Reverse Culture Shock – My Experiences of Returning to Home Country

Have you been living abroad for so long that once you return your home country you feel disconnected, misunderstood and frustrated?⠀

After living abroad multiple times I’ve gone through it a few times. After 6 months Erasmus in Ireland the shock wasn’t enormous but rather a relief of being back in the familiar.

After over 2 years in Malta it was more of a big inconvenience and took quite a while to settle back in Finland.

Third time in Spain, there was no return to home country anymore permanently. ⠀ In this article I tell what Reverse Culture Shock is and my personal experiences on it.⠀

Basically Reverse Culture Shock means the emotional and psychological distress suffered by people when they return home after a number of years abroad. What’s the difference of culture shock and reverse culture shock?

Culture shock happens when moving abroad to unfamiliar surroundings. You may feel uncertainty, confusion and anxiety.

Reverse culture shock, on the other hand, happens when coming back to your familiar home country.

You don't need to deal anymore with stuff like How to Stay Sane When Travelling Full-Time or Gut Health While Traveling but you may feel like the familiar home country does not resonate with you anymore.You feel like nobody understands you and therefore wanting to be alone and isolated.

Reverse culture shock can feel even depressing, and like you have lost your roots.

The re entry shock can be quite surprising as well – at least that’s how it was for me as I was really looking forward to move back to Finland; but when I returned, it all felt disappointing, depressing and not the same anymore.

I would say I have three main points in my life so far that I have felt serious Reverse Culture shock.

The first one was in 2013 after my six months of Erasmus in Ireland.

I would say this was a mild one though, as it was the first time living more than 3 weeks abroad.

I would argue that the first time you move abroad, you learn much more about your own culture than about the country you are in.

The first time you become most aware of the customs, traditions, and essence of your own culture.

And six months is short enough time to remain attached to your own culture and norms and even to feel a bit homesick.

Related article: The struggle of living abroad when you’re young

Second time I got reverse culture shock when I had lived over 2 years in Malta and I wanted to move back to Finnish Lapland to finish my Master’s studies in Tourism Research.

The stupid thing is that I was really looking forward to return to my studies, friends, hobbies, routines and nature of Finland.

However, it turned out to not to be the same at all as it was before I moved abroad.

It's kind of frustrating to see that absolutely nothing has changed, except your own attitude towards own culture, traditions and ways of being.

I felt like I had lost some part of me, as I just can't find the old me anymore that I was before living abroad for a bit longer while. ⠀

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Erasmus exchange or couple of months working abroad earlier weren't long enough for me to trigger this feeling, then it was more of a relief and ease to come back to Finland and culture shock faded away quickly. ⠀
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But this time, even after a year of having been settled back in Finland, I still felt like I'm watching some phenomenon externally and not really being so strongly part of the community and culture anymore.

It's really hard to point the finger at what exactly it is. ⠀
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I'm not sure either if it's more of a personal growth or just getting more and more lost with myself 😄⠀

I felt like I could not fit anymore into the life I was looking forward to return to, and I could not realize exactly why was that.

Partially it was also due to loneliness; the friends I had there before had gotten closer and I felt like I couldn’t be a part of the group anymore.

I felt left out.

I also felt like my life was so wastly different in Malta where I was working in responsible digital marketing roles in stock listed companies, and then returning back to full-time student life to socialist country.

I feel like within Europe, places can not be more opposite than that. From capitalist sunshine to socialist seasonal depression.

I just could not relate anymore with the earlier friends I had, and I felt like they did not either respect my choices that much.

Nothing was ever said like that, but you know, when others are all about preserving nature, using second-hand clothes and living cheaply and optimizing costs, whereas you are more about personal and financial growth, learning difficult things in environments that push you out of the comfort zone and aiming towards luxurious living with hard work, it sounds like a little bit of a mis-match.

I would not say all my values changed in Malta, but I do think I became much more bold, confident and daring to want money.

I feel like many intellectual women focus on getting smarter and smarter, yet I wanted to also make more money, and I don’t see anything bad in that.

Anyway, the bottom line is – second time living abroad had apparently changed me, so I did not fit anymore the student life I had outgrown from.

I felt like a dog returning to dog bed that was bought to her as a puppy: the whole dog does not simply fit in anymore.

The time returning back to Finnish Lapland turned out to be the world changing winter of covid.

(As a matter of fact the very first Covid case in Europe was in Finnish Lapland, in Rovaniemi where I was living. A Chinese tourist was tested positive.)

(PS: I have also written this travel guide to Finnish Lapland, as I happen to have a lot of experience on that. )

So that was also a reason the time in Finland was not the most social.

We relocated to my parent’s summer cottage and spent the covid months in the best place on earth: in the middle of nature with a dog, without any neighbours nearby.

So natural isolation and retreat.

