Five Stages of Culture Shock

I just finished reading a truly excellent article over at Expat Exchange. In Culture Shock: It’s the Little Things that Count in the Biggest Ways, author Desi Downey identifies five stages of culture shock:

• Honeymoon/Tourist
• Irritation-to-Anger
• Rejection/Regression
• Integration/Assimilation
• Reverse or Reentry

You can read the entire article here

Downey went to China with her husband, sent there by his company. As she describes it,

“One of the first things I noticed about China was that all the men carried purses and the women held hands. This phenomenon shot straight to the top of my list of “Weird World Wonders” and stayed there until a mere five minutes later, when I went looking for a bathroom at the airport and came face to face with my first squatty potty.

This was culture shock, pure and simple, and I was already moving from the first stage of it – the honeymoon, or tourist, stage, which I had entered before we ever left the States – into the second, the irritation-to-anger stage. “

The article is amusing and informative, and I highly recommend reading it.