often hidden.
The curve can be read quietly:
Which of the seven phases — immobilization, minimization, depression and self-doubt, acceptance and letting go, testing, seeking meaning, internalization — feels most familiar right now?
Is this phase sometimes described, by you or by others, using words like laziness, ingratitude, weakness, or failure?
Is there a phase on the curve that you keep returning to? What conditions tend to pull you back there?
What does testing look like in your current situation, even if it is a small or uncertain step?
Which of the surrounding pressures — chronic stress, unresolved tensions, volatile timelines, scarcity of time or money — is doing the most work on you this season?
If you were to describe your current internal state in plain terms, what words would you use? Are those words about the phase, or about your character?
These questions do not solve Stage 2 but make the inner weather easier to read.
The person inside Stage 2 is not only their reaction. They respond from a phase that has a name, a shape, and a place in the research literature, while the conditions around them continue to change.
In a prolonged transition, that distinction is not a small one.
It may be the beginning of a more accurate story.
The next issue, The Roots, picks up from this ending and asks what a person is actually working with at different levels — the situation around them, the self they bring, the support they have, and the strategies available to them — and how those roots are shaped by the map. It introduces Nancy K. Schlossberg's 4 S's as the second main frame of the series.
Resources
1 Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (2nd ed.). Da Capo Press.
2 Anderson, M. L., Goodman, J., & Schlossberg, N. K. (2012). Counseling Adults in Transition: Linking Schlossberg's Theory with Practice in a Diverse World (4th ed.). Springer Publishing Company.
3 Adams, J., Hayes, J., & Hopson, B. (1976). Transition: Understanding and Managing Personal Change. Martin Robertson.
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