The Expatriate’s Alienation: A Guide to Overcoming Feelings of Homesickness

[Editor’s Note: The following post is by Justin O’Connell, TDV correspondent]

You’re somewhere new and unfamiliar, far removed from the localities and situations to which you are adapted. It doesn’t matter if you’re an expatriate in a new land or a new college student packed like a sardine in your first dorm, the feeling of homesickness is an acute feeling of alienation and uncertainty. Your past cannot inform you of your future, at least at first, and you feel a bit out at sea. How far out depends on how alien your new surroundings are and how well you did your homework.                                        

Homesickness was mentioned in the Bible’s Old Testament book of Exodus and in Homer’s “Odyssey.” Odysseus wept and rolled on the ground in misery as he thought of home. Homesickness happens to individuals from all walks of life away from home – athletes, actors and musicians alike. Even the most adventurous expatriate gets homesick.

Documented cases began cropping up in the 17^th century when Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician, diagnosed a young man on his deathbed with homesickness.  After he was released to return home, the story goes, his condition immediately improved. Early European settlers in North America wrote of their longing for their faraway homes, and often displayed such longings publicly. Their feelings fill diaries, letters, and histories revealing that a yearning for Europe was a deeply embedded part of colonial life.  References to homesickness adorn journals and letters, and Americans acknowledged the emotion as a widespread social malady during the American Revolution War. Of the thousands of men who left home to fight the war, countless soldiers complained of homesickness. As the frontier expanded due to resources such as canals, steamboats and railroads, many Americans found out that the change for which they had longed brought them a sense of dislocation and homesickness.         

Mainstream psychology has moved towards identifying what is commonly known as homesickness as not just a mélange of feelings possibly rooted in our instincts of self-preservation, but, instead “a distinct adjustment disorder with identifiable symptoms.” (Yep, feelings are disorders according to the most-sterile of western medical thought.)

In a paper published in the magazine Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, homesickness is defined as “distress and functional impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home and attachments to objects such as parents.” Sufferers experience anxiety, sadness and nervousness, and, most distinctly, obsess over thoughts of home.                                               

If homesick, you might feel as though your old friends and families are moving on without you, as friends get married, have children and so on.  But, despite its name, homesickness is not necessarily about home. It’s also definitely not a disorder or illness.  It is a part of our survival instincts. It’s our selves telling us to get our things together, to start building something that resembles a life. This means new acquaintances, friends and habits.  Quite possibly, also, a new language, which can be a daunting thought.

Homesickness arises from our instinctive need for love, protection and security, all of which are feelings usually associated not only with home, but familiar places.  When our physical and emotional contact with individuals lessens, we can feel less loved and more exposed to danger. We then naturally long for the familiar. It is your old normal that you are missing – your routine or the intimate knowledge of social and regional space you don’t have in a new place.  Any sort of new handicap picked up in a new land – such as language hurdles and cultural nuances- can make you long for home.

Depending on one’s outlook, new surroundings can be exciting or scary. How you adapt to your new surroundings depends upon a number of factors related to your upbringing and life experiences, as well as your immediate feelings on what has brought you to your new life.  The novelty of a new place can wear off quick or over weeks and even months. To be certain, some people do not experience homesickness at all.  A lot of it has to do with how you choose to relate to your new home, which then raises questions of language proficiency, contacts in the city or town where you are, and how at peace you are with having left your prior home.  Once homesickness settles in, if not handled appropriately and healthily, you can succumb to lying on your bed bemoaning your choices and missing old friends and families, doing nothing you came to do. Your potentially new relationships could suffer, as you grow listless and uninterested in your new social life. Your new friends and acquaintances will pick up on this, and you risk growing even more isolated.                                                                                                                  

By filling your days up with fulfilling and useful activities, an expatriate growing homesick can stem a lot of the feelings of loneliness and isolation. Even if money is tight, equipped with your native tongue you can barter languages with a native. That’s what I did when I moved to Brazil from the US three years ago. Having never learned Portuguese, navigating around my new town, where few spoke English, was difficult without the necessary language skills. So, three days a week I met with an English student who, for one hour taught me a bit of Portuguese, and afterwards for an hour took my crash English course.

