The life of a Third Culture Kid therapist

This episode finds me struggling to articulate a sensation I've both felt personally and witnessed in my work with TCKs - a feeling that it's hard to truly trust the love of others as being about us. When we have spent a lifetime working to be useful or likeable by different cultural prisms, it can be hard to let love land as an experience we get to fully participate in, rather than simply work to generate.

I'm getting reflective this week in anticipation of my birthday - and pondering especially what it means to acknowledge the degree to which I feel safe and well in this, my 41st year. As I reflect on my TCK story so far, I have been collecting those memories - or reasons - I can honour as part of what has got me here so far, and wonder why 'safe' can be such a complicated word.

Third Culture Kids and decisions - it's a topic that comes up a lot and here I work with the distinction between a decision deciding the kind of person we are versus knowing the kind of person we are making sense of our decisions.

Authenticity has become a tense word for many Third Culture Kids. It seems to invite us to choose one way of being, one part of our selves to declare as our true self, and condemns us to a kind of consistency of being that can feel claustrophobic. In this episode I explore how we can work with our many selves, negotiating the internal mobility that we need to express them all in fluid freedom.

Inspired by a client recently, I've been pondering how we work with the edges of our maps - more precisely, what do we do when we step off the maps we've walked so far, and start exploring where known self and world are uncharted? After all, as they put it, "There be dragons"...

I talk a lot about how we can process our story so far to understand better the chapters we want to write next... but what happens when we can't write those chapters where we want to? Here I walk through a process I'd invite in these challenging circumstances.

Dipping my toes into local civic processes this week - and exploring both my delight and curiosity in the 'local' given the TCK early exposure to 'global'. Join me as I ponder!

A meandering episode this week - where I reflect on how I tell the story of my week, and how my narrative echoes a hesitation I hear for a lot of TCK stories, and how hard it is to let the little things take up space.