Issue #3 - The Roots
What is holding you right now, even if you cannot see it
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 success formula. It gives language for transition conditions that are often lived privately but shaped structurally.
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 Roots
Issue 1, The Map, named Stage 2 as its own terrain: the prolonged middle between arrival and stability. Issue 2, The Inner Weather, described what that terrain can feel like from the inside — the emotional movement, self-doubt, fatigue, and uneven adjustment that can happen after arrival.
This issue sits underneath both of them. It looks at the roots beneath the weather: the resources a person is actually working with at different levels, and how those roots are shaped by the map around them.<sup>1</sup>
The question of this issue is small but important. When two people land inside the same broad transition and experience it very differently, the answer is not only personality, mindset, or discipline.
It is also roots.
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This issue begins with a simple problem. Newcomers are often asked whether they are doing well, settling in, coping, integrating, or moving forward. These questions sound neutral but often carry a smaller assumption: that adjustment depends mostly on the person.
If someone is not moving quickly, the explanation becomes personal. They lack confidence, organization, effort, or the right strategy. The transition is interpreted through the individual's character.
Transition does not happen inside a person alone. It happens between a person and the conditions surrounding them.
Counselling psychologist Nancy K. Schlossberg offered a way to read transitions through four sets of resources: Situation, Self, Support, and Strategies, often called the 4 S's. (1) The point is not to score a person but to look at what is present, strained, and changed.
Behind this issue is the larger picture of transition introduced in Issue 1. William Bridges described transitions as having three broad phases: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. (2) Stage 2 in this series sits inside that neutral zone, the long middle where the old life is disrupted but the new one is not yet stable. Schlossberg's 4 S's, with Hobfoll's resource work, act as a second frame on top of Bridges. They show what a person is working with and what can be depleted or protected while inside that neutral zone.
For Stage 2 migration, this matters because many newcomers are not adjusting to one change. They are adjusting within a moving system: changing immigration status, unstable timelines, survival work, housing pressure, financial limits, family obligations, credential barriers, and uneven access to information and support.
The question shifts from why am I struggling to what I am working with.
That shift does not remove the difficulty but changes where it is located.
What Schlossberg found
Schlossberg describes a transition as an event or non-event that changes a person's roles, routines, relationships, or assumptions. (1) A transition does not have to be dramatic to be disruptive. It can be a move, a permit decision, a job loss, a delayed document, a relationship that changes, a career path that does not open, or a future that does not arrive in the expected form.
Her model also pays attention to timing, duration, control, role change, previous experience, concurrent stress, and the person's interpretation of the transition. (3) This helps explain why two people can face the same event but experience it differently. The transition is not only the event itself but also its timing, consequences, supports, and meaning in that person's life.
The 4 S's name the main resource areas that shape adaptation:
Situation — what is happening, when it happened, how much control the person has, how long it lasts, and what else is happening at the same time.
Self — the person's internal and personal resources, including health, identity, prior experience, beliefs, sense of agency, and emotional steadiness.
Support — the people, institutions, relationships, communities, information channels, and practical help available to the person.
Strategies — the ways the person responds, including what they can act on, how they make meaning, and how they manage the effects of stress.
In Stage 2, these four rarely stay separate. A delayed permit can affect work, which affects income. Income affects housing, housing affects sleep, sleep affects focus, and focus affects paperwork, relationships, and the ability to plan. What looks like one problem often sits within a wider pattern of resources and strain.
This is why the 4 S's are useful for NTB. They make the surrounding conditions visible.
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Situation
Situation is the external shape of the transition. It includes the trigger, timing, duration, level of control, role change, and other simultaneous pressures. (3)
For a newcomer in Stage 2, the Situation may include immigration processing, temporary status, precarious work, unstable housing, family separation, credential assessment, debt, language pressure, transportation constraints, childcare, or a job that pays the bills but narrows future options.
Situation also includes the public climate around migration. A newcomer is dealing with rent, status, work, documents, family responsibilities, and access to services. They are also living inside public narratives about migrants — some evidence-based, some myth-heavy, and some hostile. (14,15) These narratives can shape policy, institutions, sense of belonging, and how a person interprets their own difficulty.
For many newcomers, immigration policy does not feel like a stable bridge. It can feel like a moving target, with criteria and point systems shifting while the person is already in motion. Living inside that can make someone feel as if they are always chasing something just ahead and then mistake that chase for a personal failing instead of part of their Situation.
