By Roua Eltayeib
Following the flow of what emerges in our healing circles – we’ll walk through stories, emotion, reflection, and meaning-making that comes with being held.
My Experience of Being in the Diaspora
The pain of the diaspora is an interesting one.
I’m Sudanese-American, raised in NYC. I recently took a trip to Saudi Arabia to visit family in Riyadh – people I hadn’t seen in over ten years, and some I was meeting for the first time.
I found myself sitting among four women: my mother, who grew up in Sudan and came to America when I was one; my aunt, who spent most of her life in Sudan caring for my grandmother, navigating multiple displacements before having recently relocating to Riyadh; and a family friend with her daughter, who had been in Sudan when the war broke out and managed to escape in the early days.
Each of them carried a different story of leaving.
My aunt had to convince her mother, my grandmother, to leave her home in Khartoum. Displaced for almost a year and a half, moving from place to place before my aunt left for Riyadh to be with her daughter, my cousin, who was pregnant, only a few months before my grandmother’s passing. Allah yerhama.
The family friend described fleeing by bus in those early days, witnessing bodies lining the streets as they exited, holding the reality that they were privileged enough to leave when many could not.
My mom shared stories of trying to convince family members back home to leave the comfort of their homes in Khartoum, holding fear from afar. Hearing of passings, difficult births, hospital visits, low medicine supply, etc., while scrounging whatever she could to provide the only way she knew how.
There were so many stories.
As I sat there listening, I felt everything in my body.
My heart raced.
My eyes warmed, tears beginning to well.
My body felt hot.
My throat tightened – the way it does when there’s too much to say, but no way to say it without breaking.
And yet, when I looked at their faces, I saw something different.
There was an absence of visible heaviness. A distance.
They spoke in facts – what happened, who left, where they went.
Not in the emotional language I felt flooding through me.
It felt disjointed. Almost confusing.
To feel so much, while witnessing so little expression of it.
Grieving without grieving.
Telling without feeling.
And yet, there was a kind of solace in the telling.
What I felt in that moment mirrors what I’ve heard again and again in healing circles within the diaspora.
Stories shared, ending with Alhamdulillah.
Distance embedded in the words.
A heaviness transferred to the listener.
And then something else emerges – guilt.
Guilt for feeling so much when the person who lived it does not seem to.
Guilt for emotions that rise to the surface with nowhere to go.
Guilt for being removed, yet deeply impacted.
Brief Context of the War
I find myself resisting the urge to explain the war in detail.
Not because it isn’t important, but because so many Sudanese people are exhausted by the expectation to explain, especially after nearly three years in.
There is a specific kind of gut punch that comes with being asked, “What’s going on there?”
As if the stories haven’t been living in our bodies for years.
As if the emotional timeline didn’t begin long before the current war, with the revolution in 2018–2019, the fragile hope of transition, and the fear many of us carried about what might come next.
What I felt in that moment mirrors what I’ve heard again and again in healing circles within the diaspora.
And then, when it did.
And even before that – the violence, crisis, and genocide in Darfur and across West Sudan that families have been carrying for decades.
There are many resources available to understand the political and historical context. I will include some at the end.
What I want to center here is the emotional experience.
Emotions Within Fragmented Grief & the Struggle of Coping
In our healing circles, certain feelings come up again and again:
Guilt.
Numbness.
Anger.
Shame.
A sense that “the world is worse off – why am I feeling this?”
A difficulty accessing optimism.
A lingering belief that “no one cares.”
There is often an isolation to this grief.
People speak about friendships that have shifted or even fallen apart because of a lack of acknowledgment, a lack of being seen. The pain of having to explain, again and again, what is happening. The exhaustion of being met with distance.
There is frustration. Disappointment.
At the same time, many of us notice how deeply we’ve inherited our ways of coping.
We dissociate.
We push through.
We say Alhamdulillah.
And while that phrase is rooted in gratitude, it can sometimes become a form of spiritual bypassing – leaving no space for grief to be held, even within community.
There is often a lack of permission to feel.
People speak about friendships that have shifted or even fallen apart because of a lack of acknowledgment, a lack of being seen. The pain of having to explain, again and again, what is happening. The exhaustion of being met with distance.
Anger feels unsafe.
Numbness becomes protective.
And when feelings do surface, they can bring shame with them.
Some people turn to organizing, to doing, to creating impact – trying to regain a sense of control.
But even then, there is a lingering question:
Am I actually making a difference?
When the scale of loss feels endless, it can feel like shouting into an abyss.
This leads to cycles of:
- Disappointment
- Urgency toward action
- Emotional shutdown
- Unintentional disconnection
And yet, within all of this, there is also something else emerging.
