A “transiente proffesional” is someone who moves , from time to time, from the country where they live and work in. This kind of people may be executives of a company, diplomats, university professors , employees of international organisms...
The main caracteristic of transitori workers is that they know, from the begining (the moment they arrive to a new country) that they are not going to live there forever. They know they are staying there only for a period of time. And when they move again, it will happen the same.
So, since this point of view of life, they can´t allow themself to feel as belonging to a country, to a group of friends, to a house with it´s neighbohood, to a differents places where they enjoy...They can´t organize their lifes in a stable way.
In this situaction, most of the proffesionals take their families with them . For all of them international migration is a way of life. Families in transit are different from those who don´t are like that.
Most of the people who have to live this situations, either deny or minimize the big effort they must make to adjust to the new situation constantly. They must leave what, until now, was their home, their country, their daily rutin...to transform the new place, until now unknown, into their home, their country, their daily rutin...
If they deny, minimize or keep silent this important information of their reality, this will become as a “symptom”, in all members of the family or in someone, which will be the “designated patient”. In this case, the family has the sensation that the adjustment is very easy. The “problematic” member (the rebellious teenager, the histerical woman..)is the one who assumes the difficulty of the adjustment and the one that shows the whole problem of the family. In the end the “problem” is just the own member.
Normaly the father is the one who has the oppotunity to work abroad. In this situation, all the family could be happy, hopping to change their lifes in a better way, earning much more money, learning a new languaje, getting to know a new culture...but they don´t know, and even think, about the problems about their adjustment.
The proffesional has been chosen because of his skills and has been trained to do his job in the perfect way in the destination country. But he hasn´t been trained for the real adjustment to his new life there. And the company hasn´t taken into account neither his familiar situation, nor his wife labour situation. Most of the failures of this kind of people in their new jobs are due to the adjustments problems of their families, and mainly, of their wifes.
Probably his wife is a woman who had study at the university and had her own job in her country. So, now, she must resign her proffesional development.
Most of these families are organized in the new destination as traditional families. While the man works and does everything related to the external of the house, the woman remains at home, taking care of it and the children. And, of course, she, may be, doesn´t like this way of life. She can fell like going to a contradiction, between what she wanted and what she is doing. So in this situation we can´t consider that these women are neurotic because they react in a jealous, envious or destructive way.
The most important characteristic this families need is flexibility. The more capacity they have to change their roles and relations between them, inside the family, (in view of this situational stress), the easier they will be able to adjust. Each one of them will leave many roles that they had in their former community, as members of a familiar extensive group, of a work group, of a friends group...
Only a good relationship with oneself, a good family cohesion, the acceptance and elaboration of losses.... will allow them to integrate easily the different countries, periods of time, the past and present groups of people...In this way, it will be possible to reorganize an consolidate the sense of identity, correspondent to whom they really are, in spite of all the changes they have lived.