Thinking About Moving Back Home

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

Expat therapy for the decision to move back home. A repatriation therapist understands that going back isn’t the reverse of leaving, because neither you nor home are the same.

You've started looking at flights. Not booking them. Just looking. Checking what's available, what it would cost, how quickly you could be back in a place where the street signs make sense and you could order a coffee without rehearsing the sentence in your head first. You close the tab. You open it again an hour later.

Maybe you mention it to your partner and frame it as practical. "Just exploring options." Maybe you haven't mentioned it to anyone, because saying it out loud would make it real, and you're not ready for it to be real. Or maybe you are. Maybe you've been ready for months and you've been talking yourself out of it because leaving would mean the whole thing: the move, the goodbye parties, the shipping container, the brave new chapter, was a mistake.

Let me save you some time: it wasn't necessarily a mistake. And going back isn't necessarily the answer. The problem is that you're asking a logistical question (should I stay or should I go?) about something that isn't actually a logistical problem.

What you're imagining isn't home. It's "before."

When you picture going back, what do you see? Be honest. You see the coffee shop. The friend who gets you. The feeling of walking down a street and belonging there. The version of yourself that was competent and connected and known.

But that picture has a date stamp on it. It's from before you left. And nobody warns you about this: that version of home doesn't exist anymore. Your friends' lives moved on. Your old apartment has someone else's furniture. The coffee shop might still be there, but you won't walk in as the person who left, you'll walk in as the person who comes back. And those are very different experiences.

This isn't pessimism. It's just how time works. The home you're homesick for is a home at a specific moment, with a specific version of you in it, and neither of those things paused while you were gone.

The two kinds of wanting to go back

The first kind is practical, and it's straightforward. The job didn't work out. The relationship didn't survive the move. The country is not a fit: the climate, the culture, the professional opportunities. You gave it an honest shot and the data is in: this isn't where you want to build your life. That's a clear signal, and there's no shame in following it. Sometimes the right move is the return flight.

The second kind is harder to see, because it disguises itself as the first kind. This is the wanting-to-go-back that isn't really about geography. It's about identity. You don't want to go back to a place. You want to go back to a self. The self that felt competent. The self that had friends. The self that didn't have to think about who it was because the context did that work for you.

If it's the second kind, going back won't fix it. You'll feel the relief for a few weeks. The familiar streets, the language, the friends, and then a new discomfort will set in. Because you're not the same person who left. You've been changed by the experience of leaving, whether you wanted to be or not, and you'll be trying to fit a new shape into an old space.

This is what people who've moved back and been surprised by how hard it was are describing. It's not that home was bad. It's that they weren't the same, and the gap between who they'd become and who everyone expected them to be was its own kind of loneliness.

The question you're actually asking

What I've learned from sitting with people in exactly this position: "should I move back?" is almost never the real question. The real question is one of these:

Am I allowed to admit that this isn't what I wanted? Because somewhere along the way, you absorbed the idea that you're supposed to love this. That people who move abroad are brave and adventurous, and if you don't love it, the problem is with you. So the fantasy of going home is carrying all the weight of the admission you can't make: that this is hard, and you're not happy, and you don't know if it's going to get better.

Am I running toward something or away from something? Going home because you've found clarity about what you want. That's running toward. Going home because you can't stand the discomfort of not knowing who you are in this new place. That's running away. The first one tends to feel clean. The second one tends to feel urgent, panicky, like you need to decide now.

If I leave, will I always wonder? This is the one that keeps people up at night. The fear that going back is giving up. That you didn't stay long enough, try hard enough, give it a fair shot. That twenty years from now you'll look back and wish you'd held on.

What actually helps

First: separate the decision from the feeling. You're allowed to feel like you want to go home and also not go home. You're allowed to feel like this isn't working and also give it more time. Feelings are data, not instructions. The urge to book a flight is telling you something important (it's telling you that something here isn't being addressed) but it's not necessarily telling you to book the flight.

Second: name what you've lost. Not the practical things, though those matter too. The identity things. Who were you at home? What parts of yourself did you leave behind? What are you mourning that you haven't been allowed to mourn because everyone keeps telling you how lucky you are? The grief is real, and it needs somewhere to go.

Third: ask yourself what you'd need (not from a place, but from yourself) to feel okay here. Not happy, necessarily. Not "adjusted." Just okay. Because if the answer is "I'd need to stop pretending I'm fine," or "I'd need to deal with the fact that my relationship is under real strain," or "I'd need to figure out who I am without my old job and my old friends," those are things you can work on here. They're also things that will follow you home if you don't.

And fourth: give yourself permission to leave without it being a failure. If, after sitting with all of this honestly, the answer is still "I want to go home," then go home. Not because you couldn't hack it. Because you made a choice based on real information. That's the opposite of failure.

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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