The Bridges We Build

How an iPPL Gathering Sparked Questions About Belonging in Luxembourg

Are you an expat or an immigrant?

Did you come to Luxembourg for love, for opportunity, or for someone else’s dream?

Are you building a life here or simply adapting to one?

These were the questions that opened the iPPL community evening on 21 January in Luxembourg.

We met. We shared. We listened. We recognised ourselves in each other’s stories.And we left not only with answers, but also with some questions.

The evening, led by Amita Patel through her workshop developed as part of her Anglia Ruskin University MAPP (Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology) research, created a space for something rare in multicultural environments: honest dialogue without performance, reflection without labels, and connection without agendas. It was not a presentation or a panel, but a shared human space.

Images by Andreea Cimpoesu, Dana Moldoveanu & Frederika Roberts

We spoke about identity and belonging. About the small, almost unnoticeable losses that come with relocation, the ones that don’t announce themselves, yet quietly accumulate. About adaptation that becomes erasure. About resilience that becomes endurance. About competence with nowhere to go. About the roles we slip into without choosing them. And about the invisible lives of trailing spouses and passive partners: people who move for love, for family, for circumstance, and whose professional and personal identities don’t collapse, but gradually, softly, fall silent.

The Insights We Shared

·         Integration is not administrative. It is psychological.

·         Belonging is not legal status. It is relational.

·         Adaptation without activation creates fragility.

·         Unused competence becomes suffering.

·         Community protects identity.

·         Silence is not resilience.

·         Kindness and curiosity are integration tools.

And perhaps the most important one:This is not an individual problem. It is a systemic gap.

The Questions We Left With

·         What does belonging look like in a fluid culture?

·         What structures exist for people who didn’t “move for work”?

·         How do we live well when assumptions, norms, and values are not shared?

·         Who are we when our professional identity disappears?

·         What happens to competence when it has no place to land?

·         Where does potential go when it isn’t activated?

·         How long can someone adapt before they start to disappear?

·         How do passive partners move from support roles to self-directed futures?

Moving Beyond Empathy

If we care about integration, wellbeing, and mental health in multicultural environments, we need to move beyond empathy and into action.

For individuals, that begins with naming the transition, rebuilding daily structure, reclaiming identity beyond a partner’s role, activating competence even in small ways, choosing community over isolation, practicing self-kindness, and asking for support early rather than late.

For communities, it means creating safe spaces for dialogue, building group-based integration spaces, supporting trailing spouses explicitly, creating bridges into entrepreneurship and community leadership, developing re-entry pathways into meaningful work, and designing identity reactivation programs that restore agency and belonging.

For society, it means recognising passive partners as a real integration group, creating activation pathways rather than adaptation systems, turning presence into participation, designing belonging ecosystems, and building bridges instead of silos.

We met. We shared. We connected. And we left more aware,  carrying a clearer sense that living in Luxembourg is about learning to live in a fluid place where identity is continually reshaped, belonging is built rather than given, and purpose, contribution, and being seen grow through the quiet work of building relationships in a culture that is always in motion.

This is not about pity, and it is not about charity. It is about recognising potential, restoring agency, and creating the conditions for all of us to participate fully. And while policies and programs are necessary, what we are choosing to build at iPPL is something equally vital: spaces where people can meet as humans, speak honestly, listen deeply, form trust, and slowly create the bridges that allow belonging to grow  not as a concept, but as a lived experience.