You Built a Life Here. So Why Does It Still Feel Like You Don't Belong?
Maybe you have lived in the Netherlands for a year. Maybe five. Perhaps it has already been fifteen.
By now, many things that once required thought have become ordinary. You know how to make an appointment with the huisarts. You understand a little more about Dutch directness. You have learned that rain is not necessarily a reason to cancel plans, and perhaps your Dutch is good enough that you can manage work, school conversations, appointments and everyday life without too much difficulty.
You may have built a good life here. A career, a relationship, children, friendships, a familiar neighbourhood, perhaps even a house that genuinely feels like yours.
From the outside, you look settled.
Still, belonging can be surprisingly difficult to measure.
Sometimes it takes only a small moment to bring that uncertainty back. You hear someone speaking your first language on the train. Your family sends photographs from a celebration you could not attend. You cook something that tastes exactly as you remember it. Someone casually asks where you are from and, despite having answered that question hundreds of times, you hesitate.
Then there is another experience that many people living abroad eventually encounter. You return to the country you once called home and realise that you do not completely fit there anymore either.
It raises a complicated question:
Where is home when more than one place has become part of who you are?
Adjusting is not quite the same as belonging
We often talk about migration as if adjustment follows a predictable sequence. You arrive, experience culture shock, learn the language and local customs, build relationships and eventually settle.
There is some truth in this. Familiarity makes everyday life easier. But becoming capable of living somewhere and feeling that you belong there are not necessarily the same experience.
You can genuinely appreciate your life in the Netherlands while still missing the life you left behind. You may love your partner and still recognise that moving countries cost you something. You might speak Dutch comfortably in ordinary situations but find that certain emotions, memories or experiences remain easier to express in your first language.
None of this automatically means that you have failed to integrate.
Psychologists use the term acculturation to describe changes in culture and behaviour that can develop through ongoing contact between cultures. Importantly, acculturation does not simply mean abandoning one culture and becoming part of another. Research in cross-cultural psychology recognises that people can maintain connections with their cultural heritage while also participating in the society around them.¹
The academic language sounds rather neat. Everyday life is usually messier.
You may notice that your communication style has changed. Your ideas about privacy, parenting, relationships, independence or boundaries may have shifted. Some traditions from home might become less important, while others suddenly matter more because they connect you to something familiar.
Adaptation, then, is not simply about learning how to live in another country. There can also be an ongoing process of working out what you want to adopt, what you want to preserve and what no longer fits the person you are becoming.
There are losses we do not always recognise as grief
Migration can bring opportunity, safety, love, education, work or a chance to build a different future. It can also involve loss.
Those realities can exist together.
Some migration-related losses are particularly difficult to name because the things you miss have not actually disappeared. Your family may still be there. Your childhood neighbourhood still exists. Your language is still spoken. The food, celebrations and traditions you grew up with continue, just without you being physically present for most of them.
What has changed is your access to them.
Family can no longer casually stop by. A birthday may require a flight rather than a short journey. Seeing an ageing parent may depend on annual leave, finances and school holidays. Even spontaneous friendship becomes different when the people who once knew your entire history now live thousands of kilometres away.
Sometimes what you miss is less tangible. It is the ease of knowing how everything works. The humour you never had to explain. The version of yourself who could enter a room without first wondering whether you had understood the social rules correctly.
And then guilt can appear alongside the homesickness. If you chose to move, have opportunities here or feel grateful for the life you have built, it may seem as though you should no longer be allowed to miss what you left behind.
But gratitude does not cancel loss.
A person can value the life they have built and still grieve parts of the life that became distant in order to build it.
Sometimes you are translating more than language
Language is one of the most visible parts of adjusting to another country, but the translation involved in migration goes much further.
Sometimes you are translating yourself.
You explain traditions from home to people here and Dutch customs to relatives back home. You gradually learn how communication works in your workplace, how friendships are formed, what people mean when they are being direct, and which parts of your humour survive translation.
There can also be differences around family obligations, relationships, parenting, independence, privacy and asking for help. None of these necessarily has one culturally “correct” answer. Moving between different expectations, though, can require a surprising amount of mental work.
Language adds another layer.
