The Comfort You Didn’t Know You Had
The comfort that our familiar surroundings offer is rich and deep. Until we leave them, we rarely realize how held in place we are by their predictable, reliable web of sights, sounds, smells, and social interactions. As we’ll see, this is what expat loneliness derives from.
The heroic, hopeful expat is prepared to cast aside this protective cloak of familiarity in order to embrace the unknown. They are ready — and even wanting — to feel like a fish out of water in their valiant pursuit of the great beyond: a grander, more authentic, more fulfilling life.
But most expats, sooner or later, will be surprised by the depth and stubbornness of the particular brand of loneliness that confronts them.
This is the expat loneliness nobody warned you about — and (even thought it’s lonely!) you are far from alone in feeling it.
Why Expat Loneliness Hits So Hard
Before you leave for life abroad, you’re surrounded by an ever-reliable, always-available cocoon of predictability. You know what to expect and you know how to respond. It’s a bit like the air you breathe, or the ground you stand on.
It consists of established routines and familiar faces at the café or the gym. The 5pm news and billboards you can make sense of. The sounds of your native language pulsating in the background. Family and friends within driving distance. Seamless checkouts at the grocery store and roads you know by heart.
You don’t think about any of this. You don’t have to. It’s simply there — holding you in place, quietly and reliably, every single day.
Until it isn’t.
Removal of that web of familiarity can result in a loneliness that is disorienting and stubborn. And what makes it particularly sharp is that it tends to strike hardest exactly when you need it most — when your job is hard, when financial concerns are pressing, when new relationships are struggling. These are precisely the moments when you’d normally reach out to a familiar face or routine for relief or distraction.
Instead, you find no place to turn.
I know this personally. I live and work as an expat in Istanbul, and when things get hard, the loneliness can feel overwhelming. In those moments, it feels like it will last forever.
But it never does.
This is the important thing to understand about expat loneliness: it’s not just about missing people. It’s about losing access to familiar, predictable systems and routines that everybody back home takes for granted. The distance isn’t just geographical. It’s structural. And it compounds whatever difficulty you’re already facing.
One client came to me after nearly two years of living abroad, convinced she was simply “bad at making friends.” She wasn’t. She was grieving a whole invisible world she’d left behind — and nobody had told her that was allowed.
What Actually Helps Expat Loneliness
In my work with expat clients, I’ve found that loneliness rarely responds to a single strategy. It’s more nuanced than “join a club” or “put yourself out there.” Here are the approaches I’ve seen make a real difference.
1. Turn loneliness into aloneness
Sometimes the most powerful move is to lean into the loneliness rather than run from it. If it’s what’s there, it’s what’s there.
When we turn toward ourselves in moments of loneliness — rather than scramble to escape the feeling — something shifts. Loneliness becomes aloneness. And aloneness can be quite beautiful. We can learn to sit with ourselves, move with ourselves, appreciate ourselves, and do what feels authentic.
“We need solitude, because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.”
Tamim Ansary
We learn that it’s often the running away from the loneliness that calcifies it into something that feels permanent and unbearable.
2. Examine how you might be co-creating the loneliness
This one takes courage to look at — but it’s often where real change happens.
Many people who feel lonely are, without realizing it, isolating themselves. They hold back, push people away, and pin their loneliness on things over which they have no control.
If you want connection, it’s worth taking an honest look at how you might be getting in your own way.
Are you saying no to invitations? Are you keeping conversations surface-level? Are you leaving before things get real? Are you running from relationship rather than leaning into healthy conflict?
3. Address the anxiety underneath
Here’s what I see often in my practice: many expats who are lonely genuinely want connection, but feel anxious about it. Loneliness, painful as it is, is the devil they know.
Some expats felt lonely long before they moved abroad. They may have hoped expat life would resolve it. Now they blame expat life for their loneliness, feel powerless in the face of it, and resign themselves to it.
The pattern looks like this: reach for connection, feel anxious, retreat to lonely despair.
To break this cycle, we need to explore and work through the anxiety around connection itself — not just the loneliness.
4. Challenge the belief that this is permanent
Long-held beliefs like “I’ll always be lonely” or “This is just who I am” deserve examination. These narratives often feel like facts, but they’re stories — stories that can be rewritten.
A useful place to start: ask yourself, Where did I first feel this way about myself? Has loneliness always felt this permanent — or only since I moved abroad? When we investigate where these beliefs came from and whether they’re truly accurate, we create space for something different.
5. Work through it therapeutically
In my practice, I draw on several therapeutic approaches to work through expat loneliness. Radical acceptance of what’s present — influenced by Buddhist psychology — helps us stop fighting the feeling. Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) helps us access and work through the anxiety that blocks connection. And Relational Life Therapy (RLT) helps us see how our relational patterns keep us stuck.
The combination allows us to meet loneliness from multiple angles: accept it, understand it, and change the behaviors and beliefs that sustain it.
The Path Forward
If expat loneliness has been part of your experience abroad, that is par for the course. It is one of the most common realities of life outside of your home country. It doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision. It means you’re human, and you left behind more than you realized.
But loneliness doesn’t have to be something you grit your teeth at and simply learn to endure. It can be understood, worked with, and transformed.
Sometimes, that’s something you can do on your own. And sometimes it helps to have someone walk alongside you — someone who understands the particular texture of what it means to build a connected, fulfilling life far from home.
If this resonates and you’re tired of white-knuckling it alone, I’d love to hear from you. I work with expats navigating exactly this.
You can learn more about expat therapy services, explore individual therapy, or simply book a free intake call — no pressure, just a conversation.
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