The Myth of “Returning Home”: When Coming Back from Expatriation Becomes a True Identity Transition

We prepare everything… except ourselves.

I remember very clearly the first year after my return. I had spent 17 years in New York. There, I had dared quite a lot: leaving the comfort of a large French corporation after six years to develop a jewelry brand with another French woman I met there. Above all, I learned not to be afraid. And then one day, much later, I chose to return to reconnect with my family and my culture.

At first, I was on cloud nine. For a year, I fully enjoyed the beauty of Paris, my friends, and large family gatherings. But then, a much more difficult period began—when the reality of returning truly took shape, when the extraordinary became ordinary. That small sense of uniqueness I relied on in New York was gone. I had become one among many again, and yet I felt so different.

Ironically, I never felt as French as I did in New York, nor as American as I did in Paris. It is the suffering born from this gap that regularly shows up in my therapy practice.

When we return, we often anticipate everything: housing, children’s schooling, job hunting, health insurance, taxes. The to-do lists are endless. But we too often forget to prepare our emotional balance and to process the grief of expatriation.

When discomfort hits, we feel guilty. We tell ourselves we should be happy to be back. Yet it is almost mechanical. This is the well-known “W-curve,” which describes the cultural shock upon arrival abroad and the “reverse culture shock” upon returning. After a longer or shorter period of euphoria from being reunited with one’s home country, reverse culture shock sets in.

Suddenly, we are confronted with grieving the person we were abroad, trying to find our place again in an environment that has continued without us—where everything seems so familiar, yet we feel like strangers.

It is the suffering generated by this inner tension that we work with. In Gestalt therapy, the approach is specific. We do not lie down to endlessly analyze the past; instead, we focus on the “here and now.” Nor do we try to erase this uncomfortable gap—we learn to live with it.

For example, we might imagine a symbolic dialogue between the two polarities: the “me in the U.S.” and the “me in France.” The idea is not to choose sides. The goal is to integrate these two identities so that we no longer suffer from feeling split in two.

If you are in the midst of this transition, it is normal for it to feel difficult. You are not resuming your old life—you are creating a new one, enriched by everything you have brought back from abroad and that has transformed you.

And if it feels too heavy to carry alone, don’t hesitate to talk about it. The right time to seek support is simply when it feels right to you.