Reverse culture shock

Visiting back to where I'm from recently,  Pennsylvania,  I had the unusual experience of reverse culture shock.   That's when one's own native culture seems unfamiliar due to acclimating to another culture,  from living abroad (see Wikipedia description; as usual pretty decent).

This diagram, from a blog post about culture shock, covers a number of separate stages including initial and reverse culture shock phases (which I won't really go into):

from www.deborahswallow.com; follow link for more details

Not exactly Buddhism,  right.  It is an unusual indicator of how expectations factor into normal experience though, a subject common to Buddhism.   Normally such a frame of reference is transparent,  especially if one only travels a normal amount,  perhaps with the occasional week or two in another country and culture.  With a longer stay in a very unfamiliar culture lots of small differences can be hard to deal with, but this is normal culture shock, not the "reverse" kind of adjusting to one's own native environment.   A few typical examples might help.

What is culture shock:

Asians never wear shoes in their houses, and it was hard for my wife to adjust to seeing it happen in America.  One might imagine the instinctive revulsion this could trigger but without sharing it someone couldn't completely relate to it.   For me it was hard to adjust to the Thai culture trait of saying what is expected rather than an edited version of one's actual thoughts.  A normal expression relating to complete disagreement in Thailand might be a silent smile, but in America at most someone would say something noncommittal,  and smiling is reserved for being happy or intentionally appearing so, not as an expression of politeness.

Reverse culture shock is an odd variation of these.  Immediately people seemed too forward and friendly when I first arrived back, actually engaging me in conversation when they didn't know me.  Just the way people looked seemed odd, so different,  even though I had been quite familiar with that range of appearance and looked relatively similar myself.  One subtle point could be lost here; it seems possible to have trouble adjusting to experiencing one's own traits in other people.  In Thailand I'm as direct or reserved as I see fit to be, for example I'll do the unthinkable and offer help to visitors that seem lost, but someone I don't know initiating conversation would seem odd.

Even talking to family could seem unusual, although since I had remained in more close contact with my parents the experience didn't really relate to them.  It could be that other aspects seemed unfamiliar instead, how people that don't know each other relate, or other types of experiences.  It was odd that this overlapped with a sense of nostalgia,  which was triggered by just seeing different streets, or a drug store or grocery store interior.

It seems I should be able to leap to some insights about expectations in experience but it's hard to summarize any points on a lower level.   The range of behaviors, appearance,  and communication patterns we expect varies more and runs deeper than is easy to notice,  but it's hard to say what that really means.   In some branches of Buddhism, like Zen, the communicated goal seems to be to notice underlying patterns as a function of self and minimize these (in extreme forms eliminate them,  but it seems more accurate to say notice and minimize them).  But it's not so clear this really makes sense, removing expectations and relationship patterns, in general or related to culture and culture shock.

It seems if others around you are drawing on and utilizing this layer of assumptions even if it was possible to minimize them one cost would be seeming odd to everyone else.   Or it may be possible to make these more clearly understood and to communicate using them more consciously,  but not drop them.  Speech without levels relating to social role or familiarity would seem impossible.  It's interesting how foreign language study makes this clearer, and how these ordinary functions of a native language wouldn't be nearly as transparent as it would first seem.  Maybe an example again would clarify, and a bit of the tangent about languages.

Language use variation and culture differences:

Languages tend to have different ways built in to contain level of formality, to the extent that you can't simply leave it out.  Words like "hello" or even "eat" can be expressed in far different ways with essentially the same semantic content (meaning) but quite different context, variation in how one says things or to who.   In English it's common for this to occur in using whole sets if roots in different ways (per my limited understanding;  I'm no linguist) so that over time the Latin and Germanic variations can serve as different levels of formal or informal speech.

I don't experience it directly but I have read that Thai language does the same thing related to words based in Khmer origins versus Pali or other sources.   All this is drifting a bit from the related points I'd meant to make originally but it seems the far distant past  generally includes spheres of influence that help define this, and it sticks long after those connections would seem relevant.  By this I mean that the way Latin and Germanic derived English words are used would tie back to how different regions related to England as English evolved to a relatively modern form.

