Tag: ATCK

Learning to Stay (a TCK story)

by Sangita Shresthova

I never thought I’d be the kind of person who put down roots. Having grown up between Nepali and Czech cultures, I have always thrived on change — the desire to leave, to be open to new possibilities, and discover something new. For decades, I was always on the move. Colombo, Ahmedabad, Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin, Boston, Prague, Kathmandu. I didn’t just adapt to transience; I sought it out. Home was wherever my suitcase landed. Rootlessness felt like freedom.

Then, somehow, I settled. 

It didn’t happen overnight; it crept up on me. I fell in love. I had a son. I grew to care about my son’s school, the community around the church children’s choir he joined, the trails our family hiked together, the coffee shop that always got my order right, the streets I biked, the neighbors that waved.

Slowly, quietly, place began to matter. One day, I realized that I had somehow unpacked my suitcase in Altadena, California. Don’t get me wrong, I still sometimes imagined leaving, but for the first time, these desires didn’t rise to the deafening levels that had pushed me to move on before.

And then, on January 7, 2025, everything changed when Altadena (our Altadena) was destroyed by the Eaton Fire. Overnight, sixty percent of our town burned down, and the places I’d come to love disappeared. The coffee shop, the park, the trails, my son’s school and church. Though our home (thankfully) survived, we were not able to return for months, and when we did everything was different. I was overwhelmed and surprised by the depth of my grief. I had lost places before by leaving them, but this was different: the place itself had disappeared.

Through the pain, I felt my old instincts return. I was prepared for this moment, I told myself. My cross-cultural upbringing had taught me to adapt and move on. I know how to start over. I know that rootlessness can be a strength. And so, my first impulse was to do what I had always known how to do: leave and start again somewhere else.

But then, I also remembered what I had learned about the power of connecting (really connecting) to a place and committing to being shaped by geographies as much as cultures. I also thought about my now eleven-year-old son and his emerging Czech, Nepali, Indian, and American cross-cultural identity. I thought about how much his church choir community meant to him.

I realized that I wanted him to know that staying in a place is just as meaningful as having the courage to leave it. I wanted him to understand that resilience can take many shapes and that his cross-cultural upbringing does not mean that rootlessness is his destiny.  

So, despite a strong urge to pack those suitcases, my family and I decided to stay (for now) and become part of Altadena’s long journey to rebuild. I committed to being part of the local community, to holding space for what Altadena may become. I make it a point to visit the restaurants and coffee shops that remain. My son composed a song about Altadena to perform at local events and wears his Altadena tee shirt with hope.

I have adapted and embraced change, while staying in place to grieve for what we have lost, knowing it will never be the same. Through it all, I have learned that living across cultures can teach us how to adapt, move on, and let go. But it can also teach us something I am still learning: how to stay.

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A Czech-Nepali mother, writer, former dancer, and current professor at the University of Southern California, Sangita Shresthova currently lives in Altadena, California. She recently published The Cross-Cultural Parenting Handbook, to share what she learned about parenting across cultures through her conversations with more than thirty cross-cultural parents and caregivers.

As an Adult TCK, I Was Resistant to Grief Processing. Here’s What Changed My Mind.

I first learned about the Grief Tower model while taking a course on providing care for Third Culture Kids. Some things weren’t new to me. I’m a TCK. I’m married to a TCK. And I raised two TCKs. But some stuff was. 

In the course we learned that global childhoods are ampersand in nature and that we can honor both the good and the hard things that shape our backgrounds. We learned that global kids are twice as likely as monocultural kids to experience harmful risk factors—but that their international upbringing is also full of deliciously unique potential.

We heard how much expat parents love their kids—but also how goodbyes, starting over, losing people, exposure to trauma, and relationship disruptions can stack up during childhood until the body finally says, “This is enough,” and our health topples over, often when we least expect it. 

These things made sense to me. For other TCKs at least. I could picture the faces of kids I knew who had experienced Big T traumas, and I began to understand why that first or second year of college was disastrous for so many, as they suddenly developed risky behaviors and health problems. They must have been going through a lot, and it all caught up.

Part of me wanted to interrupt the instructor with my perspective as a TCK and let all the eager participants know that most of us still love TCK life. But I held my tongue, literally between my teeth. Even when I disagree with someone or don’t like what I’m hearing, I believe in keeping an open mind. 

So I tried to think of these new thoughts, the ones I was resisting, on a personal level. I thought back to my first year of college and remembered the unexpected turn my life took. If my parents hadn’t planned a home assignment for that same year, I don’t know where I would be today. My thoughts about “those” TCKs suddenly turned personal. I’d had some hard things stack up too. But in my fierce love for growing up global, I had brushed them off.

