Coming Home Is Harder Than Leaving: Return Migrants in Georgia Rebuild Their Identities

For decades, migration researchers have charted the psychological turbulence of leaving home: the culture shock, the identity negotiation, the slow construction of a self that can survive between two worlds. Far less attention has been paid to what happens when the journey ends and the migrant steps off the plane back onto familiar soil. A new qualitative study from Georgia, published in Trends in Psychology, argues that this post-return phase may be the most psychologically demanding stretch of the entire migration cycle, and it offers one of the most detailed maps yet of how returnees reassemble their sense of self when the culture they return to no longer matches the person they have become.

The research team, led by Maia Mestvirishvili of the Psychology Department at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University together with Natia Mestvirishvili, Mariam Kvitsiani and Tamar Kamushadze, conducted 23 in-depth interviews with Georgian return migrants, 12 women and 11 men, and analyzed the transcripts using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a method designed to reconstruct how individuals subjectively experience major life transitions. Rather than measuring adaptation with survey scales, the approach lets the interviewees’ own accounts of readjustment, belonging and friction with home culture drive the analysis, revealing patterns in how values, gender roles and identities are transferred, negotiated and sometimes defended after remigration.

Theoretically, the study leans on two complementary frameworks. The first is the Cultural Identity Model developed by Nancy Sussman, which describes the cultural transition cycle of sojourners and predicts that returnees will exhibit distinct identity outcomes, including additive identities that incorporate elements of the host culture, subtractive identities in which internal change is preserved but connection to the home society weakens, and other configurations shaped by the meaning the sojourn assigned to the time abroad. The second is proculturation, a concept introduced by Vladimer Gamsakhurdia that reframes adaptation as a dialogical process: instead of merely acculturating to a new culture, migrants actively carry values between cultures and renegotiate their home identity in light of what they absorbed abroad. Applied to the post-return period, proculturation captures the push and pull between Georgianness and the Western norms many returnees encountered during their time overseas.

From the interview material, the researchers distilled three scenarios that capture the range of readaptation trajectories. The first, which they call sustaining changes after remigration, corresponds to the additive identity type in the Cultural Identity Model. These returnees came home as self-conscious change agents. They integrated values acquired in the host country into their everyday lives in Georgia and actively promoted them in their families, workplaces and social circles. For this group, the changes experienced abroad were not an inconvenient residue of life elsewhere but a resource to be deployed at home, a way of improving practices and expectations in their immediate environment while remaining embedded in Georgian society.

The second scenario, labeled resistant versus receptive, reflects the subtractive identity pattern. These returnees preserved the internal transformations they had undergone abroad, in their values, habits and expectations, but struggled to reconnect with the home society around them. The gap between the self that returned and the culture that received it produced persistent friction: the returnees felt the society was resistant to the changes they carried, while they themselves remained receptive to the norms they had adopted overseas. The result is a form of readaptation stress in which the migrant is physically home but psychologically partly elsewhere, unable to fuse the two versions of the self into a workable whole.

The third scenario, the fusion of values, represents a more flexible variant of the additive identity. Here returnees selectively and situationally embraced elements of the host culture, adopting some practices in some contexts while retaining traditional ones in others, and negotiated a balance between traditional and modern values. Rather than championing wholesale change or retreating into alienation, these migrants behaved as cultural bricoleurs, assembling a working identity from both repertoires depending on the demands of the situation. The researchers present this fusion as a distinct strategy of proculturation, one in which the negotiation between Georgianness and Westernness becomes an ongoing, context-sensitive balancing act rather than a one-time choice.

Underlying all three scenarios is a set of concrete negotiation sites, and among the most consequential are gender roles. The study situates itself within a substantial body of evidence showing that migration can transfer norms: research on Turkey, Mali, the Middle East and elsewhere has linked migration experiences to shifts in women’s empowerment, political participation and family dynamics. The Georgian interviews show that returnees bring these negotiated gender expectations home with them, and that how they handle the collision between transformed expectations and traditional domestic arrangements is a central component of readaptation. For some, promoting more egalitarian roles becomes part of the change-agent scenario; for others, the mismatch feeds the disconnection characteristic of the resistant-versus-receptive pattern.

The Georgian context gives these findings particular weight. Georgia has one of the higher emigration rates in its region, and the country’s Migration Strategy for 2021 to 2030 explicitly frames return and reintegration as policy priorities. Yet, as the authors note, existing studies tend to concentrate on the psycho-emotional challenges and identity reconstruction that occur during migration itself, while the readaptation stress and identity clashes of the post-return phase remain underexplored. By documenting three distinct reintegration trajectories in a single national context, the study supplies policymakers and support services with a more granular picture of who struggles after return, why, and in what ways, information that could shape reintegration programs that currently treat returnees as a homogeneous group.

Methodologically, the study is careful about scope. Interpretative phenomenological analysis with 23 participants is designed for depth, not statistical generalization, and the authors are transparent that the three scenarios are analytic ideal types distilled from lived accounts rather than population-level categories. The research received ethical clearance from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Psychological and Educational Sciences at Tbilisi State University, and the interview data are available on request from the corresponding author, with public release restricted to protect participant privacy. The authors declare no competing interests, and the work was conducted in accordance with institutional and international ethical standards for research with human participants.

The broader significance of the study lies in its reframing of what coming home means. Return migration has often been treated in both research and public discourse as the end of the migration story, a homecoming that closes the loop. This research suggests instead that return is a second cultural transition, complete with its own identity dynamics, negotiation of values and potential for both personal strain and social change. Returnees, the findings imply, are not simply migrants going backward; they are carriers of transformed values whose reintegration can either enrich their home societies, as in the change-agent and fusion scenarios, or leave them stranded between worlds, as in the resistant-versus-receptive pattern. For a country like Georgia, where labor migration and return are demographic constants, recognizing returnees as agents of cultural negotiation rather than passive reentrants may be the study’s most actionable insight, and a reminder that the hardest border a migrant crosses is often the one leading back home.

Subject of Research: Identity readaptation and proculturation among Georgian return migrants

Article Title: Re-Adaptation with Home Culture: A Qualitative Study of Return Migrants in Georgia

Article References: Mestvirishvili, M., Mestvirishvili, N., Kvitsiani, M., & Kamushadze, T. (2025). Re-Adaptation with Home Culture: A Qualitative Study of Return Migrants in Georgia. Trends in Psychology, 34(1), 442-464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00505-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00505-4

Keywords: return migration, readaptation, cultural identity, proculturation, Georgia, interpretative phenomenological analysis, gender roles, identity negotiation, Cultural Identity Model, reintegration, cultural psychology, migration studies