It is very important to fill your old routine with a new routine once you arrive. I took my initial months in Brazil as an opportunity to write, and I wrote a lot of material from the balcony of the hostel where I was living while rolling cigarettes. I can now look back at those nights under a new, Brazilian sky with affinity.  The ache and longing for the familiar, friends, siblings, parents and grandparents does not have to define whole periods of one’s life.  An important way of dealing with the transition is ensuring you stay in touch with those people with whom you feel you need to stay in contact.  With Skype you can have a teleconference with a friend or family member pretty much whenever you want.                                                        

Homesickness is experienced similarly by 8 year-olds at summer camp, an 18 year-old university freshman or 28 year-old attending medical school in an unfamiliar country. There are not too many noticeable differences in the length and intensity of homesickness between the sexes.  The younger the individual, generally, the more intense the feelings of homesickness can grow.

Homesick emotions can be felt strongly for as many as a few weeks. Depending on the individual, the distress and paralysis in a homesick individual can become extreme. Homesickness can negatively affect an individual’s health. It can become hard to eat, sleep or interact with others. Such extreme symptoms are very, very rare, but it has been recorded. The youth are at the most risk for suffering extreme homesickness, so if you are planning on expatriating with whole family in tow, be mindful of the children’s feelings of alienation.

Homesickness is a purge of sort for the individual.  While living through a difficult separation, your mind forces itself to cope and prepare to learn a new way of life. It is understandable for many to experience homesickness, but to deny it by taking the next flight home is akin to the expatriate’s version of the banker-bailout.             

Overall, it is an emotion that you ought not be scared of. Like all emotions, it comes and goes.  When you are feeling homesick, you might feel as though something is wrong, but nothing is wrong.  It should be expected that while embarking on a new journey you will long for your old lifestyle.  The feelings of homesickness are a sign of you beginning to adapt, and over time they will grow less acute.

To handle homesickness, it is important to not get too carried away in thoughts of home, as these can become a sort of addiction that arrests you. Instead:

1.       Think about the wonderful new experiences and lessons that being abroad is bringing you.

2.       Make sure you are ready for real time contact with your friends and families back in your old hometown or city. Sometimes writing is better, as real time contact can bring a lot of overwhelming feelings to the surface. To be sure, real time contact should not be a problem with most who are abroad and removed from their old lives. 

3.       Find your new friends! Meet a nice boyfriend or girlfriend so you can learn a new language the most efficient way possible: under the sheets.

4.       Don’t decide that if you can’t take the homesickness that you are going to go home. Instead, stay focused on the likelihood of your success in the new environment. Remember why you came there in the first place.

5.       Stay engaged in the now. Soak in your surroundings. Go out with new acquaintances. Adapt to your new job, if you must take on a new job.  Forget the homesickness feelings and party or study. Be sure to do what you do.

6.       Establish a new routine.  It might be a lot like your old routine.

7.       Write home. There’s nothing wrong with an ongoing email dialogue with friends and family from your old land.

8.       Talk to someone. Perhaps there are other expatriates you know who potentially have had similar experiences.

9.       Practice time away from home.  If you haven’t departed for your expat days, perhaps spending extended vacations away from home before you go can help soften the shock of a new land.

Suck it up and take advantage of your wonderful new phase in life. You will see many strange, exciting, breathtaking and totally foreign things, and this is excellent. The memories you make will turn you into a better person, a more complete individual, with a better understanding of your place in the world. Chances are, if you’re a North American, your very first trip abroad will separate you from vast swathes of your fellow countrymen and women, who have never even stepped foot out of their own familiar hometowns and cities.

Virtually from the outset, you will have a deeper understanding of the way of the world. And, if you end up learning another language, you will probably trip out at certain points of the journey on new ways of seeing the world. Within languages lie keys to cultures that are quite different from yours.  Remain vigilant and pretty soon you will come to understand that the homesickness was simply you coming to terms with the new you. This is an exciting transition, and everything is going to be okay: the sky is still blue, the birds are still chirping and the sun is still beating down on you.  Plus, from a political risk perspective, you might be much safer in your new home than in your old home (for instance, the US), no matter what your homesickness seems to be telling you.

