When I first became an expat I had not read any of the mountains of material available about the psychological processes one goes through in this transition. Bad preparation, you may think, but it really never occurred to me and I certainly never felt the need. And that coming from a background as a University teacher of social work and as one familiar with notions of change, loss and transition.

So when I did glance through the material, many years after I had become an offshore resident, I was somewhat surprised to discover that much of it is based on models used to explain the grief process. Kubler-Ross’s seminal work ( Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: On Death and Dying. Macmillan 1969) on the 5 stages of the grief process, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance seems to underpin a number of the culture shock models. And I am sure there is some congruence between this and situations where the notion of ‘involuntary’ offshore resident is concerned. Political refugees, for example, who may have left family and all they hold dear behind in their home country, because they have to, either in order to stay alive or to avoid repressive governmental or judicial action. (This is not to negate that many first world western citizens are also leaving their home country to avoid repressive governmental action in one form or another, but they are doing so voluntarily which is slightly different). On the same continuum but lower in grief intensity come the ‘economic refugees’; those people who move offshore from a developing country to a ‘developed’ one in order to be able to obtain employment and support a family back home. Likewise, a diplomatic or corporate posting overseas may be viewed in this light if the person’s wish to move is more perceived than real. Technically, these last two examples are with the full consent of the about-to-be-expat but in real life it may not feel like that, due to the belief that the alternatives would be even less acceptable. The diplomatic postee may be heard in the denial phase with an incredulous ‘They’re not really sending me to Ulan Bator, are they…………?’ And before the letters roll in, I lived in a yurt in Ulan Bator in 1990 and loved it. It’s only an example.

Most of the culture shock models posit a 4 stage process for the offshore resident: the honeymoon or euphoric stage, the irritability or hostility stage, the adjustment stage and the adaptation stage. This can be useful in providing an explanation so that the expat is aware of which processes are likely to happen to him or her. The downside, however, is that they can also set expectations that this WILL happen and that there is something wrong with you if it doesn’t. You must be ‘in denial’!!

Fourteen years ago when I became an offshore resident and moved from the UK to the Dominican Republic, I cannot honestly remember ‘grieving’. It was an adventure, an opportunity, a challenge. I was a ‘voluntary’ expat. Of course, like many who had been young adults in the hippy era, I wanted to leave the rat race. But the overwhelming motivation was the going to something better (for me), not grieving for what I had left behind, looking forward not backward.

Now, in the 21st. century, there is an even larger and growing number of ‘voluntary’ offshore residents who have ‘caught the wave’ or are thinking about it; those people who decide to move to another country, sometimes for their retirement years, sometimes much earlier in their lives. They may be looking for a different climate (and not just a meteorological one based on many emails I have received as a result of earlier articles!), or a lower cost of living or a more relaxed lifestyle but whatever the motivation these about-to-be expats are exercising choice. They could stay where they are; they decide not to; they are, thus, voluntary expats or proactive offshore residents. Although they will go through transition processes in becoming an offshore resident, the whole notion of loss and grieving is perhaps less relevant as an underpinning theory. Somehow notions of loss and grieving seem to both overplay the melodrama angle of how different the new lifestyle will be and underplay the offshore resident’s ability to control their own destiny. After all, in the 21st. century moving even to the remotest point on earth is not in the same ballpark as the experiences of pioneers like the Vikings, Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama!! And basing the transitions attached to offshore living on a grief, loss or ‘disease’ psychological model such as that of Oberg seems to give undue weight to Freudian psychoanalytic models at the expense of others which may be more appropriate. It emphasizes ‘sickness’ at the expense of ‘health’, loss at the expense of positive choice and gain, the 20th. Century at the expense of the 21st, pathology at the expense of the normalcy of moving overseas.

It could be that for voluntary offshore residents behavioural psychology has more to offer than psychoanalytic concepts based on notions of neuroses. A model which is based on skills and behaviours is Storti’s competence model ( C. Storti: Figuring Foreigners Out Intercultural Press 1999). This suggests that the offshore resident moves through stages of unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally unconscious competence.

At the stage of ‘unconscious incompetence’ you don’t know what it is that you don’t know. This would explain the early euphoria or honeymoon phase before the reality of one’s new lifestyle strikes home. This stage may be drastically curtailed or even removed by careful preparation, research and the acquisition of realistic information before the move is made. Vasco da Gama, for example, had no OffshoreWave.com to consult! So potential offshore dwellers should read, ask, read some more, ask some more and visit their intended new home several times before making the move. Having said that, some people will be able to adjust and adapt no matter how little preparation they do. Fourteen years ago I did some preparation but nowhere near the amount I now advise others to do. We were not exactly the first gringos ever to arrive in the Dominican Republic (!) but there were not many Brits. living in the DR then and thus fewer of one’s own countryfolk to ask questions of, although we did seek out the US, Canadian and German residents who predated us as offshore residents. Now it is different, there are plenty of people to ask (some better than others); the days of the pioneer have long since gone.

