At a glance
Living in Denmark as a foreigner can be hard in ways that do not show up in your description of your life. The effort is usually spread across small daily things rather than gathered into one problem you could name. This article looks at where that effort goes, why the language keeps you at the edge, and what helps.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The difficulty is cumulative. Clients rarely bring me one large problem about Denmark. They bring a long list of small ones, each costing more here than it did at home.
- Competence is the first thing to go quiet. Clients tell me they feel slower here than the person they used to be, and they draw a conclusion about themselves rather than about the conditions.
- The hardest part is often the saying of it. Clients find it harder to admit the difficulty to people at home than to live through it here.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does an ordinary day here take so much out of me?
The effort is not in the large things you prepared for. It is in the ordinary ones nobody warned you about. You expected the move to be demanding. You did not expect the letter from the municipality, the appointment booked through a system you cannot read, the shop that shuts earlier than you keep remembering, the small talk you can follow but not join.
At home most of your week ran on recognition. You knew how things worked and so did everyone around you, and that knowledge cost you nothing. Here a good deal of the week runs on translation instead, and translation does not get cheaper because the task is small. By the evening the tiredness has no obvious cause, which is what makes you suspect the cause is you.
It is also why you can look at your life, agree that it is good, and still arrive home with nothing left over. Work on acculturative stress finds it sitting close to difficulty managing feelings: among 443 international students in Germany, higher acculturative stress went with more difficulty in emotion regulation and less of the coping that draws on meaning, though everything was measured at a single point in time and cannot show what caused what.1 What I take from that is plain. The cost is not only in the tasks. It is in holding yourself steady while you do them.
Is it Denmark, or is it me?
You will not get a clean answer, and the question becomes more useful once you stop trying to settle it. 3 different things are usually mixed together, and only one of them is available to you.
- What belongs to the place. Much of Danish social life sits inside groups that formed long before you arrived and have no visible door. Weeks are planned well ahead. The warmth exists, and it arrives later than you are used to.
- What belongs to the move. Any relocation removes the structures that carried your social life without your help: the colleagues who turned into friends, the family close by, the chance meetings in a place you knew by heart.
- What belongs to you. Your own history decides what you do when you need something and nobody is offering it. Some people ask. Some withdraw and call it independence. Which of those you are doing here is worth knowing.
A year spent deciding whether Denmark is at fault tends to leave the third item untouched, and the third item is the one that moves.
Why does the language keep me at the edge of things?
You can be competent in English all day and still be missing the layer where people become close to each other. Danish colleagues switch to English for you, generously, and the conversation changes as they do it. Jokes get explained. The quick associative talk that friendships are actually built from goes flat in translation, and you end up well treated and not quite included.
One finding here complicates the obvious advice. In a study of 431 Georgian immigrants living in Germany, Italy and Greece, fluency in the host language at the time of the study went with better psychological adjustment, while fluency on arrival went with more depressive symptoms, which the authors read as possible unmet expectation or earlier exposure to prejudice; the sample was mostly women and measured once, so it carries limited weight.2 Perceived unfair treatment was among the strongest predictors of poor adjustment in the same study. My own reading is that the language helps where it buys you depth, and does little where all it buys you is a clearer view of how you are being treated.
Why do I feel ungrateful for finding it hard?
Because you have taken the difficulty as an argument against your own choice, and it is not one. You chose this. You may have been the one who pushed for it. Saying out loud that it is hard feels like withdrawing the choice, so you keep it to yourself, and the keeping becomes part of the weight.
What wears people down is rarely the absence of belonging. It is 2 belongings that both have a claim on you. In a study of 131 Portuguese immigrants in Luxembourg, most of whom had lived there around 30 years, feeling attached to the host country went with slightly less loneliness, while a conflicted sense of double cultural identity went with more of it; the sample was small and covers one origin group only.3 What I see in my own room runs in the same direction. The people who struggle longest are not the ones who feel nothing for Denmark. They are the ones holding 2 lives and apologising for both.
What helps when the difficulty does not lift?
Start with the part that is yours to move, and be honest about which part that is.
- Separate the admin from the meaning. Clear the practical backlog in one afternoon, then notice how much of the heaviness was paperwork wearing the costume of a life decision.
- Put one thing you are good at into this country. Not a new hobby. Something you were competent at before, done here, in front of people. Competence is how you become visible again.
- Say it plainly to somebody who lives here. Another foreigner will recognise it in 2 sentences. A friend at home will try to talk you out of it, and you will stop telling them.
- Learn Danish for the depth, not for the duty. Learnt to prove something, it becomes a second job. Learnt to hear what people are actually like, it pays you back.
- Stop auditing your gratitude. The difficulty and the good choice can both stand. You do not have to settle which one is true before you are allowed to find this hard.
There are situations these steps will not reach, and it is worth saying which. If the flatness has stopped lifting at all, if you have given up wanting things you used to want, if your partner is carrying the mood of the household, or if you have quietly stopped making plans, then the problem is no longer the paperwork and working on it alone is unlikely to shift it. That is the point at which sitting down with someone does more than another year of managing. My work with people in this position is described on the expat psychotherapy page, and a free 30 minute call is enough to work out whether it is the right thing for you.
Questions people ask
Is this worth therapy, or should I give it more time?
Time helps with the practical side and does very little for the part that has started to feel like a verdict about you. If you have begun explaining the difficulty by saying something is wrong with you, that is the part worth bringing to a session.
Will a therapist who has not moved countries understand this?
What matters more is whether they work with it often enough to know the shape of it. I see individuals and couples living in Copenhagen from elsewhere every week, and the pattern is familiar even where the countries differ.
Do I have to talk about my childhood?
No, and we will not go there unless something in the present keeps pointing that way. Often the move has removed supports that were covering something older, and that becomes clear without being dug for.
Can therapy help if I do not know whether I am staying?
Yes, and not knowing is a reasonable thing to bring. The work separates what you actually want from what the current strain is telling you, which tends to make the decision clearer rather than nearer.
Does this work in English, or should I find a Danish-speaking therapist?
English is usually the better choice when English is the language your inner life runs in. I work in both, and we can move between them when a feeling only has words in one of them.
If daily life here feels harder than it should, expat therapy is where I help you understand why and what might ease it.
You may also find these helpful
Sources
- Soufi Amlashi, R. and Forstmeier, S. (2025). The relationship of acculturative stress with meaning in life through the mediating role of difficulty in emotion regulation and meaning-centered coping style among international students in Germany. Frontiers in Psychology, 16. Read the study
- Shekriladze, I. and Javakhishvili, N. (2024). Sociocultural predictors of immigrant adjustment and well-being. Frontiers in Sociology, 9. Read the study
- Albert, I. (2021). Perceived loneliness and the role of cultural and intergenerational belonging: the case of Portuguese first-generation immigrants in Luxembourg. European Journal of Ageing, 18, 299-310. Read the study
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
