Culture Shock - The stages
Culture shock has four stages.
The Euphoria stage where everything is great. You love everything about the country. It’s novel, it’s new, it’s interested, and it’s everything your home country is not.
But then that stage wears off and comes the… Shock stage. This is where you just hate everything. You are doing what you thought was polite, but it’s not polite or not polite enough so are treated differently. You are trying to do what you think is kind, but it isn’t kind in this country. You are just trying to be, but something doesn’t match right. You miss your home country and just hate all the differences now. This stage usually comes about from something so totally different that it shakes you. Some people stay stuck in this stage forever until they leave the country or pass in that country.
If you were able to overcome the shock stage, the next is the Adjustment phase. You kind of get it now. It’s starting to make sense. This new place is still catching at your edges and it feels off still, but you’re beginning to understand it for what it is and come around to the differences. Think of it as a graph where the Euphoria stage peaks at the top of the graph, the shock stage is where it tanks, this adjustment stage is that transitional stage climbing back up again.
Finally, you reach Acceptance stage. This would be at the center or so of the graph. You’ve leveled out at a good place and now understand and accept this new place for what it is. It is different and that is ok. It’s must easier to understand and accept at this point now.
The hardest part of these stages is not knowing that what you’re going through is completely normal. Unfortunately no one hands us a 101 on Culture Shock when we move to another country. We have just had to fumble with it on our own. What you need to know is you are normal. This is all completely normal. It’s normal to feel lost, frustrated, angry even. You are not bad, wrong, or a failure for any of it. You’re just still working through the stages.