At the ‘conscious incompetence’ stage the new offshore resident becomes aware of how much they do not know and how much there is to learn about the new environment. This can be a fairly debilitating phase because of the feeling of being permanently wet behind the ears and based on my observations of new expats where I live in the DR, it is this phase and how one handles it which shapes the future development, well being and happiness of the offshore resident. Again transition through this phase can be accelerated by detailed homework in advance of the move.

Of course, there will always be expats who stay at the honeymoon or ‘unconscious incompetence’ phase because they are not so much offshore residents as transplants who bring much of their home culture (and in some cases their belongings!) with them and set it up like a wall around themselves. Other ‘unconscious incompetents’ will be given a pass key to enter through this wall but usually the indigenous inhabitants of the country will not be in receipt of such a pass key, unless they are in a service capacity of one sort or another; their passage through that wall is only in terms of the role they fulfill and not as real people. Such transplants can manage to live very happy, if shallow, lives usually in blissful ignorance of what is really going on in the country they now call home. They tend to find the ‘conscious incompetents’ amusing as the latter struggle with all they feel they need to learn; they are mildly perturbed by the ‘conscious competents’ whom they find strident and they have absolutely nothing in common with the unconscious competents. This is, of course, entirely reciprocal!

The second phase, for those fortunate enough to reach it, can be both debilitating and life changing. The feeling of permanent wetness behind the ears is not pleasant as Winkelman describes, and it can be during this phase that people give up and go ‘home’, except that home may well have changed and probably so will they. This is the phase for focusing on the positives, not concentrating on the negatives, whether that is enhancing one’s sense of humour (sometimes maybe of the gallows variety), drawing strength from the partnership one is in, or really concentrating on the new opportunities which the different lifestyle provides. Motivation is an important factor here: I have met very few volunteer workers whether missionaries, Peace Corps, Habitat for Humanity or those not attached to any NGO, who focus on feeling ‘wet behind the ears’. They are doubtless aware that there is much to learn, but they do not focus on themselves so much as the people they have come to help. So expats going through the ‘conscious incompetent’ stage could well be advised to spend less time berating themselves and more time helping the less fortunate.

The third phase, that of conscious competence, is when offshore residents can work out the solution to most issues confronting them if they sit and think about it long enough. This is the phase of having knowledge of one’s surroundings at the intellectual level but not at the heart level. At this stage people know the ‘what’, they do not, however ‘feel’ the ‘how’ instinctively. Frequently at this phase the offshore resident is tempted to set up relocation services for other new expats, I have noticed, myself included, I should add. Maybe something to do with the pecking order in the barnyard? Or maybe something to do with shoring up an ego which has taken a bit of a bashing in the preceding stage, by surrounding oneself with people who think you are an expert and know less than you do? Either way, many expats remain at this stage for the rest of their offshore life, because although they are knowledgeable about their new country they do not ‘feel’ it, they merely ‘know’ it.

This disconnect between intellect and emotion can manifest in a number of ways. Witness, for example, the expat noticeboards and forums on the internet where quite long term and intellectually knowledgeable voluntary expats seem to do nothing but whinge and moan about this foreign land in which they are living. I am normally a relatively empathic soul, but try though I might, I find it hard to understand the notion of voluntarily moving abroad and then doing nothing but moan about the ‘differences’. It could be part of wanting to export your country of origin with you, or it could be to do with feeling like a fish out of water in the foreign environment, because although the intellect is knowledgeable about the new culture, the heart does not mesh with it. But it is horrendously embarrassing for those of us from the same original culture as the moaners who do not want to be perceived in this light by the indigenous population. And more importantly it is offensive to political and economic refugees who have had to leave that culture for all the reasons enumerated above. Economic refugees who would love to be back in their own country but have decided to relocate for a while in order to support their families, experience the moanings of the affluent foreigner who has relocated to their country like a stab in the back.