Our class was instructed to make a timeline of some of the harder life experiences that stood out to us. A disquieting malaise settled over me. Were we ever going to get to the good stuff? The adventures of my childhood in Cameroon felt strangely compromised by this exercise. I needed people to know that global childhood is wildly beautiful.

At the same time, I knew these instructors were experts in TCKs, and my single experience didn’t tell the whole TCK story. They were coming at it from a research background, while mine was totally anecdotal. But this exercise still didn’t feel very ampersand-y. It felt more like a betrayal to my entire life. So, do I say something? 

I decided to wait and see if we would get a chance to write about our positive experiences too. My pen was ready to wordify the memories flooding my mind—

My whipping ponytail flying down dirt roads with five friends piled high on my bike. Stirring corn flour into fufu over eucalyptus embers. Joining the beat of goatskin drums and Cameroonian choirs to worship God in the way that became normal to me. Twisting horsehair into birdtraps and roasting our reward with my friends. Huddling around the radio to listen to the BBC chime of news every evening. My family of six devouring Mom’s pancakes made from precious flour and sugar from the capital city. Muddy soccer wars in torrential tropical rains with my high school friends. Learning from the actions of my international school teachers that Jesus doesn’t recoil from our ugly parts, He leans into them. 

These were a massive part of my childhood, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing down the bad stuff without also acknowledging the good. It wouldn’t fairly represent me or my experience. And it might just scare my classmates off from the good work of raising their own kids abroad. 

I was forming a model in my head for how the class could better balance the good with the hard. Then came the instruction: “When you’ve drawn your timeline of grief blocks, go ahead and write two emotions you felt under each block.”

I could no longer keep silent. I’d watched some TCKs get stuck there on an unforgiving path of retelling their hardship. So I formed my concern as a question: “Will we go back later and write down some of our childhood highlights? Those are really important to me.”

Her knowing smile told me she’d heard this before. Her look wasn’t patronizing. It was gentle.

“That makes sense. The good stuff is so important to honor. But the reason we focus on grief for this timeline is because the good stuff doesn’t weigh us down. Unprocessed grief does.”

If I’d been struck by lightning, the accuracy of her words couldn’t have cut any faster or truer to my heart.

The good stuff doesn’t weigh us down. 

It’s there. We honor it. We remember it. We celebrate it. But the good stuff is not what caused some of the TCKs I knew in college to suddenly engage in risky behaviors, try drugs for the first time, abuse alcohol, start having nightmares, develop hair loss, become hypervigilant, have health crashes, or harm themselves.

It was the hard stuff that caught up to us. We ignored it because we were so busy focusing on the good stuff. Or we thought we couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Or we had internalized messages that anger and sadness are bad. Or it felt like betrayal to our rich experiences to acknowledge anything remotely negative. Or we simply hadn’t learned how to hold two truths in tension—that life can be both good and hard. 

God was at work beneath my resistance, and the tectonic plates of some un-nameable thing in my core began to shift. I realized that I had learned the ampersand truth in my faith. Wrestling with God through hard seasons, devastating seasons, I’d learned deep in my cells that He could hold all of me, not just the best of me. He could hold my questions, my anger, my unhealth, and my valleys, alongside my gratitude. 

But I’d not applied the same full care to my TCK story. On some level I had acknowledged the hard parts, but I hadn’t honored them with the space they deserved. For my spiritual life, grief and tension felt appropriate. For my global childhood, sitting a bit longer with the hard parts felt like a betrayal to the wonder that it was. 

I began to sink my teeth into deeper truths about the incredible gift of a global childhood, but this time of acknowledging and honoring some of the harder things about globally mobile life truly impacted me.

And I didn’t get stuck. I didn’t negatively or irreversibly polarize my experience. Quite the opposite. This exercise unlocked an even deeper appreciation for my full life—all of me and all that shaped me. 

I began to hold some of the beliefs I’d built up to the light and re-examine whether they were helping me, and whether I wanted to carry them into the next decades of my life. Beliefs like processing the hard parts diminishes the gift, anger is bad, and acknowledging hard stuff betrays someone or something.

My faith already had ampersand depth. Now I was being asked to apply that same depth to something I cherished as positively wonderful — my TCK story. God had already taught me the beauty of holding truths in tension. Now I was inviting Him to show me how to hold this full truth in tension. I was inviting Him to help me honor the goodbye to Cameroon that sucker punched me, the reverse culture shock that bewildered me, the cultural isolation that marked periods of my life. 

