Reverse culture shock is the disorientation, irritation and sadness many immigrants feel when they return home after living abroad, and for a lot of us it arrives exactly when we expected to feel most at ease. You land, you smell the air, you hear your own language at the airport, and for a few hours it is perfect.
Then something shifts. The traffic makes you furious. Your cousins tease your accent. Your favourite shop is gone. A conversation about your life abroad ends after two sentences. You start to wonder how you can feel homesick while standing in your own home.
This article names the eight feelings immigrants most often describe when they visit home, explains what researchers have found about re-entry, and offers practical ways to make your next trip home gentler.
Table of Contents
At a Glance
Reverse culture shock (also called re-entry shock) is the difficulty of readjusting to your home culture after adapting to another. Researchers John and Jeanne Gullahorn extended the “U-curve” of culture shock into a “W-curve” in 1963 to include this second dip on return.
It often feels worse than the original culture shock because nobody expects it. Psychologist Nan Sussman noted that returnees frequently found going home harder than adjusting abroad.
The 8 feelings: being a stranger at home, guilt, irritation and then shame, feeling unheard, being treated as a walking wallet, losing your language, grief for what has changed, and belonging nowhere.
The scale is huge. The UN estimates about 304 million international migrants worldwide in 2024, and Bangladesh alone received a record US$30.32 billion in remittances in fiscal year 2024-25.
What helps: lower expectations before landing, plan time with “your people,” share your life in stories rather than comparisons, and give yourself a few days to adjust on both ends of the trip.
What Is Reverse Culture Shock?
Reverse culture shock is the emotional and practical difficulty of readjusting to your own culture after living in another one long enough to absorb its habits. It is sometimes called re-entry shock or repatriation distress.
The idea has a history. Researchers first described ordinary culture shock with a “U-curve”: excitement on arrival, a dip into frustration, then gradual adjustment.
In 1963, the researchers John and Jeanne Gullahorn extended this into a W-curve, arguing that people go through a similar cycle of honeymoon, crisis and adjustment a second time when they return home.
A 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology summarising this literature defines re-entry as readapting to your home culture after adapting abroad, and points out that returners often expect to fit straight back in, which can make the readjustment harder.
That expectation is the trap. When you moved abroad, you prepared. You read about the weather, the food, the paperwork. When you visit home, you prepare gifts, not your heart.
Why Is Reverse Culture Shock Often Worse Than Culture Shock?
Reverse culture shock is often worse than the original culture shock because it’s unexpected, and because it happens in the one place you assumed would always fit you.
Psychologist Nan Sussman, who studied repatriation for years, described this puzzle in a 2004 article for the Association for Psychological Science. Families returning from overseas often found going home harder than adjusting abroad, with high stress, family tension and dissatisfaction.
Sussman developed a Cultural Identity Model proposing that a deep cultural experience can change identity in several ways.
Some people become “additive,” blending both cultures. Some become “subtractive,” feeling less connected to their original culture. Others “affirm” their home identity more strongly, or develop a more “global” identity.
Interestingly, her preliminary research with people who returned to Hong Kong from Canada and Australia found that their return was mostly positive. She suggested Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan self-image may have made the transition easier.
That detail matters, because it means reverse culture shock is not identical for everyone. It depends on where you left, where you went, how long you stayed, and how much you changed.
It also depends on how much home has changed. When I think about Bangladesh, home has changed enormously in the last decade, with new flyovers, new apps, new prices and new slang. An immigrant carrying a ten-year-old picture of Dhaka in their head is visiting a city that no longer exists.
How Many People Experience Reverse Culture Shock?
Nobody has a reliable count of how many people experience reverse culture shock, and I couldn’t find a trustworthy prevalence figure, so I won’t invent one. What we do know is how many people are potentially exposed to it.
