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Self Compassion and the Third Culture Kid
I marvel at how often self compassion (or the lack of it!) comes up in my work with Third Culture Kids. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, my own therapists point it out in me too. But it does seem a strange kind of paradox that TCKs, who we all talk about as tending towards high levels of empathy and compassion towards OTHERS (like articles here and here) struggle so much in SELF compassion.
Courage & Relationships: A TCK Challenge?
How many of us find relationships utterly terrifying? My hand is up.
Third Culture Kids have grown up in flux, travelling around different identities as much as different countries and cultures. Raised by parents in a culture other than the one represented by their passport, and often embedded in an organisational context (mission, military, business), we TCKs are hard to pin down. We become cultural chameleons, adept mimickers (or perhaps rejectors of?) of localised belonging.
Some of us, of course, are drawn to relationships like magnets, for they signal ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in a way that soothes the weary nomad soul. But this doesn’t make them easy to navigate, drawn as we are to their promises of love, and of rest. Hence the terror.
Be You-tiful
In the last week, a lot has changed in my life. I’m entering new roles and responsabilities, negotiating changing relationships and managing the ripple effect this has. It’s tiring stuff! And I’ve found it very easy to slip into feelings of inadequacy, worrying that I’ll never be enough for all the people in my life. As TCKs we can grow so adaptable it’s as though we get caught spinning in circles holding tightly onto our mirror, reflecting all the demands that come whirling towards us. With practise, we learn to reflect back what is expected; just one expert flick of the wrist and we can juggle competing demands on our identities. But the stage shifts too, and the dance can become frantic as we whirl to keep up with the identity demands around us.
#travelanywhere
The schools in England have just had two weeks off, so I have had this time off work also to be with my daughter. I thought it would be a good opportunity to dig into my Anywhere Travel Guide. We didn’t have any adventures planned abroad, but I wanted to see how easily we could feel that same sense of exploration and exhilaration here. I wanted to practise approaching at my own familiar surroundings with the same expectation of adventure as I do the unfamiliar.
Third Culture Kids and Therapy: The Survey
Thank you so much to all who took part in this survey about Third Culture Kid experiences of therapy. I received 161 responses in a matter of days. This is part of the wonder that is the Third Culture Kid community, you are all so generous with your stories and your time. I promised I’d honour your stories by relaying the survey results back to you – so here we go!
TCKs and PTSD continued: West African culture-bound syndromes
A couple of readers of my last blog post, on PTSD and Cultural Variance: Implications for Third Culture Kids, commented on specific features of their childhood that could perhaps be explained by cultural features from West Africa – the part of the world that had hosted them during their early years. It had already been bothering me that I’d not found culture-bound syndromes for West Africa, given my own story, and these other TCK stories stoked my curiosity. And you know what curiosity is…
PTSD and Cultural Variance: Implications for Third Culture Kids
The implications of PTSD and its cultural variances are mind-blowing. Third Culture Kids are one group of many that migrate around this beautiful, and messy, globe of ours. And like others, their early cultural exposures and identifications may bear little resemblance to the cultures they move through and settle into in later life. As such, a clear and sensitive understanding of TCK life stories becomes crucial.
Boarding School Syndrome and Third Culture Kids
So, there is an article in popular circulation at present, entitled: “The Long Term Impact of Boarding School”. And it makes for uncomfortable reading. The article expounds on Joy Schaverien’s research and experience working with ex-boarding school students, and the development of what she describes as a “boarding school syndrome”. For an interview with Joy on her work, click here.
Another Valentine’s… another opportunity for Connection and Belonging
Okay, so Valentine’s Day might feel a silly sort of subject to get so heated about… but it’s not, is it? Because it’s one of those many points, along with birthdays, graduations and weddings, that makes us feel the extent (or perhaps the limits?) of our connectedness to the world.
What Story Does Your Home Tell?
What story does our home tell? Do the walls, colours, furniture and photos tell of its inhabitant(s)? Or does our home somehow neutralise our stories, rendering our histories incommunicable to those who pass through its halls?