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Culture shock.

You’re lost, standing baffled in new surroundings with a heavy pack on


your shoulders, unable to tell left from right, up from down, phone booths from trash cans
or ripoff artists from friends.

But this image of sudden shock isn’t quite accurate.

In reality, culture shock is a much more nuanced phenomenon that can take months to
develop and overcome. Culture shock will flip your emotions topsy-turvy. It will effect
you in completely unexpected ways.

More than simply being surprised at unfamiliar social norms, weird new food or foreign
modes of conversation, culture shock will impact you long after you become familiar and
comfortable with the day-to-day customs of a new culture.

Culture shock tends to move through four different phases: wonder, frustration,
depression and acceptance.

Of course, like all things that happen in our complicated little brains, it’s never really that
simple or easy. Each of these stages take time to run their course, and how deeply one
effects you is never set in stone. Even the order of these 4 stages can be unpredictable.

Jet-Lag and Wonder

The first stage of culture shock is often overwhelmingly positive and far from
bewildering. This is often called the “honeymoon phase” – when you’re so fascinated
with the language, the people and the food that the trip seems like the greatest thing
you’ve ever done. You’re having an adventure!

The first stage of culture shock is often overwhelmingly positive and far from
bewildering.

On shorter trips this honeymoon period can be a huge boon, as the rush of foreign
stimulation makes a vacation all the better, and having a set return date can ward off the
less enjoyable aspects of culture shock.

Anyone who’s visited another continent has felt this rush of excitement the minute they
got off the plane, and will no doubt never forget it.

Guidebooks about Southeast Asia play on this fairly often, inevitably starting with a vivid
description of Bangkok – the overwhelming smell of fish sauce, the muggy tropical air,
the traffic straight out of hell – all things that contribute to the sense of having touched
down on another planet.

Settling In…To Frustration?!


This is a difficult stage of culture shock, familiar to anyone who has lived abroad or
traveled for a long time. You don’t understand gestures. You get laughed at, you horribly
offend a little old lady without knowing why.

The usual response is anger. I often tell people that culture shock is is walking out the
door, being greeted by a neighbor and wanting nothing more than to shout obscenities at
them.

It is a visceral reaction that permeates every part of the experience, from


misunderstanding shopkeepers, to losing your keys or missing the bus. Frustration comes
and goes, disillusion comes on like a monsoon and the pangs of homesickness can
become debilitating.

The first time I went to Asia I got it bad. After a month and a half of backpacking and
two months teaching in Saigon, I was ready to go home.

The city began to weigh on me in ways I couldn’t have forseen. Struggling against the
smog and noise felt like trying to keep my head above water while wearing lead boots.
The food, the people, the language – nothing was exotic anymore. I just wanted a
hamburger.

Depression: Feeling Stuck

Ah, the big one. We’ve all felt a little down before, but rarely
when we’re so far from home.

Depression on the road is a feeling of hopelessness and


longing, like nothing will ever be OK again until you hop on
that plane home.

The worst part about this brand of moping is that it’s difficult
to see the link to culture shock – the feeling can sometimes
seems disconnected from travel, and often even
homesickness. It can take the form of simple, implacable
malaise.

It’s hard to be so far away, especially if you’re all by yourself. Frustration can bring on
homesickness, but depression adds the dimension of feeling like you just have to get out.

Acceptance: Home Away From Home

After weeks and months of blindly struggling through a thousand different emotional
states every hour, acceptance finally arrives like a warm bath at the end of a hard day.

Acceptance does not necessarily entail total understanding – it’s nearly impossible to ever
claim complete understanding of another culture – but instead involves the realization
that you don’t have to “get” it all. You find what makes you happy and content in your
new surroundings.

For me, this realization happened a few months after I moved to Saigon a second time. I
began to find my place in the motorbike horns, cigarette smoke and other expats floating
through the fray. When Vietnamese started sounding more like a language than a fax tone
and I ceased getting hopelessly lost on the potholed roads, the whole experience began to
feel like a coherent whole instead of a random collection of aimless madness.

And there lies the crux of culture shock: the bad stuff, like feeling lost, hopeless and out
of place, will run its course no matter what happens.

