Claudia Feichtinger, Gerhard Fink (1998). The collective culture shock in transition countries - theoretical and empirical implications. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 19:6, 302-308.
It wasn't until roughly 2 months later that I noticed a strange pattern in my behavior and mindset, a pattern that I couldn't remember experiencing before, at least not consciously. This pattern was a particular combination that included: a lack of coherency in making sense of my experiences/what I was learning in school, social bewilderment, feeling spiritually lost, difficulties making even minor, everyday life decisions, and underneath all of the above, trouble focusing my attention on what was relevant - because I didn't know what was most relevant. I'll give one simple example: I dreaded grocery shopping because I would spend an hour trying to decide how best to spend 10 euro. I would have too many irreconcilable variables in mind that I could not (or would not) prioritize, such as finances to a new extreme (my first time spending all of my savings with no source of income plus what I'm spending it on - a Master's in semiotics - is a bit unnerving), getting a balanced diet (I endured four months of physical issues that I'll spare you the details of), wanting tasty comfort food (for the compulsively eating inclined, the gray dorm & skies, lack of things to do in this small town, and grocery store right next door = a recipe for the munchies), and getting food that complied with my only available cooking option - 1 working stove burner and limited cookware. So there I'd be, walking from one section of the store to another, carving a star-shaped path in the linoleum.
When I finally became conscious of this pattern, I remembered the chart on culture shock and realized that maybe I was not generally inadequate at life, but disoriented. Disorientation might be a useful concept to understand a state of mind that may not only result from culture shock, but may include any kind of disruptive change, such as the death of someone close to us, a career change, a break-up, a serious illness, a physical accident, etc. What happens is that our usual ways of approaching life - our habits of behavior, including our decision-making processes, are no longer adequate because of a loss, addition, transformation, and/or reorganization of the various elements of our life - e.g. our social environments, experiences, people, places, and ideas we've internalized and relied on to develop our own mental models for functioning. Such changes can explode our meaning-making systems and we lose a sense of control in our daily life processes.
I benefited from this concept because I realized that disorientation is not an inherently negative thing. It may give rise to temporary uncomfortable feelings, but my initial conflation of disorientation with depression was incorrect. I think the biggest source of my own depression resulted from focusing on how things should be instead of how things are during times of disorientation. There are times when our ideals play a vital role in motivating us to strive for more, to improve ourselves and all the imperfect and sometimes horrifying conditions of our world. There are other times when our ideals distract us from learning, and I think one of these times is when we feel disoriented. Unconscious of the fact that I was naturally lacking a model to navigate my novel circumstances, I was attempting to resolve it by cramming my feelings and behavior into ideas of what they should be - e.g. I should be socializing more like everyone else, I should be studying more on a daily basis.. when the reality was, I was starting to thrive alone much of the time, and I had about one-third the amount of homework that I did at a graduate school in the U.S. (my only source of comparison/model for grad school). My homework here was different in that it was less horizontal and more vertical: that is, less work a daily basis, and deeper thinking for the work I did have. Focusing on how things are instead of how they should be included accepting that I was disoriented, that figuring things out would be messy and mistake-ridden, and that this alone said nothing bad about me as a person.
Becoming aware of this also helped me realize that this was a time to learn how to develop new models. And in order to do this, I needed to direct my attention to how things are before I could move to ideas of how they should be. When I was doing this backwards, I was ignoring important novelties in my life by using inadequate models to fit new situations. Of course, this cannot be avoided entirely - it's not possible to approach a situation with no framework, forgetting our own history! However, we can be more or less flexible, not only in the moment of confusion but in our reaction to/reflection upon it - I needed to spend more time rolling with things as they unfolded, as well as less time analyzing and judging them afterward. I needed to accept that things were imperfect and turbulent and would be that way indefinitely.