We had already decided not to stay in Finland, as my master’s studies were coming to an end in summer with the thesis.

(I did my master’s thesis about orientalist representations in yoga travel narratives – super interesting topic in my opinion.)

We were planning on relocating to South East Asia, yet the restrictions were too heavy to make it appealing to struggle through all of that.

So we decided to back our Ford Focus to the brim, and drive through Europe to Spain.

Covid was actually a blessing in disguise, at least for us, as both of us got remote jobs then.

So we were working full-time remotely while taking two months to cruise through Europe in autumn 2021.

Now in 2025, we’re still on the same trip.

After living in Valencia, we decided to settle in smaller town Alicante and we have been living here since.

You can read the whole personal story of buying apartment in Costa Blanca, Spain here: Moving to Alicante

From here I can easily visit my home country Finland, yet I do not think I will ever permanently return.

The reasons are the feelings of unfamiliarity with the familiar, the feeling of not fitting in anymore and the feeling of not being able to explain yourself and what you’ve gone through to others.

I still have the sense of home country, and maybe occasionally I will return for a few months, but something in me has changed permanently.

This does not mean Spain feels like my home country now, or that I don’t feel like a Finn anymore. I feel like often it’s ignored that it’s much more complex than that.

I feel like other expats can relate, that you kind of feel like you belong to many places, but at the same time you feel like you deeply don’t belong with your roots anywhere anymore.

It’s the same when learning new languages: you don’t just suddenly become more fluent in more languages, but first you get awkward in all the languages you know, and you don’t even know anymore in which language you think.

You’re in between identities, cultures and cultural norms.

Too serious topic? Read also this not so serious article: 10 dont's in Finland

From this roots also the very much expat phenomenon (especially among Boomer generation) to want home away from home.

You want only the good parts of both countries and complain how things do not work as in your home country.

I know we all have our moments of that, or expats in Spain have their moments of complaining about the Spanish bureaucracy or paperwork, yet I find these complaints so pointless and kind of embarrassing.

It’s all about glorifying the home, while at the same time you clearly had your reasons to leave as here you are.

Bottom line - No country is perfect and you can’t just cherry-pick the best parts.

(Or if you do, I don’t find it respectable to the country you live in.)

I know how you feel—everything should be the same, yet somehow, nothing feels right.

You’ve changed, but your home country hasn’t.

Your favorite café now feels overpriced, lack of small talk in Finland feels even too silent, and you miss things you never thought you’d care about.

You don’t fit in the way you used to.

Friends and family expect you to be the same person you were before.

You miss things from your life abroad—foods, customs, even the feeling of being an outsider.

I found these stages in my reverse culture shock.

First stage after moving back to your beloved home country feels fantastic.

At least for me the ease of everything in Finland is so lovely and nostalgic.

Grocery stores have everything you love, nature is wonderful, internet is fast and free everywhere, there are friends and family and you can easily figure everything as you can communicate with your mother tongue.

This is the best time after moving back to home country, so take it all in as long at it lasts.

Unfortunately quite quickly after the first phase comes the realization you don’t fit into the role and person you used to be.

You realize you have experienced so many new things that you can’t really explain to people who have remained living the same life in the same village all these years.

Something inexplicable keeps you slightly disconnected and frustrated.

The awesome things you were looking forward to and nostalgizing about don’t feel the way you imagined.

Some magic seems to be gone.

You may feel disconnected from people if they don’t have similar experiences.

You’re swinging between the feelings of wanting to belong, but knowing too much not to live as blissfully unaware as before and just falling back to the never-questioned routines and ways of being.

After some time you of course start also missing the great things you had at your home abroad; this is called reverse homesickness.

Aren’t we humans sometimes so complex creatures? First you get culture shock and homesickness.

Then you move back home just to get reverse culture shock and reverse home sickness.

I do think this all is anyhow part of personal development journey and broadening your ways of seeing the world.

So I would say it’s a good thing in a way.

I have to be honest, I have not fully “completed this stage” (as far as these are any other official stages more than my way of seeing and feeling it).

But after the awesomeness, reverse culture shock and emotional rollercoaster comes a moment where you start finding ways to connect the identities of you before living abroad, during living abroad and now living back in home country.

Very helpful for this part is simply to get to know more people who have gone through the same.

Although reverse culture shock and discomfort is real, it does not mean it lasts forever.

After the first shocks and storms you find your way of settling into this “old new country”.

It may mean also that the people around you change, as you may have grown separately with the earlier friends.

But that’s not the end of the world, it’s just a normal continuation of life; only constant is change.

So that this article isn’t only talking about the culture shocks and difficulties in re entering home country after working or studying abroad, I want to give you some useful tips.

Let’s be honest, they did not make me stay in my home country permanently, so if you’re born with big wanderlust, it may not work for you either.

But hey, you can always give it a try, or at least relate with the feels as an expat.