Working with acculturation stress in coaching #1

Over the past year, I have worked with coachees who moved from Mediterranean countries to Germany, often with a strong sense of hope and ambition. In many of these conversations, I have seen how demanding adjustment can be, even when it is not named. Because the move was voluntary, some coachees interpret their stress as a personal failing. In my role as a coach, I have come to see acculturation stress as a process that requires recognition and careful attention.

Acculturation stress refers to the psychological and emotional strain that can arise when people adapt to a new cultural environment. In my practice, it often appears across four interconnected dimensions: learning new social norms and ways of relating, functioning in a different language, navigating unfamiliar institutions such as workplaces or bureaucracies, and reconfiguring one’s sense of identity and belonging.

Working with this in coaching involves identifying these different layers, making them explicit, and creating a setting in which coachees can process, describe, and gradually integrate their experience.

In the next posts, I plan to consider each of these four dimensions separately and reflect on what they mean for coaching in concrete terms.