When Expat Life Gets Overwhelming

By Anatta (Anna) Zarchi

Change can be tough

Think back to when you first moved to Thailand. The streets buzz with a beautiful but unfamiliar language. You move your things into your new apartment and go looking for a place to eat. Then you realize you don’t know where to go or what to look for. You miss the coffee shop around the corner at home, where they know your order by heart. 

You wake up for your first day of work and your coworkers are nice, but they seem to have a very different approach and you have trouble connecting with them. You struggle to understand the nuances of their words, and they struggle to understand yours. You go home after a long day, hoping to make plans with a friend. Then you remember that your friends are at least an ocean away and that here, you do not have anybody to call. 

You go to work and do your laundry and shop for groceries and cook your food and go to sleep, and the next day you do it all over again. You don’t have time to look for friends and you’re not sure where to start. Life feels monotonous, draining, and isolating. 

The scenario above is reminiscent of what many expats describe experiencing when they first moved to Thailand. The strain of moving to a new country takes its toll, and when initially lacking a support system, many turn to counseling for guidance. 

In this day and age, counseling has become a very common tool in dealing with any personal, emotional, or psychological issues. Counseling opens up a confidential and non-judgemental space for you to share your thoughts, feelings, and struggles with a professional counselor who is specially trained to listen to you and guide you through your issues. 

You can get counseling for a range of issues including, but not limited to, stress, depression, anxiety, grief, relationship issues, or advice or assistance on specific situations. For this reason, counseling can take place over any period of time from just a few sessions to several weeks, months, or years, depending on the issue. An additional benefit of counseling is that you also get to know yourself better, making you better equipped to cope in the future. 

Common expat issues

The most common issues that expats in Thailand face are depression, anxiety, work stress or burnout, and parenting or relationship issues. Counselor Pam from New Counseling Service (NCS), a mental health clinic in Bangkok, says, “We often encounter expats who feel very lonely moving to a new country where they don’t speak the language and in which they are unfamiliar with the customs. It is difficult for many people to start making friends and find a community in a completely new place, so their loneliness often results in feelings of depression, anxiety, and isolation.” NCS counselor Tatiana adds, “If the experience has been that they end up completing every task on their own, they might develop anxiety and burnout from being chronically overwhelmed and under-resourced. So instead of having the energy and motivation to go out and seek new friends and experiences, they find comfort in the safety of their homes. But then this isolates them even further, which feeds into that initial alienated feeling.”

Cultural differences and language barriers can also play a role in work stress. There are often vast cultural differences on how to handle certain situations and how to talk to colleagues, and the language barrier may be frustrating as many feel that they are unable to communicate clearly. This is often a source of distress for expats as these factors can lead to miscommunication and even ill feeling among colleagues, reinforcing the expat’s feeling of isolation. For parents, this might result in bringing feelings of frustration home to their family, which brings us to another common issue: parenting or relationship difficulties. 

Family tensions

In addition to dealing with their own emotions, parents are also responsible for their family and children. It can be difficult maintaining a relationship or raising a family outside one’s own country without the support of friends, family, and familiar social and institutional systems. Feeling under-resourced is an issue that many parents of all nationalities face. In addition, parents may also face financial stress. 

Education and finding a caretaker for your children if you are a working parent can be expensive, but being under-resourced is not just limited to financial difficulties—it can also refer to lacking emotional support and physical space, being unable to access resources, and more. The stress of parenting can manifest in different ways; Tatiana explains, “Some parents subconsciously react to this by making their children the focus of their life, identifying their children's success and well-being with their own accomplishments. Others react by becoming less emotionally available to their children, when in fact they might be struggling to meet their own needs.” 

Pam points out that expats sometimes struggle in intercultural relationships. “Sometimes couples of different backgrounds struggle to find common ground due to their cultural differences. For parents, this can be seen through disagreements on the best way to raise their children or how to educate them. This is a key component in parenting and can therefore cause a lot of issues.” Disagreements of this sort can affect relationships to varying degrees, both between parent and child and between the parents themselves. Relationship counseling may help couples find the source of their issue and learn how to better support each other with respect to their different backgrounds. 

Finding support

Lastly, it is important to recognize that it is normal to feel grief in moving to a new country and to mourn your old life even if you are excited about this big change. Moving to a new country means you are building a new life and changing as a person, which is always easier when you have support. Lack of support and simply the shock of being in a new place is therefore understandably a cause of depression, anxiety, and burnout. However, many manage to overcome these feelings once they begin to adjust, develop new routines and relationships, and become more comfortable in their growing identity. 

The most important thing to remember is that it is completely normal to have struggles and there are always resources available if you need any support, guidance, or even just a listening ear, whether that is reaching out to friends and family or seeking professional help. 

Photos courtesy of the author and Canva.

About the Author

Anna works for New Counseling Service (NCS), the first and only licensed mental health center in the heart of Bangkok. NCS has provided counseling services in Thailand and surrounding regions for over 20 years, with therapists specializing in a wide variety of issues such as anxiety, depression, work stress, relationships, and more. 

Contact: info@ncsbkk.com; Phone: +66-2-114-7556; ncsbkk.com; FB/IG: @ncsbkk.