In Conversation With Betty-Ann Smith
by Sandra MacPherson
I recently spoke with Betty-Ann Smith, a marriage and family therapist, about adjustment issues for employees, spouses and teenagers returning to Canada from a posting.
Sandra MacPherson:
Maybe we could start off with a general overview of some issues related to what people experience in terms of culture shock when returning from abroad and then we can get into issues facing specifically spouses, teenagers etc.
Betty-Ann Smith:
I work as a marriage and family therapist and I also do a lot of work for government and business, helping prepare people for international assignments, assessing their ability to cope with the stress of living abroad, and what is referred to in the business world as repatriation, which means when people come back. So I see hundreds and hundreds of people every year, either on their way out or on their way back, and in general, people find coming home the most difficult part of the posting cycle. In the department there are several categories of difficulty - one is almost always reduced financial circumstances when returning to Ottawa. It's not as if we make buckets of money abroad, but we live with subsidized lifestyles and with a mindset "we're only here once so we should just do everything there is to be done." So we spend a lot of our money travelling and doing the kinds of stuff that's there because we're in this wonderful place. We come back to our world and there's no allowances for recognizing the cost of keeping the house, kids in school etc. This is one of the major difficulties people have. Also, there is a loss of status. No matter how humble we are about who we are abroad, we are diplomats, or we are special as foreigners and we have special arrangements in the countries we work in. So there is a level of not power so much, but authority or respectability and when we come back, we're just ordinary people. Now, for the person in the family that has the job in the Department there is a bit of a let down because you go back into headquarters and become one of however many hundreds there are in that building everyday. And then quite frankly winter is extremely hard for people to cope with if they have been away from it. It's hard enough for those of us who don't go but that first year back it's something to reckon with, unless of course you have been somewhere worse. But the other aspect is that we are generally in bigger cities when we are abroad and adjusting to an ordinary slow-paced city like Ottawa can be sometimes difficult. It all comes down to coping with change, but sometimes I think a lot of people find it difficult because they don't really expect it. They sort of assume that coming home is easy and they won't need any adjustment. The other common issue is disappointment with Canadians. Sort of being embarrassed by Canadians in terms of their lack of sophistication, their inability to speak intellectually, or their disinterest in something outside their own world, or those kinds of things. So we tend to become foreigners in our own land and critical of our own culture when we come back and I think that is a very disappointing phase to go through, but it's not uncommon.
SM:
Would you say that most people experience some form of this adjustment?
BAS:
Yes. Usually the worst part of it is after Christmas of the first year. And it's usually accompanied by symptoms of depression, not necessarily clinical depression, but a loss of interest, irritability, difficulty sleeping. Family conflict is quite common in that first year, and when you add to that the pressure on the spouse to find employment, that is very discouraging. You need that employment for your own self-esteem and your own career advancement and for financial reasons, so there's lots of reasons to get a job, but getting a job is not that easy to do. Certainly not in the first year. That's frankly been my experience, whether I've had more experience and more education. Whatever I've done abroad, it still takes me a couple of years when I come back to get back to the level of work that I was doing before I went. I think it depends on whether you are able to keep in touch and keep your name active in Ottawa. My advice to people now would be try, if possible in terms of family demands, to come back periodically. I met a Danish diplomat's wife here, and she went back every summer to Copenhagen and worked in her field as a summer replacement for people so that she kept her skills active, but also people were ready for her when she came back after posting.
SM:
Based on the courses that are offered, could you outline the challenges that might be faced by a spouse, an employee of the department and teens. You've touched on some of them, but maybe you'd like to summarize the challenges for each.
BAS:
Why don't we start with the employee and then we can work our way through the family. With the employee, sometimes it's an adjustment to their loss of status and the loss of autonomy you have abroad. Inevitably there is some jockeying for jobs when you come back, and it's often not only related to your own abilities and interests where you end up. And so you've got the adjustment then of working with a new team and perhaps a new content area.
A change in a job is always challenging for a little while. As the Department moves forward, depending how long you've been away, changes in technology may be happening at headquarters that you haven't been using abroad, so there's that kind of catch up stuff to do, and if there has been a change in direction or a change in policy then you've got that adjustment to make in the area you're going to. I don't hear a lot from single people about their adjustment. The parts I do hear is that it's hard to make friends in Ottawa. There's not enough happening in Ottawa. I think people tend to work long hours at headquarters as a way of coping.
