Psychological aspects of living in another country

You have been living in a new country for a few months, and you have unpacked your suitcases and boxes. You have read all kinds of information about housing, transportation, work, schools, health, taxes, paperwork. Little by little things fall into place and you do your best to settle down as quickly as possible, to feel at home and feel comfortable.

And how do you feel? Have you stopped to think about it? Moving is considered a highly stressful experience, as is changing jobs, looking for a job, changing countries, etc. In your case, all in one. You are going through a lot of changes around you with more demands than usual and this new environment demands adaptation.

In some cases, expatriates seek therapy motivated in part by the frustration of being isolated. Whatever the problems that lead to starting therapy, the most frequent causes are that people do not have friends (or not so close) or close family with whom they can confide about their current difficulties. For anyone, the pressure that builds up from not being able to share struggles can be maddening. This seems to be further intensified for people living abroad.

Immigrant syndrome
(Ulysses syndrome)

Although most people manage to cope with the negative aspects of migration due to the existence of other positive aspects, migration is a risk factor for mental health due to migratory stress or mourning, called the immigrant syndrome or Ulysses syndrome.

Sources of stress

• Loneliness caused by the separation from the loved ones.
• Feeling hopeless and a failure because of the maybe few opportunities to get ahead with a project abroad.
• Absence of a social support network.
• Fighting economic problems such as paying for housing, food.
• Fear or disorientation.
• Temporality of a situation.

Stages of grief

• Denial: the reality of the change is not accepted.
• Resistance: when facing difficulties and challenges, complaints about the effort involved in order to adapt to the new situation.
• Acceptance: settles thoroughly in the new situation.
• Restitution: accepting the positive and negative aspects of both the country of origin and the host country, involves affective reconciliation.

Psychological defenses

People use a series of psychological defense mechanisms or errors in order to help them cope with the new situation abroad. They are not in themselves negative but when they are plentiful they radically distort the view we have of reality and prevent us from adapting and preparing for migratory grief.

• Selective abstraction is about focusing on a detail drawn out of context.
• Arbitrary inference, excessive generalization when a conclusion or rule is drawn from one or more isolated facts.
• Maximization and minimization, distortion modifying the magnitude of events.
• Personalization, attributing external phenomena unjustifiably.
• Absolutist or dichotomous thinking, classify experiences as “all or nothing”, in extreme categories.