Going The Distance

Even though you can’t avoid culture shock entirely, there are things you can do to make
it easier on yourself.

The first step, of course, is to recognize that what you’re going through is culture shock.
If you can come to terms with wild mood swings and sad times, and recognize they’re
part of the inevitable process, it’s a lot easier to convince yourself that the bad feelings
will pass. And they will.

Secondly, it’s crucial to learn the language as you go. Culture shock, at its simplest, is an
inability to integrate, and the biggest barrier to that is generally language. The more able
a traveler is to laugh, cry and seek solace with the locals, the easier it is to deal with ups
and downs.

Though it can be one of the toughest parts of traveling, culture shock is just as integral to
the experience as food, people and scenery. By recognizing it for what it is and doing
your best to cope, you can easily prevent culture shock from ruining an otherwise
fantastic journey.

Culture shock is the feeling that one experiences when one enters a new cultural or
social environment and begins to adjust to that environment. This adjustment period
may be relatively easy depending on a variety of factors or it can be a time of
extreme anxiety, stress, and hopelessness. It would be too simplistic to say that it is
caused by the new cultural environment. There are several other factors which will
influence how easy or complex the culture shock experience will be when you move
into a new environment.

5 Major Culture Shock Myths:


Culture Shock Myth #1: Culture shock is experienced when moving to a new
country.

Introduction to Culture Shock: This is a common misconception. Moving to a new


country may or may not produce culture shock. It is an experience triggered when
one is exposed to any new cultural or social environment at home or abroad. Moving
is nothing more than geographic relocation and does not create culture shock. On
the other hand, being exposed to a new cultural or social setting, where all your
rules of behavior don’t seem to work as well as it used to, can be a very unsettling
experience.

Every country consists of a large variety of cultural and social environments. For
example, I would argue that there is not one American culture or society. There are
a multitude of them and one can experience culture shock even within one’s own
country. There are no shortage of television dramas of the small town country boy or
girl moving to a large city and going through the trauma of adjusting to city life. This
is every bit as much of culture shock as moving to the Philippines and has nothing to
do with moving to a new country. It has everything to do with new social and
cultural settings.

In fact, if you retire abroad and move to a new country, you are probably better off
not looking for “the culture” of your new home. Most countries are like the USA and
consist of a multitude of cultures, and an expatriate living abroad should be prepared
for a wide range of cultural options associated with international living.

Here in the Philippines, the rural countryside is a completely different cultural


experience from the city. In the city, life in a squatter settlement is a completely
different cultural experience from life in an upscale gated community. Life among the
working class is a different experience from life among the more upwardly mobile
middle class. Life among teenage gang bangers is going to be completely different
from the culture of the social elite. The culture of the Chinese, the Muslims, the
southern islands, the northern islands, etc. are all unique experiences onto
themselves. All of these unique cultural environments have the potential to create
culture shock.

In coming to the Philippines, I have discovered a multitude of unique cultures as a


result of my choice of an international living lifestyle. My level of culture shock varies
depending on the situations that I expose myself to. By selecting those life situations
carefully, I seem to have been able to manage culture shock pretty well. If I so
choose, I can enter an environment here and find myself surrounded by older
American retirees, listening to old 60’s and 70’s American music, and talking about
the next Superbowl and feel like I’m living in the States.

Or I could be in an entirely Filipino environment and experience minimal cultural


shock when playing an online game, sharing favorite YouTube videos, or watching
the Jonas Brothers on Nickelodeon with some younger Filipino friends.

On the other hand, I would be in major culture shock mode in an Filipino


environment for which I had little or no personal experience upon which to frame
that situation and for which my rules of behavior and living suddenly no longer
worked. In some places in Cebu City, foreigners are likely to be swarmed by begging
children. I find this to be unsettling, because while I take pity on their circumstances,
my experience back home has been not to help beggars but to help train street
people to get jobs. Unfortunately, at present I have neither the capacity or support
to provide such training and am at a loss when surrounded by children with hungry
eyes. My American behaviors for dealing with the poor do not currently work and
leave me with some degree of psychological stress.