You might be perfectly capable of ordering food, talking to your child's teacher or having a professional conversation in Dutch, yet struggle to describe shame, grief, childhood memories or relationship problems with the same precision.
Being able to speak in another language and being able to express your emotional world in it can be quite different things.
This has practical implications in healthcare as well. Current Dutch guidance on language barriers notes that almost 2.5 million people living in the Netherlands do not have Dutch as their mother tongue and that, for some, communication with healthcare and social-care professionals is not adequate without language support. The guideline recommends considering the complexity and sensitivity of the conversation when deciding what kind of language support is appropriate.²
That does not mean that everyone who speaks Dutch as an additional language needs an interpreter. It does show why conversational ability alone may not always tell us whether someone can comfortably communicate about a complex or emotionally sensitive issue.
There is also a quieter experience that guidelines cannot fully capture: having to explain the cultural context of something before you can begin explaining how it made you feel.
Over time, many internationals and migrants become remarkably skilled at moving between these different worlds. That flexibility can become a strength.
It can also be tiring.
The country changes you, too
There is another part of migration that receives less attention.
While you are learning how to live somewhere new, you are changing.
Perhaps you became more independent because circumstances required it. Maybe your views about relationships changed. You developed different boundaries. Your parenting became a mixture of what you grew up with and what you have encountered here. Perhaps living outside your original culture even made you examine beliefs you had previously taken for granted.
Then you go home for a visit.
For a while, everything feels familiar. The language, the food, relatives, streets, sounds. But eventually something happens that reminds you that time has passed for you too.
Someone might say, “You've changed.”
They may mean it affectionately. They may not.
Either way, they may be right.
I think this can be one of the stranger parts of building a life abroad. We spend so much time asking whether we have adapted to the new country that we sometimes overlook how much the experience itself has reshaped us.
Change does not necessarily mean losing your original identity. Cultural identity can become layered. Connections to one cultural world do not automatically require disconnection from another.¹
The question may gradually shift from “Which culture am I really?” to something more useful:
Which parts of these different worlds have become mine?
When your children belong differently than you do
For parents raising children abroad, belonging can take another turn.
Your children may speak Dutch with an ease you had to work hard to develop. Their school experiences, friendships, humour and cultural references may be rooted here in ways yours never completely will be.
That can feel wonderful. It can also bring an unexpected sadness.
You may suddenly realise that things that were automatic during your own childhood now have to be intentionally passed on. A language. A recipe. A family story. A particular celebration. The reason your grandmother did something a certain way.
Parenting between cultures can quietly create questions that never existed before migration. How much should I preserve? What can change? Will my children understand where I came from? How do I give them roots in one place without disconnecting them from another?
There is no single correct balance.
Some families speak several languages at home. Some blend traditions. Others discover that their children identify differently at different stages of life. What matters deeply to one family may feel less important to another.
Recognising that these questions exist can still help. They do not necessarily signal that something has gone wrong. They may simply be part of raising children whose sense of home developed differently from your own.
Belonging often grows through ordinary things
One of the difficult things about migration is that there is rarely a clear moment when you can say, “There. I am adjusted now.”
Life simply becomes more familiar.
You stop checking the route before travelling somewhere. You know which train you need. You have a favourite supermarket, café or walking route. People begin expecting you at birthdays. You understand jokes that would once have confused you. Your children's lives become intertwined with school, friends and activities here.
Belonging can grow quietly through these ordinary experiences.
Sometimes it is also built deliberately. Perhaps you find people with whom you do not have to explain every cultural reference. You cook food from home on an ordinary Wednesday rather than reserving it for special occasions. Your children grow up with traditions from several places. You create friendships with people whose accents, passports and histories are completely different from yours but whose experience of starting again feels strangely familiar.
Eventually, you may even create traditions that are neither completely from your country of origin nor completely Dutch.
They simply belong to the life you have created.
There is research behind the importance of these connections. A 2024 systematic review of 43 studies examining immigrants and refugees in post-migration settings found that social support and social networks were positively associated with wellbeing and life satisfaction. Community engagement could also contribute by supporting a sense of belonging. The authors were careful to note limitations in the evidence, including the large proportion of cross-sectional studies, so this should not be interpreted as a simple claim that social connection alone determines mental health.³
Still, the broader idea matters: belonging is not only about where you live. Relationships, participation and feeling connected to others can form part of how a new place gradually becomes part of your life.