To illustrate, let me briefly describe the situation surrounding an email I received in response to the very first article I ever wrote about the Dominican Republic. In total I received some 30 plus mails, most either asking for information, confirming my perceptions or disagreeing with them in an adult fashion. One mail however stood out. It was a diatribe, not so much against me as against the Dominican people, replete with generalizations, half truths, untruths and totally unwarranted negative accusations. I did not know the sender, who did indeed use his own name, but a colleague of mine who is quite an internet detective discovered that the sender was indeed a long term ex-resident of the Dominican Republic. So the knowledge this expat possessed would have been considerable (or should have been considerable!) but clearly on an emotional level was out of touch with the reality of the Dominican Republic (or ‘off his meds’ as another reader mailed me!). And to share with you the smile the mail gave me……..it accused me of living in the DR because I could not make it in the ‘real world’, wherever that is. The mail, I believe, came from Florida.

Back to the model – the fourth stage of the process ‘unconscious competence’ you really won’t know you have arrived at until quite some time after you have got there – forgive the construction but I am of Irish origin. This is where an understanding of the ‘new’ culture becomes instinctive; you can, for example, predict reactions to given situations with the same degree of accuracy as you would have had in your country of origin. You don’t have to ‘think about it’ anymore, you just do it ‘naturally’. For that reason you will not be aware you are are doing it unless you stop to think about it. This does not mean you have nothing left to learn about the new culture; there is always masses left to learn. But because you instinctively know how to handle a situation, the ‘what’ or factual data or knowledge becomes less important because you know how to get it; or rather you ‘feel’ how to get it. So knowing how much you don’t know stops being debilitating; it is no more debilitating than it would be in your country of origin where you knew the ropes.

There may be a fifth stage or even a sixth in this process, but since I’m not there yet, I am not really competent to speculate…………. I would however like to spend a few lines on the difference between accepting one’s new culture and embracing it for the good it contains to the attitude of not being prepared to listen to one ‘bad’ word about the new culture. Arriving at the unconscious competence stage does not mean one’s critical faculties have gone out the window (if you have one, in your new surroundings, that is). There are going to be social and other evils perpetrated by some of the indigenous inhabitants, as there are in any culture. It is not realistic to defend these, nor to become over defensive when others, particularly newer arrivals, criticise. Sometimes it is possible to offer an alternative explanation for certain behaviours, sometimes it is not. I live in the Dominican Republic where male machismo, in common with other parts of Latin America, was something which I thought would be a problem for me to handle initially. In the upshot I had to learn my ‘limitations’ as a female in this environment as perceived by some of its male inhabitants. I know, for example, that technicians from the electricity company Edenorte (or rather Edenada because of all the blackouts) are, for some inexplicable reason, a supra-macho group, so I let my other half handle them, otherwise we would have wires in all the wrong places! It does not stop me working (slowly) to achieve change, nor more importantly my other half who being a male will actually get listened to. But the ‘how’ of doing this is very important – gently, firmly but without being strident. However, I continue to speak out about machismo applied to the Dominican family when the end result is abuse of a female partner. That will never be acceptable and it is ludicrous to think one does not have the right to criticise and intervene merely because one is a gringa.

Offshore residents need not feel guilty when they find things of which they are critical in their new environment. The mere act of moving offshore does not entail an automatic evaporation of critical faculties. What is important is why and how you are criticizing – there is a huge difference from whingeing and moaning in order to demean or belittle someone else and gently criticizing from affection and understanding in order to achieve improvement and development. Done right it does not make you a colonialist, imperialist oppressor.

Finally, in any transition, never forget your sense of humour. In the early days of living offshore this may well mean laughing at oneself more than you have ever done before. Apart from being common sense there really is a scientific basis for this. The location in the brain which helps us understand jokes and metaphors is the very same location where the mental process which results in sudden insight occurs. So by finding humour in many of your new offshore experiences, you are actually accelerating the ‘light bulb’ moment – with or without input from Edenada.

References

E. Kubler-Ross On Death and Dying Macmillan 1969

R.H.Sims & M.Schraeder An Examination of Salient Factors Affecting Expatriate Culture Shock in Journal of Business Management Vol. 10 No. 1 Colorado State University.

G.W.Shames Transcultural Odysseys: The Evolving Global Consciousness Intercultural Press 1997

C. Storti Figuring Foreigners Out Intercultural Press 1999

C. Storti The Art of Crossing Cultures Intercultural Press 1990

M. Winkleman Culture Shock and Adaptation Arizona State University. Dept. of Anthropology 2003

K. Oberg Culture Shock and the Problems of Adjustment in New Cultural Environments in Weaver (Ed.) Readings in Cross Cultural Communication 1987

Dominican Republic Country Profile

Real Estate in The Dominican Republic