REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK

Welcome Back! We hope that your study abroad program provided you with unforgettable experiences and invaluable memories. Right now you may be feeling a variety of emotions while you adjust to being back home, just as you experienced when you first arrived overseas. We would like to help make this transition a little easier by providing you with information about Reverse Culture Shock or Re-entry Shock. Research has shown that re-entry shock is at least as frequent as initial culture shock. It is therefore an inevitable part of your study abroad experience and can lead to personal growth and understanding.

What Is It?

Does it feel as though your friends and family don't understand the importance of your experience abroad? Do they ask questions about your time overseas, but then seem to lose interest after only a few minutes? Does everyday life here seem trivial?

If these questions identify feelings you've been having recently, you may be experiencing "reverse culture shock ". In the same way that you may have experienced culture shock when you were adjusting to your new cultural surroundings abroad, you will now experience a re-adjustment period in the United States.

While you were abroad, you may have initially looked at some local customs as silly and wondered why people there did not "do things right" or do things "the American way". Over time you probably lost some of these feelings and began to feel that your host culture had even better customs and ways of dealing with various situations Americans. Now that you've returned to the U.S., you may experience similar feelings, wondering why Americans don't do things right or follow what you have now come to believe as the correct way to deal with a situation.

Every individual deals with these feelings in a different way. Some people want to be left alone by everyone and allow interaction only with others who were abroad with them. Others will want to tell everyone they meet all about their experiences abroad! Some returnees will have a difficult time finding anything positive to say about the U.S., while others will hardly feel out of place at all.

The real key to re-entering your home culture is to realize that there may be frustrations with readjusting to life in the United States, and that the frustrations are a normal part of the total learning process, and an on-going part of your cross-cultural experience.

If friends, roommates or parents seem to be somewhat mystified or bothered by your behavior once you're back home, you may want to explain to them a little about reverse culture shock and what you're experiencing. Knowing what is happening and that there is a process of adjustment can make you more understandable to those close to you, and can help them to be more supportive and understanding of what you're going through.