I was talking with a friend whose city is horrendously polluted—the air is regularly 10-30 times WHO recommendations—and it understandably frustrates him. He blurted out in exasperation “it’s a [expletive] gas chamber.” He’s not wrong about the harm of polluted air: the WHO estimates that 4.2 million people died from polluted air in 2019.

Whether it’s pollution, lack of rule of law, threats of kidnapping, unstable governments, rampant corruption and bribery, petty theft, being “othered” constantly, or living in places that treat women and children poorly, expat life is full of challenges that can cause Raging Expat Syndrome (RES). RES isn’t actually a real mental condition. I made it up to refer to the condition where expats live with a kind of simmering resentment against parts of your host culture which aggravate you. Then, when a local does “that thing” which annoys you so greatly, you react with rage and, usually, make the situation far worse.

This series is about how to react to these cultural challenges without succumbing to RES. Today’s article is the third in that series and won’t make a ton of sense unless you’ve read Part 2, so I encourage you to do so.

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Summary of past articles

Since I know not everyone has read Part 1 and Part 2 (or will go back to read them—I’m human too), here is a super brief summary so you’re not lost in Part 3. (Even though [assume teacher’s voice] you really will benefit more if you go back and read Part 1 and Part 2 first).

Summary of Part 1

Part 1 helps us understand what “makes up” a culture and why we react to cultural differences that we experience. This entire conversation is greatly enhanced by understanding a few key ways to understand culture:

Cultural norm: Something that a lot of people typically do (or don’t do) in a culture
Cultural value: Something a culture believes to be intrinsically valuable or desirable
The relationship of norms and values: Values always influence norms, and norms always reflect values. Norms are what people do, values are why they do it.
Implications:

1. We must embrace and emulate as many norms as we can, especially the ones that are unimportant or “don’t matter.” The more you do, the less frustrated you’ll be.
2. We must avoid reflexively judging our host culture’s norms by our passport country’s values. That’s a recipe for misunderstanding and frustration.
3. We must understand and respect a culture’s values if we ever are to make peace with its norms. Frustration comes mostly from what a norm means—the value it reflects—not so much from the actions by themselves.
4. We must humbly recognize that judging another culture’s values takes an immense amount of careful thought. Few expats take the time to carefully compare values philosophically and ethically, they just jump to judgment.

Summary of Part 2

Whereas part 1 helps us understand what makes up a cultural difference we encounter, part 2 of this series helps you know how to dig deeper into that frustration so that you can accurately understand what, truly, is going on. To do that, I suggest a four-part process, C-A-L-M, to help you navigate cultural differences:

1. Carefully Observe. Objectively identify as much as you can about a frustrating circumstance, paying close attention to things that your brain may be trained to ignore.
2. Avoid Judgment. Temporarily refrain from judging what you observe, since you likely don’t know enough to judge it rightly and will, instead, judge according to your own cultural norms and values.
3. Learn Humbly. Engage with locals to understand their customs and traditions, showing respect and willingness to learn.
4. Manage Your Judgments and Reactions. Control your emotional responses to cultural differences, aiming for patience and understanding.

That last step is easier said than done and that’s why this article will consider ways to Manage Your Judgment, and the next in this series will consider ways to Manage Your Reaction. The two aspects are closely related, but different enough that it provides a good point of separation rather than making this article ridiculously long.¹

Part 3 is about the “M”

The “M” language of Manage Your Judgment and Reaction was carefully chosen, not just because I wanted a nice memorably acronym, but because I want to emphasize that your judgment and reaction to a cultural difference is a choice. Most people’s judgments and reactions are mostly unchosen, instinctive, and unthoughtful. Those insta-judgment-reactions might serve you well in the culture in which you grew up, assuming you fully understand the situation and thus can judge and react rightly. But those insta-judge-reactions absolutely will not serve you well in your host culture. Your judgments and reactions will likely be quite wrong unless you slow down to do C-A-L-M.

Insta-judge reactions will not serve you well in your host culture. They’ll probably be quite wrong.

A humorous example of this is when I was shopping for cars last year. As I did, I repeatedly turned away from nice, luxury models in favor of simpler and more basic cars. An individual with me said that my thinking was that of a “country person.” I took judged it as a compliment. After all, my great-grandparents were farmers, my grandpa grew up on a farm, my father’s best memories are of his grandpa’s farm, and I grew up on multiple acres of land for which we had to care. I feel like a “country person” and so I thanked that individual for his words, explained why I absolutely was a “country person,” and went on to further embrace that identity. I even asked people to show me the cars that only a “country person” would buy.

I later learned that, in my host culture, being called a “country person” is an insult. “Country people” are considered backwards, uneducated, and unintelligent “peasants” who don’t understand and can’t adapt to modern life. Oops.

