Why did the hard part arrive after I settled in?

What is culture shock?

Culture shock is the strain of living somewhere the ordinary rules, cues and routines are no longer yours. It is rarely one clear feeling. It turns up as tiredness that sleep does not fix, a flatness that arrives around 6 in the evening, an irritation in the supermarket out of all proportion to not finding the one thing you wanted. You spend your day reading a room you used to read without effort, and that costs something you cannot itemise.

The version most guides hand you instead is a diagram: honeymoon, then crisis, then recovery, printed in almost everything written for people moving abroad. It is worth knowing what that diagram is before you measure yourself against it. Read more about reverse culture shock.

Does culture shock follow a curve?

No. The staged curve was drawn long before anybody tested it, and the tests did not support it. The honeymoon, crisis and recovery sequence, and the W-shaped version that adds a second dip for going home, were models that then got copied from guide to guide¹. The conclusion reached in the research literature is blunt: despite its popular and intuitive appeal, the U-curve model of adjustment should be rejected¹.

Where adjustment was actually measured over time, difficulty was at its highest on arrival and eased across the months that followed, which is close to the reverse of the diagram². Students interviewed in detail about an exchange reported neither a crisis stage nor the 4 classic stages, and their accounts sorted instead into excitement, routine and farewell³. Those were small groups of students on temporary exchanges, so they unseat the curve without describing your move.

What this takes away is the timetable. No month owes you a low, and no month is the one by which you are supposed to be finished. That is a loss of a kind, because a curve at least tells you where you are.

Why does the low arrive months after the move?

In my clinical experience the low arrives when the project of moving ends, and that is my judgement rather than a research finding. A move is a project: a flat, a CPR number, a bank account, a phone contract, a chest of drawers that arrives in 11 pieces. The work is tiring and it is absorbing, and absorbing work holds a great deal at a distance. Then it finishes. Everything functions, the boxes have gone, and a Wednesday evening has nothing in it that has to be done.

What comes into that gap is a feeling before it is a thought. Then the body version of it, the heaviness at the door of a flat where nobody is waiting, the reluctance to cook for one. The thinking arrives last and does the most damage: you decide you ought to be over this by now, and that needing help 8 months in is a verdict on you rather than a description of the month. You are unhappy, and then uneasy about being unhappy over something you asked for and were envied for.

You can tell somebody at home, truthfully, that the city is beautiful and the job is good, and then put the phone down into a silence you have no words for. The dip lands a few months in for one person and a year later for another, and plenty of people never meet it at all. Read more about how to deal with loneliness.

What makes settling in Copenhagen harder to read?

Friendships that form slowly, a dark winter and a city where nothing is visibly going wrong all make a low harder to interpret.

• Circles already full. Many people who grew up here still see the friends they made at school and university, so a warm conversation is not the opening it would be elsewhere.
• Heard as rejection. A full diary lands as a closed door, and that reading does more damage than the diary does.
• The light. From November to February the days are short, and a mood that began in October gets put down to the move.
• Nothing to complain about. The transport runs, the system works, and with no obvious villain you conclude that the problem must be your own character.
• The edge of the room. Working in English keeps you out of the Danish spoken sideways at lunch, which is where a good deal of ordinary contact happens.

None of that is explained by anybody being Danish, and reading it that way shuts down the useful thinking. These are circumstances. They describe what a newcomer meets here rather than who anybody is, and most of them loosen with time and repetition. The friction belongs to the new place, which makes it a different matter from homesickness for the old one. Read more about grief that is not a death.

How do you get through culture shock?

With several small repeated commitments rather than one large decision.

• Date it from the right day. Count from the day the admin finished, because that is when ordinary life here actually started.
• Fix one hour in the week. A class, a choir, a sport, a volunteering shift: something that meets at the same time whether or not you feel like going.
• Then repeat it. Repetition turns strangers into acquaintances, and acquaintances are most of what a life in a city is made of.
• Learn some Danish anyway. Even where your work runs in English, enough Danish to follow the sideways conversation changes what a room feels like.
• Say the whole thing out loud once. To somebody who is not also managing their own move, and who has no reason to reassure you.
• Give it longer than you were told. A couple of winters rather than a single season is my suggestion, not a measured interval.

These steps are not enough when the low has run on for months and you have stopped arranging anything at all, when the move also ended a career or a relationship, or when the person you are here is somebody you no longer recognise. What stays genuinely unclear in that last case is whether the difficulty belongs to this city or to a question that travelled with you, and that is worth examining properly rather than settling alone on a Sunday. If your question has moved from settling in to who you are now, read more about an identity crisis.

Questions people ask

Is therapy the right place for this, or should I give it more time?

Time does the work where a routine is already forming, and therapy is the better move once the low has stopped shifting at all. The free 30-minute call is usually enough to work out which of those you are in.

What happens in a first session about a move abroad?

You describe the move, what ended when you left and what your weeks look like now, and I say what I think is holding the low in place. Nothing is decided in that hour.

Does it matter that therapy would be in my second language?

It matters and it is workable, because some feeling only arrives in a first language, and noticing which words are missing is part of the work. Sessions run in English, and many clients move between 2 languages inside one hour.

Should I wait until I know whether I am staying?

No, because waiting for that decision is often what keeps it open. Working on what the move has cost you is useful whether you stay 2 years or 20.

How do I choose a therapist for this?

Choose somebody who has worked with people who moved countries, because the practical shape of a move carries a great deal of the feeling. Ask how they think about adjustment, and be wary of anybody who hands you a stage model.

If the hard part hit after the boxes were unpacked, relocation psychotherapy is where I help you understand the delay and steady yourself.

Sources

1. NAFSA, Cultural adaptations, culture shock and the curves of adjustment
2. Ward, Okura, Kennedy and Kojima, The U-curve on trial, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 1998
3. Viol and Klasen, U-curve, squiggly lines or nothing at all?, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 2021

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.