Thai also includes explicit and  literal additions to adjust tone, something English language generally doesn't.   Since it doesn't no good direct example works but in a similar way adding "sir" at the end if a sentence includes almost no actual content but does change tone.  There are a number of vaguely related words in Thai that are not actually any sort of title, they just adjust tone.

In Buddhism it's common enough for the ideas to be practical.  Even if all I'm saying is clearly how perception and interaction works there needs to be some relevance to applying that, or it's not really in the scope of Buddhism.  It would need to improve self awareness in some way that increases general satisfaction with life experiences,  or put the opposite way something that removes sources of dissatisfaction.  Self awareness is an important component of Buddhism but really only when it's practical.

Practical culture shock, reverse culture shock

So can it apply in such a way, can noticing the experience of culture shock be useful?  Again I'm not sure.   Normal culture acclimation can take years and I guess to some extent greater awareness could speed up the process.  Reverse culture shock is mostly re-acclimation, with a limited experience of adjusting to changes over time.  I was just back in Pennsylvania and everything seemed a lot more normal in a week.   Of course something unrelated could've been a factor,  like jet lag, or other changes in personal relationships brought on by people I know aging.

So I'll leave this without saying exactly what it means, or how to use it.  Someone could try to experience something related directly during foreign travel but in my experience it doesn't work that way.   The "shock" part is about immersion within a culture and two weeks of seeing tourist theme attractions doesn't entail that experience.   Even spending a day with a local family wouldn't cause it,  although a little of the awareness function might trigger.

Reverse culture shock is a bit counter-intuitive because even though cultures can shift slightly over time the problem is re-adjusting to a familiar one, not so much those changes (in my experience).  It is strange when new habits of new word use comes up (like people always messing with phones), but then to some extent such changes would be likely to have been encountered in the other culture, or in personal discussion or through media coverage.  As I've experienced it the odd part is not having the same perspective as in the past, not about external changes.  I think I could probably re-acclimate more quickly than I have here in Thailand (many years in I'm still gradually integrating), but then my experience with "going home" in a more complete sense is still limited, so maybe not.

In the Wikipedia article I referenced earlier they claim that for reverse culture shock "the affected person often finds this more surprising and difficult to deal with than the original culture shock."  An expat I met from South Africa, living in the United States, expressed this opinion, claiming you can't really go back, so in a sense you won't completely fit in anywhere.  Of course the related diagrams assume you can completely adjust to a new culture or re-adjust, and the different articles conclude it works out differently for different people, and some do adjust--in different ways--and others don't.

The role of narrative themes in everyday experience

This topic isn't exactly Buddhism, but at the same time essentially based within the same set of ideas.  It seems likely to me that if some of the most related themes in Buddhism (on duality, or rather non-duality, for example) were developed more in contemporary writings it might seem more so.

The rejection of self is seen as a more common starting point, or the aspect of experience of suffering.  Non-attachment also tends to come up more, and to me that's fair as a critical concept at the core of Buddhism.  In modern writing Zen emphasizes a potentially improved perspective when  ordinary thought and experience relate to not over-analyzing reality, taking things as they are, but I've not researched how these are derived from earlier Buddhist concepts and teachings.

Some of these general themes remind me of mindfulness teachings.  One of my favorite references is Mindfulness with Breathing, by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, so this is tying back to the Thai Buddhist tradition and early Buddhism.  When you read some of the content (like this introduction) there might seem to be no connection to narrative themes in experience at all, or perhaps even just a focus on meditation without a clear connection to everyday experience.  But it goes in that direction later, and the effect on everyday experience is really the point, not accumulating merit or a vague and general "inner peace."

At any rate this take is sort of my own, for what that's worth.  It's only here because it's close enough that I won't start another blog for psychological observations that relate to Buddhism but don't clearly map onto core teachings.

