Deep-level differences between the host society and a person’s own country can make cross-cultural adjustment difficult to attain. This was the lesson learnt by a Belgian counsellor when she went to live and work in a Middle Eastern country. The counsellor’s inability to deal with deep-level cultural differences caused some of her Arab neighbours to regard her as a member of an alien culture with outlandish attitudes and threatening ideas.

After less than a year in the country the counsellor admits to herself that she has failed to adjust to Arab culture and she decides to move back to Belgium:
‘I can’t cope with the culture,’ she tells an expatriate friend. ‘It’s suffocating for women.
Muslim men don’t care about a woman’s feelings. If a Muslim man divorces his wife, the children are his.’
Later, however, the counsellor begins to realize that she has contributed to her own problems by being inflexible, and by not adjusting to the cultural realities.
Throughout her stay in the country her approach to relationship counselling had been based on Western theories of independence and couple negotiation, and had ignored local cultural imperatives – such as the need to involve family networks in helping to solve marriage problems. Such basic differences – together with language difficulties and gender disparities – eventually lowered her morale so that eventually she decided to return to Belgium.