Stage 2 often contains more than one transition at once. A person may be navigating legal uncertainty, financial strain, social dislocation, work instability, and identity disruption simultaneously. The situation is not a single event. It is a configuration.
When the situation is unstable, even ordinary decisions carry more weight. A shift change, rent increase, document request, missed appointment, or change in work hours can disturb the whole arrangement. The person may look inconsistent from the outside while the situation is unstable.
Self
Self does not mean attitude alone. In Schlossberg's framework, Self encompasses personal and demographic characteristics, as well as psychological resources, that shape how a person experiences transition. (3)
In Stage 2, Self can include physical health, fatigue, language confidence, previous experience with uncertainty, family role, age, cultural expectations, financial history, faith, shame, grief, identity, belonging, and the story the person has about what this migration was supposed to become.
This matters because many internal reactions are not proof of weakness. They may be responses to prolonged instability. Chronic stress research shows ongoing pressure can affect attention, planning, emotional regulation, and the body's stress systems. (4) The person may still care deeply about the future while having less capacity to hold it clearly.
Research on immigrant acculturation and well-being in Canada also treats belonging as part of adaptation rather than as a simple private feeling. Berry and Hou examine how immigrants relate to both Canada and their country of origin, and how these patterns relate to life satisfaction and mental health. (9) This matters for Stage 2 because the self is often being reorganized across more than one place, more than one role, and more than one imagined future.
Migration research also shows that movement is often not only an individual decision. It can be a household strategy shaped by shared risk, pooled resources, remittance expectations, and family hopes placed on one person's movement. (13) This matters in Stage 2 because the self may be carrying more than personal ambition. It may also be carrying an obligation — to send money, to justify sacrifice, to stabilize a child's future, to support relatives across borders, to make the migration worth it. What looks like private pressure may partly be the weight of a family strategy living inside one person's body.
Self is not the only root. It is one root among several.
Support
Support is not only encouragement. It includes people, information, institutions, services, community, practical help, emotional presence, and the reliability of those supports over time.
In Stage 2, support can be thin even when people are surrounded by others. A person may know many people, but not who can help with a document. They may attend community events, but lack someone who understands their exact situation. They may receive encouragement but not access. They may have family love but no financial margin. They may have a settlement agency nearby, but not the time, language confidence, eligibility, or transportation to use it.
Support also changes. It can weaken when a person moves, changes jobs, loses status, feels embarrassed, becomes too tired to explain, or learns that some relationships only hold when things go well.
Thin support does not mean no support. Sometimes the roots are small: one person who answers, one reliable appointment, one community contact, one document trail, one ride, one message, one place where the person does not have to perform stability.
Social capital research helps explain why support can be present without becoming access. Robert Putnam distinguishes bonding social capital—closeness and solidarity within familiar groups—and bridging social capital, which connects people across groups and opens access to information, institutions, services, and opportunities. (10) In Stage 2, a person may have family, co-ethnic community, religious community, or online groups, but still lacks the bridging connection that explains a document, names a trusted employer, connects to housing, or makes an institution less opaque. The person is not simply alone. They may be connected in ways that do not reach the gate they need to enter.
Migration research gives this question a more specific shape. Goldin, Cameron, and Balarajan describe migration as shaped across micro-level individual and family factors, meso-level networks and systems, and macro-level demographic, political, and economic conditions. (13) For this issue, the meso level matters most: the relationships, intermediaries, community structures, organizations, and transnational ties that can carry information and opportunity across borders. Support is not only about whether people are present. It is also whether the network reaches the problem.
The roots are thin. They are not glamorous. They are real. And they are holding.
Strategies
Strategies are the ways a person responds to the transition. Schlossberg's model includes strategies that try to modify the situation, manage the meaning of the situation, or manage stress after it occurs.(3)
That distinction matters in Stage 2. Action strategies try to change the situation—applying, calling, moving, searching, submitting, asking, leaving, accepting, refusing. Meaning-making strategies interpret what is happening. Stress-management strategies address the effects once pressure has entered the body. When status, work, housing, money, and time are unstable, action strategies may be hardest to carry out consistently. What remains visible may be reflection, endurance, withdrawal, emotional containment, or small forms of maintenance.