Now the spouse person. Unless they're someone who works in the Department and have a job to come back to, in that case they would still have the same adjustments that the employee has. But if they are looking for work, that process of searching for a job is quite difficult, and typically women postpone their job search until after they've got everybody settled. It's usually into October or November until they wake up saying "oh my goodness what am I going to do now". And in many cases these women have been out of the work force not just for that posting but maybe on and off a lot. Some of them may not even be clear about the career they want, what it would be or how to go about it. And then if you don't want to work in Ottawa, there's a lot of pressure to be working in Canada which there isn't abroad. Especially if people have small children and have made the decision to stay home, it can be quite lonely in Ottawa whereas it wasn't so much so abroad.
Now for kids. Teenagers are probably about the worst off because they are at a stage in life when the external world is more important than the family to them in terms of their development. They're on their way to creating their own life outside the family and that has been taken away from them when they move and they have to try to find it again. Breaking into an existing group of people as a teenager is quite difficult work, especially if you're feeling some lack of confidence or insecurity. The risk for teenagers is that the easy people to make friends with are the marginalized people in their group and sometimes that's where they can collect more easily and get picked up by those people rather than the mainstream group.
One thing that's in favour of teenagers - they feel the pinch of the money thing and when I talk to teenagers they say all their parents are talking about how they have no money compared to what it looked like they could afford when they were abroad - but the plus side is that kids can work in Canada, which they can't abroad. Also, it's very difficult for teenagers to find somebody that they can talk to about what they've experienced because it sounds like they're bragging. So in the teen re-entry program there is a lot of emphasis on connecting these kids because they actually have had a common experience. It doesn't matter where in the world they were. It's a tremendous sense of relief. We always hear from them that it was so nice to come into a room full of people who knew what they were talking about and were interested in where they'd been. And we encourage them to bring along photographs of their school or stuff related to their posting that they value and they want to carry forward into their Canada life. It's a great opportunity to complain about what it's like to be back and their experiences from abroad, what they're missing, part of the grieving process they're going through, which we all do.
My heart goes out to teenagers. It takes them a good part of that first academic year to settle. I usually tell parents not to be overly concerned until Easter. I think it takes that long for them to kind of be happy, to stop complaining, to stop blaming and being angry and to actually embrace their new environment and inevitably their school work suffers that first year even if they're ahead, which is not uncommon.
SM:
What issues do foreign-born spouses face returning to Canada or coming to Canada for the first time?
BAS:
There is a re-entry seminar for foreign-born spouses this year and it will be led by somebody who is a foreign-born spouse and will also include some networking from some other foreign-born spouses. The obvious issue is that it's just another posting for a foreign-born spouse with the disadvantages of headquarters: no allowances, more modest housing, and perhaps language issues, certainly employment issues because in some cases too they're not Canadian citizens, so that has some restrictions. Also it's never home. They may never get posted home whereas the rest of us, with all its warts, we still love it as home. It's a very difficult thing for foreign-born spouses and the ones I meet still have a sense of being on the edge here, on the periphery and also being lonely for their home country. It's very lonely and isolated for the first year or two because they don't have old friends to look up or a familiarity with Ottawa or networks, certainly not the first time in Canada.
SM:
Over the years do you think adjustment issues have changed or is it basically the same?
BAS:
I think the process of adjustment is the same as it has always been. I think what's different now is we're more open about it, acknowledging it more openly, recognizing the process a little bit. One area that is difficult for spouses when they are abroad, but it is also triggered when they come home is, for spouses in my age bracket, where you're in a sandwich generation, where you have got elderly parents you are concerned about and you may be expected to take over some of the care responsibilities when you come back to Canada. Plus you've got kids that you're still responsible for and concerned about. Coming back to Canada can sometimes mean a return to responsibilities that you had a break from when you were abroad. It's more of an issue now because our parents are living longer, but not necessarily well. There are plans that need to be addressed and care that needs to be organized. And as difficult as that is when you're abroad, when you're abroad there is only so much you can do. You have to trust that either someone else in your family will do it or you hire somebody to do it. When you come back, there's a lot of pressure on women in particular to take over that job, to take over the care of the elderly.
SM:
Do you have anything else you would like to mention that we haven't touched on so far?
BAS:
The one piece I would like to add is a bit of advice. If people have, in addition to just normal re-entry, if they have experienced a traumatic event while they've been abroad like robbery, accidents, illnesses or earthquakes or whatever, they should not be surprised that there will be some leftover reaction to those. They should very quickly get some professional help with that. It's not a major piece of work for a therapist to help people cope with what's called post-traumatic stress. It's not uncommon for us to have had experiences abroad that are just unsettling. The second thing is that if people feel the adjustment has gone on too long or the symptoms they are feeling are just too difficult to bear, then it's appropriate to get some counselling, either for themselves or the whole family. Don't expect miracles before January or February but if it is just unbearable until then anyway come and talk it over with somebody. Being able to voice it and to realise you're not unusual or crazy because you're having these adjustment problems is really a relief to people, and it is often something quite simple like being able to talk about it openly.