Navigating Reverse Culture Shock: Understanding the Unexpected Homecoming

Yes, reverse culture shock is real and often more challenging than initial culture shock because it's unexpected. When returning home after years abroad, you discover that both you and your home culture have changed significantly. This creates feelings of alienation, frustration when friends show little curiosity about your experiences, and difficulty applying skills gained abroad. Unlike culture shock in a foreign country, reverse culture shock catches people off guard precisely because they assume coming home will be easy.

Understanding that this is a normal transition phase helps you handle the emotional journey home more effectively.

The Unexpected Emotional Journey Home

Just like expatriation, repatriation has psychological phases that are unexpected and daunting. Most notably, encountering reverse culture shock when returning home is a surprising situation overlooked by both expats returning and their businesses calling them home. Unlike initial culture shock in a foreign country, reverse culture shock is far more subtle and difficult to manage precisely because it's unexpected and unanticipated.

Understanding Culture Shock vs Reverse Culture Shock

Like culture shock, reverse culture shock has distinct stages, forming a u-shaped curve. At first, you may feel excited to return home: seeing friends and family, wearing the rest of your wardrobe, eating at your favorite restaurants. This initial euphoria eventually wears off. That's when you find yourself feeling out of place in your own culture. This is reverse culture shock: the bottom of the curve and often the roughest part. The good news is that although it takes time, you'll gradually adjust back toward feeling comfortable with where and whom you are.

How Reverse Culture Shock Happens

Expatriates learn during their time in a host country to behave and think like locals to greater or lesser degrees. By the time most international assignments end, several years may have passed, providing significant time to learn new behavior patterns and thought processes necessary for their host country. Expats returning home are shocked into the realization that they've changed substantially. This usually happens upon encountering their home culture. Both they and their home culture have changed, and this is often the first time expats experience any of these changes.

As one intercultural specialist explains, expats become less familiar with their home stomping grounds. Returning brings a blanket of fog on perception: it's like walking around in a setting that's familiar but still unreal. Everything looks almost right, but something feels off.

What Reverse Culture Shock Really Feels Like

Being an expat creates such a lengthy and deep international experience that it brings great professional and personal changes. You see old norms and values from your home country from a fresh perspective. Expats and their families see things in a new light, something like Dorothy going from black and white to Technicolor.

Expats frequently feel frustrated or confused when close friends and family show little curiosity about their experiences. After all, they lived in a foreign land for years with new sights, sounds, and exotic smells to explore. Top re-entry challenges include:

• Boredom and restlessness
• Feeling like no one wants to listen
• Inability to explain your experiences
• Reverse homesickness
• Changed relationships
• People perceiving negative changes in you
• People misunderstanding you
• Feelings of alienation
• Inability to apply new knowledge and skills
• Compartmentalization of your experience

Strategies for Managing Reverse Culture Shock

Share Your Experience

Although you might feel like no one wants to listen, there will be close ones supporting you with open ears and honest interest. Start a blog, contact friends you made as an expat, or write articles. Find communities from the country you moved from and meet them socially. Find new ways to incorporate your urge to share stories with an audience who will listen intently.

Maintain Your International Style

Things might be different, and people including yourself might have changed, but this doesn't mean you should give up character and interests learned abroad just to fit in. Maintain your lifestyle, from the food you ate abroad to your evolving personality. If you worked in leadership while abroad, keep an open and encouraging mindset in your new position.

Remember that flexibility and expecting the unexpected helped you through difficult times abroad. This same attitude helps you back home. Reverse culture shock is a transition and important learning experience. Use this time to rebuild relationships, interests, and your worldly self. Keeping an international perspective is a special skill not to take for granted or put away. Read international magazines, foreign newspapers, or access news from your host country.

Ask for Training

From an occupational perspective, training courses help not just the employee but the entire family. Involve your human resources department at least six months before return so the company can ensure a position for you that values your new skills. Repatriation training helps your entire family adjust to the fact that you've all changed significantly. Training assesses and values those changes and helps you see how your home country changed while you were abroad.

Moving Forward

The transition requires patience and an open mind. Careful preparation eases the bumps on the ride home for your entire family. Brace yourself for the shock and enjoy the unique thrills of seeing your home from this different perspective. Reverse culture shock is temporary, and with intentional engagement and support systems, you can successfully integrate the best of your international experience with your return home.

Visit ExpatsList for more expat resources, check out our blog section for repatriation guides, or add your business to our directory.