Student to Student

Culture Shock at Home

Understanding Your Own Change—the Experience of Return

By Allison Bruce

The traveler who lives immersed in another culture often returns home a different person.

When I was studying in Germany I met a teacher who had lived in America for several years and returned every summer to her home in Germany. The problem was, she now felt it was her parents’ home and not her own. As she sat in a small bar talking with her students, her mood grew pensive. “I hope you’ll never have to experience this,” she said, “but I am afraid that you all will, because you have already started traveling.”

She described how she had spent her life moving between the two countries, not satisfied with either. Regardless of where she was living, it didn’t feel like home. “Home” would be a place that combined the two countries and all that she admired in both of them. She felt doomed to unhappiness because of her transient life, but could think of no way to reconcile her feelings and settle down in one country.

This sense of not belonging is a common feeling among those who have lived abroad. The term “culture shock” is often applied to visitors in a foreign country. What we may not realize, however, is that home can also become quite foreign to people who have experienced another culture. Learning to adapt to another culture forces people to adjust their way of thinking, and that way of thinking can cause problems when they return.

Students, who are given both the freedom and the security to live in another country, usually adjust well to their new environment, but that can become a burden when they return home. “Students who are accepted into the foreign culture have a harder time adjusting when they return," says Richard Page, a professor who specializes in counseling and cross-cultural relations. The student has developed a part of himself that he was not able to explore while in his home country, and now he’s asked to lock up that new identity and go back to his old one. He was accepted as he was in the foreign society, but his own society will not do the same.

Life Here Is “Ordinary”

Emily English, a junior at the Univ. of Georgia, studied at the Institut de Tourraine in France. Coming home for her was  a shock. “Everything is so ordinary when you get back,” said Emily. “I thought, ‘I was at the Eiffel Tower two days ago, and now I’m bagging groceries at Kroger?’“

Emily’s reaction is quite common, according to Bobbi Johnstone-Lathrop, coordinator for Univ. of Georgia study abroad programs. Emily also found that while she gained an appreciation for the things she had in America that she couldn’t get elsewhere, she was also more critical of her home country. “I found some things which disgusted me. Everything is wasteful, cheap, plastic,” said Emily, “We don’t take time to make anything that lasts—everything’s a throwaway.”

Johnstone-Lathrop says that students often have a heightened environmental awareness after living in another country—especially when it’s a country that is poorer and therefore less wasteful. Still, there are many other factors that make readjustment to a home culture difficult. “The bottom line is that they’ve changed,” she said, “They tend to adopt some of the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the host country, and they have to readjust to their own."

The Adjustment Process

Booklets given out to students preparing to study abroad often contain a list of the four phases of adjustment. The first is a “honeymoon phase” when everything is new and different and observed from a distance. After a period of immersion in the culture, the student may enter a phase of hostility toward the culture because he does not completely understand it. Hostility is soon replaced by a stage of coping with the new culture, rather than fighting it. Students can now laugh off some of the same things that earlier left them in tears. Finally, the student feels secure in the new culture, often adopting many of its customs and forms of behavior.

The successful adjustment to a different culture, however, can become an obstacle to fitting in once the student gets home. “Their behaviors have changed by living in that environment, and they find out that it’s different here,” said Johnstone-Lathrop.

What we have to realize, according to Johnstone-Lathrop, is that students develop “new perceptual lenses.” Different interests and a heightened awareness of world issues often arise through experiencing another culture. Students begin to see the world not just from the one-sided perspective of their own country, but from the multi-dimensional perspective of a world-view.

Chris Glass, a business student who studied in Italy, found that this new perspective made her an outsider. “I felt like everyone had stayed in the same place, and I had changed,” she said. There seemed to be no point to many of the social activities she had once participated in and she could no longer relate to the lifestyle that many of her friends led.

Both James Harden and Susan Spears, who studied for a summer in southern Germany, felt that they had not been away long enough to have trouble readjusting. James said that when he returned to the U.S. he welcomed the freedom and convenience he had missed. “I came back into a fast-food culture,” he said, “where you’re able to get in your car and go anywhere and do what you want.”

Even though he doesn’t claim much change after the summer, James does admit to a somewhat different perception of the world. One thing that has stayed with him since this summer is the basis of friendships in Germany. “They’re less superficial . . . no one worries about other people’s perceptions.” In the U.S., he says, people mainly rely on appearance and acquaintances. “It made me rethink some things. “The way I perceive things—the foundation of my thinking structure—has changed.”

It is that change which allows students who have studied abroad to gain more respect for other cultures. Shoko Fukada, a journalism student from Japan who lived in the U.S. for three years, said that before she came here, she never talked with foreigners in Japan. Now, however, she approaches foreigners and tries to make them feel welcome. After having experienced the feeling of alienation in another culture, many students who have studied abroad try to help others adjust to their own culture.

Will Readjustment Get Easier?

As the world becomes more global, can it be hoped that students won’t have such a hard time readjusting? Will society become more accepting of different cultures? Professor Page thinks that may be a little too idealized.

“You can know something intellectually but not on an experiential or feeling level,” he says. Regardless of how global our society becomes, adjustment will still be hard because it is a product of experience. The reason students have trouble readjusting is not so much because of the rigidity of their own society, but because they as individuals have changed.

As Johnstone-Lathrop put it, “It’s very common . . . you’ve kind of become another person.” This new person is one who has to come to terms with adopted values and attitudes before expecting others to do the same. Once he has reconciled the culture he lived in and the culture he calls his own, this student will have grown as an individual and can see the world with a little less cultural bias than before. That in itself is a major step towards becoming a true “world citizen.”

ALLISON BRUCE writes from Athens, GA.