According to UN DESA figures summarised by Germany’s federal statistics office, there were about 304 million international migrants worldwide in 2024, around 3.7% of the world’s population, up from about 154 million in 1990. Each one of them, if they ever visit home, has a chance of feeling what this article describes.
Bangladesh offers a vivid example. The Dhaka Tribune reported that roughly 1.31 million Bangladeshi workers went abroad for jobs in 2023, a record at the time according to government data.
And in the fiscal year 2024-25, Bangladeshi expatriates sent home a record US$30.32 billion, a 26.8% increase on the previous year, according to United News of Bangladesh citing Bangladesh Bank data.
Behind those numbers are millions of people who come home every year or two, carrying gifts and expectations, and often leaving with feelings they can’t name.
The 8 Feelings Immigrants Experience When Visiting Home
These eight feelings are drawn from re-entry research, migrant memoirs and novels, and the stories immigrants tell each other in airport lounges. You may not feel all of them. Most people feel at least three.
1. Feeling Like a Stranger in Your Own Home
Feeling like a stranger at home is the core of reverse culture shock: everything is familiar, yet nothing quite fits. You know the streets, but you forget which side to stand on in a queue. You know the language, but the new slang passes you by. You know your parents’ house, but someone else’s furniture is in your old room.
Homer understood this almost three thousand years ago.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years and is recognised first by his old dog, Argos, not by the people who should know him best. That scene feels uncomfortably modern to many immigrants. (Our breakdown of The Odyssey’s themes covers the homecoming in more depth.)
The word “nostalgia” itself is built from this ache. A Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, coined it in 1688 by combining the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain) to describe the distress of Swiss soldiers serving abroad.
Reverse culture shock is a strange twist on that old word: the pain of homecoming, felt while you are actually home.
What helps: Expect it. Remind yourself before you land that home has kept living without you, just as you kept living without it. Neither of you is the same, and that’s not betrayal.
2. Guilt for Leaving, and Guilt for Wanting to Leave Again
Guilt is the most constant companion of the immigrant visit. Guilt for leaving your parents to grow older without you nearby. Guilt for missing weddings and funerals. Guilt for finding the visit hard. And then, near the end of the trip, guilt for feeling relieved that you are going back.
For South Asian immigrants especially, this guilt is tied to duty. Families often sacrificed so that one child could go abroad, and the visit home becomes a kind of audit of whether the sacrifice was worth it.
What helps: Separate guilt from responsibility. Responsibility asks, “What can I practically do?” Maybe it’s a monthly call schedule, a plan for your parents’ health care, or a longer visit next year. Guilt just asks you to suffer. Responsibility is useful. Guilt alone rarely is.
3. Irritation, Followed by Shame for Feeling It
Irritation is the feeling that ambushes many returnees in the first week. The traffic. The noise. The paperwork that takes three visits. The lack of queues. The constant questions about your salary and your marriage plans.
Then comes the shame. “Who am I to judge? I grew up here.” You worry you’ve become arrogant, or that your relatives see you as someone who now looks down on them.
Generally, this isn’t arrogance. It’s adaptation. You spent years building habits that work in another system, and your nervous system is reacting to a mismatch. That’s exactly what the W-curve describes.
What helps: Keep irritation private and brief. Vent to a friend who also lives abroad, not to your aunt at the dinner table. Also try to notice what home does better. It might be warmth, hospitality, food, or the way neighbours show up when someone is sick. Comparison cuts both ways.
4. Feeling Unheard When You Talk About Your Life Abroad
Feeling unheard is one of the quietest and most painful parts of reverse culture shock. You’ve built a whole life somewhere else, with struggles, friendships and small victories. But when you start to describe it, people’s eyes drift, or the conversation swerves back to local news within a minute.
It isn’t usually rudeness. People at home simply have no reference point for your new life. They can’t picture your street, your office or the winter you survived. As the Frontiers in Psychology review notes, re-entry involves renegotiating relationships, and part of that renegotiation is accepting that some people will not be curious in the way you hoped.
