Homesickness: why it arrives late and what helps

What is homesickness?

Homesickness is distress or impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home. That definition comes from Thurber and Walton, writing in the Journal of American College Health.

• Preoccupying thoughts. Its hallmark is that thoughts of home and of the people and things you are attached to keep taking over.
• Anticipated counts. You are homesick in the last days of a visit while you are still standing in your mother’s kitchen.
• How it shows. It appears as low and anxious mood, withdrawal and difficulty focusing on anything other than missing home.
• A concentration problem first. That is why it often feels like poor concentration before it feels like a feeling.
• 2 strains. Reviewing 55 studies, Stroebe, Schut and Nauta argue that home-related loss and new-place stress are different problems with different consequences.

Missing your sister is a different problem from not understanding your payslip. Read more about culture shock.

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. This is my clinical view. Forms, a language, a bank and a route to work pull attention outward, and when the arranging finishes, what waited underneath has room to be felt.

• The arranging ends. The practical work stops absorbing you, and the absence becomes audible.
• Home changes without you. A parent falls ill, a house is sold, or a friend has a second child you have never held.
• Your life here starts working. Your child speaks a language your grandmother did not, or your partner’s family holidays replace the ones you grew up with.
• Permanence. Nothing has gone wrong, something has become permanent, and permanence is when people grieve.

Read more about grieving someone who is still alive.

Is homesickness a kind of grief?

Yes, the research describes homesickness as a separation experience and calls it a mini-grief. Stroebe, Schut and Nauta proposed a dual process model in Clinical Psychological Science, in which the stress of missing home is distinct from the stress the new place produces.

• What treatment should cover. They conclude that help should attend to the missing-home side and to how you handle those feelings, alongside distraction and adjustment.
• What the usual advice leaves out. Join a club, learn the language and make local friends all point at the new place and none point at the loss.
• Unattended loss waits. A loss that nobody addresses does not go quiet.
• The cost of having had somewhere. Missing a place you loved is what happens to people who loved a place, and it is no verdict on the decision you made.

You are homesick because the place you left was real. You are also arriving while you carry that absence, and those are 2 jobs.

What makes homesickness harder in Copenhagen?

The light, the language and circles that formed years before you arrived make it heavier here.

• The light. Winter is long and dark, and a mood you managed in June weighs more in January.
• The language. You live a full life in English and still sit outside the joke at the end of the table.
• Half a beat behind. Being slightly behind a room, week after week, is its own slow tax.
• Closed circles. Many of the people I work with describe arriving into circles formed years earlier, and finding that warmth and availability are different things.
• Age as much as country. Some of that is Denmark, and a good deal of it is arriving as an adult in any city where other people already have their Saturdays booked.

Read more about being lonely even with people around you.

Does homesickness mean you should move home?

Sometimes it does, and the decision is yours. Others find that they were missing a time and not a place, and that the home they ache for stopped existing years ago.

• Wrong moments to decide. Do not decide in the worst month of the winter or in the week after a visit ends.
• Find out which strain is talking. A pull towards specific people is one conversation.
• Push or pull. A push away from a job, a flat or a relationship here follows you to the next country.
• Going back has its own adjustment. Returning is a move too, with its own losses.

Read more about therapy around returning home.

How do you ease homesickness?

You separate the 2 loads and give each its own remedy. Write 2 columns: what I am missing, and what I am struggling with here. Most people find one column much longer than the other, and it is often the one they did not expect.

• Give missing home a fixed place. Sit down once this week and write what you miss in specifics: the bakery on the corner, your sister’s voice, your first language overheard in a supermarket.
• Then the other half. Write one ordinary thing you would like to be true here in a year, and do both halves.
• Keep a real tie. A call where something is actually said does more than an evening of watching other people’s lives go past.
• Repeat one small thing here. A swim on Wednesdays, the same bakery or a class that meets whether or not you feel like it builds belonging through repetition.
• Say it to somebody here. Homesickness kept private is read by the people around you as coldness, which then makes it truer.
• Let a visit be a visit. Asking a trip home to fix the whole year is how people come back flatter than they left.
• Allow both. You are glad you came and sad about what it cost, and requiring only one of those turns an ache into a private argument.

I think you are able to belong in 2 places and be slightly unfinished in both, and that this is a liveable way to live.

These steps fail when the missing has become the shape of your weeks and you are carrying it without telling anyone. That is what the session is for.

Questions people ask

How long does homesickness last after you move abroad?

There is no fixed timetable, and homesickness is no stage that finishes. It comes in waves attached to events, and what changes with time is how much room it takes up.

Why am I homesick years after moving to Copenhagen?

In my clinical view, either the early years were busy arranging a life, or home has changed without you in it. Neither means the move has failed.

Is homesickness the same as culture shock?

No, homesickness is about separation from what you left, and culture shock is about friction with what you arrived in. The first asks for grieving and the second for adjustment.

Does going home more often help with homesickness?

A visit allowed to be a visit helps, and a visit asked to fix the whole year disappoints. Watch whether trips home are becoming the only thing you look forward to, because that shows too little has been built where you are.

When is it more than homesickness?

It is more than homesickness when low mood lasts for weeks, nothing gives you pleasure, and sleep, appetite and work are all slipping. Thurber and Walton note that intense homesickness makes existing mood and anxiety problems worse.

Sources

• Thurber, C. A., and Walton, E. A., Homesickness and adjustment in university students, Journal of American College Health, 2012
• Stroebe, M., Schut, H., and Nauta, M., Homesickness: a systematic review of the scientific literature, Review of General Psychology, 2015
• 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. Nothing is published until I have read it, corrected it and stood behind every clinical statement in it. The professional and clinical judgement is mine and mine alone.