Culture shock or abuse?

In the beginning, I was confused. I had been in Gothenburg for only a few months but something seemed amiss. Something other than just attempting to accumulate to a new country.

My fiancé seemed to have another very different personality from the one he had shown me over the course of our relationship. For all the time we had spent together before my moving to Sweden, he was sweet, funny, smart, supportive, respectful and, it seemed, crazy in love with me. 

At first, I thought it was stress. Now that I was living with him, his work situation had gotten sketchy. He was working only as his boss needed him and he wasn’t doing a regular 40 hour week. His moods would swing radically and when they did, he became mean. The things he would say to me could be vicious and the things he would do were spiteful and passive-aggressive. He drank a lot when he wasn’t working. 

I had never been exposed to abuse. Not from my parents, not from former boyfriends, not from my first husband. This sweet loving guy I was now living with was showing me that he had a bit of a temper, and a bit more. And as for me, I was starting to find fault with everything and everyone.  

Moving to a new country is a crazy experience. It is without a doubt exciting and challenging, and some believe terribly glamorous. It is all that, but there is also the very real experience of “moving to another country” and there’s the matter of culture shock. It happened to me. Or maybe not. 

I never expected to experience culture shock in Sweden. I had visited the country a number of times and because of the relationship with the ex, I considered myself fairly well educated about the culture, work environment, and current events. Even more surprising was that I would experience it eight months into my move to Göteborg. 

I began to wonder exactly what the hell was wrong with me. All the fighting and quarreling with my guy didn’t seem to make sense but what seemed to make sense was that perhaps I might be culture shocked.

The symptoms seemed to fit. 

The condition known as culture shock is described as including some, or all, of the following maladies:

• Sadness, loneliness, melancholy
• Aches, pains and allergies
• Sleeping too much or too little
• Depression, powerlessness
• Strong feelings of dissatisfaction in even the little things
• Viewing host country and it’s people as hostile
• Intense anger, irritability, resentment
• Lack of desire to interact with others
• Homesickness
• Loss of Identity
• Unable to problem solve, lack of concentration and focus
• Loss of self confidence
• Feelings of being lost, overlooked, exploited or abused
• Lack of energy, emotional exhaustion

What I didn’t know was that these symptoms also corresponded to the effects of psychological and emotional abuse.