An Alternative Approach to Managing Culture Shock for Old Coots

If you are feeling alone ... look for global commonalities to make connections.

Culture shock can be a period of much stress for expatriates who retire abroad. However, those who are able to step back and analyze the causes of culture shock are more likely to be successful at controlling and managing culture shock. Managing culture shock involves understanding what you can and cannot change about living abroad in a new culture and taking steps to restore an acceptable level of control and predictability into your life.

Managing Culture Shock: Why Do People Experience Culture Shock?

To a large degree people experience culture shock because they find themselves in a situation where they have lost a great deal of control over their environment. This loss of control will initially lead to frustration and if not managed properly can grow into a great deal of resentment towards the host culture, a sense of isolation, suspicion of others around you, and a lot of stress.

The simplest of daily living acts may become very complex and difficult. You can’t read a menu at a restaurant. You don’t know how to ask where the bathroom is. The waiter seems to ignore you and serves the local customers first. The waiter doesn’t understand you despite you having explained your request in the simplest of English terms – several times. You say something out loud to the waiter and get astonished looks from others around you. And ultimately, you walk out of the restaurant angry that the management is so bad, the workers are stupid, and that the other customers are rude busybodies.

Magnify this simple task of eating at a restaurant to many other simple acts in life and you are beginning to experience the pains of culture shock when living abroad. You have lost control over your environment. Everything seems unpredictable. Someone seems to have changed the rules of life without telling you. And you are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. But sadly, no one is listening or even seems to care. You are experiencing culture shock.

Managing Culture Shock: Can Culture Shock Be Avoided?

The answer is no. When you move into a new cultural environment, there are a host of new rules that are in play. Not knowing what these new rules of life are is likely to cause some degree of culture shock. However, it is also very likely that by proactively managing culture shock that you can reduce the level of culture shock to acceptable levels of stress.

Part of the trick to managing of culture shock is to develop an understanding of what things can be changed and what things cannot be changed when living abroad. By positioning yourself in environments where things can be managed and changed, your sense of control of the environment remains intact and you can minimize the feeling of culture shock.

Managing Culture Shock: A Macro-Cultural or Social Approach to Managing Culture Shock

If you are an adaptable type of person, then all of the traditional advice about dealing with culture shock will probably be the way to go. Learn the language, mix in with people, gradually learn the subtleties of non-verbal communications, learn to put the blinders on for things that are not to your liking, and immerse yourself into your new culture.

This strategy is what I consider a culture based approach to managing culture shock. You accept the fact that you will have to adapt to a new culture and make the appropriate modifications to yourself to fit in. You are the focus of change.

But how do you cope if you are an old coot (like myself) who is somewhat set in his ways and likes it that way? Then my recommendations are to take a macro-cultural based approach to managing culture shock. Rather than focusing on all the little details of cultural behaviors and trying to adjust to them all at once, this approach focuses on the broad social forces that are constantly shaping all societies. These social factors tend to be more global in nature - rather than being highly localized and provincial. And they tend to be more universal across cultures rather than unique. In essence, this strategy is built around connecting with the cross cultural elements that are similar (at least at first) rather than trying to adapt to a new culture immediately.

Managing Culture Shock: Macro-Cultural and Global Social Points of Connection

Well what are these macro-cultural and global social points of connection that a less adaptable person can use in managing culture shock? There are many, but here’s a list of a few common ones:

Urbanization: today, there are certain commonalities between all urban environments. These commonalities are reflected in housing styles, community development, technology infrastructure, and businesses. What kind of lifestyle do you have in America? Do you live in the middle of a large city, a suburb, or a rural setting? One strategy for managing culture shock is to seek out a similar home and community environment that you are used to. That will at least place you into familiar surroundings every night when you go to bed.

Social Class: which social class do you belong to? Are you wealthy, upper middle class, working class, or dirt poor? Another strategy for managing culture shock is to move into a community that is comparable to the social environment that you already are familiar with. While people may speak a different language from you, they are very likely to have similar values to you with respect to life, work, and family that will make cross-cultural understandings easier.

Technology Network: what social networks do you belong to with respect to technology? These represent points of connection between people of different cultures. I regularly chat with Filipinos over yahoo messenger, I communicate with many Filipinos over the global network of blogs, and I interact with expatriates via an expatriate forum. All of these activities plug me into various online Filipino communities, despite the fact that I’ve barely learned more than a couple of sentences of the language. Believe me, the smiley is part of a global language that almost everyone understands when chatting online.

Entertainment Network: one of the most powerful forces in globalization today is entertainment and you can use this to make connections with any culture where global entertainment has made in-roads. What are these centers of entertainment? They are many, you just have to get creative about their use.

Of course, it can be music and this is commonly shared in karaoke places and bars across the world. It could be shopping and hanging out in a mall and becoming a mall rat. A mall in Manila is not all that different from a mall in San Francisco. Your fellow mall rats are usually engaged in the same social games that you are (shopping, dining, entertainment, etc.).  Internet cafes are almost universal these days – open up a Friendster account in the Philippines and there will be tons of experts who will be willing to help you fine tune your Friendster site. Coffee places like Starbucks seem to pop up all over the world and quickly populate themselves with certain types of people including expatriates and certain social classes. If you are a couch potato, select a retirement destination with your favorite cable channels. I occasionally watch the X-Files and Scare Tactics re-runs on television here.

Food Network: if food is a favorite pastime, then take heart in knowing that food has become a globalizing phenomenon. I sometimes watch Rachel Ray or the Iron Chef here in Cebu City. When I miss something from back home, I can choose anything from McDonald’s to Pizza Hut to TGIF and immediately connect with the familiar. In fact, Pizza Hut delivered a Meatlover’s pan pizza to me just the other night. Managing culture shock is all about making personal connections to your world of comfort when you are living abroad.

Managing Culture Shock: A Summary

If you are retired or soon to be retired, there is a high degree of probability that you are set in your ways. If this is the case, an alternative strategy to rapid cultural immersion when you retire abroad is a more gradual selective social immersion. Select those social environments and situations that you are familiar with and insert yourself at those points. With globalization at work today, this is easier than ever.

Over time, slowly integrate yourself into the foreign lifestyle at a pace that will not be stressful to you. This may mean that you may be spending your first few months eating Big Macs and watching X-Files reruns until you are sick of them and wanting to immerse yourself in a culture that has something different to offer you.

Take things slowly. I really don’t buy into the old method of rapid cultural immersion for adapting to a new culture or learning a foreign language. Some of us old coots prefer doing it slow and for a long time. It works well for many other things besides managing culture shock.

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