Here's an amusing social example of post-disorientation consciousness. General background: Estonians don't really communicate via facial expression, body language, and tone of voice, though they can be bluntly honest with their words. At the same time, I rarely see them look nervous or uncomfortable with themselves - they always appear calm, collected, and attentive. Therefore, they also tend to notice certain things about the way that I communicate that I've taken for granted, especially kinetically and paralinguistically, and make different meaning of them than I intend. This mutual misunderstanding makes me feel like we are communicating past each other and not with each other at times. Specific example: A friend of mine was talking to an Estonian I've seen around our department. My friend noticed me standing there and said, "Have you two met?" In a very Midwestern American manner, I gave a big smile, with open body language and a friendly tone of voice, and said, "No, we haven't," and awaited his response. I think the only part of his body that indicated he heard me was a very slight twitch of his mouth, almost like he was going to crack a smile. Looking very relaxed, almost bored, keeping his hands in his pockets, he kept eye contact with me for a few seconds before calmly strolling away to the dessert table. My normal way of understanding this would consider it strange and/or rude. Fortunately, this occurred at a time after I had ceased to emotionally respond to social behavior that was incongruent with my American expectations. I still don't know what it means, if anything, but I have realized it is common (not strange), and isn't necessarily insulting.
I was also able to apply this to the research process. I was very disoriented when facing the different European school system, let alone the bizarre study of semiotics. Yet, the biggest source of my school-related anxiety was that I wasn't measuring up to a productivity schema in my head - an idea of how research is supposed to be done, what a real grad student is supposed to do, how much on a daily basis, etc. Then I got to go to a dazzling 5 day winter school where they somehow made school really fun (I think the free coffee breaks with cake, lunch, and dinner + wine every night helped a lot). They were all very congenial, there were no social hierarchies (despite diversity of academic experience and backgrounds), the pace and structure of the week was a brilliant combination of learning and leisure, and they enabled as much freedom of thought as possible, deviating far from any kind of institutional feeling. The lectures were exhilarating and the very first one talked about how messy the research process actually is, that rather than climbing up some marble staircase as our final works imply, it's full of unexpected turns, looking in the wrong places, and realizing things when you're doing the dishes or catching a bus. It was refreshing to hear that I wasn't an impostor, and that I can relax and let the research process unfold as it will, instead of trying to cram it into ideal boxes, failing, and consequently thinking I'm a failure or not good enough.
Now when I experience and reflect upon bewildering situations, I am starting to become aware of when I am disoriented -when my navigation system is in flux and/or failing. This heightens my attention to the context and what is going on - it helps me quiet my inner voice and listen. Its not just about learning something, but is also about learning how to learn - how to discover what is relevant and when. This has helped lift the depression and anxiety that I experienced in response to a comparison of how things are with how things should be (including myself) based on my mistakes. I needed to let go of a desire to control things and humbly embrace being clumsy. Laughing at myself helped a lot! Disorientation may be uncomfortable at times, but it is also the best time to learn and grow by shifting our attention to the present moment. It is a time to patiently await inspiration instead of rely on memory.
This blog has three endings that I couldn't reconcile in a logical sequential order, so it's more like a choose your own adventure, but they all have the same theme in that they were experiences that were mystically synchronistic with my mental models that emerged out of disorientation - namely, my models OF disorientation (this post). In other words, they are all happy endings.
Ending 1:
In the spirit of going with the flow, an ice sculpture dedicated to the Chinese year of the snake recently appeared in Tartu's town square.
Chinese New Year was on January 10th. More specifically, 2013 is the year of the water snake - I don't think I could imagine a better symbol for the theme of this post - a flexible organism going with the flow of its environment! I stuck a coin to the ice and contemplated making a wish. I decided not to in the spirit of awaiting what comes instead of imposing what I think I want.