There is no deadline for feeling at home
After living abroad for several years, people can become surprisingly hard on themselves.
They may wonder why their Dutch is not better, why making close friendships still feels difficult, or why homesickness occasionally returns after they thought they had moved beyond it. There can be an assumption that enough time should eventually make these feelings disappear.
But life keeps changing the meaning of migration.
Becoming a parent may make you miss your own parents differently. Illness in the family can suddenly make geographical distance feel enormous. A relationship ending may change the reason you originally stayed in the country. Children growing older can bring questions about culture and identity that were barely noticeable when they were small.
Even returning home can stir something unexpected when the place you remember and the place you encounter are no longer quite the same.
In that sense, migration may not be something we adjust to once and then finish.
Different stages of life can ask us to reconsider what home means.
So instead of asking:
“Why haven't I adjusted yet?”
another question may be more useful:
“How can I build a life here without feeling that I have to leave parts of myself behind?”
Perhaps home becomes bigger
Living abroad can create a subtle pressure to choose.
Here or there. The person you were or the person you have become. Your original culture or the culture surrounding you now.
Human identity rarely fits into such clean categories.
You can appreciate living in the Netherlands while finding parts of Dutch life difficult. You can miss your country of origin without wanting to move back. You can feel deeply connected to family somewhere else while recognising that the centre of your everyday life is now here.
And perhaps, when you visit the place you once thought would always feel unquestionably like home, you discover that you have become slightly foreign there too.
That can initially feel like losing something.
There is another way of understanding it.
Perhaps belonging does not always require choosing which place owns the largest part of you. Over time, home can become something broader: people, memories, languages, routines, values and relationships gathered from different parts of your life.
Finding home within may simply mean allowing those parts to exist together without demanding that one of them wins.
You can miss where you came from and still put down roots where you are.
Both can be true.
When these feelings become heavier
Feeling homesick, culturally tired or uncertain about where you belong does not automatically mean that you have a mental-health disorder. Mental health is shaped not only by symptoms but also by people's experiences, circumstances, relationships and the challenges they are navigating in everyday life.⁴
There are times, however, when something more may be happening. Persistent anxiety or low mood, increasing isolation, difficulties functioning in everyday life, trauma-related symptoms or serious relationship distress deserve attention.
What appropriate support looks like depends on the person and the situation.
Sometimes connection with family, friends or community may help. At other times, preventive counselling can provide space to understand what is happening before difficulties become more entrenched. When symptoms require clinical assessment or treatment, the huisarts, POH-GGZ or appropriate GGZ services may be the better route.
You do not need to turn every difficult feeling into a diagnosis.
But you also do not have to wait until you are in crisis before deciding that something deserves care.
If this feels familiar
Finding Home Within is an Astramía Counselling pathway for internationals and migrants navigating migration stress, cultural adjustment, identity, belonging and the emotional experience of building a life away from where they began.
Astramía provides preventive, psychosocial and non-clinical counselling. It does not replace medical care, crisis support, psychological assessment or specialist GGZ treatment when those forms of care are needed.
Sources & further reading
1. Berry, J. W. (2019). Acculturation: A Personal Journey across Cultures. Cambridge University Press.Berry describes acculturation as changes in culture and behaviour arising through intercultural contact and examines how people relate both to their heritage cultures and to wider societies.
2. Patiëntenfederatie Nederland et al. (2025). Richtlijn Omgaan met taalbarrières in de zorg en het sociaal domein. Pharos.The Dutch guideline addresses communication when language barriers may affect healthcare or social support and provides recommendations for selecting appropriate language support.
3. The Resettlement Journey: Understanding the Role of Social Connectedness on Well-being and Life Satisfaction among (Im)migrants and Refugees: A Systematic Review (2024).A systematic review of 43 studies examining social connectedness, wellbeing and life satisfaction in post-migration settings.
4. Pharos (2023). Mentale gezondheid en stress bij inwoners in kwetsbare situaties: handvatten voor professionals.Pharos discusses mental health in relation to people's experiences, living circumstances and ability to cope with challenges in everyday life.
This article provides general psychoeducational information and is not intended as individual psychological or medical advice.
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