This exercise unlocked something else of equal or greater value. The ability to hold all of my family and all that shaped and is still shaping them. My husband. My daughter. My son. 

And this kind of ripple effect started to spread outward to other relationships.

I no longer feel compromised by making space for all of life—not only my own. As I work with expat families and their children, there’s a fuller and newer space for their entire story. We can synthesize the whole story—including the parts that haven’t taken up enough space—whether good or bad. We can talk about the joy of friends and the missing of parents at boarding school. We can talk about the thrill of travel and the hardship of living in a war zone. 

If their story is mostly great, we can acknowledge the hard parts they might have glossed over—the lonely birthday party after a big move or the long, empty nights of a parent disappearing into the overwhelm of their own mind. And if their story is mostly hard, we can honor it and still be curious about the hidden sweet moments that may have been overshadowed for years—their host country nanny picking them ripe mangoes or the tropical sun streaming through banana leaves on a steamy morning. Because either extreme of grief—ignoring it or getting swallowed whole by it—isn’t helpful. 

And now I understand better why some TCKs get stuck. They don’t get stuck because they’ve dared to examine the hard things—they get stuck because they’ve never had enough space to process them. Maybe they’d been rushed past their hardship too many times, told to focus on the adventure, the privilege, the good. Or maybe they weren’t told anything, and the silence was thundering. They never got a chance to catch their breath from those hard stories in the safety of loving arms. As a global community we need to make space for the full TCK story, not just the instaperfect parts we’re comfortable celebrating.

I’m reminded here of God’s tender provision to make a shade plant grow quickly over Jonah as he sat exposed and vulnerable to the sun’s pounding heat, grumbling about God’s grace to Nineveh. Scripture tells us the plant was to ease the discomfort that Jonah faced as he listed his grievances (Jonah 4).

Even though Jonah had just been the recipient of immeasurable grace himself, God didn’t shut his frustration down. He provided shade and a receptive place for Jonah’s reflection. And when Jonah still couldn’t escape his negative mental loop, God allowed the sun to touch him again, sparking an honest and welcomed conversation. 

If God could hold space for Jonah’s fury without rushing him past it, then maybe I could learn to do the same. For myself. For the expat families I work with. For my own kids. I have a living picture of a God who didn’t say, “Get over it, Jonah. Focus on the good,” but made room for the mess. First He offered the comfort of shade, and then He initiated an honest conversation. He didn’t recoil. He stayed present to hold the whole story. It didn’t start with a lecture, but with shade.

In a way, all this grief processing brought me back to the same place I started. I have a more full appreciation of the hard and painful parts, and still I’d like to raise my hand to the whole global classroom and say, “And it was wildly beautiful. All of it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

Hearing the Good and the Hard of Missionary Kid Lives

I have been working in TCK research for over ten years. That includes six large scale surveys (with 200-2000 responses) and over 600 interviews. The data I’m currently analysing comes from TCK Training’s 2024 survey of 1,643 TCKs around the world. It was a long survey covering a lot of topics and I wish I could spend ten hours a day delving into the details! For now, the initial data on missionary kids has a lot to say about their experiences. (The full First Look data drop is available paywall free.) 

In this post I will share with you four key things we learned about missionary kids (MKs) through the research:

  1. Most missionary kids are glad they grew up abroad.
  2. Good things and hard things are often intertwined.
  3. Missionary kids feel a lot of pressure.
  4. Emotional support and mental health are key.

1) Most missionary kids are glad they grew up abroad. 

Throughout my research I have learned many hopeful things about how TCKs perceive their globally mobile childhoods. The vast majority have positive things to say about their experiences, even though they may in the same breath acknowledge that there were also difficulties. In this latest research we learned:

  • 91% of MKs said growing up abroad was a good experience overall.
  • 76% of MKs said it made their family closer.
  • 72% of MKs said it was “the best way to grow up.”

2) Good things and hard things are often intertwined.

Life is rarely black and white. To truly understand the lives of missionary kids, we must hear the nuance in their stories — that there were hard things along with the good things. Even many MKs who had the most difficult experiences of childhood also saw positives in their upbringing.

  • 98% of MKs said, “I can see both good parts and hard parts in my story.”
  • 96% of MKs said, “There were hard times, but it enriched my life.”
  • 83% of MKs said, “I enjoyed my childhood, but I think some things could have been handled better.”
  • And only 7% of MKs said living abroad “ruined my life.”