Ending 2:
On the culture shock graph, you see the later part of the line called "new take off." After a few months of feeling disoriented, I started thinking things may never make sense again. Then, about a week before all of my grade-determining papers were due, we had a rare stretch of 5 days of sun. Everything started clicking for me and I suddenly knew how I was going to write those papers I'd been trying to figure out all semester. I had visited several different libraries, checked out countless books I wound up not using, traveled from topic to topic, and emailed/visited professors whose explanations (including the same professor explaining a paper about 10 different times) would change my entire idea of what I thought I was supposed to do based on their previous explanation (also a problem of our different cultural/linguistic backgrounds). I felt newly inspired, as if I suddenly woke up and started living. It felt like redemption. Then, to top it all off, as I was strolling across the pedestrian bridge during one of those special sunny days, I spontaneously stopped to photo some birds on the frozen river. As soon as I went to take it, they took off toward me. I smiled because I felt like I was finally taking off, too.
When I finally became conscious of this pattern, I remembered the chart on culture shock and realized that maybe I was not generally inadequate at life, but disoriented. Disorientation might be a useful concept to understand a state of mind that may not only result from culture shock, but may include any kind of disruptive change, such as the death of someone close to us, a career change, a break-up, a serious illness, a physical accident, etc. What happens is that our usual ways of approaching life - our habits of behavior, including our decision-making processes, are no longer adequate because of a loss, addition, transformation, and/or reorganization of the various elements of our life - e.g. our social environments, experiences, people, places, and ideas we've internalized and relied on to develop our own mental models for functioning. Such changes can explode our meaning-making systems and we lose a sense of control in our daily life processes.
I benefited from this concept because I realized that disorientation is not an inherently negative thing. It may give rise to temporary uncomfortable feelings, but my initial conflation of disorientation with depression was incorrect. I think the biggest source of my own depression resulted from focusing on how things should be instead of how things are during times of disorientation. There are times when our ideals play a vital role in motivating us to strive for more, to improve ourselves and all the imperfect and sometimes horrifying conditions of our world. There are other times when our ideals distract us from learning, and I think one of these times is when we feel disoriented. Unconscious of the fact that I was naturally lacking a model to navigate my novel circumstances, I was attempting to resolve it by cramming my feelings and behavior into ideas of what they should be - e.g. I should be socializing more like everyone else, I should be studying more on a daily basis.. when the reality was, I was starting to thrive alone much of the time, and I had about one-third the amount of homework that I did at a graduate school in the U.S. (my only source of comparison/model for grad school). My homework here was different in that it was less horizontal and more vertical: that is, less work a daily basis, and deeper thinking for the work I did have. Focusing on how things are instead of how they should be included accepting that I was disoriented, that figuring things out would be messy and mistake-ridden, and that this alone said nothing bad about me as a person.
Becoming aware of this also helped me realize that this was a time to learn how to develop new models. And in order to do this, I needed to direct my attention to how things are before I could move to ideas of how they should be. When I was doing this backwards, I was ignoring important novelties in my life by using inadequate models to fit new situations. Of course, this cannot be avoided entirely - it's not possible to approach a situation with no framework, forgetting our own history! However, we can be more or less flexible, not only in the moment of confusion but in our reaction to/reflection upon it - I needed to spend more time rolling with things as they unfolded, as well as less time analyzing and judging them afterward. I needed to accept that things were imperfect and turbulent and would be that way indefinitely.
Here's an amusing social example of post-disorientation consciousness. General background: Estonians don't really communicate via facial expression, body language, and tone of voice, though they can be bluntly honest with their words. At the same time, I rarely see them look nervous or uncomfortable with themselves - they always appear calm, collected, and attentive. Therefore, they also tend to notice certain things about the way that I communicate that I've taken for granted, especially kinetically and paralinguistically, and make different meaning of them than I intend. This mutual misunderstanding makes me feel like we are communicating past each other and not with each other at times. Specific example: A friend of mine was talking to an Estonian I've seen around our department. My friend noticed me standing there and said, "Have you two met?" In a very Midwestern American manner, I gave a big smile, with open body language and a friendly tone of voice, and said, "No, we haven't," and awaited his response. I think the only part of his body that indicated he heard me was a very slight twitch of his mouth, almost like he was going to crack a smile. Looking very relaxed, almost bored, keeping his hands in his pockets, he kept eye contact with me for a few seconds before calmly strolling away to the dessert table. My normal way of understanding this would consider it strange and/or rude. Fortunately, this occurred at a time after I had ceased to emotionally respond to social behavior that was incongruent with my American expectations. I still don't know what it means, if anything, but I have realized it is common (not strange), and isn't necessarily insulting.
