Remember Your Initial Culture Shock
Remember what it was like those first few weeks and months coming to your host country? It was new, exciting, often confusing, and always changing. And while your whole year may have been exciting, it wasn’t always pleasant. You probably became irritated with, and even hostile to, your host culture when the deeper differences between your culture and their culture became apparent. As you began to develop real language skills, and you better understood fundamentally different cultural values, you began the slow process of adapting. Eventually, maybe only well into your stay, you began to realize how you could really fit in ‑ adapting fairly well to your adopted culture while maintaining your own native cultural identity. And now, just when it is getting good, the year is almost over and you will have to go “home”.Â
Most people who live abroad for an extended time go through similar successive stages of culture shock. These stages are generally recognized as being:
- Initial Excitement or Euphoria
- Irritability and Hostility
- Slow and Gradual Adaptation
- Eventual Adjustment and Biculturalism
 If your experience was anything like this, you learned that culture shock is not just adjusting to jet lag and different food. It is an on‑going process of developing increased cultural competence, by being “shocked” by differences, adjusting to them, learning new skills, and eventually adapting. And when you prepared for going abroad, you had some expectation that you would experience culture shock. It is not possible (or even desirable) to avoid culture shock, but at least anticipating it made it somewhat easier ‑and kept you from thinking it was all your fault or all the new culture’s fault.