Under the right circumstances moving to the Philippines produces no culture shock
for me. By carefully selecting my social and cultural experiences, culture shock has
been greatly minimized in my day to day living. When I enter a situation for which I
have no cultural experience or understanding, then I am likely to experience culture
shock. Culture shock is not an inevitable consequence of living abroad in this day and
age.

Culture Shock Myth #2: Culture shock is the result of being immersed in a
foreign culture.

Introduction to Culture Shock: Culture shock results from both social as well as
cultural shifts in your day to day living experiences.

Of course, when one is immersed in a new culture, one has to adjust to cultural
changes in language, customs, behaviors and so forth. But invisibly embedded in
these changes are a number of major social changes as well. By consciously
separating these two types of changes, it may be possible to manage the level of
culture shock experienced.
I have traveled to many countries in my life, and have experienced life in the jungles
of South America to the frozen Arctic to large urban centers in China to peaceful
rural life in New Zealand. And without question, the greatest cultural shock in my life
took place in America when I joined the Army in my youth.

The transition from an unruly, long-haired, hippie dude into a disciplined, crew cut
soldier put me through the greatest culture shock that I have ever experienced.
From a social perspective, it was a transition from youth to adulthood, from parental
dependence to independence, from an isolated middle class life to a truly cross
cultural life experience among America’s poor (white and minorities), to a lack of
discipline to extreme discipline, and from an academic life to a college of life world.

The second major cultural shock in my life was another American experience when I
moved from the ranks of my fellow professors into upper management. Upper
management represented a completely different set of values, perspectives,
behaviors and even language from being among the teaching professoriate.
Suddenly, I had to learn to speak about revenue streams, “robust” ideas, profits and
losses, management and labor, graduated discipline and a long list of other world
views alien to an academic. I even had to pretend that I enjoyed watching local
university football to be able to communicate with my new management peers. And
the most difficult aspect of being in management, was the culture shock that my
former “academic friends” now considered me part of the “enemy” of administration.

In comparison, moving to the Philippines has been much simpler and less stressful.
Perhaps, because of my personality and background as a geographer, the culture
shock has been gentle – because to a large degree I was prepared for the changes
and adaptations that had to be made. And honestly, I have had to compromise far
less of my personal beliefs and behaviors by my decision to retire abroad to the
Philippines than I did when joining the Army or entering upper management.

The transition to expatriate living can be far less difficult for you if you can separate
out the cultural from the social experiences that you undergo. You can’t change a
foreign culture much, you will have to adapt. But you can certainly manage and
control the types of social experiences that you will be exposed to. And by managing
those social experiences, you can greatly reduce the level of culture shock that you
will be exposed to.

So being a suburbanite in the states, I found a residence located away from the city
center and closer to parks and more developed residences and businesses. As a
former professional, I opted for a community of professionals – predominantly
Filipino, Japanese and Korean. I also came from a very multicultural society and
made sure that my neighborhood is multicultural as well. Within a thirty minute
walk, I can dine on Japanese, Korean, American or Filipino food; shop at a modern
mall or buy food from a small mom and pop store; get a Thai massage; walk to the
phone or cable tv company; or have Pizza Hut or McDonalds deliver.

No, I’m not in Kansas anymore, but my social interactions with my community are
almost the same – if not better than they were in the USA. And all this while being
completely immersed in Filipino culture.

You can be immersed in another culture, but by managing your social environment,
it is possible to recreate the kinds of functional relationships that you had back home
within a different culture to minimize your culture shock.

Culture Shock Myth #3: Culture shock goes through several stages.

Introduction to the Reality of Culture: One of the greatest culture shock myths
among the expatriate community is that culture shock occurs in stages. The reality is
that no country is static. The Philippines is a country in transition and the Philippines
of today will not be the same Philippines 10 years from now. Expatriate living means
that you will have to adapt to these changes on a continuous basis, because in many
respects these changes are powerful global changes affecting the entire world –
including the USA.

Each and every day you need to be prepared to be exposed to some new cultural or
social element that will could induce culture shock. It was no different in the USA.
There is no reason to expect that it will be different in the Philippines or any other
country. Life changes and it happens. You need to be prepared for that each day of
your life. Being prepared for culture shock is another useful strategy for dealing with
culture shock.