I understood the word and even its component parts, but I didn’t understand its cultural usage and especially not the cultural values that it reflected.² Thus, my insta-reaction wasn’t appropriate to the situation, and my embrace of being a “country person” suggested things about myself which aren’t true.

Insta-reactions will almost always mislead you. Managed judgments and reactions—informed by what you’ve learned about cultural norms and values as you do C-A-L-M—are crucial. So, how do you manage your judgment? That’s what we’ll consider in this article and the next in the series will tackle the topic of managing your reactions.

Manage your judgments

Step 2 of C-A-L-M is to temporarily Avoid Judgment so that you’re able to learn what is really going on in a cultural situation. Having Learned Humbly in step 3, in step 4 you will intentionally make a judgment that, hopefully, is now informed and accurate.

Just because your judgment is accurate and informed, though, doesn’t mean that you won’t experience RES. In fact, some of the greatest rage I’ve observed is when someone is correct about a wrong in the host culture, but their judgment contains a vitriol that is deeply unhelpful. Thus, we need to manage not just the fact of our judgment, but the intensity or manner in which we hold that judgment.

When you make your judgment, one of three possibilities will arise. You’ll judge a cultural norm or value as (1) being right, (2) being neutral, or (3) being wrong.³ Let’s consider each of those in turn with a mind to how you can make that judgment without experiencing RES.

When you judge something rightly

If you make a judgment that something in your host culture is good, then it’s easy to react rightly. After all, you now like or value the norm/value which used to frustrate you. Your reactions will likely now be rightly attuned so that you react rightly. You may have to remind yourself, on occasion, though, that you value the thing that used to frustrate you—change doesn’t happen overnight—but you’ll likely find that your reaction flows naturally from your judgment. RES is mostly a non-issue if you really have judged a cultural norm/value as being good or right.

For example, I used to be horribly offended by all the staring and not-so-surreptitious taking-photos-of-foreigners that I experience. Understanding how the norm of staring expresses the value of curiosity has helped me embrace it. Further, I’ve really come to value the curiosity that locals have about foreigners. One of the key ways for more peace and less conflict in this world is for people to actually know people from other cultures instead of otherizing them. If my cheerful posing for a photo creates a bit more kindness and understanding in this world, one person at a time, then I am glad that locals are curious enough to take pictures of me. Consider what the alternative would be if I refused or if they weren’t curious at all!

If you judge that something is right or good, you’ll likely avoid RES merely by that judgment. Wonderful.

When you judge something as neutral

You may do C-A-L-M and discover that a cultural frustration is ultimately not a matter of right or wrong but a neutral or benign issue. Avoiding RES in this scenario is a bit tougher, because it is likely something that was negative in your culture but is neutral in your host culture. In these situations, the most important thing when frustration flares up is to remind yourself of what you concluded in C-A-L-M and take deep breaths to calm down. I find, at least for me, that this is enough. Slowly, over time, I’ve adapted to the local patterns in many of these things and they no longer bother me.

Remind yourself of C-A-L-M and take deep breaths to calm down.

For example, locals slurp their food and chew with their mouths open, creating a cacophony of food sounds that used to disgust me. There were times I literally felt queasy in my stomach because of how gross the sounds were to me. Ingrained into me from childhood is that it’s rude to slurp your food or to make noise while eating, and even though I knew locals weren’t trying to be rude, it was still hard not to judge them by my cultural upbringing.

But, after I did C-A-L-M, I knew that this difference wasn’t an issue of right or wrong or of rudeness or politeness. It’s just not rude to make those eating noises here. Slowly, I’ve changed. Even though I eat with my mouth closed and teach my kids to do the same thing—after all, I want them to be able to live in the US someday without being rude—I no longer get queasy or judge others for their “rudeness” in eating. In fact, I sometimes slurp now myself. I find that the lack of formalism while eating is actually far more comfortable and friendly a feeling than “being on your best behavior” during a meal.

Judging that a cultural norm/value is neutral will hopefully help you avoid RES, but you may have to remind yourself regularly of your judgment and “talk yourself down” from an insta-negative reaction.

When you judge something as wrong

What do you do when you’re convinced a cultural norm or value is actually wrong? How do you judge something and still avoid RES? This is problematic because doing C-A-L-M will help you make a slow, reasoned, and informed judgment that something is wrong. That judgment may make it more likely that you’ll be an upset expat precisely because you’ve done C-A-L-M!

For example, let’s say that my friend has done C-A-L-M to understand the polluted air. He understands that there is still a lot of poverty in the country, and so the government has chosen not to protect the environment so that it can boost the economy. In fact, he even realizes that the number of people who die from poverty is greater than those who die from pollution, and so he can even respect the government’s prioritization of economic health over environmental health. Still, though, he believes that this value and norm are wrong.

