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.