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I’m not traumatised… am I?
I watched Gabor’s documentary on trauma, “The Wisdom of Trauma” (link below) last night. Late at night I found myself weeping at the combined relief and hope that his words and experience offer. Relief, because his approach validates my own approach to working with human pain, and hope because of the healing power of relationship that he demonstrates.
“I’m just not enough”
We have witnessed many lifestyles, noted many different ways of doing life, parenthood, friendships, relationships. While we might experience not feeling ‘enough’ in terms of belonging to our passport (or host country) peers, we might also feel ‘not enough’ as a parent, a businessman/woman, artist, author, friend… the list could (and does) go on. To risk literary pluralism, we feel like “too little butter spread over too much bread” (Thanks, Tolkien).
Complex PTSD – the missing piece for many Third Culture Kids
As a follow up to my previous interview with PTSD practioners (read more here) I was prompted to seek out a therapist who could shed some light on Complex PTSD (or C-PTSD). And Mary-Clare de Echevarria very kindly stepped into the breach. In this post, she outlines...
Failure: my greatest fear & my greatest gift
“So my name is Rachel Cason, and I’m a failure”. This was how I felt like introducing myself yesterday. Complete with aggressive self-loathing and topped with misery and embarrassment. I had failed my driving test. Halfway through it I failed to see and respond to the actions of the driver ahead of me, and probably frightened my examiner half to death. I somehow managed to complete the rest of the test competently, but my ultimate failure was made worse by the fact that my examiner was convinced due to my otherwise tolerable driving, that I had seen the danger ahead and simply taken a chance. So I had failed. AND I had been misunderstood. This is such a ‘double-whammy’. I am a Third Culture Kid, and have grown up working frantically to try to work out the rules of every new cultural environment I found myself in.
What is a Third Culture Kid?
The chances are, if you have landed on this blog, you already know something about Third Culture Kids. Maybe you are one, and are looking for resources to better understand or support your experiences. Maybe you are a parent of a TCK? Maybe you have just started realising there is a whole community our there who share your experiences… and you are excited to find you have a name! Or maybe TCK feels more of a label than a community, and you are feeling ambivalent about it all. Whoever you are, welcome!
Why I hated ‘Resilience’
I’ve been delaying writing this post. So much has already been written about Resilience, how to foster resilience in our children, how it’s a good thing, and a predictor of success. And I would cringe at the sound of it. As much as my rational brain knew that the science behind resilience made sense, I recoiled. Odd because, after all, who would want the alternative? Who would want to NOT be resilient? Who wants to crumble under adversity? Resilience is a particularly popular buzz word for Third Culture Kids, those children raised abroad due to parental employment, and their expatriate communities. For anyone who has loss or transition built into the structure and fabric of their lives, resilience can be an attractive concept.
Language Imperialism: how identities get negotiated, and suppressed
I came across language imperialism before I had a name for it. If you have spent time in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual setting, you will have experienced the negotiation that occurs to try and establish the common denominator, the language most commonly spoken and understood. You will have witnessed a group dynamic writhe under the effort to incorporate such individual Individuals and lend accessible expression to all their tongues. Language imperialism, however, is when this negotiation does not occur.
PTSD: interviews with two specialists
In light of my previous posts on this topic, PTSD and Cultural Variance: Implications for Third Culture Kids and TCKs and PTSD continued: West African culture-bound syndromes, I wanted to speak to some therapists who are more experienced than I in this field. My hope is that my interviews with them will both inform and encourage any Third Culture Kids to feel better equipped in understanding their stress responses, and actively seek help if needed. There are wonderful practioners out there – and it’s an important investment in our mental health to reach out to them.
Terror, Fear… and Victory
I’ve never been frightened of the world around me. I grew up on airplanes, alongside scorpions and malaria. I grew up as a member of a minority group in my host country; a speck of White in a Black landscape. I grew up without fear. I knew nothing of hijacking; I had relatively good access to medical supplies and treatment, and I was a privileged and tolerated, if not welcomed, minority. Protection nurtures Fearlessness.
Living at the Edge of our Competencies
Many of us are living in a culture other than the one (or ‘ones’!) in which we were raised. We are called Cross Cultural Kids, Third Culture Kids, Expats, Immigrants, Global Nomads, and many other things besides. We are competence tight-rope walkers. We are familiar with borderlands, with the edges of our Selves. We are marginals, drawn to the edges of our competencies. We seek out new challenges, excited by the novelty, the stretch we feel in our characters and abilities. Yet as stimulating as these spaces are, we can easily tip from thrill to spill as we dance on the edge of situations that we feel ill-equipped to handle with grace.