Moving back home after years abroad: why the return hits hardest

The plane lands. Everything is familiar — the signs, the voices, the bread, the language — and yet nothing feels like a homecoming. You are home, and you are not quite at home. Friends say: "You've changed." And you wonder: am I arriving, or leaving for a second time?

The return is the hidden face of expatriation. Departure is prepared for months; installation is survived; but the return — nobody talks about it. And yet for many it is the most disorienting stage. This essay is about that crossing: the shock of return, the in-between, and how to come out of it grown rather than broken.

Reverse culture shock: what nobody explains

Everyone knows the culture shock of arriving abroad. Less known is its twin: reverse culture shock, documented for decades, which strikes on the way home.

Its signs look like a diffuse unease:

• A sense of unreality: everything is normal, and nothing feels quite familiar.
• Irritation at the habits you left — and you had stopped tolerating them in silence.
• A muffled sadness tied to "there": the climate, the rhythm, the faces, the freedom.
• The fatigue of questions: "So how was it?" — five minutes granted to what built you for years.
• The feeling of imposing when you tell, and of betraying when you stop.

It is common enough to be considered normal. What is not normal is that this stage is so badly prepared for.

Why the return disorients so much

Leaving a country does not only leave landscapes behind: it leaves a version of yourself. And that version is not the one stepping off the plane.

• You come home without being quite home. You know the codes — but your body, your reflexes, your patience react to the old world with eyes from elsewhere.
• Life went on without you. Friendships held, reorganised, transformed. You missed weddings, births, funerals — and everyone's fabric of memories has a missing stitch: yours.
• Daily life feels narrow. What was reassuring now sometimes seems small: schedules, distances, paperwork, roundabouts. This is not contempt — it is the gap between two scales of life.
• Comparison never stops. The climate, the simplicity, the friends in Asia — everything is measured against "there". And "there" becomes idealised, even if you have not returned to it.
• You no longer know how to tell it. What happened does not fit into anecdotes. You carry an experience that local words cannot yet name.

The in-between: from neither here nor there

At this stage a question keeps returning: "So where am I from?" It is not a crisis: it is a state — the in-between, known to everyone who has truly inhabited several worlds.

You are no longer entirely from here: something in you lives on there's clock. You are no longer entirely from there either: one is always a bit a foreigner there too, even after years. The in-between is not a loss. It is the mark of someone open enough to be transformed — and who must now learn to inhabit that transformation.

Leaving, too, was a grief

The return carries a rarely acknowledged grief: the grief of departure. Leaving Thailand, you lose people, rhythms, a version of yourself, a daily life that had become the shape of your life. For many, the experience is not "going back to square one": it is one more move. And like any such move, it has its missed goodbyes — I write about this in the essay on grief from abroad.

If you miss Asia's warmth, if the loneliness of return surprises you — these emotions do not ask to be corrected, but listened to.

How to cross the return

It is not linear, but it has footholds. What helps:

• Name what is happening. "Reverse culture shock": these words already change the experience's status — you are no longer in a disorder, you are crossing a known, documented stage.
• Give yourself time. Often one to two years to find your marks. Demanding immediate adaptation is the best way to delay it.
• Rebuild rituals here. A class, a place, a recurring appointment: belonging is rebuilt through repetition, not decision.
• Keep living ties with there. A regular call, the language, the food, a community of "returners": you do not come home to cut everything off.
• Find people who know. A friend who also lived abroad, a group, a professional: what local words cannot name, others have lived.
• Accept that "home" has become a question. And that the answer may be: here, there, or both — in alternation, in comings and goings, in multiple roots.

When to bring it to a professional

The return unsettles landmarks of identity, belonging and meaning — sometimes consciously for the first time. Support is particularly indicated when:

• sadness, irritability or disconnection do not fade after several months;
• sleep, work or relationships durably suffer;
• you loop around the same question — return? leave again? — without moving;
• a feeling of emptiness or failure appears: "what was it all for?"

This is not an exotic problem: it is work on grief, bonds and meaning — the very ground of analytic work. And depending on the case, the question is not to forget or to dream of going back: it is to invent the shape that fits you.

Talking about it, even after coming home

I see patients at the Hua Hin office — and via video sessions for those who have returned to France, Europe or elsewhere. Video is not a fallback: it is a frame, with a place, a time, someone who listens — even after expatriation ends. Philosophy, here, is not an ornament: it helps think a self no longer defined by a map of the Earth.

How long does reverse culture shock last?

No rule, but frequent rhythms: a few weeks of euphoria ("good to be back"), then a phase of disconnection or low mood around the second or third month, an easing often between one and two years, with waves. Going through this does not mean you were wrong: it means you came home.

Will I regret coming back?

However pressing, the question cannot be answered on the spot: nostalgia is part of the journey, not the verdict. Many who keep "one foot there" (ties, regular visits, projects) find a balance that takes nothing away from their life here. You do not have to choose between two homes — you have to arrange both.

Should I cut all ties with the country I left?

Rarely salutary. Ties — friends, language, food, passion — are resources: they nourish identity instead of preventing it. The return is not a grief to complete about there; it is a bond to transform into a shape compatible with life here.

What if I want to leave again?

Then it deserves thought — and a look: is it a desire for meaning, or an escape from what is difficult here? Both are respectable, and therapeutic work helps tell them apart. Leaving again can be an answer; it is not the only one, and it can be invented in small steps rather than one big jump.

To set this down somewhere — at the Hua Hin office or via video session — a first exchange is enough.