So, the next time he breathes air, how does he avoid RES? For you, it may not be pollution. It may be corruption, capricious rule by human beings rather than law, economic systems of inequality, rampant disregard for the value of children, unsafe working conditions, etc. How do you judge something as wrong without becoming an arrogant expat suffering from constant resentment against a host culture for its wrong value or norm?

Here are some ways I’ve found helpful to Manage Your Judgment.

1. Compare the wrong to your own culture’s history

I grew up near the Cuyahoga River which famously caught fire in 1969.⁴ How do you put out a burning river? That event that helped catalyze the US to clean up its environmental pollution and, just one year later, the Environmental Protection Agency was created and the US began to clean up its pollution.

Why do I mention this little bit of history? Because that progress started only 50 years ago. Pollution wasn’t good in the US, and it’s not good in my host culture—but comparing the situation in my host culture to the history of my passport country can help me avoid RES.

• Is my judgment of the “badness” of my host cultures pollution correct considering that, one generation ago, my passport country was also greatly polluted?
• Is there something significant about the last 50 years that justifies anger at my host culture for not achieving what my passport culture started achieving 50 years ago?
• If this year is the year that my host culture has its “burning river” moment, would that change my reaction?
• What if your host culture starts tackling this issue in its 50th year of existence, whereas the US wait until nearly its 200th? Could that mean your host country is actually chronologically better than your passport country even if, in absolute terms, the pollution is worse?

The point of these questions isn’t to relativize the wrong or suggest that it’s okay—your process of C-A-L-M should have helped you judge the norm/value as objectively wrong. Rather, these questions help you to recognize that your judgment may need to be managed more than you think. Your reaction may be rooted more in cultural pride or chronological arrogance than in an objective sense of the actual wrongness of the norm/value.

In other words, these questions help you be a bit more humble even as you judge something as being wrong. That humility, in turn, enables you to actually improve the situation. As I wrote in The Humble Expat:

A proud person may see wrongs in a host culture and seek to teach the “uncivilized” how things should be done. It’s service that puffs the proud person up, elevates the teacher, or which makes life more convenient for the one speaking, but it’s not service that truly seeks the good of others. A humble person, though, may see wrong or less-than-ideal elements of a culture and seek to change it, but with the goal of helping others, not proving themselves right. A humble person serves, teaching and helping others so that they may have a better life.

A lot of RES is caused by this chronological snobbery. An expat compares the host culture’s current state with their passport country’s accomplished state, as if what their passport country has accomplished is the standard of what every country should have achieved. Yet, most people in the US a mere 50 years ago didn’t see a pressing need to protect the environment. After all, the Cuyahoga River caught fire thirteen times before people finally took action. Don’t be angry at your host culture because they’ve put up with ten fires so far without taking action.

A lot of RES is caused by chronological snobbery.

2. Compare the wrong to your culture’s wrongs

One of the worst comparisons an expat can make is to compare their passport country’s strengths against their host culture’s weaknesses. On the one hand, expats do this quite naturally. Our sense of “normal” is created by our experience in our home culture and so we naturally judge things in comparison to that standard. Thus, all the ways that our host culture is the same as our passport culture we judge as “normal” and don’t even see, but all the ways that they “fall short” of our passport culture are immediately obviously.

On the other hand, it’s just not a fair comparison. If you compare your current lover’s negative traits to a previous lover’s positive traits, you’ll definitely end up resentful. If you compare one child’s negative characteristics to another child’s positive characteristics, you’ll end up with a skewed judgment.

So, too, if you judge your host culture’s wrongs to your own culture’s rights. You’ll never end up with a positive attitude towards your host culture because your comparison is unfair and skewed. Instead, compare the wrongs of your passport culture to the wrongs of your host culture.

You’ll never end up with a positive attitude towards your host culture because your comparison is unfair and skewed.

I dislike the way that local parents actively and publicly berate their children. Parents seem to think that the way to change their children is to high-decibel scream and yell at their children and shame them into behaving rightly. Often the screaming is because the child has, in some way, shamed or dishonored the parents. The parental screams pressure the children into behaving in a socially acceptable way. It’s common and I believe it’s wrong.

Okay, but in the US there were over 80 school shootings. So, which culture is better? A culture where kids are forced into conformity but are safe in schools or a culture where kids aren’t but have a risk of being killed at school?

It’s not a fair comparison, I know. To say one culture is better because doesn’t have school shootings is to focus on one bad thing and ignore all the good.

To say one culture is better because of a wrong is to focus on one bad thing and ignore all the good.

That’s precisely the point. That’s what you’re doing with your host culture, focusing on just one wrong as if it’s the primary metric by which a country is judged as “good” or “bad”. Expats with RES focus on some wrongs of their host culture and thus conclude the culture is bad. Comparing the wrongs of your host culture with the wrongs of your passport culture reminds you that such judgments are not so simple. This practice, again, helps you make a judgment with humility and that humility is key to preventing RES. After all, raging anger at a culture can only happen if you believe you’re in a superior enough position to judge it. If you judge a culture from a humble position, that judgment will be without rage.