It's based on personal observation, just my take on things, so there are no Pali-based concept references.

Role of narrative themes in everyday experience

So what is the role?  We like to think that what we do makes good sense, that we are rational, and that both ideas and actions in our life are based on a logical framework of how things make sense.  To some degree this is true, and for some experiences it's not as relevant.  Something like a change of employment should relate to a lot of reasoning; a favorite ice cream flavor not really at all.  But my point here is instead that we tend to map most of what we experience into a series of narrative themes, regardless of whether that is functionally required or not.

Assuming I had established that to be true--the next part--we might wonder, so what?  Is this really related to Buddhism, or is it a good or bad thing, or not really functional or non-functional?  To what end do we do this, or just as habit, not towards an end.  But then I'll get to that after some more background.

How we organize events into narrative themes should be apparent to everyone with a worldview and life experience, to everyone, but then for the sake of argument I'll have to assume that some aspects of experienced reality aren't really apparent to everyone.  Put another way, that different people "do" introspection to different degrees, so that it could make sense for me to explain it all.  Of course sometimes I wonder if I'm really making any sense, but that's a separate issue.

One starting point for noticing this came when I noted that I tended to organize days into good or bad days, that early in the morning things seemed to be going well or not well.  "Luck" was invoked to explain why a train might have a long queue, for example.  Some of the same ground might be covered by the concept of "getting up on the wrong side of the bed."  That wouldn't relate to the timing of trains, or traffic patterns, but it would set a positive or negative tone for the earliest part of the day.  But then I could be more superstitious than most, right?  Or maybe I was caught up in explaining things that didn't really need to be explained, as much as really doing those things myself (meaning maybe the tendency to categorize was as much a function as the tendency to examine and explain, as it was a "real" thing).

A separate aspect of this general theme relates to noticing patterns in your own mind, how events match up with more general series of events.  Of course any version of this is essentially what reason was originally for.  My later thoughts on this have turned towards the role social media plays in this, how a decade ago we might have described these many small events to someone else in conversation, but now we do so in short messages in lots of different places online.

I'm not sure if this means narrative theme means more now than it would have a decade ago, or if it is experienced differently now or not.  Surely conversation would have covered a lot of the same ground in the past (the distant off-line-experience past of 25 years ago), just not as frequently, and not as documented in text.

Back to Buddhism

Seems a good place to circle back to why I see this as related to Buddhism at all.  The connection reference might be clear already; it's about the Zen directive towards direct experience.  Now more than ever we experience our own reality through our own commentary of it.  As a lot of commentary has it to an absurd degree, so that talking about our lives in messages becomes more of what we do than actually living it.  But then that perhaps that separation is artificial; it might be as well to say that one of the main components of life experience is commentary on life experience, or perhaps small talk that doesn't even relate to much.

The typical take in Zen teachings is that this isn't a good thing.  The thinking goes that direct experience is the main defining aspect of our lives, so constant talk about actual experience (the non-verbal, non-logical part) is noise, except in the other cases where the higher order message is necessary.  For example, you need to resort to abstract verbal constructs to order lunch.  During lunch you don't need to talk constantly or keep typing text messages, or surfing feed images.  Then again it's hard to imagine how looking around, or focusing on the actual experience of eating, could be so much better than those things.  In a McDonald's it probably wouldn't be, but that doesn't necessarily contradict Zen teachings, that in general people probably should drift towards eating decent food in more pleasant surroundings.

This "ought" might not be clear still.  What's the problem with observing story lines in our daily life?  To start, it's really not clear any tenet of Buddhism should be interpreted this way, or that any "should" really applies.  It's a possible connection I'm discussing here, because it's an interesting line of thought to me.  To most people, even those interested in Buddhism, it might not be.

