Living abroad is glamourous and exciting until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, chances are culture shock is to blame.

As a complex phenomenon experienced by those who relocate to a new community or country, culture shock is a popular and compelling topic on travel and corporate relocation blogs.

Culture shock’s popularity, however, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rethink it.

What is culture shock?

Coined by Canadian anthropologist, Kalvero Oberg, in 1954, culture shock refers to the experiences a person goes through after moving to an environment that differs from their place of origin. It can occur when an individual(s) moves to a new country or a new community within the same country.

Though culture shock is not a clinical diagnosis, it falls under psychology’s transition shock umbrella, where the loss of familiar social signs and cues invoke a myriad of psychological and physiological symptoms as the traveler adjusts to a new locale, including:

Disorientation, depression, and anxiety
Insomnia and daytime sleepiness (from disrupted circadian rhythms)
Homesickness
Irritability and emotional dysregulation
Fixation on food, drinking water, and living space cleanliness
Dissociation, or the disconnection from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity

The Current Culture Shock Model

The graph that launched 1000 blog posts.

Oberg outlined four culture shock stages in her 1954 presentation to the Women’s Club of Rio de Janeiro. These stages are still used by cross-cultural psychologists today:

1. Honeymoon. Culture shock’s first phase. Associated with positive emotions, when everything – language, culture, food, and people – feels new, exciting, and fascinating. The honeymoon phase varies in duration, and is especially intense if travelers receive high levels of positive attention from the host culture’s locals.

The honeymoon phase lasted for three months while I lived in Georgia. It was intense for me, as the country’s dramatic mountain vistas, intriguing history, and generous locals provided a whirlwind of inspiration and joy.

2. Frustration. The toughest stage, where travelers experience frustration with their host country’s idiosyncrasies and the inconveniences they cause. Frustration with the host culture is often followed by regression, where the traveler idealizes and longs for their origin culture.

During my tenure in Georgia, a frequent source of contention among Anglosphere expats was Georgian concepts of time. From bus timetables to dinner dates, time was polychronic for Georgians, flexible, intangible, and imprecise. What was laissez-faire for Georgians, however, was anxiety and frustration-inducing for my monochronic Anglosphere peers and me; we coped with it by ranting, and binge eating Snickers bars along the way.

3. Adjustment. As the slow uphill climb from the trough of frustration, adjustment is the longest culture shock stage. It occurs as the traveler adapts to their new home and rationally copes with the curve balls it throws. Language acquisition and community involvement are key ingredients in successfully moving through the adjustment stage.

Though I never completely adjusted to Georgian life’s harder aspects (such as traditional gender roles), holding fireside conversations with Georgian women and volunteering to paint murals in local public schools helped soothe my anxious and alienated feelings.

4. Acceptance. After months or years of navigating frustration and adjustment, the traveler finally arrives at acceptance, where one’s foreign environment feels normal and routine. Language fluency, mature social networks, and healthy coping mechanisms are this stage’s hallmarks. Acceptance, however, doesn’t always have a happy ending; it has three main outcomes:

Rejection, where the traveler completely rejects the host culture and holds fast to their own. Associated with social isolation. 60% of expatriates become rejectors.

Adoption, where the traveler rejects their identity in favor of fully accepting the host culture. Expatriate “adopters” tend to live in their host country indefinitely. Affecting 10% of expatriates, this is the rarest outcome.

Cosmopolitanism, where the traveler accepts a unique blend of positive aspects from their host and native cultures. 30% of expatriates belong to this group.

Out of the 20-odd Anglosphere volunteers I befriended in Georgia, only three became adopters. The traits they had in common were exceptional language acquisition abilities, psychological hardiness, and infrequent traumatic encounters with the host culture. These three volunteers – two of which are women – still live in Georgia today.

The Culture Shock Model’s Limitations

Culture shock doesn’t look the same for everyone. Photo by Henry & Co. on Unsplash

While the above stages are entertaining on paper, Oberg’s model meets its limit when applied the broad spectrum of human experience.

There are three reasons for this:

1. Eurocentric

Too many travel and global mobility professionals regurgitate Oberg’s culture shock model on their blogs and call it a day without stopping to consider its first limitation – it’s Eurocentric.

In 1954, the culture shock model’s birthdate, travel and the opportunity to expatriate was limited to a privileged few. White, wealthy, straight, Christian, neurotypical, able-bodied, and Western was Oberg’s unspoken expatriate phenotype when she gave her presentation, because that phenotype was du rigueur within her presentation’s mid-century context.

Travel has grown inclusive, diverse, and accessible since 1954; the current culture shock model, however, remains stuck in the past. It reflects a limited experience spectrum and thus cannot be used to accurately measure or respond to the needs and experiences of travel’s diverse present and future.

2. Simplified Adjustment Process

The acceptance phase has three outcomes, but how do these outcomes form? The answer lies in examining the adjustment phase, which is more nuanced than it appears in Oberg’s model. In fact, adjustment is a small part of a broader social and psychological process called acculturation.

Acculturation has four distinct forms, which depend on the host culture’s attitude towards outsiders, the traveler’s native culture, and the traveler’s decision to adopt or reject their new culture. Note that, like the acceptance phase, not all acculturation forms have a happy ending:

Assimilation, where the traveler adopts the host culture’s norms over their own, sometimes by force.

