Moving Abroad: Culture Shock
Culture Shock Stage 3: Anger
Attempts to deny have failed. Now the negative feelings come flying out in ugly chunks. You begin to dwell on the negative aspects of life in the host country. You feel unsure, anxious about the future. You feel like you don’t deserve this; your experience abroad should be a daily diet of PBS-like discovery.
I’ve found in myself that this stage is often triggered by some bad day-like event that instead of seeing as one of those things, I instead blame on the host country. Trains can run late anywhere in the world, but if you find yourself saying “Those darn [INSERT DEROGATORY TERM FOR HOST COUNTRY PEOPLE] can’t even get a train to run on time” you are thick into this stage.
This is an important time, because, with younger kids for sure, their view of the world around them is greatly influenced by your own reactions. Your five year old will not know whether or not the cashier shortchanged you unless you tell her. Your youngest will not know that traffic is bad and “they all drive like maniacs” without you mentioning it. More importantly, your child will not make the connection that things that make your day a pain in the neck are obviously designed by the host country explicitly just to make life harder for foreigners.
We are all human and so asking us to not get angry at things is more useless than eating ice cream with a spoon stuck between your toes. As a parent, your goal might be to acknowledge hardships and difficulties for your kids, but not to “conclude” that these troubles are aimed at you specifically, or that if only you were all at home there would be no trouble.
Every place, from a happy little small town to some gritty urban sprawl has its good and bad points, most of which were there long before you arrived and will be there long after you leave. In an awful lot of places the traffic is terrible, and people do seem to go out of their way to try and run you out of your lane. Acknowledge this, complain about it, but don’t use it as an excuse to build a wall of anger between you and the host country. Its hard, but without this perspective keeping, you and your kids are not going to want to stay.
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