Experiencing homesickness after moving abroad is a common challenge faced by many expatriates.
It hits in the small moments, mostly. A phrase you don’t understand, and you nod anyway. The weather shifts into something familiar, but not quite used to, and you realise you don’t own the right jacket for this in-between season. Your friends text at odd hours. You wake up with your body in one country and your thoughts in another. You’re not lost, but you’re not rooted either.
You’ve built a life, technically. You’ve got the job, the flat, the good-enough coffee place down the street. You even found someone who cuts your hair almost right. But still, there’s a quiet ache at the edges. A constant hum of almost. Almost settled. Almost understood. Almost home.
People romanticise a life lived abroad. They imagine adventure and independence. A strong, capable, global citizen. And you are those things and you’re also tired. Tired of translating yourself. Tired of being the outsider in every room. Tired of trying to explain your accent, your grief, your backstory.
No one really tells you that you can miss something you chose to leave. That you can build a new life and still long for the emotional fluency of your old one. That you can become someone entirely new and still want someone to know who you used to be.
There’s a name for this, though no one really teaches it in school: it’s displacement grief. Or third culture grief. Or what happens when your body belongs to one place, but your inner life hasn’t quite caught up. As the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1980) wrote in the Attachment Theory, “our attachment systems are built around people, places, and rituals that signal safety. When those are suddenly gone, we don’t just miss them, we grieve them.”
It’s not always dramatic. It’s not loud. It shows up in soft ways. In the silence after a group laugh you didn’t understand, in the flatness of friendships that don’t quite click, and in the effort it takes to explain your jokes, your childhood, and your strange habits.
You might start wondering: Is something wrong with me? Why do I still feel off, even now? The answer is nothing’s wrong with you. But everything has changed around you.
What you’re feeling isn’t failure. It’s the friction of becoming. Carl Jung called the journey of becoming oneself through a process called individuation. Of moving through the world without a single place to fall into completely. This doesn’t mean you’re broken; it means you’re human and self-realising. One who’s learned how to adapt. One who’s built a self across time zones.
You’re not alone. And you’re not in between. You’re just in progress. At Wellbeing Rooms, we work with people who carry multiple selves. People who cross borders and sometimes lose parts of themselves in the process. Therapy for expats and global citizens isn’t just about coping. It’s about finding a sense of belonging, not in one place, but in yourself. Book a session today with one of our therapists, many of whom have lived, worked, and rebuilt their own lives across borders. We understand what it takes to navigate the in-between space ourselves.