Separation, when the traveler rejects their host culture in favor of preserving their own. Associated with ethnic enclaves.
Integration, a blend of norms from the host and origin culture. Out of all four acculturation forms, integration is associated with the most success.
Marginalization, where the traveler completely rejects both the host and origin culture. This acculturation form is associated with the least success.

3. Linear

Honeymoon. Irritability. Acceptance. Adaptation.

These are the culture shock model’s four stages, stages that imply linearity, that they always occur in the same order for everyone, and that one stage always resolves before moving on to the next.

This implication is only exacerbated when culture shock’s four stages are presented as a bilinear graph.

In real life, however, culture shock is not linear. It’s four-dimensional. It’s like a road, with twists and turns and waypoints. Also like a road, sometimes it leads to belonging and enlightenment. Other times, to nothing at all.

Rethinking Culture Shock

Oberg’s culture shock model is all well and good, but alone, it isn’t enough to adequately understand and respond to the needs and experiences of today’s diversifying travel community.

Below are three angles to rethink:

1. Acculturative Stress

Culture shock doesn’t occur in a vacuum; it’s trajectory changes depending on outside pressure and variables. In fact, sometimes culture shock is so disruptive that travelers develop post-traumatic symptoms, such as anxiety, nightmares, avoidance, and aggressive outbursts.

The above phenomenon is called acculturative stress, and understanding it is essential for setting expatriates up for success.

Below are factors that influence a traveler’s risk for acculturative stress:

Entry distinction, or the traveler’s migration status. Entry distinction refers to the traveler’s degree of willingness to relocate. There are four types of entry distinction:
1. Voluntary immigrants, or those who voluntarily leave their origin country to pursue economic, social, or educational opportunities.
2. Refugees, those who have been displaced by conflict, disaster, or climate change in their origin country. Refugees do not always relocate willingly.

3. Asylum seekers, those who willingly leave their native country to escape persecution or violence.

4. Sojourners, those who willingly leave their native country for a definite, limited-time basis and for a specific purpose. Sojourners usually intend to return home.

Ethnicity. Depending on the host country and its brand of nationalism, select ethnicities are subject to greater negative reception than others.
Economic factors, such as gainful employment, high socioeconomic status, robust professional networks, and access to financial support resources.
Social factors, such as family cohesion, education level, host culture’s receptivity to outsiders, and the traveler’s vulnerability to stereotype threat (the risk of confirming negative stereotypes about a racial, gender, ethnic, or cultural group).
Psychological factors, including the traveler’s attachment style, neurotype, personality type, or a past history of trauma.

2. Add a New Stage

Oberg’s model suggests culture shock begins after the traveler disembarks the plane. I propose that culture shock actually begins between three and six months before departure, in the form of grief.

Grief is commonly associated with death, but life events and changes can trigger it as well; in a culture shock context, grief is born from the loss of identity, relationships, routine, familiarity, and the person the traveler was before their journey. Depending on the circumstances that necessitated relocation and whether or not the traveler can return home, grief’s trademark sadness can be accompanied by guilt, anger, dissociation, and a loss of hope about the future.

Like with culture shock’s other stages, grief lacks demarcation. It can bleed into and affect the acculturation process’s trajectory, and if left untreated, can turn an enlightening experience into a traumatizing one.

For example, grief preceded my departure to Georgia in 2014. In the three-month period before my one-way flight, I felt a hodgepodge of distressing emotions. Sadness, from leaving my friends and the remnants of my family behind. Anger, at my inability to find gainful, stateside post-graduate employment in the Great Recession’s aftermath. And fear, of the new person I knew Georgia would transform me into. These emotions affected my experience abroad, and ultimately, my ability to weather the hardships Georgia threw my way.

3. Create Personalized Culture Shock Response Plans

Just as it’s not enough to repost Oberg’s model, it’s not enough to post assignees abroad and assume Oberg’s model will universally reflect their experiences. A one-size-fits-all approach to culture shock prevents you from being able to adequately respond to assignees during culture shock’s pivotal frustration and adjustment stages. It also increases your assignee’s likelihood of developing acculturative stress.

For example, my employer in Georgia told their employees to respond to adverse cultural experiences with persistence and assertion. While these recommendations worked for the male English teachers, who, despite being outsiders, had largely positive acculturation experiences in Georgia’s patriarchal culture, this advice was dangerous for their feminine halves, who frequently faced situations where they could not safely say “no” or assert their needs. This advice was doubly dangerous for women of color and LGBTQ+ teachers, who faced increased scrutiny and negative reception from Georgians.

I’m sure you can imagine which group developed acculturative stress, all because of the Georgian employer’s one-size-fits-all approach to culture shock.

Don’t be like my Georgian employer; protect your assignees from acculturative stress and yourselves from liability incidents with personalized culture shock response plans. Consider how the aforementioned acculturative stress variables influence an assignee’s experience abroad. Know that your response will not be the same for everyone, and know that responding sometimes involves removing an assignee from a host country.

We Need to Rethink Culture Shock