F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

WHEN AN FS SPOUSE
COMES “HOME”: A STUDY
RE-ENTRY TO THE U.S. AFTER LIVING OVERSEAS INVOLVES ADJUSTMENTS
THAT ARE NOT ALWAYS EASY. THIS STUDY IDENTIFIES SOME OF THE FAULT LINES
BETWEEN SUCCESS AND FAILURE.
BY SHARON MAYBARDUK
Iremember being a young Foreign Service spouse
new to Washington, D.C., driving an old rented car
on a blustery winter’s day. Lost in a city I did not
know, I tried to soothe a 3-year-old who was pleading,
“Mommy, I want to go home.” Home, I
thought; that’s what we’re trying to find. But home
was hundreds of miles away in a sun-drenched paradise
that nobody here seemed to care about. I felt very
alone.
I did not understand it then, but I was going through a difficult,
but normal, process of re-entry. The return to the U.S.
on reassignment for a period of one year or longer after living
and working overseas is part of the Foreign Service
lifestyle. Fifty years of published research among non-State
Department populations has shown that re-entry problems
— difficulties readjusting to one’s home culture after living
abroad for an extended period of time — are shared by many
sojourners across occupational groups and cultures. These
can range from a mild sense of not fitting into the home environment
to more serious and longer-lasting emotional difficulties
that may require outside professional help.
Previous academic research on re-entry, primarily in the
Sharon Maybarduk is a 2008 graduate of the Smith College
School for Social Work, specializing in family therapy. She
has been a Foreign Service spouse for 33 years, accompanying
her husband, Gary Maybarduk, to Papua New Guinea,
Mexico, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Cuba and Venezuela.
This article is based on her master’s thesis, “An Exploration
of Factors Associated with Re-Entry Adjustment of Foreign
Service Spouses.”
fields of education and psychology, has been conducted
mainly on individuals assigned overseas as business managers,
volunteers, teachers or students. But there has been little
research on accompanying spouses. This fact inspired my
own effort to identify factors associated with the re-entry adjustment
of Foreign Service spouses, as representative of a
population of accompanying spouses.
The Study of Culture Shock
Historically, an understanding of re-entry adjustment rose
out of the study of culture shock — the problems of adapting
to life in a foreign culture — after World War II, when government-sponsored
international exchange programs came
into prominence. In 1955, a long-term study of Norwegian
Fulbright scholars who taught and studied in the U.S. found
that not only did the scholars suffer from culture shock in adjusting
to life in the U.S. but, quite unexpectedly, they also
exhibited problems readjusting to their home culture upon
return. This phenomenon of re-entry was referred to as “reverse
culture shock.”
With further study, distinctions between culture shock and
reverse culture shock began to appear. Though both phenomena
are reactions to cultural change and both represent
stages of accommodation to this change, some aspects of reverse
culture shock appeared fundamentally different. Those
differences, first posited in 1981 by Nancy J. Adler, a professor
of organizational behavior at McGill University, have to
do with expectations.
Sojourners returning home to their native culture do not
expect anything to be unfamiliar, though they had such expectations
of the foreign culture when they went overseas.
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