When the Adjustment Curve Doesn't Curve

The U-curve model of cross-cultural adjustment, first described by Sverre Lysgaard in 1955 and later expanded by Kalervo Oberg into the concept of "culture shock," suggests that people relocating to a new country move through broadly predictable phases: an initial honeymoon period of excitement and novelty, followed by a dip into frustration and disorientation, and then a gradual recovery toward adaptation and — eventually — a degree of integration.

The Model Everyone Has Heard Of

The model is useful as a rough map. It normalises the dip. For many expats, knowing that the disorientation is temporary and widely shared is itself helpful — a kind of cognitive permission to feel lost without concluding that the whole move was a mistake.

But the model has a significant weakness: it describes the average trajectory and implies that time, by itself, is the mechanism of resolution. For a substantial number of people, this turns out not to be true.

Our Cascais practice has written about where this dip tends to land in practice — a more informal, timeline-specific companion to the model above.

What "Not Curving" Looks Like

In clinical practice, persistent adjustment difficulty tends to present not as acute distress but as a quiet, pervasive flatness — a sense of going through the motions without genuine engagement. People describe it in similar terms: "I'm functioning fine, but I don't feel like myself." Or: "Everything is objectively good, so I don't understand why I still feel like this."

The gap between the objective situation (a city people chose, a job that works, relationships that function) and the subjective experience (low mood, disconnection, a sense of unreality) is itself part of what makes this form of distress hard to name. The social narrative around expat life — that it is an adventure, a privilege, something to be grateful for — actively discourages acknowledging that it can also be a source of sustained psychological difficulty.

Common clinical presentations include:

• Low mood that is stable rather than episodic — present most days, but not severe enough to feel like "depression"
• Social withdrawal, particularly from local social opportunities, combined with a heightened reliance on digital contact with people back home
• Difficulty investing in the new environment — not making plans, not forming routines, not building relationships — as if the move is still temporary even years in
• Irritability and a lowered threshold for frustration with the host culture, language barriers, or bureaucratic systems
• Anxiety symptoms — particularly social anxiety or health anxiety — that were not prominent before the move
• A growing sense of not quite belonging anywhere: too changed to slot back into life at home, not sufficiently integrated to feel at home here

Why Some People Don't Adjust: The Clinical Picture

The U-curve model treats adjustment as largely situational — a response to the strangeness of a new environment that resolves as the environment becomes familiar. But psychological research points to a more complex picture, in which individual factors interact with situational ones to determine how well a person navigates relocation.

Attachment style and relational disruption

People with anxious or insecure attachment patterns often find relocation disproportionately destabilising, because moving means losing the specific people and places that had become regulating objects — the coffee shop, the familiar commute, the friend you saw without arranging it. Research by Furukawa et al. (1997) found that the quality of social support in the host country was a stronger predictor of adjustment than any other factor, including language ability or cultural distance. For people who find building new relationships slow or effortful, this creates a compounding problem: the very thing most needed is the thing hardest to access.

Identity and professional disruption

For many expats — particularly those who relocate for a partner's career rather than their own — the move involves an implicit demotion of their professional and social identity. Competence and status that were invisible because they were ambient (everyone knew what you did, you knew how things worked, you had accumulated social capital over years) suddenly become absent. The resulting sense of diminishment is rarely articulated as such; it tends to surface as generalised irritability, low motivation, or a vague sense of purposelessness.

Pre-existing vulnerability

Relocation does not create psychological difficulty from nothing. More commonly, it removes the structures — routine, social network, professional role — that were functioning as external regulation for vulnerabilities that already existed. People who managed anxiety through busyness, or low mood through social contact, suddenly find those coping mechanisms unavailable. What emerges then is not caused by the move; it was already there, waiting for a context that would make it visible.

This is clinically significant because it means that persistent adjustment difficulty often benefits from psychotherapy rather than simply from "settling in" — the underlying pattern needs attention, not just the surface-level adaptation.

The Particular Problem of Ambiguous Loss

Psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term "ambiguous loss" to describe grief that lacks clear social recognition — loss without the cultural permission to grieve. Expat loss fits this category almost exactly.

When you leave a country, you lose access to a language as your primary medium of daily life. You lose a social network that took years to build. You lose proximity to ageing parents. You lose a version of yourself — the person you were in that context, with those people, in that language. None of this is the same as bereavement, but the emotional texture is not entirely different either.

What makes it particularly difficult is the positive framing that tends to surround the move — from others, and often from the person themselves. "You're so lucky to be living in Lisbon." This is probably true and also beside the point. The coexistence of genuine privilege and genuine loss is not a contradiction, but it can make the loss difficult to claim, which in turn makes it difficult to process.

What Therapy Actually Does Here

Psychological support for persistent adjustment difficulty is not primarily about advice on how to integrate better, or techniques for building a social life in a new city. It is about creating a space in which the actual experience can be examined — the grief, the ambivalence, the identity disruption — without the pressure to resolve it quickly or frame it positively.

In my work with expat clients, the most common turning point is not when someone develops new coping strategies, but when they are able to honestly name what the move has cost them. That naming — which often requires a witness, and a particular kind of non-judgemental attention — tends to release something that waiting, and time, and optimism cannot.

If you are working through this, you can read more about how I work on the psychologist page, or explore the online therapy options available to clients outside Lisbon.

References

1. Lysgaard, S. (1955). Adjustment in a foreign society: Norwegian Fulbright grantees visiting the United States. International Social Science Bulletin, 7, 45–51.
2. Furukawa, T., Rothbaum, B. O., Riggs, D., & Foa, E. B. (1997). Social support and adjustment to a new culture. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 51(3), 123–130. PubMed
3. Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.
4. Ward, C., Bochner, S., & Furnham, A. (2001). The Psychology of Culture Shock (2nd ed.). Routledge.