Saying Goodbye: How to cope as the ex-pat being left behind

It is getting to be that time of year again when leaving drinks are being squeezed into every free evening and you hunt the shops for something meaningful and representative of the country and culture your friends are about to depart from. Almost all ex-pats have experience of being ‘left behind’ and likely have just as many ways to cope with this as friends that they have lost. Interestingly, many ex-pats attest to experiencing loss many months before their friends leave.

Living in Stavanger for the past five years I have not only experienced this kind of loss at a personal level but also professionally. I have met with many clients in my clinic who struggle with feelings of  isolation and uncertainty when their friends leave. It can cause a great deal of frustration and worry about how they will cope as they see the support network that they have so carefully built over the past years, dissolve over a matter of weeks.

These experiences bring up a great many interesting issues from our childhoods including feelings of loss or abandonment, which can be particularly painful. We can get into an emotionally unhealthy place when we shame ourselves for feeling this way and tell ourselves that there is something wrong with us for feeling this way or we might try to cope using maladaptive strategies such as avoidance. It is important to notice and acknowledge the great many feelings you might be experiencing at this time from sadness, to anger, to warmth and relief. You might even find it surprising to realise that these feelings can all happily co-exist within this experiences. We can also do the same for our children who are likely to be going through the same process. Ask them how they feel and normalise these emotions in relation to the situation. If they do not have the words to understand these emotions you can even help by giving them a name. Remind them to look for the truth in the situation rather than jumping to unhelpful and unrealistic conclusions, such as “I don’t have any friends left now!”.

But what can you actually do for yourself not to just survive these experiences but perhaps to thrive through them?

One of the first steps is to acknowledge and experience the feelings for what they are. Often we push them aside or try to ignore them for fear that they will be too painful or you won't have the capacity to manage them, especially in the public arena. Remember it is likely that your friend is feeling this pain too. Remind yourself that there is nothing wrong with grieving the loss of this friendship. Sadness is a normal, universal and appropriate human response to loss that everyone has likely experienced over their lifetime. Allowing sadness to be present and acknowledging it can open us up to its healing qualities.

Even anticipating a loss can be painful and there might be a tendency to withdraw from the relationship before your friend actually leaves. If you notice this happening, you might want to ask yourself what the benefits of pulling away from this friendship prematurely actually are. Sometimes at the root of this behaviour is the beliefs that if we leave first (emotionally) then our loss will not be so painful. If you notice this in yourself examine it closely. There is quite a glaring hole in this logic. Quite simply no matter what when someone we love or care about leaves us, it is painful. But that pain does not have to be destructive or dangerous.

Another way of coping with the loss of friendship is to reframe it. If we always turned away from every experience that took us out of our comfort zone or had an element of risk then the depth with which we led our lives would be very shallow. So in answering the often pondered question in my sessions “what is the point in making friends anyway they only leave?” my answer is along the lines of the quality of life we live and the values with which we live it. Should you chose not to venture into new friendships then you undoubtedly will not have to experience the pain of loss and grief when it is time for them to move on. However, you also miss out on the joy, meaning, support and connection such friendships can bring. For me I am fully aware and willing to pay this price. What these friendships bring far outweighs any pain or sadness I experience at the other end.

If you are an expat, and if you have friends, then dealing with a friend leaving is inevitable. You may not like it, but for me it beats the alternative. At the same time, sadness and the wish to protect ourselves from feeling sad in the future is perfectly natural and understandable. We all want to enhance pleasure and minimize pain in our lives. Many have argued that these are core ingredients of being human. And for a period of time, it might make sense to retreat and nurse your wounds, being kind and gentle toward yourself during this time. You are in all likelihood preparing the ground for new friendships to blossom.

Why Wait: The Psychology of Procrastination

As you find yourself beginning to read this are you doing so because you are putting off something else? The next task at work, a difficult conversation you have to have, or some housework even? Did you somehow end up reading this article on your way to something else entirely?

