The Hidden Homesickness Nobody Talks About
The Hidden Homesickness Nobody Talks About
The Quiet Corner | FS Psychotherapy
Homesickness is usually thought of as something that happens to children. A first night at a new school, a summer camp, a university fresher week. It is treated as temporary, something to push through, something that fades once you settle in.
But there is another kind of homesickness, one that doesn’t fade with time, one that doesn’t always have a clear object, and one that can sit quietly inside a person for years without ever quite being named. It is the homesickness of the expat who has built a full and meaningful life abroad and still sometimes aches for something they can’t quite put their finger on. The homesickness of the person who goes back to visit and finds that home no longer feels like home either. The homesickness for a place, a time, a version of yourself, or a sense of belonging that may never have fully existed in the first place.
This is the hidden homesickness. And it deserves to be talked about.
When There Is No Home to Go Back To
For many people living across cultures, the difficulty is not simply missing a place. It is the gradual, disorienting realisation that the place they are missing may no longer exist, or may exist only in memory, reshaped by time and distance into something more golden than it ever really was.
You go back for a visit and find that the city has changed, that old friends have moved on, that the rhythms and references of daily life no longer feel instinctive. The language is still yours, but something is slightly off, a faint sense of being a tourist in your own past. You return to your adopted country and feel a quiet relief, followed by a quiet guilt about feeling relieved.
This experience of being between places, of not fully belonging anywhere, is one of the most common and least spoken about aspects of long-term expat life. It can feel isolating precisely because it is so hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it, and because there is often a cultural pressure to be grateful, to focus on the adventure, to not mourn the things that were left behind.
Homesickness for Something That Never Was
There is also a more complex version of this feeling, one that takes longer to recognise. Sometimes what people are homesick for is not a real place but an imagined one. A sense of belonging they never quite had, even before they left. A community that always felt slightly out of reach. A family home that was warm in some ways and painful in others, missed not for what it was but for what it might have been.
This kind of homesickness is particularly difficult to sit with, because it has no clear resolution. You cannot go back to something that was never fully there. And yet the longing is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as irrational.
The Weight of Being the One Who Left
There is often an invisible weight carried by people who have moved far from where they grew up. A sense of responsibility for the distance, of guilt when family members age or fall ill and you are not nearby, of missing milestones and ordinary moments that cannot be recovered. A quiet anxiety that you have chosen the wrong thing, even when the life you have built feels genuinely right.
This weight is rarely talked about openly. Expat life tends to be framed in terms of opportunity and adventure, and there is little cultural space for the grief and ambivalence that often run alongside it. The result is that many people carry these feelings alone, managing them quietly rather than exploring them honestly.
What Therapy Can Offer
One of the things therapy can offer to people navigating expat life and its particular emotional terrain is simply a space where the full complexity of the experience is welcome. Not just the parts that are easy to share at dinner parties, but the grief, the ambivalence, the longing, the guilt, and the quiet, persistent ache of not quite belonging anywhere.
In my work with clients who live across cultures, I find that being truly heard, by someone who understands something of what that experience involves, can itself be a significant and relieving thing. You do not have to translate yourself, minimise what you are carrying, or perform gratitude for a life that is genuinely good but also genuinely hard.
Sessions are available online across the UK and internationally, in English or Italian.
You Are Allowed to Miss What You Left Behind
Whatever form your homesickness takes, whether it is for a place, a person, a version of yourself, or something harder to name, you are allowed to feel it. You are allowed to grieve the life you didn’t choose as well as the one you did. And you deserve a space where that grief is held with care.
If any of this resonates, I’d warmly invite you to reach out for a free 20-minute consultation. A gentle, no-obligation conversation to see whether working together might feel right.
Federica Savoré is a BACP Accredited psychotherapist and COSCA Practitioner offering counselling, supervision and training in Aberdeen and online across the UK. To get in touch visit https://fspsychotherapy.com/contact-me
