Not feeling like yourself after moving abroad?

You may miss your favorite foods, the streets you knew by heart, your routines, the doctor you trusted, the friend who already knew the backstory, or simply the confidence that came from knowing how your world worked. Then one day you realize: I don't quite feel like myself anymore.

If that sounds familiar, it doesn't necessarily mean you made the wrong decision or that you are failing to adapt. Moving abroad doesn't just change where you live. It can temporarily disrupt some of the things that helped you know who you were. Understanding why that happens—and how to begin rebuilding those anchors—can make the experience far less disorienting.

Why a move can disrupt more than your routine

International adjustment is not simply about learning where to buy groceries or how to navigate a new city. Research on expatriate adjustment has long recognized that adapting to life abroad is multidimensional, involving not only adjustment to everyday living conditions, but also to interactions with people in the host country and, for working expatriates, to the workplace itself (Black, Mendenhall & Oddou, 1991).

Think about how many areas of your life can change simultaneously during a move. Your routines change. Your social network changes. Your children's school changes. Your support system may disappear. Your professional role or family responsibilities may shift. Even seemingly simple tasks—opening a bank account, making a doctor's appointment, driving, or communicating with a teacher—may suddenly require far more effort.

Research into expatriate identity also suggests that living abroad can affect personal, relational, social, professional, and cultural dimensions of how we understand ourselves (Adams & van de Vijver, 2015; Peltokorpi & Zhang, 2020). In other words, when your environment changes dramatically, some of the reference points that once reinforced who you were change with it.

When you stop feeling competent

When my family moved back to Argentina—a country that is technically my homeland—I expected an adjustment period. What I didn't expect was to have our newly purchased car hit within hours of buying it. Not on a highway or during rush hour. Just blocks from our new home, in a roundabout we now drive through almost every day. The accident itself wasn't the hardest part. The harder realization was that although I understood the official traffic laws, I didn't yet understand how people actually drove there. There were unwritten cultural rules operating beneath the formal ones that I hadn't learned yet.

Then came the insurance process, paperwork, phone calls, and all the small frustrations of trying to solve a problem in a system I thought would feel familiar—but didn't. That experience reminded me that expat life rarely destabilizes us through one enormous event. Often, it's hundreds of tiny moments of not knowing. You don't know who to call. You don't know where to go. You don't understand the unwritten rule everyone else seems to know. Before relocating, competence can become almost invisible. You simply know how to do your life. After relocating, you become a beginner again.

And if part of your identity has been built around being capable, independent, resourceful, or successful, repeatedly needing help can affect more than your confidence. It can affect how you see yourself.

Sometimes the person you miss is yourself

This is one of the more surprising forms of loss that can accompany expatriation. Sometimes the person you miss most isn't someone back home. Sometimes it's a previous version of yourself.

The version who felt competent. The version who knew where she belonged. The version who had friends who understood her without explanation. The version who knew what she was doing.

Research on expatriate identity helps explain why adjustment can run deeper than homesickness. International relocation can create both continuity and change in how people experience their personal, professional, and cultural identities, and these identity processes can influence adjustment to life abroad (Peltokorpi & Zhang, 2020). This can become particularly significant when the move also changes your career, independence, social role, family responsibilities, or sense of purpose. 

Your difficult emotions aren't necessarily a warning sign

As an ontological coach, I work with three interconnected dimensions of human experience: language, emotion, and body.

Language includes the interpretations and stories through which we make sense of our experiences. Emotion influences how we perceive and respond to our circumstances. And the body reflects and participates in those experiences through things such as tension, breathing, posture, and energy.

In ontological coaching, we use the word "coherence" to describe the feeling that these dimensions are working together—that you feel grounded in yourself and able to make sense of your experience.

A major relocation can temporarily shake that coherence. Your old story—I know how to handle things—may no longer feel true. Your body may be responding to constant novelty and uncertainty. And your emotional world may include excitement, gratitude, frustration, fear, loneliness, and grief—sometimes within the same day. Rather than treating those difficult emotions as evidence that something has gone wrong, I encourage clients to become curious about them. An emotion doesn't necessarily tell us the objective truth about a situation. But it can tell us something important about how we are experiencing it.

Three ways to start feeling grounded again

You don't need to wait passively until your new country finally “feels like home.” There are small ways to begin rebuilding the internal and external anchors that relocation disrupted.

1. Identify what you actually miss

Instead of stopping at I miss home, get more specific.

Do you miss certain people—or being deeply known?

Do you miss your job—or the sense of purpose it gave you?

Do you miss your old routines—or the predictability they provided?

Do you miss independence? Competence? Community? Familiarity?

Sometimes naming the underlying loss helps us understand what our emotions are responding to—and what we may need to begin rebuilding.

2. Separate what happened from what you're telling yourself it means

Imagine struggling through a conversation in a language you're learning.

The event might be:

I couldn't communicate everything I wanted to say.

The interpretation might become:

I'm terrible at this. I'll never fit in.

Try separating the two.

A different interpretation might be:

I'm still learning. I don't need to speak perfectly to communicate. Practice is how I will improve.

This isn't about forcing yourself to “think positively.” It's about recognizing that your first interpretation isn't necessarily the only one available to you.

Changing the interpretation can create possibilities that weren't available when I'll never fit in felt like an unquestionable fact.

3. Build belonging in small ways

One of the least visible losses in an international move is the network of relationships and familiar places that made everyday life feel like yours.

Research supports the importance of rebuilding those connections. In a study of 194 women who relocated across 17 countries because of their partners' international assignments, better adjustment was associated with fewer perceived losses in friendship networks and having social-support needs adequately met. Greater local support, rather than relying primarily on long-distance relationships, was also associated with better adjustment (Copeland & Norell, 2002).

So don't wait for an entire city or country to feel like home.

Find one person you can call locally.

Create one weekly ritual.

Walk the same route.

Return to the same café.

Join a group.

Invite someone for coffee.

Allow yourself to become a regular somewhere.

Belonging is rarely something we suddenly discover. More often, we build it through small, repeated experiences of familiarity and connection.

You may not need to find your old self

When we say, I don't feel like myself, our instinct is often to try to get back to the person we were before. But perhaps that's not always the goal.

International relocation naturally asks us to renegotiate our routines, relationships, assumptions, identities, and sense of belonging. So the goal may not be to avoid being shaken by the experience—or even to return to exactly who we were before it. Perhaps the work is learning how to find our ground again while allowing ourselves to change.

To listen to what our emotions are revealing.

To question interpretations that keep us stuck.

To intentionally rebuild the connection, competence, and belonging we've lost.

And to remain curious about the person emerging through the experience.

Moving abroad may temporarily disrupt your sense of who you are. Learning how to find coherence again—and discovering who you're becoming—may be one of its greatest gifts.

References

Adams, B. G. & van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2015). The many faces of expatriate identity. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 49, 322–331.

Black, J. S., Mendenhall, M. & Oddou, G. (1991). Toward a comprehensive model of international adjustment: An integration of multiple theoretical perspectives. Academy of Management Review, 16(2), 291–317.

Copeland, A. P. & Norell, S. K. (2002). Spousal adjustment on international assignments: The role of social support. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 26(3), 255–272.

Peltokorpi, V. & Zhang, L. (2020). Exploring expatriate adjustment through identity perspective. International Business Review, 29(3), 101667.