Culture Shock! 14 Posts On Coping With Uncomfortable Cultural Changes

Anyone who travels, studies or lives abroad experiences uncomfortable cultural surprises if not shocks. Actually, you can experience these discomforts moving from one town to another or one job to another as you compare and contrast your former life to your life now. You can also experience cultural shocks by staying put, as the environment around you changes, as the people you used to associate with move on, as those who used to be in charge grow old, retire, move away or die off, or newcomers come in and take over. Change is a part of life, for good and ill.

This graphic explains how humans adjust to these changes, or not. It’s easy to get stuck in one stage, “uncertainty and doubt,” decide that the shocks are too great. This may require you to make a change for yourself.

My wife, sons, and I were fortunate in our years abroad to adapt and accept what were initially uncomfortable situations, cultural differences, and barriers.

In the following articles, my wife and I describe what were the biggest cultural shocks we experienced while living in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

1. Experiencing Culture Shock, Offensive Questions from Both Sides of the Global Divide

2. A common experience for ex-pats.

   Feeling Like A Space Alien in Turkey

3. Eliciting double takes after visiting the salon.

   Cultural Shocks After 'Foreign' Haircuts

4. People of different faiths have much to teach each other.

   What Americans Can Learn from Turkish and Arab Muslims

5. First Impressions of Teaching English At University in Abu Dhabi

6. Culture Shock: Battling Traffic in Some Countries Gives Me Anxiety

7. Culture Shock: Segregated Lives for Men and Women

8. Culture Shock: Middle Eastern Men and Women Are Group-oriented Rather Than Individually Oriented

9. Culture Shock: ‘Downton Abbey’ Illustrates Similarities to Lives of Gulf Aristocrats Today. So Does 'The Help'

10. Culture Shocks & Ethical Dilemmas

11. I mentioned in the lecture above that the culture shock in adjusting to Alamance County, NC was in some ways as great as living overseas. Click.