3) Missionary kids feel a lot of pressure.

When TCK Training asked TCKs about various childhood experiences connected to their parents’ work, we found that missionary kids were much more likely to feel certain pressures when they were children.

  • 69% of MKs felt “pressure to ‘perform’ while visiting our passport country”; they were twice as likely as other TCKs to feel this pressure.
  • 54% of MKs felt “pressure to be ‘perfect’ as my behavior reflected on my parent’s employer.”
  • 27% of MKs said that as children they felt “anxiety as a result of duties assigned to me (i.e. tour guide, translator)”; they were twice as likely as other TCKs to feel this anxiety.

Through my interviews I have also learned that many missionary kids try to hide their stress from their parents, as they do not want to cause additional burden to their parents. They love their parents and recognise the strain they already carry. 

4) Emotional support and mental health are key.

While those of us working to support missionary kids have long seen impacts on their mental health, when the results came in, the numbers were still heavy. 

  • During childhood, 37% of MKs lived with someone who had a serious mental health crisis.
  • 34% of MKs reported experiencing a serious mental health crisis themselves during childhood.
  • 40% of MKs had been diagnosed with a mental illness during their lifetime.
  • 86% of MKs experienced symptoms of at least one mental health concern during their lifetime.

We’re also seeing that missionary kids are less likely to receive diagnoses than other TCKs. For example, while 47% of MKs experienced symptoms of PTSD, only 12% received a diagnosis (which is still nearly double the rate of PTSD diagnosis in the US population). 

Missionary kids are experiencing the impact of not only their own mental health struggles, but the struggles of their parents. One thing I’ve seen over and over through our research and working with thousands of TCKs and their families around the world is that when parents are doing well, they have the energy and capacity to care for their kids better. So not only do the TCKs need access to quality mental health support, but getting the parents this kind of support is crucial!  

There are a range of issues contributing to a lack of mental healthcare for missionary families. Many families lack access to quality mental health services due to a remote location, financial stress, frequent mobility, language access, or a combination of these factors. 

Stigma around mental health can also play a role in preventing MKs (and their parents) reaching out for the support they need. It is important that we talk openly about mental health and the ways we benefit from getting support.

Prevention Matters

The saying “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure” (attributed to Benjamin Franklin) is appropriate here. I believe this data demonstrates the importance of preventive care for MKs and missionary families. My hope and desire is that we support families in such a way that we see rates of mental health concerns drop over time, and MKs flourish — on the field and throughout their lives.

One of the many reasons I love my work at TCK Training is that we believe that international life is a good thing and that it can go hand in hand with a healthy family life. We work to create quality preventive care resources, and we share our research freely because we believe quality research is a critical component of exceptional TCK care. We want caregivers, parents, and supporting churches alike to be equipped to care for TCKs well! 

 

This article expands on data shared in “Key Takeaways for TCKs” in Mission Frontiers, May/June 2025.

Photo by Kasturi Laxmi Mohit on Unsplash

Co-Grieving Loss with Your Repatriated TCK

We didn’t have words for TCK loss back then. Not when I left Cameroon at nineteen and stepped onto U.S. soil as a stranger to my own country. But just because there weren’t words doesn’t mean the ache of loss didn’t burrow deep. Nineteen and newly repatriated felt like drowning in a sea of people who looked like me and talked like me but didn’t know the red-earth-Africa that shaped me. 

I hardly recognized the girl I became in the wake of losing Cameroon, my best friends, and everything that felt familiar. That season was one of the hardest – and one of the unhealthiest – of my life.

Now, after the years have fast forwarded to an empty nest, I find myself looking back, not just at my own story but at theirs. I think of my children, my third culture kids, who built rich and beautiful lives on South African soil, their home. How will they handle letting go? How will they carry the weight of leaving behind the people and places that shaped them?

When I saw Megan Norton’s invitation to write a letter to my recently repatriated TCKs for her upcoming book, Letters Now Sent, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I know the grief of leaving a place that tattoos an indelible mark on your soul. As their mother and as a TCK myself, I want to co-grieve their losses of saying goodbye to a life they loved in South Africa. And I know where I want them to root themselves now, as they step into adulthood in the U.S.

This letter is a new beginning with new language for parents of TCKs. It is my way of opening the door to a safe and sacred conversation with my young adult children—one established in love, shared understanding, and the kind of hope that reroots through the cracks of even the hardest losses. While their reactions to my letter are deeply personal and honey to my heart, I can tell you that this budding conversation was met with warm reciprocity and open arms. 

