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

What is reverse culture shock?

Reverse culture shock, also called re-entry shock, is the adjustment difficulty of returning to your own country after living somewhere else. Reviewing the research on cultural transitions, Nan Sussman described distress during repatriation as near ubiquitous.

• The ordinary case. Difficulty on return is what usually happens, and ease is the exception.
• Identity more than country. Sussman argues that living elsewhere changes how you understand yourself.
• 4 kinds of shift. She sorts those changes into subtractive, additive, affirmative and intercultural.
• You carry it home. You come back with the shift, and the country you left knows nothing about it.

You did not come back to the place you left, and you did not come back as the person who left it. Both are ordinary.

Why is going home harder than leaving?

Going home is harder because nobody prepares you for it and nobody expects it to be difficult. In a review of the re-entry literature, Betina Szkudlarek writes that re-entry remains neglected and underestimated next to the far larger literature on going abroad.

• Real effects. The studies that exist point to effects on psychological wellbeing, social readjustment and cultural identity.
• Leaving had a script. The move out was chosen, rehearsed and admired, with preparation, sympathy and a story to tell.
• Returning has none. The move back is quieter and arrives without the allowances made for you the first time.
• The questions stop. People assume you have arrived, so they stop asking how you are after a fortnight.
• Foreign without permission. Abroad, feeling foreign made sense to everyone, and at home the same feeling arrives with no explanation attached.

You are allowed to have wanted to come home and to find it hard once you were there. Read more about culture shock.

What changed while you were away?

3 things changed, 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 has a gap in it the size of you.
• Your picture of home changed. The version you missed was partly a memory and no live feed.
• A grief inside the return. Part of what you grieve on the way back is the version of home you had been carrying.
• Parts you think you must give up. You decide that some of who you became abroad is not allowed here, or that the people you love will not allow it.

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. The research on re-entry is thinner than the research on going out, and the studies use different groups, measures and lengths of time abroad.

• What the evidence shows. Laura Altweck and Tara Marshall studied 248 returnees of many nationalities.
• Heritage identity helps. Stronger identification with the heritage culture went with better psychological readjustment.
• Conflict costs. A felt conflict between the 2 cultures went with worse readjustment on stress and anxiety.
• An association only. Those are associations in one sample and no forecast about you.
• The same size of job. You spent years becoming the person who lived there, and becoming a person who lives here again takes as long.

Does reverse culture shock apply if you are leaving Copenhagen?

Yes, and leaving Denmark after years here is an ordinary event.

• If you are going. Treat the return as a move in its own right and not as the end of one.
• Plan for the landing. Expect the months after arrival to ask more of you than the packing did.
• If you are staying. In my experience a friend who has gone back is at their loneliest some months after the goodbye, when the messages have stopped.
• If 2 of you are deciding. A return that one partner wants more than the other needs its own conversation before the boxes are packed.

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. Finding the return hard is no failure of gratitude and no evidence that the years abroad were a mistake.

• Say the true sentence. Tell one person “I am finding this harder than I expected”, which does more than a month of pretending.
• Keep one live thread. Keep a language, a recipe or a friend you actually telephone from the place you left.
• Do not pick a side. The finding on cultural conflict points the same way: disowning one of your 2 cultures makes the return harder.
• Routine before meaning. Settle where you buy bread, where you walk and who you see on a Tuesday.
• Drop the wrong question. For the next month, stop asking yourself whether you are glad to be back.
• Find the nearest honest version. Name the single ordinary thing you miss most, a walk, a market or a way of talking on a Friday, and find its nearest honest version where you are now.
• Use the supermarket moment. Treat the moment when the familiar feels strange as information about what has changed in you.

In my experience meaning follows routine far more often than the other way round. Give it longer than seems reasonable.

These steps fail when low mood stays for weeks and the ordinary week will not rebuild. That is what the session is for.

Questions people ask

Is reverse culture shock a real thing, or am I being dramatic?

It is a documented pattern with a research literature behind it. Sussman describes distress during repatriation as near ubiquitous.

Why do I feel more foreign at home than I did abroad?

Abroad everyone expected you to feel foreign, and at home nobody has given that permission. The feeling has not grown, and the scaffolding around it has gone.

Should I just move back abroad?

For some people that is a legitimate answer. First settle whether you are moving towards something or away from the discomfort of the return, because the discomfort travels with you.

When is it more than reverse culture shock?

In my clinical view it is more than re-entry when low mood does not lift, sleep and appetite stay gone and you are unable to function at work or at home. Re-entry difficulty explains a great deal and does not explain everything.

Does therapy help with reverse culture shock?

Yes, and most of the work concerns which version of yourself you are trying to be now. It also covers what you are quietly grieving and how to stop treating an ordinary adjustment as a personal failure.

Sources

• Sussman, N. M., The dynamic nature of cultural identity throughout cultural transitions: why home is not so sweet, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2000
• Szkudlarek, B., Reentry: a review of the literature, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2010
• 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. 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.