Culture Shock: Can It Be Avoided?

Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Life
3 comments

Living abroad and never getting culture shock is like being an entrepreneur and never freaking out. Or organising a wedding and never having a meltdown.

It’s a nice little fantasy. You really want to believe it can be done. You go to cross-cultural training sessions and language classes. You collect travel books and online resources as if they were amulets that will ward off the big bad culture shock.

Unfortunately, information and knowledge alone are not enough. Not if you don’t know how to process them on the emotional, internal level.

No matter how well prepared, well travelled, or open-minded you are, culture shock can strike at any time, sometimes triggered by the most minor incidents – and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Or is there?

The way I see it, there’s nothing you can do to prevent culture shock from happening.

If you are to be fully engaged, fully present to the experience of living abroad, sooner or later you’ll come into contact with values, behaviours or beliefs that clash with your own. Your emotions will be triggered and – bam! Culture shock.

I do believe, though, that there are ways to minimise your emotional response to culture shock. In other words, you still get culture shock, but it’s not such a big deal. It doesn’t send you reeling for weeks or months at a time.

Hint: the solution isn’t to “do your homework” or “keep an open mind” (I’m waging a war against oversimplified, overly general expat advice – wish me luck!). And it’s not to cling to what’s familiar either – quite the opposite.

But more on that in a future post. I’d love to hear your opinions first.

What do you think? Can culture shock be avoided? Can it be softened? What strategies have you found to deal with it?

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Emmanuelle

Image by get down (top) and vapour (bottom), both via Flickr Creative Commons