Going back or staying: the emotional weight of the decision to return home

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Few decisions weigh as heavily as whether to go back. For many, returning was always the plan — "a few years, save some money, then home". For others it kept being postponed until it stopped being certain. And some never thought about going back at all, until something shifts: parents age, children grow, homesickness tightens, or life abroad simply stops making the sense it used to.

A decision that is rarely purely rational

When you think about returning, you do the maths: salaries, cost of living, schools, career, housing. But the decision to go back — or to stay — lives mainly on an emotional plane, and that is where it gets hard. Because both staying and returning involve a loss. Stay, and you lose closeness to home. Return, and you lose the life you built abroad, often over many years.

The return that does not go as imagined

There is a phenomenon few talk about: the shock of returning. Many people idealise home for years — and when they go back they find a country that has changed, friendships that moved on, a different job market, and an unexpected sense of not fully belonging either here or there. This "grief of return" is sometimes called reverse culture shock: feeling foreign in your own land. Knowing it is possible, and normal, helps you prepare with more realistic expectations.

Questions that help bring clarity

• What is pulling me back — a wish for something, or an escape from something?
• Am I deciding based on my real life, or on an idealised image of home?
• Is this decision mine, or am I carrying other people's expectations (family, partner, children)?
• If I stay another five years, what will I regret? And if I go back now?

Deciding with support

Talking these questions through with a neutral professional — someone with no stake in the outcome, unlike family — helps separate desire from fear, and reach a choice you can stand behind without regret. Whichever way it goes. HICOA supports this decision process in online sessions, wherever in the world you are.