In Stage 2, strategies may look uneven because conditions are uneven. A person may organize paperwork but not keep up with social messages. They may show up for work but struggle to study. They may protect their child's appointments but lose track of their own plans. They may continue community service only when energy, schedule, and survival demands allow.
Some strategies are also shaped by obligation rather than preference: taking the available shift, delaying study, sending money home, or choosing short-term income over long-term positioning because the household's needs are immediate.
This is not always a failure of commitment. Sometimes a strategy that once worked no longer fits available capacity. A detailed plan may collapse—and the collapse is rarely about carelessness. The day has been shaped by work hours, childcare, fatigue, transportation, money, and paperwork. The plan was written in one version of capacity. The day was lived in another.
This is where personal responsibility is too small as an explanation. No amount of goal-setting language can fully overcome a structural arrangement that repeatedly removes time, attention, money, rest, and predictability. The question is not whether plans matter. The question is what kind of planning is possible when the ground keeps moving.
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The 4 S's help explain why Stage 2 can feel confusing from the inside. A person may do many things correctly and still feel unstable. They may have effort without momentum, intention without bandwidth, hope without a clear path, or gratitude and grief in the same week.
Two people can be in Stage 2 and suffer differently. One may have stable housing but weak employment options. Another may have worked, but no legal certainty. One may have family nearby but no time, while another has time but no community. One may have strong language skills but weak support, and another may have support but heavy debt. The difference is not simply a matter of strength or weakness. It is the configuration of roots.
This is where many experiences become psychologically privatized. A structural condition is seen as a private flaw. The person starts to view repeated, structurally shaped pressure as individual failure rather than a predictable response to prolonged instability. They ask why they are not stronger, more consistent, grateful, disciplined, or settled by now. The broader terrain disappears, leaving only the self to blame. When wider conditions are invisible, the only explanation left is the self, and every difficulty is seen through that lens.
Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory adds another layer. His work describes stress as closely tied to the threat of resource loss, actual resource loss, or the failure to gain resources after effort.<sup>5</sup> He also describes how resources tend to travel together in caravans, and how environments can either support or block the movement of those caravans. (6)
This language fits Stage 2 because losing one resource can weaken others. Losing hours at work can affect rent. Housing stress can affect sleep. Poor sleep can affect focus. Reduced focus can affect forms, study, interviews, parenting, or the ability to ask for help. A person may not face a single isolated problem but live within a resource chain.
Hobfoll's work also helps explain why loss can spiral. Resource loss is not only painful in itself. It can make future resources harder to access. (5) When money, time, health, status, transportation, or support become unstable, the person may have fewer resources available to protect the remaining ones.
This is one reason Stage 2 can feel like standing at the edge of a cliff while holding thin roots. From the outside, the person may look like they are simply hanging on. From the inside, those roots may be the actual system of survival: a job, a friend, a child's routine, a settlement contact, a landlord who waits, a community role, a borrowed car, a line of credit, a phone reminder, a familiar place, a small routine, a reason to keep showing up.
These roots may not look like success. They may be the difference between falling and remaining attached to life.
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Why support is more than "just network"
When this issue says Support, it includes more than family, friends, and encouragement. It includes the middle layer around the person — the networks, organizations, intermediaries, and community structures that connect migrants to information, opportunity, and practical help. (13)
At this level, support is not simply being outgoing or putting yourself out there. It includes family and friends who migrated earlier, community organizations, churches, settlement agencies, Home Town Associations, local groups, labour recruiters, intermediaries, alumni networks, professional networks, and transnational ties.
These networks carry practical information and social knowledge: where people stay when they first arrive, how work is found, which documents matter, which risks to avoid, which institutions are easier to enter, and which paths have already been tested. They can reduce uncertainty and make movement, settlement, and continued adjustment more possible.
Networks are uneven. Some are mature and dense. Others are young, thin, informal, fragmented, or concentrated in sectors that do not match the newcomer's situation. A person can be willing to connect and still land in a place where the relevant network is not strong enough to carry them.
This matters for Stage 2 because not every newcomer arrives at the same point in a network's life. A person who comes when networks are still weak is not failing to use a rich system. They stand where part of the system is still under construction. In another decade, the network around their background in that city may look very different. They are living through the early, unstable phase most people will never see.
