I Moved Abroad and I'm Miserable

What follows is how I understand and approach this issue in my work with clients.

Expat therapy for when the move isn’t what you expected. A therapist who works with expats understands that the advice to “give it time” misses the point.

You probably didn't type that into Google expecting a therapist to answer. You were hoping for a Reddit thread, or a blog post from someone who felt the same way and then found a great café and made a friend and now everything's fine. I'm not going to give you that.

What I'm going to tell you is that your misery makes complete sense. Not in the vague, hand-wavy "it's okay to feel your feelings" way, but in a specific, concrete, of course you feel this way kind of way. Let me explain.

You didn't just move. You dismantled your entire support system.

Think about everything you left behind. Not just the people: the rhythms. The coffee shop where you didn't have to think about what to order. The friend you could call when you had a bad day who already knew the backstory. The ability to go to the store and buy what you needed without translating anything or wondering if you're doing it wrong. The feeling of basic competence.

You went from being a functioning adult to feeling like a child who doesn't know the rules. That's not a metaphor. Your nervous system literally doesn't know how to relax in this new environment because nothing is familiar enough to signal safety. You're running a low-grade stress response all day, every day, and you're calling it "not adjusting well." You're adjusting exactly as well as a human being can be expected to adjust when every anchor point has been removed simultaneously.

The part nobody warned you about

What the expat blogs and relocation guides don't tell you: the loneliness of living abroad isn't the same as regular loneliness. Regular loneliness is missing connection. Expat loneliness is missing connection plus the exhausting awareness that everyone around you seems to have it. The locals have their lives. The other expats seem to be thriving. You're the one who can't make it work.

Except you're not. Most of them are struggling too. They're just performing competence the same way you probably are when anyone asks how the move is going. "Oh, it's an adjustment, but we love it!" Meanwhile you cried in the shower this morning because you couldn't figure out the recycling system and it became the thing that broke you.

So what's actually going on?

You're not weak. You're not ungrateful. You're not failing at something other people find easy. What's happening is that you moved to a place where none of your usual coping mechanisms work, and you haven't built new ones yet. The things you used to do to feel okay (calling that friend, going to that place, falling into that routine) are gone. And in their absence, you're meeting yourself without the buffer.

For some people, that's the first time in years they've been alone with who they actually are. And it turns out there's stuff there they've been avoiding. The move didn't cause your misery. The move removed the things that were keeping the misery manageable. (This is also what makes expat loneliness so different from ordinary loneliness.)

That's not a comfortable thing to hear. But it's actually good news, in a way, because it means the path forward isn't just "adjust better to living abroad." It's something deeper and more worthwhile than that.

What you can do

First: stop performing. If you're miserable, be miserable. Not publicly, necessarily, but at least with yourself. The energy you're spending pretending everything is fine is energy you don't have to spare right now. If you have a partner, this performance may be straining your relationship in ways neither of you is naming.

Second: understand that this is not a character flaw. Given everything you've been through (the upheaval, the loss, the disorientation) your response is exactly what any human being's response would be. You were always going to feel this way. You couldn't have prevented it by being stronger or more adventurous or more positive. You're a person responding to an enormously stressful life change in the way people respond to enormously stressful life changes.

Third: consider that this might be an opportunity. Not in the toxic-positivity sense, but in the real sense. You're in a place where your usual defenses don't work. That's painful, but it's also rare. Most people never get a chance to see themselves this clearly. If you can sit with it, ideally with someone who can help you make sense of what you're seeing. You might come out of this not just adjusted, but changed in a real way.

Aaron Platt, MA (Counseling, La Salle; Sociology, UC Berkeley) is a therapist offering individual and couples therapy in English to clients worldwide. His psychodynamic approach focuses on the patterns that keep people stuck, not the surface symptoms, but the underlying structure.

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