The first way is to look at your personal space (your safe environment where you feel safe and in control) as growing during cultural adaptation. This is what we did so far.

Another perspective on cultural adaptation is to see it as starting a new life. In this approach, your life is defined in terms of various areas: identity, physical, social, psycho-social*, linguistic, behavioral, emotional, and educational.

If you are going to a culture that is quite different from your own, you need help rebuilding each of these:

• Identity: defining who you are
• Physical: the place, your health, the food
• Social: making a new network of friends, having new ways of getting support form your social group
• Psycho-social: what do these people expect of me? Who should I react to them?
• Linguistic: Learning a new language from scratch
• Behavioral: a new system of what to do and how to do it
• Emotional: Why am I feeling all these kinds of things? What should I be feeling?
• Educational: "I this culture, I know less of than a first-grader." I have to relearn my education to use it in a different culture.

The most interesting aspect to this is where I got it from.

It comes from drug addiction rehab. Rehab workers help recovering addicts to rebuild their lives in most of these ways. Residents need a new location, new networks of friends, counseling, and (usually) some education to get a job. If they don't, their old social networks and behaviors will lead them back into addiction.

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*"psycho-social" means how you react emotionally or psychological y to people in social relationships.