One way to see this is through two ordinary arrivals.
One newcomer lands in a large city where their community of origin has been present for decades. A cousin meets them at the airport. They stay in a shared apartment for a few months. A relative introduces them to a survival job where people already speak their language. Someone at church explains how to book a health card appointment and which buses to take to the settlement office.
Another newcomer lands in a mid-size city where almost no one shares their background. There is no cousin at the airport. They move into a basement found online. Information comes from search engines, not people. When told to network, they go to mixed events where everyone is busy, polite, and stretched thin. There is no obvious person whose stability can carry them for a while.
Both newcomers may be told the same sentence: build connections. Only one of them is standing inside a strong meso-level system.
How meso-level networks grow over time
In Exceptional People, Goldin, Cameron, and Balarajan describe how migration networks develop over time. Early movement may begin with a few risk-tolerant pioneers who move with limited support, sometimes relying more on institutional recruiters or agencies than on established social networks. (13) As they settle and share information, others may follow because the path has become more visible and less uncertain.
Over time, networks deepen. Relatives and friends follow earlier movers. Social networks begin to provide accommodation, job leads, emotional support, and practical knowledge. Specialized organizations may form around origin communities, faith groups, occupations, or shared locality. Professional and alumni networks may support skilled migration. Transnational networks may keep information, remittances, family obligations, and a sense of belonging moving across borders.
In some places, migration becomes self-sustaining because the network has become a pathway. In other places, the network remains thin, partial, or difficult to enter. This difference can shape the Support long before the newcomer's personality enters the explanation.
See the network phases here adapted from Hein de Haas, “Migration System Formation and Decline” (IMI Working Paper, Oxford, 2009):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BI9c_kbYzE18xCIN_2X14ahPaD3Fp4X_/view?usp=sharing
A short chain of ideas
Borrowing the phrase in a limited way, this is where a chain of ideas can quietly form. (14)
In many Canadian integration settings, success is often framed as a personal project — be adaptable, build connections, make yourself visible, learn the norms, and keep moving. Inside that frame, a newcomer is told that progress depends on building connections.
That idea then gets simplified. It becomes network more. Then it becomes meet more people, ask more, show up more, and try harder.
When thicker support still does not come, the advice often has no next step. There is no language for weak networks, missing intermediaries, thin community infrastructure, or network development stages in a city. With the meso level missing, the only place left to look is inward.
At that point, the explanation narrows again: maybe the person is too shy, too passive, too slow, too hesitant, too closed, or not serious enough.
The missing step is the meso level. The advice treats support as only an individual task. It leaves out whether there are established communities, trusted intermediaries, functioning organizations, professional pathways, or people with enough stability to help others. The chain jumps over the entire middle layer, where much of the migration support actually lives.
Once that middle layer disappears, the burden of explanation falls back on the individual. What is partly a network condition becomes a character flaw. This is one way migration difficulty becomes psychologically privatized.
It also distorts the 4 S's. Support and Situation begin to disappear from the explanation, and Self becomes the main place where the struggle is interpreted. The person is no longer seen as living inside a particular arrangement of roots. The person becomes the root of the problem.
How this returns to the Support S
The Support S includes personal relationships and individual effort. It also includes the meso-level structure a person lands inside — the strength or weakness of networks in a particular city, community, field, class position, language group, and migration pathway.
If there are strong community organizations, active alumni groups, settled origin communities, and clear institutional pathways, Support may feel thicker. If services are thin, networks are still forming, or useful connections are elsewhere, Support may feel thin even when the person attends events, introduces themselves, and follows every piece of networking advice they hear.
Naming this does not solve the condition. It changes the story. My support is thin is not the same as I failed to network properly. Part of what the person is working with may be a younger, uneven, or inaccessible meso-level system.
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Settlement systems often divide needs into categories: employment, housing, language, legal status, health, education, childcare, transportation, community, and mental health. These categories help services. The person does not live them separately.
Inside Stage 2, these needs interact. A newcomer may need employment support, but the deeper barriers are status uncertainty, childcare, sleep debt, credential delays, or fear of losing current income. A newcomer may need mental health support, while the pressure comes from housing insecurity, food costs, isolation, precarious work, or the cost of care.