Resilience & Healing in Stories and Connection
Anger that often begins as heavy and intense becomes a form of movement into action.
Action through anger becomes:
- Educating others
- Reclaiming pride in Sudanese identity
- Supporting Sudanese-owned brands
- Engaging politically
- Centering stories – not just statistics
And in the righteous anger that elevates these forms of action also comes a powerful shift toward self-empowerment. A recognition that:
- You have to be your own voice
- You have to demand respect
- You have to see yourself
There has been a visible rise in pride.
A pride in being Sudani that feels louder, more intentional, more embodied than before.
People are reconnecting – to land, to tradition, to ritual.
Even in small ways.
For me, it has shown up in food.
In engaging with Sudanese cuisine in a way I never had before.
In feeling excitement over seeing our stories documented – our images, our history, our culture reflected to us.
There is something deeply grounding in that.
We are also reclaiming forms of gathering.
Our parents may not have had the language for mental health, but they had community.
They had ways of being together that allowed them to survive.
We, in the diaspora, often have the language but lose access to those forms of connection.
Now, we are rebuilding.
Recreating.
Reimagining.
Finding our way back to each other.
One reflection that has stayed with me from these spaces is this:
“You don’t need to be the process. You can just be a particle in the process.”
For those who feel the pressure to do everything – to fix, to lead, to carry – it offers a different way of existing within collective struggle.
You can contribute without consuming yourself.
Storytelling, in particular, has become a powerful site of healing.
It allows us to be in relation with one another.
To feel seen.
To feel heard.
I’ve found myself attending more Sudanese spaces than I ever have before – events, gatherings, ranging from spoken word to painting – simply to be in community.
And I’m not alone in that.
There has been an expansion of Sudanese spaces:
- Through art
- Through poetry
- Through music
- Through storytelling
- Through educational and healing spaces
I’ve had the privilege of sitting and facilitating some of these healing spaces, and I hope to continue creating more opportunities for connection, both online and in person.
A pride in being Sudani that feels louder, more intentional, more embodied than before.
At the same time, what has felt most grounding is the act of witnessing each other.
In these spaces, I’ve seen the natural resilience that surfaces when we are simply allowed to be together. The way we listen. The way we hold. The way we create meaning out of what feels impossible to name.
It reminds me that we already have the tools.
We have the language.
We have the capacity to hold one another.
What we often lack is space.
Spaces like healing circles offer something rare – an opportunity to name what has gone unnamed, to put language to pain that has lived in our bodies without words, to lay it out on the table in a space that feels safe enough to hold it.
And that matters.
Because part of the struggle we face as a Sudanese diaspora is not just being “forgotten” or “invisible,” as it is often framed, but being made to feel erased.
That erasure compounds when we are constantly asked to explain, to contextualize, to educate, when we are not given the room to simply sit with our grief.
So I urge mental health professionals reading this to stay curious.
To be open to holding space for that pain without rushing to make sense of it.
To recognize the range of emotions that Sudanese people across the diaspora are carrying.
What I’ve shared here is only a snippet of what has come up in healing circles and of my own experience.
There are so many more stories.
There is no clean resolution to collective grief.
But there is something meaningful in witnessing it together.
In naming it.
In allowing it to exist – without rushing it away.
And maybe that’s where healing begins.
Final Thoughts & Resources
This blog is only a “particle” of the process of what it’s been like to heal and move through the grief for me and for those I’ve been honored to share a vulnerable space with. The hope and continued work, both for me and what I hope to see in mental health spaces, is providing more safety and room to share these stories of pain, coping, and resilience as we continue to feel the range of experiences and emotions that come with the waves of collective grief.
If you are a Sudanese mental health professional, I would love to connect. I’ve been working to bring together Sudanese professionals so that we can bring the work we do individually in our own communities and take it further together.
There is something powerful about building networks intentionally, about creating spaces where we can support one another while also building for our community. One of my favorite quotes, an African proverb, has come to be “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
Resources, including historical context and ongoing updates, can be found here: Mental Health Resources for Sudan
About the Author
Roua Eltayeib is a Sudani American Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist who runs her solo private practice, Rooted Change Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC. Her clinical work focuses on Black Muslim individuals and couples, supporting clients in exploring identity, strengthening relationships, honoring their needs, and creating change that feels authentic and grounded in who they are. Beyond her practice, Roua is deeply involved in community healing through facilitating Sudani healing circles and speaking on Muslim mental health and collective care. She is currently working to connect Sudani mental health professionals across the U.S. to support sustainable, community-rooted healing efforts.
Contact Roua Eltayeib, LMFT at info@rouamft.com or visit her website rootedchangemft.org.
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