What helps: Share stories instead of summaries. “Life in Toronto is good” goes nowhere. “Last winter my car got stuck in snow up to the door handles, and a stranger spent an hour helping me dig it out” invites questions. Also, ask more than you tell. People open up when they feel you’re interested in their lives too.
5. Being Treated as a Walking Wallet
The walking wallet feeling is the uncomfortable sense that some relatives and acquaintances see you mainly as a source of money, gifts or favours. Everyone assumes life abroad means wealth. Requests arrive before your suitcase is unpacked.
Remittances are a real lifeline.
Bangladesh’s record US$30.32 billion in 2024-25 shows just how much families depend on them. Yet many migrant workers earn modest wages and send a large share of them home. Being seen as rich when you are stretched thin can feel isolating.
What helps: Decide your gift and money budget before the trip, and stick to it. Tell close family honestly about your real costs abroad, such as rent, taxes and savings goals. Clear limits, said kindly, usually protect relationships better than silent resentment.
6. Losing Your Language, or Being Teased for Your Accent
Losing your language is a surprisingly emotional part of the visit home. You reach for a word in your mother tongue and find an English one in its place. You mispronounce something and a cousin laughs. Older relatives say you “talk like a foreigner now.”
For many immigrants, language is identity. Feeling clumsy in it can make you feel like you’ve lost a piece of yourself, and being teased about it, even affectionately, stings.
What helps: Laugh first, then practise. Read in your language before the trip. Call relatives regularly while abroad. Teach your children some of it too, because language survives when it’s used. If someone teases you, a light reply like “I’ll be fluent again by Friday” usually ends it.
7. Grief for What and Who Has Changed
Grief is often the heaviest of the eight feelings, and the one people least expect. Your father moves more slowly than he did two years ago. Your grandmother’s memory is fading. The tea stall where you spent your teenage evenings has become a pharmacy. A childhood friend has died, and you weren’t there.
Every visit home carries this grief because each visit is a snapshot, and snapshots exaggerate change. People who live there watch it happen slowly. You see it all at once.
Michelle Zauner captures this ache beautifully in Crying in H Mart, her memoir of losing her Korean mother and searching for her through food and memory. Our review of Crying in H Mart explains why the book became so meaningful to so many children of immigrants.
What helps: Let yourself grieve rather than distracting yourself with errands. Visit the places and people that matter most early in the trip, not on the last day. Take photos, record a voice note of your grandmother telling an old story, write things down.
These small acts give the grief somewhere to go.
8. Belonging Nowhere, or Belonging Everywhere a Little
The last feeling is the existential one: realising you don’t fully belong in either place anymore. Abroad, you’re the immigrant with the accent.
At home, you’re the one who left. You live in the space between.
Sussman’s research gives this feeling a more hopeful frame. Her Cultural Identity Model suggests that people can develop “additive” identities that blend two cultures, or switch between them depending on the situation. In other words, you might not belong nowhere. You might belong in a new way that didn’t exist before, partly here and partly there.
Literature has long been fascinated by this in-between life. Albert Camus wrote about it in stories collected in Exile and the Kingdom, and V. S. Naipaul turned it into the restless heart of Half a Life.
If you want to read further, our analyses of Exile and the Kingdom and Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul both deal with that exact feeling of standing between two worlds. Bora Lee Reed’s Song for Another Home, reviewed here on Sopranu, is another quieter take.
What helps: Stop asking “Where do I belong?” as if there must be one answer. Ask instead, “What parts of each place do I want to keep?” The answer can include your mother’s cooking and your new city’s public libraries at the same time.
How Long Does Reverse Culture Shock Last?
Reverse culture shock on a short visit usually eases within the first several days to two weeks, but there is no fixed timeline that research agrees on, so treat any specific number with caution.
