At a glance
No one in your new country has treated you badly, and yet you keep coming home feeling you were never really let in. Local reserve is often a rule about who already belongs, not a judgement on whether you are worth knowing. This article helps you see what the distance is made of, and what begins to change it.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The polite exchange that leaves nothing behind. Clients tell me the hardest part is that nothing actually went wrong, so there is nothing to point to and nothing to repair.
- Practising a single sentence. Clients describe preparing one ordinary line for a neighbour over several days, and then letting the moment pass.
- Quietly rewriting who they are. People who arrived outgoing begin, within a year, to describe themselves as someone who was never very good with people.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Are people here really cold, or am I misreading them?
The distance is real; what you conclude from it about yourself is where things go wrong.
You share a stairwell with a dozen neighbours and nobody has asked your name. On the train someone shifts their bag to make room before you ask, then turns away again. Parents collecting their children greet you courteously, and that is where it ends. Nobody is rude, and that is what makes it so difficult to get hold of: there is no single moment to look at. What you notice instead is in your body: a little sinking under the ribs, and your own voice coming out a shade too cheerful.
So you reach for an explanation, and the nearest one is that people here are cold. It fits the facts and it costs you, because once you believe it your hope quietly drains away, and people with no hope of contact rarely find any.
Why does nobody start a conversation?
In many places, contact needs a reason, and simply being near someone does not count as one.
Where you grew up, sharing a space may have been enough. Queueing for coffee, sharing a lift, walking a dog or sitting through a delay, and someone would start talking. Here the same closeness produces a calm, courteous silence, and the longer it lasts the more personal it feels.
How much people show, and to whom, seems to follow local rules more than personality. A survey of more than 5,000 people in 32 countries found the same broad pattern everywhere: people considered it more appropriate to express feelings to those they already belong with than to outsiders1. It asked people about appropriateness, not their actual behaviour, so I treat it as a general pattern rather than a portrait of any one country.
What it supports is modest but useful. The reserve you meet is aimed at a category you happen to be in at the moment, not at you as a person, and categories can shift in a way temperaments cannot.
Why do I keep misreading people’s faces?
You are reading local faces with instruments calibrated somewhere else, and they keep giving you false alarms.
A colleague answers you with a plain yes and no smile, and for hours afterwards you keep replaying what you might have done. A neighbour answers in a handful of words and you add it to the evidence. Much of this is not really observation. It is translation, and you do not yet have the dictionary.
Even a smile is read differently from one culture to another. In a study across 44 cultures with about 4,500 participants, smiling faces were judged cleverer than neutral ones in some cultures, made no difference in many, and were judged less clever in a handful2. Most participants were university students and the findings are correlational, so the study shows that expressions are interpreted differently, not why. What helps is realising that facial warmth is valued on local terms, and those terms may be quite different from home.
This matters because of what you do next. If each flat reply becomes evidence about how likeable you are, you can build a convincing case against yourself within a few months.
Why does it bother me so much?
Being overlooked for long enough stops feeling like circumstance and starts to feel like a fact about you.
Often a picture runs alongside it: everybody else belongs somewhere cosy, and only you are on the pavement looking through the glass. That picture is rarely accurate. Loneliness is common among people who have lived in a place all their lives too, and the guardedness around you is not a private circle that everyone except you has joined.
For some people the difficulty also stirs something older. When standing at the margins of a group was a feeling you knew long before you moved, the new place may simply be giving that feeling new material. I would never take that for granted, but I would want to explore it with you early on.
What actually helps?
Stop using warmth as the yardstick and change what you are testing for; most of what improves follows from that one shift.
- Judge a conversation at its end. Where you live now, talk may start without any warming up. The first moments are not a verdict, and treating them as one makes you retreat before anything has begun.
- Say the plain thing. Hints, generous hosting and enthusiasm may carry meaning where you are from and simply read as noise where you are now. A clear sentence about what you would like usually lands better than it feels to say.
- Go back to the same place. Familiarity does the work that charm does elsewhere. Turning up in one setting week after week for a year counts for more than being a new face in many.
- Keep one place where you are already understood. A regular call in your first language with an old friend from before the move protects you from drawing conclusions about yourself during a bad month.
- Listen for the shift in your own words. Thinking this place is hard is different from thinking nobody could like me. The second thought creeps in quietly, and it is worth catching.
These suggestions have limits. When the heaviness has gone on for months and reached your sleep and your work, when you have given up rather than decided to step back, or when your inner voice has become harsh, more socialising will not fix it, and struggling at it will only seem to confirm the wrong belief. At that stage it deserves careful attention with someone alongside you.
Questions people ask
Should I see a therapist about this, or give it more time?
Bring it once it has begun to change your view of yourself rather than your view of the country. Time sorts out the practical side, but it does little for a conclusion you have already drawn about yourself.
Can I do sessions by video from wherever I live?
Yes: all sessions are by video, at a regular time in Copenhagen time that suits your time zone. Many of the people I work with live in a country that is not their own.
Do I need to learn the language before therapy can help?
No, that is a separate question. Language opens doors, but plenty of fluent speakers feel the same distance, so it is rarely the whole story.
I have lived here for years and it still bothers me. Is it too late?
No; how long it has lasted tells us something, and it is not a sign you have failed. By then the original difficulty has often hardened into a fixed view of yourself, and that view can be worked with.
What would a first session involve?
Mostly a close look at particular moments rather than general impressions. One real conversation that went nowhere is more revealing than a general overview of the years.
If the reserve around you leaves you feeling shut out, I can help you understand it in a new way, and carry it less alone, in online psychotherapy, by video.
Sources
- Matsumoto, Yoo and Fontaine. Mapping expressive differences around the world: the relationship between emotional display rules and individualism versus collectivism. More than 5,000 respondents in 32 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2008.
- Krys, Vauclair, Capaldi and colleagues. Be careful where you smile: culture shapes judgments of intelligence and honesty of smiling individuals. 44 cultures. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 2016.
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
