The life of a Third Culture Kid therapist

Here I explore that tension I see myself and so many other TCKs carry in our stories - a sense of needing to figure out how to do life 'right'. I connect this to the necessity in childhood for many of us to figure out the correct way of being for the current cultural context. The urgency that surrounds this can often inhibit our ability to give ourselves goodness...

It's common for Third Culture Kids to ask themselves, 'Who am I?' With Life Story Therapies we look to our stories to inform the answer to this - but these same stories can also help us but showing us who we didn't get to be. There will have been chapters for us where options were limited, as well as opportunities opened, and in this episode I explore how looking at who I didn't get to be can offer expansiveness to our sense of self, if we have a desire to explore it.

Typically, Third Culture Kids carry grief triggered by the changes experienced in their early years. Here, I'm exploring how changes we may be working to choose in later life may actually need us to do grieving first. Grief reminds us of our story, why the things we find hard are hard, and makes space for us to change the next chapters.

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.

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.