Stage Of Jakarta Life: The Let-Down Stage
The Let-Down Stage Part 2
The Causes of the Problems: The difficulties and challenges you will experience during this Let-Down Stage are due to:
The Need for You to Adjust to the place Jakarta Expat Community
This makes serious demands on your adaptive resources. You face the task of developing new attachments in the community as well as mourning the loss of the old. You find there are so many new people to identify and to locate in their place in this new world of Jakarta. You will meet many people from different European, American and Asian backgrounds all with different professional and private hopes and aspirations as well as strong political, cultural and ethical differences from your own. You will be untried in Jakarta and so under scrutiny. Will you match up?.
Jakarta way of doing things will also be different from what you are used to.
You may well be told this is just the way it is in Jakarta. Most reasonable people experience strain from such a response.
Remember that psychological adjustment is related to and to personal characteristics. At the environment level problems occur due to separation from accustomed surroundings, the demands of small community living, dependence on groups and subordination to authority. This creates tensions and conflicts more difficult to avoid than in normal urban life.
Personal characteristics and behaviours are determined by heredity, character structure, previous experience, current pre-occupations and in a general way behavioural propensities based upon custom and habit.
Overall, being satisfied or dissatisfied in a new environment is more a product of state of mind than of the immediate external environment.
Adjusting to the Indonesian society
Initially you may have an intense desire to comprehend the differences in this new host culture. Slowly you will often begin to experience frustration at the way Indonesian people act or approach some task: They drive in a different style to many of us, they have few traffic rules, they are not as regimented as many western societies, they are rarely in a hurry, they do not easily get upset by problems, they practise a very different religion and so on. It is of nil surprise that things are not done the same way as in your home country. That is a very large part of the positive experience of living in another country. You may even become more tolerant.
A very old civilisation such as Indonesia has slowly evolved socially to develop those norms of behaviour which best suit their people and which best avoid unnecessary social conflict. The easiest way to cope with these cultural frustrations is to remember the Indonesian way is not wrong, it is simply different. More likely the Indonesian way of doing things may very well be the best way.
Be patient. It may take a year or more to integrate and develop your own relevant coping mechanisms for the ambiguity, value conflicts and hidden clashes you find in this new society and culture. Those who find ways to communicate across cultural barriers rather than retreat into an enclave of like minded expats will make the most successful adaptation to life in Jakarta.
You may well be told this is just the way it is in Jakarta. Most reasonable people experience strain from such a response.
Remember that psychological adjustment is related to and to personal characteristics. At the environment level problems occur due to separation from accustomed surroundings, the demands of small community living, dependence on groups and subordination to authority. This creates tensions and conflicts more difficult to avoid than in normal urban life.
Personal characteristics and behaviours are determined by heredity, character structure, previous experience, current pre-occupations and in a general way behavioural propensities based upon custom and habit.
Overall, being satisfied or dissatisfied in a new environment is more a product of state of mind than of the immediate external environment.
Adjusting to the Indonesian society
Initially you may have an intense desire to comprehend the differences in this new host culture. Slowly you will often begin to experience frustration at the way Indonesian people act or approach some task: They drive in a different style to many of us, they have few traffic rules, they are not as regimented as many western societies, they are rarely in a hurry, they do not easily get upset by problems, they practise a very different religion and so on. It is of nil surprise that things are not done the same way as in your home country. That is a very large part of the positive experience of living in another country. You may even become more tolerant.
A very old civilisation such as Indonesia has slowly evolved socially to develop those norms of behaviour which best suit their people and which best avoid unnecessary social conflict. The easiest way to cope with these cultural frustrations is to remember the Indonesian way is not wrong, it is simply different. More likely the Indonesian way of doing things may very well be the best way.
Be patient. It may take a year or more to integrate and develop your own relevant coping mechanisms for the ambiguity, value conflicts and hidden clashes you find in this new society and culture. Those who find ways to communicate across cultural barriers rather than retreat into an enclave of like minded expats will make the most successful adaptation to life in Jakarta.
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