by Robin Pascoe

One of the biggest existential headaches for spouses moving abroad is the temporary loss of the critical qualities that a woman needs to keep her ego from collapsing in total despair, namely self-confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of her own identity. In my experience, the first social invitation provides the litmus test for how those qualities are faring overseas. If you fail the test, you are in good company.

It does not matter if it is your first dinner party, cocktail party, or coffee morning, a good majority of women will decide at the last minute that they do not want to go! I use an exclamation point only because it will match most women’s emotional condition at the point of their decision. The reasons for the refusal will vary: nothing to wear, hair needs to be cut but a trustworthy hairdresser has not been found, a perm has gone awry in tropical heat, exhaustion and lack of energy, inability to reciprocate while still unsettled, or a face that is a mass of welts from allergic reactions to hotel soap. The list of excuses will go on and on but they will share a common theme. You feel rotten about yourself. You feel invisible and inferior. You hate yourself and nobody could possibly like you. You are not budging, ever, from your hotel room, apartment, or house.

If your husband is standing by watching your self-flagellation (I should ask my own husband to add a footnote here), he will either be shaking his head or trying not to laugh. It is not funny to you, though, especially if you can remember a time long ago when you were a confident person who felt good about herself. When we moved overseas our first time to Bangkok, it would be an understatement to say that my self-confidence was at an all-time low. I wanted to stand at parties and hand out my résumé as a way of showing people that I was certainly a more interesting person that I appeared to be, which was a sweating, self-conscious, newly arrived wimpy-looking character, clutching a drenched purse (from holding it under my arm), frozen three inches from the hors d’oeuvres table. Soon after we arrived in Beijing (and I was supposedly getting good at moving around), I gave this post-arrival inferiority complex a name: “speck syndrome.” Hi, I wanted to say and practically did, I’m nobody from nowhere: Ms. Speck of Dust.

It is the rare individual who can casually walk into a room to face strangers (even friendly ones) after just relocating her life thousands of miles. Absolutely nobody is that secure. It takes time to build up that security again.

When it dawns on you, however, that almost every woman who moves abroad must start from scratch to rebuild her shattered ego and actually manages to do so, your own self-confidence begins to return. You realize that like everyone else, you too will get past being the nervous newcomer. People will know who you are, remember meeting you or hearing about you from somebody else. Someone may actually remember that you have a skill of some sort and ask you to do something—bake a cake, give a course—perhaps even offer you a job. Events do eventually transpire to allow the return of your self-confidence.

In an overseas setting, though, you must make more of an effort. There is no built-in security blanket of friends or family, or even professional community like you may have had at home. You have to be more aggressive and open with people: ask questions, follow up with phone calls to arrange another meeting. Your ego is going through adjustments and will even out given the proper circumstances. Often just one new friend with common interests or an assignment of any kind will set you on track again.

My overseas Chinese friend, for instance, quickly realized that she would have to compromise a bit and attempt to be more outgoing in the United States than she would normally be at home. She also befriended a Filipino woman while living in Taiwan. Together they faced many of the same cultural attitude problems and could empathize with each other. Your self-esteem will be challenged throughout your posting, just as it can be at home, but a foreign setting can inflame inferiority complexes, and it will not be only successful women in the host culture who throw your self-image into the gutter. Often it is other expatriate women, who exude confidence and ability, who will get you down, especially when you are starting out in your new post and feeling unsure of yourself. You may meet some dynamo who has started her own export business of some rare local treasure, and you have not even been able to find raisins anywhere. On my first posting, when I still believed I wanted to be a foreign correspondent (motherhood helped me abandon that fantasy, combined with new-found knowledge that I am actually a coward and could never handle being in any danger zone), I met real live female foreign reporters. One day I felt so inadequate telling them I was writing articles for airline magazines that I wanted to slide under the lunch table. Since I was extremely pregnant at the time, it was a physical impossibility, but I would gladly have disappeared by magic if I had been capable.

Self-confidence and self-esteem have to be nurtured slowly and deliberately. The first time you go out and do something by yourself, you gain both confidence in your abilities to function in a new city and a better feeling about yourself. The trick is to attempt something relatively easy, thereby guaranteeing success. I am not making this up: on our second posting, just the simple act of successfully purchasing a box of paper clips in a downtown Taipei stationery store boosted my morale enormously (to say nothing of my skills at charades.) Take small steps at first.

It can be very difficult for even the most energetic of souls to project an identity separate from her husband’s when settling into a posting. After all, his job is still the main event no matter how busy you get. He has all the instant status. Yours will come in time. So in the beginning, accept that you are Mrs. Husband’s Job for now, and be patient for the return of your own credibility as an individual. What is important is that you know who you are, not some stranger you may never see again in your life. I realize this is easier said than done, but it is a terrific character building exercise to begin measuring your self-worth in your own eyes rather than in someone else’s. Returning home with that ability under your belt will also be a lot more useful than some trinket you will have to dust every second day.

If you have kept your maiden name rather than taken your husband’s, now is not the time to change it. Keep your own name. Some women revert to married names overseas because they think it is simpler to explain who they are. The quickest way to lose your own identity is to give up the name you have been using for the past number of decades. In many countries, it is the custom for women to keep their maiden names, so you would not be that unusual. And sometimes, last names get lost in the shuffle anyway. For most of my first posting in Thailand, I was known as Mrs. Robin (or a close approximation), so switching to a married name would have served no purpose, except to fuel my identity crisis.

One last comment about identities: print up name cards for yourself which do not mention your spouse. Not only are name cards a great way to get home in a taxi (if you have the card printed in the local language on one side), but they are also proof positive that you exist outside of your marriage, at least in print.

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Robin Pascoe is the author of five books on global living and the challenges of the global family. This article was excerpted from “A Broad Abroad: The Expat Wife’s Guide to Successful Living Abroad” by Robin Pascoe (Expatriate Press 2009). For more information visit her website www.expatexpert.com/bookstore