Whilst everyone may find themselves procrastinating from time to time, not everyone is a procrastinator. So why do we procrastinate in the first place? Well the short and simple answer is that when we undertake some tasks we can experience a negative emotional reaction. For example at work there are perhaps tasks that you do not enjoy or want to do, or if the laundry is piling up but the sun is shining for the first time in weeks. Thus we manage these negative emotional reactions, that we may not even be entirely conscious of, using an avoidant coping strategy…..procrastination. Essentially, you experience a small amount of anxiety about your upcoming task and in order to reduce that anxiety you go into an avoidance pattern. However, the fact that some of us indulge in procrastination even when it comes to enjoyable tasks that we think we would like to do, suggests that the psychology behind procrastination may be a little more complex than that.

The good news is of course that procrastination is a learned behaviour and not something we are born with. Meaning  that we can take steps to unlearn this way of coping with unpleasant emotions.

Procrastinators might try segmenting tasks into smaller pieces so they can work through a more manageable series of assignments. Furthermore, setting meaningful personal deadlines may also help to improve your ability to complete a task. Granted they are not as effective as imposed external deadlines, but they work better than no deadline at all. If you can also work with your procrastinating mindset then you may have at your disposal one of the most effective coping strategies yet. For example try to accept that any suffering or unpleasantness is in fact inevitable, thus putting off beginning the task seems like a less sensible solution. Moreover, if you can try to dig a little deeper and find some personal meaning or worth in the task then that will help you to overcome the initial hurdle of starting.  

Independent Dependence: On Being A Trailing Spouse

What are your immediate thoughts when I say I am an ex-pat? Perhaps adventure, courage and ambition are the words that come up in your own mind. What about if I tell you that I am an ex-pat wife, what do you think now? An easy life of coffee mornings, yoga and socialising are perhaps more the connotations. Ex-pat wives are commonly thought of as being privileged as they do not necessarily have to work for the financial stability of the family. Of course both of these are both stereotypes but the reality is that being an ex-pat and being an ex-pat wife are two very different roles and experiences.

When I moved to Stavanger five years ago I was the trailing spouse and my husband was the ex-pat. Whilst there are many expats who might recoil at being described as a trailing spouse, for me the term captures well this new state of being. I went from being a woman with a promising career and a sense of independence to a dependent within the space of a short plane journey. This was a huge transition of role for me having been anything but dependent in my previous life. At times, particularly at the beginning, I felt incredibly vulnerable, isolated and bored. I often felt lost, invisible even, and struggled to find, and be comfortable with, who I was in this new role. An important part of my identity was undoubtedly lost through the career that I had left behind and the social structure in which I previously functioned.

As a psychologist I began thinking about how I might find meaning in a life that I had not, and could not, have planed for. I often contemplated what happens to our identity when we move to a place where we have no previous history or experience? What happens to our identity and sense of self if we cannot make use of the skills we valued previously? There were times I would find myself caught in self-doubt and struggling with my own self-worth.

After the first year I knew that I was not one of the trailing spouses who was satisfied with coffee mornings and knew I needed to upgrade my status from dependent to independent. Fortunately I was not alone in this and many of the friends that I had surrounded myself with were struggling with the same issues and trying to become the new generation of ex-pat wives…the independent dependents! In 2015 a study by Expat Insider reported that 84 percent of trailing spouses are women, 50 percent hold postgraduate degrees, and yet only 24 percent were currently employed in their host country. Whilst the reasons for such a significant group of highly educated women not to be in employment vary hugely from person to person and country to country, from my own personal and professional experience, neither trailing spouses, nor their career plans, are typically considered at the beginning of the expat journey.

For some trailing spouses however, moving abroad brings the opportunity for reinvention, either into a new career or down a new educational path. For me this was exactly the case and five years on I find myself not only working as a psychologist but also running my own business in a foreign country. A place I could never have imagined myself at the beginning of my clinical training. So whilst I wouldn’t necessarily term myself as entirely independent, nor would I want to, I have at least dropped the “trailing”.