Canadian newcomer mental health research points to this wider terrain. Mental Health Research Canada and CAMH describe newcomer well-being as connected to social determinants such as affordable housing, employment, livable income, food security, social support, and access to services. (7) IRCC also recognizes that settlement providers may connect newcomers to information, non-clinical mental health and well-being support, and referrals. (8)
Canadian research on precarious migratory status adds another layer. Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard argue that Canadian immigration policy can produce multiple forms of precarious status and that precarious status is accompanied by precarious access to public services. (11) Goldring and Landolt later connect migratory status trajectories with precarious work and economic incorporation, showing why legal status cannot be separated from labour-market outcomes. (12) In the language of this issue, status is not only a legal category. It can shape Situation, Support, Strategies, and the internal pressure carried by Self.
This matters because the roots of adjustment are often practical before emotional. A person may not need to be told to be resilient. They may need the conditions around them to stop draining the resources required for stability.
The 4 S's help name this without turning the person into a problem. Situation, Self, Support, and Strategies do not erase responsibility. They place responsibility back inside a real field of conditions.
For Stage 2 migrants, this distinction matters. Without it, difficulty becomes a character judgment. With it, difficulty becomes legible as a relationship between the person and the resources available to them.
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This issue does not ask anyone to diagnose themselves. It offers a map to notice what is often hidden.
The 4 S's can be read quietly:
Which part of the transition is most strained right now — Situation, Self, Support, or Strategies?
What condition have you been interpreting as a personal flaw?
What support is present, even if it is thin, temporary, or imperfect?
What meso-level support exists around you — networks, organizations, intermediaries, or community pathways?
What strategy once worked but no longer fits the current conditions?
What root is holding, even if it does not look like enough from the outside?
These questions do not solve Stage 2 but make the structure easier to see.
The person is not only their reaction. They respond from a set of roots, some strong, some damaged, some missing, some still growing.
In prolonged transition this is an important distinction.
It may be the beginning of a more accurate story.
The next issue, Communitas, Not Community, picks up from this ending on the Support S. It asks why so many newcomers can be surrounded by communities and still feel unmet — and names the lateral, phase-shaped recognition that most settlement frameworks do not have a word for.
Resources
(1) Nancy K. Schlossberg, "A Model for Analyzing Human Adaptation to Transition," The Counseling Psychologist 9, no. 2 (1981): 2–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/001100008100900202
(2) William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004).
(3) Mary L. Anderson, Jane Goodman, and Nancy K. Schlossberg, Counseling Adults in Transition: Linking Schlossberg's Theory with Practice in a Diverse World, 4th ed. (New York: Springer, 2012).
(4) Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).
(5) Stevan E. Hobfoll, "Conservation of Resources: A New Attempt at Conceptualizing Stress," American Psychologist 44, no. 3 (1989): 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513
(6) Stevan E. Hobfoll, "Resource Caravans and Resource Caravan Passageways: A New Paradigm for Trauma Responding," Intervention 12, no. 1 (2014): 21–32. https://doi.org/10.1097/WTF.0000000000000067
(7) Mental Health Research Canada and CAMH, "Immigrant and Refugee Mental Health Project Newsletter," January 2024. https://www.camh.ca/en/professionals/professionals--projects/immigrant-and-refugee-mental-health-project/newsletter/2024-01-newsletter-2
(8) Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, "Mental Health and Well-being Support for Newcomers." https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/settle-canada/health-care/mental-health.html
(9) John W. Berry and Feng Hou, "Immigrant Acculturation and Wellbeing in Canada," Canadian Psychology 57, no. 4 (2016): 254–264. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000064
(10) Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). See also Robert Putnam's Social Capital Primer: http://bowlingalone.com/?page_id=13
(11) Luin Goldring, Carolina Berinstein, and Judith Bernhard, "Institutionalizing Precarious Migratory Status in Canada," Citizenship Studies 13, no. 3 (2009): 239–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020902850643
(12) Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt, "The Impact of Precarious Legal Status on Immigrants' Economic Outcomes," IRPP Study no. 35, Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2012. https://irpp.org/research-studies/the-impact-of-precarious-legal-status-on-immigrants-economic-outcomes/
(13) Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan, Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
(14) Ibram X. Kendi, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age (New York: One World, 2026). The phrase is used here only as a way to describe linked assumptions, not to apply Kendi's full argument to Stage 2 migration.
(15) Hein de Haas, How Migration Really Works: A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2023).