Computers changed America. Globalization changed America. DVD’s changed


America. YouTube and Friendster and blogging changed America. 9-11 changed
America dramatically. The mortgage and housing crisis changed America and the
world overnight. Where does one get the illusion that culture shock is an experience
reserved only for world travelers or that it is a one time event that one eventually
outgrows? It isn’t. The world changes no matter where you are and you need to
develop the mind set and skills to adapt.
In a changing world, culture shock is an ongoing and continuous experience. Each
country may respond differently to the change, but the forces of globalization are
great and shape each country significantly and you will be forever exposed to those
changes that will shape your diet, the housing market, healthcare, entertainment,
transportation and communication systems, and just about anything else that you
can think of.

To think that culture shock is limited to language and trivial cultural differences is a
gross understatement of how the world works today. However, by being concious of
your environment and adapting to social and cultural circumstances, you can reduce
the adverse effects of culture shock on yourself. You will have to adapt, but if you
can control the pace of change so that it is not overwhelming for you and if you can
anticipate the changes that are likely to occur, then culture shock is not something to
be feared. Instead of a shock, events can become new adventures.

Culture Shock Myth #4: Culture shock only occurs when you move abroad.

Introduction to the Reality of Culture Shock: Culture shock can occur whenever
there is a change in your life circumstances. This can occur without leaving the
country. And it can occur when returning to your home country from living abroad.

When returning to life in the USA from my Army and Peace Corps experiences, I
experienced culture shock. Often, it was the result of me recognizing all of the
changes that I had gone through when living abroad and feeling that everything still
was the “same” back home. And it usually took a few months for me to get back into
routine life after having been abroad. Culture shock can hit you even when you
return to America from a trip abroad.

Living abroad will change you in subtle ways. And the America that you return to
(should you decide to return) will be different, because you will now see with
different eyes. And if you are not prepared for it, returning home can result in a big
culture shock as leaving did.

Culture Shock Myth #5: International living is a new phenomenon.

Introduction to the Reality of Culture Shock: Nothing is further from the truth.
Humans have been migrating all over the planet since the earliest forms of man.
Back in the Stone Age people were on the move and exposing themselves to new
environments and situations regularly. America is a country of immigrants, most of
whom came to the USA not speaking the language, with just the shirt on their back,
and with little education. Yet most lived and survived to tell the tale of their
immigration experience.

My grandparents immigrated to America. They never really learned the language but
were able to eke out an existence and obtain a piece of the American dream. People
have been going abroad forever … simply put, that is how the planet got to be
populated in the first place. Pioneers like this represent the heart and soul of the
American experience.

Today, over 10% of the Filipino population live and work abroad. Many don’t have
the luxuries that we do. With little education and money, but with a lot of
determination and drive, they are able to make the transition to living abroad. It’s
part of the harsh economic reality of a developing nation, but in many respects it’s a
reflection of what individual human beings can do when they adapt.

Sadly today, America may have grown too fat and soft – and have lost the taste for
adventure and ability to adapt. Americans, in my opinion, are often too America
centric in their thinking and have become more provincial than people in other
countries. Here in the Philippines, I run across young children who are capable of
speaking in a variety of Filipino dialects and have some knowledge of English and
Japanese and Korean as well.

America may be sitting on the top of the heap today, but unless it can open its eyes
and see the world from a greater perspective and understand all the changes afoot –
the greatest culture shock of all may be seeing some of these Asian street kids grow
up and take their countries forward and leave America in its protectionist, self-centric
and isolationist dust.

Culture Shock: A Summary

Culture shock occurs whenever one is exposed to a new cultural or social situation.
In an ever changing world, this occurs on a continuous basis. It is not something to
be feared, its simply a part of adapting to something new in life. With proper
planning, one can minimize the effects of culture shock. People have been venturing
abroad throughout human history and exposing themselves to change. Change has
never been easy for anyone. But in today’s world, those who can adapt and deal with
culture shock are likely to be those who come out ahead in the long run. And the fact
that many Americans are unprepared for culture shock suggests that America may
be falling behind other countries that are more prepared for the changes the world
has in store ahead.

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