For people who move back home permanently, the adjustment can take much longer, sometimes months. The W-curve suggests you move through stages: an early honeymoon, a dip into frustration, and gradual adjustment. On a three-week visit, you may only reach the dip just before you fly back.
That’s one reason many immigrants describe their trips home as emotionally confusing; the visit ends before the adjustment does.
How Do You Cope With Reverse Culture Shock?
You cope with reverse culture shock by preparing for it as seriously as you prepared to move abroad, adjusting your expectations, and building in time to recover on both ends of the trip.
Here’s a practical checklist:
| When | What to do | Why it helps |
|---|---|---|
| 2 to 4 weeks before | Ask family what has changed: prices, roads, health, local news | Reduces the shock of seeing everything at once |
| Before you fly | Set a gift and money budget | Prevents resentment and overspending |
| First 2 days | Rest, eat simple familiar food, don’t schedule big events | Your body is adjusting to time zone and climate |
| First week | Visit the people and places that matter most | Prevents last-day grief and regret |
| During the trip | Keep one small daily habit from abroad, such as a morning walk | Gives you a sense of continuity |
| During the trip | Talk with another immigrant friend | Someone who understands without explanation |
| After returning abroad | Allow a few slow days before diving back in | Reverse culture shock can echo on the other side too |
Also, write things down. A short journal during the visit helps you notice patterns. You may find, for example, that your irritation spikes when you’re jet-lagged and hungry, not because home is “worse.”
What I’ve Come to Believe About Home
I’ve come to believe that home is not a place you return to. It’s a relationship you keep renegotiating. The country changes. You change. Your parents age. Your siblings grow into people you have to get to know again.
That realisation was hard at first. It felt like loss. Now it feels more like honesty. When I stop expecting home to be frozen in my memory, I can enjoy the version that actually exists, with its new flyovers and new slang and the same tea that still tastes exactly right.
If you’re an immigrant reading this before a trip, here’s my one piece of advice: go home curious, not nostalgic. Nostalgia looks for what’s missing. Curiosity finds what’s new. Both are valid, but only one lets you enjoy the visit you’re actually having.
For a broader look at how globalisation is reshaping cultures like ours, our essay on cultural globalization and value erosion is a thoughtful companion read.
FAQs About Reverse Culture Shock
What is reverse culture shock in simple words?
Reverse culture shock is the feeling of being out of place in your own home country after living abroad. Familiar things feel strange, and you may feel irritated, sad or disconnected.
Is reverse culture shock real?
Yes. Researchers have studied it for decades. In 1963, John and Jeanne Gullahorn described the W-curve model, which adds a second adjustment dip when people return home, and psychologist Nan Sussman found that many returnees struggled more on return than when they first went abroad.
Why do I feel sad after visiting home?
Feeling sad after visiting home is common because each visit shows you how much people and places have changed, and because the visit ends before you’ve fully readjusted. Leaving family again also reopens the original goodbye.
Can reverse culture shock happen on short visits?
Yes. Even a two- or three-week visit can bring reverse culture shock, especially if you’ve been away for several years or if home has changed a lot.
How do I stop feeling like a foreigner in my own country?
Reconnect gradually. Spend time with people who knew you well, practise your language, revisit meaningful places, and accept that a blended identity is normal rather than a failure.
Does reverse culture shock affect children of immigrants?
It can. Children raised abroad often feel like visitors in their parents’ home country, and they may struggle with language, customs and family expectations during trips back.
Final Thoughts
Reverse culture shock is the price of having two homes. It shows up as feeling like a stranger, guilt, irritation and shame, feeling unheard, being treated as a walking wallet, losing your language, grief for what has changed, and the sense of belonging nowhere.
None of it means you’ve failed as an immigrant or as a son or daughter. It means you’ve grown in two directions at once. The research is clear that re-entry is real and often harder than expected, and that knowledge alone can make the next trip easier. Go with lower expectations, an open heart and a small budget for patience.
Home will still surprise you. Let some of those surprises be good ones.
