Why am I homesick for a place I chose to leave?

What is homesickness?

Homesickness is the distress of separation from home, whether the separation has already happened or is only coming. What marks it out is preoccupation rather than sadness: home keeps taking over the hour you meant to give to something in front of you¹. You feel low, then restless; your chest and shoulders hold a weight you cannot place; and only afterwards do you reach for an explanation, which lands on the weather or the job.

Inside it sit 2 strains worth keeping apart². Missing your sister is a different problem from not understanding your payslip, and they ask different things of you. Read more about culture shock.

• It counts before you leave. You are homesick in the last days of a visit, while you are still standing in your mother’s kitchen.
• It reaches you as tiredness. Attention that will not hold reads as exhaustion, so missing home is the last thing you suspect.
• Two problems, two remedies. Advice about settling in does nothing for the loss, and grieving the loss will not teach you the payslip.

Why does homesickness arrive years after the move?

It arrives late because the first years of a move keep your attention on arranging a life. That is my clinical judgement rather than a research finding. Forms, a language, a bank, a route to work: all of it pulls you outward, and while you are busy there is nowhere for the missing to sit. When the arranging quietens, it has room.

By then home has changed without you. A parent falls ill, a house is sold, a friend has a second child you have never held. At the same time your life here starts working: your child answers you in Danish, your partner’s family Christmas quietly replaces the one you grew up with. Nothing has gone wrong. Something has become permanent, and permanence is what people grieve. Read more about grieving someone who is still alive.

Is homesickness a kind of grief?

It behaves like grief, and treating it as a settling-in problem is what keeps it alive. One account calls it a mini-grief and describes missing home and coping with the new place as 2 demands pulling at you at once, concluding that help has to attend to what is absent and to how you handle feeling its absence, not only to distraction and adjustment³.

• What the usual advice leaves out. Join a club, learn the language, make local friends: each of those points at the new place and none of them points at the loss.
• Unattended loss does not go quiet. It goes underground and returns as irritability, or as a flatness you hand over to the winter.
• Loyalty works against you. Staying half-arrived here protects what you left, and it leaves less built where you live, which turns the missing up louder.

You are glad you came and sorry about what it cost, in the same week and sometimes in the same hour. Requiring one of those to be false is what turns an ache into a private argument you hold alone.

What makes homesickness heavier in Copenhagen?

The dark months, running your life in a second language and friendship circles that closed years before you arrived each add weight.

• The light. Winter here is long and dark, and a mood you handled in June weighs more in January.
• The language. You run a full working life in English and still sit outside the joke at the end of the table.
• Half a beat behind. Being slightly behind the room, week after week, is a slow tax on your confidence.
• Circles already formed. Clients describe discovering that warmth and availability are different things, and that friendliness in the moment does not become a Saturday.
• Age as much as country. Part of this is Denmark. A good deal of it is arriving as an adult anywhere that other people already have their weeks spoken for.

Treating Danishness as the explanation closes the enquiry early and leaves you nothing to do. The better question is which particular thing you are not getting, and whether it was ever on offer to a newcomer of your age in any city. Read more about being lonely with people around you.

Does homesickness mean you should move home?

Sometimes it does. The difficulty is that the question arrives when the missing is the loudest thing in the room, in the worst week of February or in the days after a visit ends, and a decision taken then is a decision taken by the ache.

So find out which strain is talking. A pull towards particular people is one conversation. A push away from a job or a flat here is another, because a push follows you. Some clients discover that the home they ache for stopped existing years ago and that going back would not hand it to them; for others the pull is precise and worth acting on. Returning is itself a move, with its own adjustment and its own losses, and those arrive later than people expect. Read more about therapy around returning home.

How do you ease homesickness?

You separate the 2 loads and give each one its own remedy, instead of treating the whole thing as a single mood. Write 2 columns: what I am missing, and what I am struggling with here. One column comes out longer, and which one it is tells you where to start.

• Give missing home a fixed place. Write what you miss in specifics: the bakery on the corner, your sister’s voice, your first language overheard in a shop.
• Then write the second column. One ordinary thing you would like to be true here in a year, and do both halves rather than the easier one.
• Keep one real tie. A call where something is actually said does more than an evening watching other people’s lives go past.
• Repeat one small thing here. A weekly swim, as a suggestion rather than a prescription, or a class that meets whether or not you feel like going. Belonging is built by repetition more than by effort.
• Say it out loud to somebody here. Homesickness kept private reads to the people around you as coldness, and their stepping back makes it truer.
• Let a visit be a visit. Asking one trip home to carry the whole year is how people come back flatter than they left.

I think you are able to belong in 2 places and stay slightly unfinished in both, and that this is a liveable way to live rather than a problem waiting to be solved. If you would rather think it through with someone, a session or the free 30-minute call is a reasonable place to start.

None of this is enough when the missing has become the shape of your weeks, or when the pull home is tangled with a job or a relationship here you have stopped being able to look at directly. It is the wrong starting point when what you grieve is a particular person rather than a place, because that asks for grief work and not for settling in better. What stays uncertain is whether the ache eases as you build here or whether it is telling you something about the direction of your life, and that is worth exploring slowly rather than deciding in one bad month.

Questions people ask

Can therapy help with homesickness, or is it something you wait out?

Therapy helps once the missing has stopped moving and started organising your weeks. The work separates grief for what you left from adjustment to where you are, so you stop applying one remedy to both.

What happens in a first session about missing home?

I ask what you miss in specifics, what is hard about being here, and which of the 2 is carrying more of the weight. You leave with a clearer picture of which problem you are actually working on.

Will a therapist tell me to go home or to stay?

No, that decision stays yours. My part is making sure you reach it from somewhere other than the worst week of the winter.

Does it matter that my therapist is not from my country?

What matters more is whether the therapist can hold the fact that you have 2 homes without pushing you to choose one. I work in English with expats and mixed-culture couples in Copenhagen, and much of the detail is recognisable without being shared.

Should I come on my own or with my partner about this?

Come on your own when the ache is yours to sort out, and together when the move itself has become the subject of your arguments. A free 30-minute call is enough to work out which of those fits.

If you miss a home you chose to leave, I give that longing a place to be heard rather than hidden in expat psychotherapy.

Sources

1. Thurber, C. A., and Walton, E. A., Homesickness and adjustment in university students, Journal of American College Health, 2012
2. Stroebe, M., Schut, H., and Nauta, M., Homesickness: a systematic review of the scientific literature, Review of General Psychology, 2015
3. Stroebe, M., Schut, H., and Nauta, M. H., Is homesickness a mini-grief? Development of a dual process model, Clinical Psychological Science, 2016

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.