Why Expat Life Is Lonely Even When It Looks Perfect

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

Therapy for expat loneliness. An expat therapist understands that you can have a social life and no one in it who knows you. That’s a specific kind of lonely.

Your Instagram looks amazing. The cobblestone streets, the weekend trips, the foreign grocery store that somehow feels cinematic. Your friends back home are jealous. "You're living the dream!" they say, and you say "I know, I'm so lucky," and then you hang up and sit in your apartment in silence and feel a loneliness so heavy it has actual weight.

And then you feel ashamed. Because you are lucky. Because millions of people would kill to be in your position. Because who the hell complains about living in Europe, or Asia, or wherever you are? What is wrong with you?

Nothing is wrong with you. Something is wrong with the story you've been told about what this experience is supposed to feel like.

The loneliness nobody talks about

Expat loneliness isn't the same as regular loneliness. Regular loneliness is an absence. You don't have enough connection. Expat loneliness is an absence wrapped in a performance. You're lonely, and you're pretending not to be, and you feel guilty about being lonely, and you don't have anyone to talk to about the loneliness because the people in your life are either back home (and you don't want to worry them) or other expats (and you don't want to be the one who's not handling it well).

So the loneliness becomes a secret. And secrets are heavy.

What makes it worse: you're surrounded by people. You go to the expat meetups. You have colleagues, maybe. You chat with the barista. But there's a specific kind of loneliness that comes from being around people who don't know you, who don't know your history, your references, your humor, the things that make you you. You can be perfectly social and still feel invisible.

Why the shame makes it worse

The most destructive part of expat loneliness isn't the loneliness itself. It's the shame about it. Because you chose this. You moved here voluntarily (or at least you told yourself you did). You're supposed to be grateful, adventurous, open-minded. Lonely doesn't fit the narrative.

So you do what humans always do with feelings that don't fit the narrative: you push them down. You tell yourself you just need to try harder. Join another group. Be more outgoing. Put yourself out there. And when that doesn't work, because the problem was never that you weren't trying hard enough. You conclude that something is wrong with you at a basic level.

Let me be direct about this: nothing is wrong with you. You're a social animal who has been separated from your pack and dropped into a territory where you don't know the rules. The loneliness you're feeling is not a personal failing. It's a biological response to social displacement. It would be bizarre if you didn't feel it.

The shame, on the other hand. That's doing real damage. Because shame isolates. It makes you hide the very thing that, if you shared it, would connect you to others. Every other expat at that meetup who's pretending to be fine is carrying the same secret you are. But nobody says it, so everybody thinks they're the only one.

What's really going on under the loneliness

Sometimes the loneliness is straightforward: you're in a new place and you haven't built connections yet. Give it time, put in the effort, and it resolves. That's the version the expat guides prepare you for.

But sometimes the loneliness is telling you something else. Sometimes it's telling you that the connections you had at home were themselves a way of avoiding something, a way of staying busy enough and social enough that you never had to sit with yourself. And now, in this new place where the social buffer is gone, you're sitting with yourself for the first time in years, and what you're finding is someone you don't know very well.

That's not a failure of your new life. That's your new life holding up a mirror.

I've seen this again and again in the people I work with. The move strips away the distractions, and what's left is the person. And sometimes the person has been neglected for a long time. Not by anyone else, but by themselves. The loneliness isn't just about missing other people. It's about being a stranger to yourself.

What to do with this

First, stop shaming yourself for the loneliness. It's real, it's valid, and it's not something you can positive-think your way out of. Feeling it doesn't mean you're ungrateful. It means you're human.

Second, say it out loud to someone. Not the curated version: the real version. "I'm lonely and I feel stupid for being lonely." You'll be amazed how many people respond with "oh thank god, me too." Connection starts with honesty, and honesty starts with stopping the performance.

Third (and this is the harder one) sit with it. Not to suffer, but to listen. What is the loneliness actually about? Is it about the absence of people, or is it about the absence of yourself? Because if it's the latter, no amount of socializing will fix it. What will fix it is turning toward yourself with the same curiosity and compassion you'd give to a friend who was struggling.

If you can't do that alone, and most people can't, especially in the middle of a major life transition, find someone who can help you do it. (If you're not sure where to start, I wrote about how to find a therapist when you live abroad.) Not a friend, because friends are part of the performance. Someone outside the system. Someone who has no stake in you being fine.

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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