I was also able to apply this to the research process. I was very disoriented when facing the different European school system, let alone the bizarre study of semiotics. Yet, the biggest source of my school-related anxiety was that I wasn't measuring up to a productivity schema in my head - an idea of how research is supposed to be done, what a real grad student is supposed to do, how much on a daily basis, etc. Then I got to go to a dazzling 5 day winter school where they somehow made school really fun (I think the free coffee breaks with cake, lunch, and dinner + wine every night helped a lot). They were all very congenial, there were no social hierarchies (despite diversity of academic experience and backgrounds), the pace and structure of the week was a brilliant combination of learning and leisure, and they enabled as much freedom of thought as possible, deviating far from any kind of institutional feeling. The lectures were exhilarating and the very first one talked about how messy the research process actually is, that rather than climbing up some marble staircase as our final works imply, it's full of unexpected turns, looking in the wrong places, and realizing things when you're doing the dishes or catching a bus. It was refreshing to hear that I wasn't an impostor, and that I can relax and let the research process unfold as it will, instead of trying to cram it into ideal boxes, failing, and consequently thinking I'm a failure or not good enough.
Now when I experience and reflect upon bewildering situations, I am starting to become aware of when I am disoriented -when my navigation system is in flux and/or failing. This heightens my attention to the context and what is going on - it helps me quiet my inner voice and listen. Its not just about learning something, but is also about learning how to learn - how to discover what is relevant and when. This has helped lift the depression and anxiety that I experienced in response to a comparison of how things are with how things should be (including myself) based on my mistakes. I needed to let go of a desire to control things and humbly embrace being clumsy. Laughing at myself helped a lot! Disorientation may be uncomfortable at times, but it is also the best time to learn and grow by shifting our attention to the present moment. It is a time to patiently await inspiration instead of rely on memory.
This blog has three endings that I couldn't reconcile in a logical sequential order, so it's more like a choose your own adventure, but they all have the same theme in that they were experiences that were mystically synchronistic with my mental models that emerged out of disorientation - namely, my models OF disorientation (this post). In other words, they are all happy endings.
Ending 1:
In the spirit of going with the flow, an ice sculpture dedicated to the Chinese year of the snake recently appeared in Tartu's town square.
Chinese New Year was on January 10th. More specifically, 2013 is the year of the water snake - I don't think I could imagine a better symbol for the theme of this post - a flexible organism going with the flow of its environment! I stuck a coin to the ice and contemplated making a wish. I decided not to in the spirit of awaiting what comes instead of imposing what I think I want.
Ending 2:
On the culture shock graph, you see the later part of the line called "new take off." After a few months of feeling disoriented, I started thinking things may never make sense again. Then, about a week before all of my grade-determining papers were due, we had a rare stretch of 5 days of sun. Everything started clicking for me and I suddenly knew how I was going to write those papers I'd been trying to figure out all semester. I had visited several different libraries, checked out countless books I wound up not using, traveled from topic to topic, and emailed/visited professors whose explanations (including the same professor explaining a paper about 10 different times) would change my entire idea of what I thought I was supposed to do based on their previous explanation (also a problem of our different cultural/linguistic backgrounds). I felt newly inspired, as if I suddenly woke up and started living. It felt like redemption. Then, to top it all off, as I was strolling across the pedestrian bridge during one of those special sunny days, I spontaneously stopped to photo some birds on the frozen river. As soon as I went to take it, they took off toward me. I smiled because I felt like I was finally taking off, too.
Ending 3:
Around New Year's I stuck a bunch of colorful sticky notes with positive messages on them to the gray wall above my desk. They did wonders to brighten my mood, especially the phrase at eye level that read, "Everything will be okay." One morning after finishing my last big paper of the semester, I noticed that the "okay" had fallen from the series. I decided to leave it, because it couldn't be more appropriate to where I was at.
