Leave. Adapt. Anchor. Thrive. The Four Stages Nobody Maps for You.
Everyone tells you about the logistics of moving abroad. The visa. The school. The health insurance. The forms that require other forms. Nobody gives you a map for what happens to your sense of self along the way.
In Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self I mapped the journey through four stages. Not a clinical framework. Not a coaching model. The four stages I lived, watched others live, and eventually found language for. They are not always linear. Some people cycle back. Some skip ahead. Some get stuck in one for longer than they expected. But they are recognisable. And recognition is where it starts.
STAGE ONE
Leave.
Everyone says the hardest part is making the decision. What nobody says is that the decision does not end when you make it. It keeps expanding. Someone tells you you must be so excited and you smile and say yes and somewhere behind that yes is a question you have not finished asking yourself yet.
Leave is not the airport. Leave begins the moment you realise that what you are carrying onto the plane is not just luggage. It is the last version of yourself who still lived inside the familiar. The professional identity. The social self. The person who knew where everything was without having to look.
An intercultural psychologist once told me that moving abroad belongs in the same category as other major life events — having a child, getting married, getting divorced. I thought it sounded academic until I was sitting on the floor at midnight with a notebook open and cold popcorn beside me, realising it was exactly that.
Leave is the stage where you begin losing yourself before you know that is what is happening.
STAGE TWO
Adapt.
This is the stage everyone sees from the outside and calls adjustment. From the inside it feels less like adjustment and more like performing a person you are not quite sure how to be yet. You figure out the takeout app. You learn which checkout lane moves fastest. You start memorising sentences before you need them so you are never caught without language in a room that requires it.
Adapt is exhausting in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who has not done it. The cognitive load of navigating a system that was not built with you in mind. The social performance of being friendly and competent when you are neither, fully, yet. The particular humiliation of making errors in things adults are not supposed to get wrong.
You stop waiting to feel fluent. You start functioning on the version of yourself that showed up. Shoulders raised slightly, jaw tight from holding words in place, getting through the day.
Adapt is the stage where the Identity Void is at its deepest, even if you do not have a name for it yet.
The stages are not a ladder you climb once. Some days you are anchored and something happens and you are back in Adapt before you realised you moved. That is not failure. That is what the journey actually looks like.
STAGE THREE
Anchor.
Anchor does not announce itself. You notice it in a small moment when you give directions to a stranger and realise your mouth opened without rehearsing first. Or your child runs straight to her favourite spot in the park without looking for it. Or you take the shortcut without checking your phone.
None of these things feel significant when they happen. That is the point. They have stopped requiring effort. This place has become somewhere you move through without translating every step.
Anchor is not the same as belonging. It is something smaller and more practical: you have built a life here that functions. The routines, the corners, the bakery, the shortcut. You are not waiting for the next place anymore. You are living in this one.
Anchor is the stage where you start living as if you belong before you feel certain that you do.
STAGE FOUR
Thrive.
Thrive is not what the relocation brochures promise. It is not confidence exactly. It is not the feeling that everything is fine. It is something more specific and harder to name: the feeling of being functional in a situation that used to make you feel anything but.
You make a phone call in a language you are still learning. Your grammar is wrong in at least one place. The person on the other end repeats themselves twice. But by the end, something that needed sorting has been sorted and you sorted it. You do not feel proud exactly. You feel functional. And that is new. And it is enough.
Thrive is also where the self you became starts to feel like yours rather than a compromise. You are not who you were before the move. You are not trying to get back there. You are figuring out who this version of you is and finding, slowly, that you can work with her.
Thrive is not the end of the journey. It is the stage where you stop waiting for the journey to end.
The four stages are not a promise that it gets easier in a straight line. They are a map. And a map is useful not because it tells you the terrain will be easy but because it tells you where you are.
If you are in Leave right now, sitting with a decision that keeps expanding and a version of yourself you are not sure how to hold onto — you are not at the wrong stage. You are at the first one.
Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self maps these four stages in full. The scenes, the research, the framework, and the specific experience of living through all of them while raising a child in a country that is not yours. If you are somewhere on this map and need language for where you are — this is the book that was written from inside it.
Available on Amazon. Endorsed by Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids. Selected for the SIETAR Europa congress resource pack, Valencia 2026.
Somewhere between Anchor and Thrive. Always.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
✦ LEAVE · ADAPT · ANCHOR · THRIVE · EXPAT IDENTITY STAGES · PARENTING UNPACKED ✦
