Reverse culture shock: why going home is hard and what helps

What is reverse culture shock?

Reverse culture shock, or re-entry, is the difficulty of returning to your own country after living somewhere else. The distress people feel on coming back is close to universal, and what produces it is cultural identity rather than the country itself¹. Living elsewhere rebuilds how you eat, argue, work and spend a Sunday, and that rebuilt self is what comes home with you.

Going away has been studied closely. Coming back has had far less attention, which is part of why nobody hands you a map for it². You did not come back to the place you left, and you did not come back as the person who left it. Those 2 facts account for most of what feels wrong in the first months.

• Identity more than place. What unsettles you is less the country than the question of who you are allowed to be in it.
• Nobody at home saw it happen. The change arrived gradually, in a place your family and friends were not in, so there is no shared record of it.
• An easy return is the exception. Finding it hard is the ordinary case and not a sign that you came back to the wrong life.

Why is going home harder than leaving?

Leaving had a script. The move out was chosen, rehearsed and admired: preparation, sympathy, a story to tell at dinner. The move back is quieter. People take it that you have arrived the moment your boxes are in the hall, and the asking stops about a fortnight later.

What is left is feeling foreign with no permission to feel it. Abroad, your strangeness made sense to everybody, including you. Here it turns up with no explanation attached, so you play it down. You keep the stories short, you stop mentioning the other life, and the better you manage that, the less anyone meets the person who came back. You wanted to come home, and you feel most foreign now that you are here. Read more about culture shock.

What changed while you were away?

3 things changed while you were away, and they are easy to mistake for one another.

• You changed. Your way of eating, arguing, working and spending a Sunday was rebuilt somewhere else and came home in your luggage.
• Home changed. Friends had children, moved, or built a week that no longer holds a gap the size of you.
• Your picture of home changed. The version you missed was partly a memory, and a memory keeps no record of the dull parts.
• A grief sits inside the return. Some of what you mourn is the home you were carrying rather than the one you landed in.
• Parts you put away. You decide that some of who you became abroad has no place here, and you make that decision without ever testing whether anyone would mind.

Read more about growing apart in a relationship.

How long does reverse culture shock last?

There is no reliable timetable, and I would be wary of anyone who offers you one. What a survey of returnees does suggest is that identifying strongly with the culture you have come back to goes with an easier readjustment, while feeling your 2 cultural identities in conflict goes with more stress and anxiety and a harder time overall³. That was one group, measured at one moment: it tells you what went together there, not what will happen to you.

• Associations, not forecasts. A study of that shape can show what goes with what. It cannot tell you when this will lift.
• The same size of job. You spent years becoming the person who lived there, and becoming somebody who lives here again is work of that order.

Does reverse culture shock apply if you are leaving Copenhagen?

Yes. Leaving Denmark after years here asks as much of you as arriving did, and it asks it later than you expect.

• If you are going. Treat the return as a move in its own right rather than the end of one, and plan for the landing and not only the packing.
• Expect the lag. The months after arrival ask more of you than the last weeks here do.
• If you are staying. In my experience a friend who has gone back is at their loneliest some months after the goodbye, once the messages have thinned out.
• If 2 of you are deciding. A return that one of you wants more than the other needs its own conversation before any boxes are packed. The weight of that choice does not divide evenly, and treating it as though it does stores up resentment.

Read more about long distance relationships.

How do you ease reverse culture shock once you are back?

You rebuild the small structure of an ordinary week first and let the meaning follow it. Finding the return hard is no failure of gratitude, and no evidence that the years away were a mistake.

• Say the true sentence to one person. Telling somebody you are finding this harder than you expected does more than a month of managing it alone.
• Keep one live thread. A language, a recipe, or a friend you actually telephone from the place you left.
• Do not disown either side. Putting away one of your 2 cultures makes the return heavier rather than simpler.
• Routine before meaning. Settle where you buy bread, where you walk and who you see on a Tuesday, and do that before deciding what the return means.
• Drop the wrong question. Stop asking yourself whether you are glad to be back. That question measures the hour you ask it in and nothing else.
• Find the nearest honest version. Name the ordinary thing you miss most, a walk, a market, a way of talking on a Friday, and find its closest equivalent where you are.
• Use the supermarket moment. Treat the moment when the familiar feels strange as information about what has changed in you, rather than as a sign that you no longer belong.

In my clinical judgement meaning follows routine rather than the other way round, and what people are least warned about is how long that takes.

None of this is enough when the ordinary week will not rebuild however carefully you set it up, when the flatness has outlasted the practical upheaval, or when the return has become the standing argument in your relationship. It is the wrong starting point when what you are carrying is a loss that happened while you were away and was never properly mourned, because that asks for grief work and not for settling in. What stays uncertain is whether the pull back abroad is a real direction or the quickest way out of an uncomfortable year, and that is worth examining slowly, in a session or on the free 30-minute call, rather than booking a flight to find out.

Questions people ask

Does therapy help with reverse culture shock, or does it just take time?

Therapy helps once the return has stopped being a transition and started being your mood. Time rebuilds the week, and the work is about which version of yourself you are trying to be now that you are back.

What would a first session be about?

I ask what you have stopped doing since you came back, and who in your life has met the person you became abroad. That locates the problem faster than talking about the country does.

Is it worth starting therapy if I might move abroad again?

Yes, and starting before that decision is better than starting after it. The work separates moving towards something from moving away from the discomfort of being back.

I feel ungrateful for struggling with a return I chose. Can I bring that?

That sentence is one of the more useful things to bring, because the guilt is what keeps the difficulty hidden. Nothing about it has to be justified before the work starts.

Should my partner come too, if the move back was a joint decision?

Come together when the return itself has become the argument, and on your own when what you are sorting out is your own footing. A free 30-minute call is enough to work out which of those fits.

If going home has felt stranger than leaving, I work with exactly this in repatriation psychotherapy, online or in person.

Sources

1. Sussman, N. M., The dynamic nature of cultural identity throughout cultural transitions: why home is not so sweet, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2000
2. Szkudlarek, B., Reentry: a review of the literature, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2010
3. Altweck, L., and Marshall, T. C., When you have lived in a different culture, does returning home not feel like home?, PLOS ONE, 2015

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.