3. Compare your host culture’s good to your home culture’s wrongs

I wrote above that if you compare the positive traits of one culture to the negative traits of another culture, the culture with the positive descriptions will always seem better. Comparing your passport culture’s good with your host culture’s wrongs will always bias yourself against your host culture. It’s a recipe for RES.

So, intentionally counter RES by doing the opposite. I know it’s not fair and will lead to a bias towards your host culture, but that’s the point! This is a really helpful exercise to help you counteract RES and appreciate the good in your host culture.

For example, in US culture, youth and innovation are valued so highly that elderly people are often ignored and disrespected. Growing up, I visited my great-grandfather in his nursing home a few times in my life. Local people are aghast at this idea. Instead, they live with their elderly parents and care for them, even hiring in-house helpers so that they are always with their elders. What a better way to live and love the people who cared for you when you were a helpless baby.

We value the good in our home culture while accepting the existence of its bad.

One of the reasons this technique so effectively to change your attitude is that we already value the good in our home culture while accepting the existence of its bad. On the whole, we usually value the good enough that we can tolerate the wrong. If we didn’t, and the bad was worse than the good, then we’d likely find a way to leave our home culture for good. For most of us, though, we haven’t left for good and we still value or even love our “mother country” despite its bad.

This technique will help you do the same with your host culture. Rather than reducing it to the sum total of its wrongs, intentionally remember the ways that it is good, admirable, and even better than your passport country.

4. Be grateful…or leave?

Don’t reduce a culture to the sum total of its failures. If it were 100% bad, you’d leave. Despite the negatives, you choose to live here—so remember the positive reasons why you choose to live wherever you do. If the negatives were really as bad as your emotions and frustrations tell you, then you’d be making plans to leave. If your assessment of the wrongs are really accurate and they are that big a deal, perhaps you should make plans to leave.

So ask yourself, ‘Is this such a big deal that I should leave?’ If the answer is yes, then be consistent and leave. If the answer is no, then intentionally call to mind the good things that outweigh the wrong. Read The Art of Gratitude: An Expat’s Journey to Joy and intentionally practice gratitude.

This is true even for situations where an expat is “stuck” in a country and unable to leave. Except for in the hardest of situations, an expat is still choosing to stay in a country for some reason.⁵ Rather than focus on the difficulty of being unable to leave, you can choose to remember the reason why you are staying.

For example, I have friends who were adopting a local orphan, the process of which took over six years. During those six years, they couldn’t leave with their daughter and so were “stuck” in their host country until the paperwork was finalized. It would be extremely easy to be resentful in a situation like that which is objectively bad, but they still had a choice. They could have left at any point without their daughter, but they believed that being with their daughter mattered more than being able to leave. They could rail against the system for creating such a horrible choice or they could choose to be grateful for the daughter that prevented them from leaving. That good, of being with their daughter, was so much better than the frustration of being unable to leave, that they continually chose to stay.

Be grateful for the good that keeps you in your host country, rather than the frustrations of that life.

Conclusion

Living as an expat presents a unique set of challenges that can lead to frustration, but managing these feelings is crucial for you to thrive and survive long-term as an expat. By understanding the differences of cultural norms and values (Part 1) and slowing things down with C-A-L-M (Part 2), we can understand local culture more deeply and integrate into it.

By comparing the wrongs in your host culture to our passport country’s history and weaknesses, we can maintain humility and gratefulness even as we recognize wrong things in our host culture. Embracing this approach will not only enhance your experience as an expat but also foster better relationships and understanding with those around you. In Part 4, we’ll examine more deeply how you can Manage Your Reaction to different cultural norm/value, so stay tuned!

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Footnotes

1. Which it probably already is. Part 2 won the TP Award for Word Count Champion and today’s article is already a contender. ↩︎
2. This is a great example of what I wrote in Context is King: that understanding a word’s usage is more important than understanding its meaning. I knew what the word “country person” denotatively meant, but I didn’t understand its connotations or usage. ↩︎
3. I’m ignoring situations where there is a mix of good and bad in a norm or value. This isn’t just because I want to make things simple. It’s also because, if you deeply analyze a behavior that you regard as both good and bad, you’ll likely find that there are sub-units of behavior, if I can speak that way, which are identifiably good or bad. ↩︎
4. Technically, it was an oil slick on the river that caught fire. But the appearance was still a river that was burning and “burning river” was the headline across the country. ↩︎
5. Excluding, of course, situations where an expat faces an exit-ban or is jailed or otherwise prevented by the government from leaving. In those situations, the expat is truly not choosing to stay, though even in such a situation, gratitude will be helpful. ↩︎