To clarify further, let's assume there is some potential problem with seeing every single life event as part of any number of individual story lines.  Put the opposite way, let's assume there is some benefit to not doing that.  What is it, or what is both?  I'm proposing that life really isn't like that, that many things are just random, with no point, and no connections to other series of events, and it's a waste of time and an improper use of logic to keep linking them.  I guess this starts to overlap with a critique of superstition, although it's still a different thing.

I can't really say I notice this is a huge problem in how I experience reality, so some of the "what if" related to suggesting a problem doesn't work.  I have noticed that my mind can tend to get a bit noisy as a matter of habit, and that in the past steps I've taken to quiet it down have been positive.  In general I can't suggest an easy way to do that, since I've had mixed results with meditation, and the only thing that really did work was spending a few days alone in nature.

Continuity versus change in narrative

The function of the stories is really to put an order to things, to measure out real patterns for what they are.  One could easily overdo primitive human references but it's obvious enough how in the distant past gathering food and avoiding danger would draw on recognizing continuity in what happened before related to the present.  Of course we're not exactly in those circumstances, so as well to not make too much of all that.

In the present one type of narrative one might follow could relate to patterns of how a spouse or significant other is helpful / not supportive / etc.  Or related to work, or hobbies, or any number of social circumstances.  Drawing on the continuity in those patterns would sort of be the point, even though there would be regular variation.  What if a significant other or job or whatever other subject altered between positive and negative, between desired outcomes and positive correlations and the opposite?  Our own read would be inconsistent, always changing.  This seems to be how experienced reality actually works.

Not necessarily a bad thing, of course.  One could say the degree to which we rise above the ups and downs to measure it all well we are actually rational.  Or maybe that's going too far.  There is a tendency for people to accept that men want to be more rational, and women are better about accepting that ordinary experience isn't about reason, so there is a natural gender-based tension related to both the nature of reality and reason.

Being married it's easy for me to pin inconsistency on my wife, for not stepping back and weighing out what individual variations in experience mean.  She comes across as "crazy."  This definitely doesn't relate to writing out too many text messages, of course.  If she wrote a lot more or a lot less I think the end result wouldn't be so different.  We tend to add our interpretive biases to those messages, and within the conversations they are a part of, so the narrative themes are already there.  Someone I send messages to would already expect my wife to be crazy, and for me to be whatever the messages would say I am, as often not supportive or the like but related to negative triggers for communication.  So goes married life, or at least mine.

What alternative, direct experience?

This part I'm not so clear on.  It seems we have to keep doing this, that human experienced reality really does depend on it.  I recently took a break from my smart phone and it is possible to not send messages or check feeds but I still can't say how it actually changes experience.  Maybe it did seem slightly more direct.  Here there seems to be two related but different considerations:  by typing messages or updates into a phone a few times every hour we seem to condense our off-line lives into commentary more consistently, and then also life experience seems to be conditioned by including that ever-present element, so that in a way we never completely leave there.  Still hard to condense all that into a "we shouldn't."

It would help to have a "Buddha" as a reference, someone experiencing reality in a different way, one that somehow seems clearly better.  Unfortunately even the people that claim to have taken a limited step towards that are typically selling something, or just a bit out there.  I've interacted with a lot of monks in the last 8 years (in addition to having been one, briefly) and there's not much direction from there either, no higher perspective to draw on.  Even people that just talk about Buddhism seem to be all over the map, more often simply repeating cryptic, archaic references than making useful points (as likely myself included, just with less references).

A long time ago it seemed that to the extent I was able to notice the nature of my own experienced reality that I could also change it, experience it in a more direct and consistent way.  Maybe to some extent I'm still doing that; maybe not.  One could as easily argue this direct experience should be about noticing less, not doing so in a different way, but really who is to say.

I try to be aware of my own immediate reactions (the mindfulness part) and also keep an eye on the interpretive themes I'm adding, and maybe to some degree that helps me work with what I've got.  For me it's also helpful to keep in mind that not everything means something, that to some extent relatively random things can also happen, so there's no need to organize or manage or make sense of a lot of things.