Justin O’Connell joined the Dollar Vigilante crew in the aftermath of his own incarceration amid the bright, blinding lights of police state Las Vegas. Justin brings his own brand of blowback to blow up in the face of tyrants everywhere. Having graduated with honors (despite his irreverent, anti-establishmentarianism) and a Bachelor’s degree in History, Justin is   familiar with the makeup of states, and how over time and space they  all resemble each other with tiny concessions made based on the cultures of the world. His mission is to expose them through unrelenting vigilantism, never becoming a shadow of his former self.  No FEMA camp or firing line can remake his mind, and 2+2 will always equal 4, as long as he roams the planet. He also writes at the Dollar Vigilante-inspired site, Silver Vigilante.

When I first came to Acapulco last year it was mostly to hang out with Jeff.  While we had a great time, I was there only as a tourist. When I came this year, however, it was more of an actual “move”…a testing of the waters for more permanent expatriation. I had even more fun with Jeff and the TDV crew which had grown in size in the course of the year. But after a few weeks, my sense of misplacement grew. I started missing the way of life I’d had in the US. I’d traveled and lived all over the US and never felt out of place, but I had always been in the same general culture. Sure, some places suited me better than others (Southeast was the worst, Midwest was the best), but it was all still the US with all the trappings and conveniences I was used to. Mexico was something else entirely. My Spanish consists of a half dozen words that I have trouble remembering so it was hard to make new friends, resulting in frustration. And I kept missing subtle cultural clues that kept others slightly on edge around me.

These are all things that can be overcome with time and with desire. I’m looking forward to trying this out in other countries that will suit me more closely than Mexico. Sadly, countries where I’d fit in best are in the declining Western World. And part of the secret to being a happy expat is to choose someplace that makes you feel like you are coming home, not going into exile. Jeff, for example, has always hated the long, bitterly cold winters and gray skies of northern Canada. When he arrived in Acapulco, it was like his body had finally found what it had been missing. I feel the same way about colder climes with gray days! And I was born in what some would consider a tropical island paradise. Yet I love autumn, winter, overcast skies, rain and snow.

You must also consider if you like the look of a place…the architecture and the people. But the last vital key to successful and enjoyable expatriation is to arm yourself with as much information as possible from people like you who have already been living there. Let the hard-won experience of other expats be your guide.  Access to knowledge like that – especially from people who will interact with you in real time and answer your specific questions and concerns – is truly invaluable. That’s why we urge you to sign up here for our TDV Newsletter. As a paid subscriber you will have access to the unique expat resources of TDV Groups.

We highly recommend leaving the US. But we want you to leave prepared…and as sure as you can possibly be that where you’re headed is indeed the right place for you. If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent countless hours trying to glean some information from various expat sites devoted to the places you have in mind to try out. But you’ve also probably come away with very little in the way of a better feel about the location in question.

That’s why we’re so excited about our new TDV Groups. Not only will we grow it into your one-stop location for just about every corner of the globe…but it will also be full of like-minded people who are ready to answer exactly the kinds of questions you will have. This will be a community with the same concerns you have, including living freer and finding and creating new opportunities to build wealth. Join them now by subscribing to the TDV newsletter here.

Regards,

Gary Gibson
Editor, The Dollar Vigilante 

The Dollar Vigilante is a free-market financial newsletter focused on covering all aspects of the ongoing financial collapse. The newsletter has news, information and analysis on investments for safety and for profit during the collapse including investments in gold, silver, energy and agriculture commodities and publicly traded stocks. As well, the newsletter covers other aspects including expatriation, both financially and physically and news and info on health, safety and other ways to survive the coming collapse of the US Dollar safely and comfortably. You can sign up to receive our FREE monthly newsletter, our Basic Newsletter ($15/month) or our Full Newsletter ($25/month) with specific stock recommendations and updates at our Subscriptions page on our website at DollarVigilante.com.