A letter to Elaina and Sawyer Danforth, 2025 (republished at A Life Overseas with permission) 

My two dearest toasted marshmallows,

You are eighteen and nineteen now. University carries a steep learning curve for everyone, but especially for the ones like you who left home, country, and friends to be grafted back to the place of your heritage. 

As second-generation TCKs, you belong to a tribe that your father and I know well. Your childhood was formed in the womb of the cradle of humankind, in KwaZulu-Natal, and it ended abruptly on the other side of a plane ride to the United States. But the things that formed you there still sing in every crevice of your mind and shape the way you see the world. 

Repatriation is a season when the losses of the familiar sink in hard for TCKs. And these are the years when you become aware of your roots, the ones that have been transplanted to new soils and now feel wildly distinct and out of place. The places of your childhood are the places where your formative and deepest roots grow. And the soil of South Africa no longer surrounds or supports you. 

You’ll remember from working on our farm that a transplanted plant often wilts for a while. It is learning to survive in a new and unfamiliar environment. Its roots aren’t sure what to make of its new home. They don’t know whether they can unfurl and take new life or whether the newness will be hostile to growth. Repatriating TCKs are the same. 

While my roots in South Africa will never be as deeply formative as yours, I am here to co-grieve your losses with you. I did the same as a nineteen-year-old with my Cameroonian roots. And your father did too, at eighteen with his Congolese and Central African roots. 

Some losses are obvious. Our imperfectly perfect little farmhouse and the stability of its cracked walls. The foamy blueness of whales flirting between the horizon and the Indian Ocean. The oneness of our multicultural, multi-lingual farm family. The wind-whipped cheeks from four-wheeling wild past giraffes. The saggy eyes after Minecraft all-nighters with friends. The laughter with your non-blood sisters farmsteading in the mountains. The crispy-edged pancakes hot off the griddle every Saturday morning. The seasonal ebb and flow of subtropical downpours and droughts. 

But some losses are hidden. Some, you won’t even know you miss until you come across them years later. And you’ll be caught off guard by a sudden feeling of home. Hidden losses are the sounds, smells, and invisible things that God sprinkled into the backdrop of your childhood. They are the things that you didn’t even know weren’t everywhere on planet earth. Until they weren’t. 

Your hidden losses don’t have to make sense to anyone else. They don’t even have to be pleasant. But something about these background sounds and smells had a profound impact on developing the unseen part of who you are today. And we honor those gifts by naming them. 

The background sound of your childhood is the cry of hadedas filling pink southern skies and beckoning your sleepy eyes open. You didn’t even know the sound was missing until that first morning in a Midwest dormroom when the synthetic shock of an alarm clock demanded your attention. 

It is the faithful singsong Xhosa greeting “Molweni” on your proud farm stoep. It is the mourning doves telling each other off gently and sternly. It is the inexplicable peace of violent rains threatening to crash right through tôle roofs. It is the baying of hounds, whether to threaten skelems or to give chase to dassies, outside your burglar-barred window. 

It is the South African flavor in which people have always said your name. It is the twisted, segregated history healing in real time through the harmony of church songs in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu. It is the comfort of our family’s age-old call to meals that reaches back to the recesses of your first independently held spoon, “On va prier.”

The background smell embedded in the roots of your childhood is a eucalyptus flame licking Karoo lamb ribs on the braai. It is soft buttermilk vanilla steam from an Ouma rusk dunked in Five Roses tea. How can something be so moorishly crunchy and goopy at the same time? It is the barely-there salt in the air where the Indian Ocean laps at the sky. And yes, it is even the familiar sewage plant every time we try to hold our breath at that bend in the highway by Uvongo.

Your roots will fumble around in this new place of red, white, and blue for a while, figuring out what is friendly soil and what isn’t. And this is the time. Dit is tyd to close your eyes, take a breath, and rediscover the power of your one unshakable tap root. It is your deepest root. The most formative one. The most familiar one. The most stabilizing one. It is your one root that pushes far past all the others, past every good and rocky soil, reaching like life depends on it, to the source of life. Water. Living Water. 

It is in Living Water that you’ve always found life and truth and all that is good. When everything around is unfamiliar, this source is the familiar. 

You’ll find community in the taproots of familiar people planted there too. And you’ll come to know new people who are automatically family because their taproot seeks life in the same place where yours does. This is the good stuff, my toasted marshmallows. 

While your secondary roots stumble around and try to make sense of star-spangled life, sink all your energy, all your questions, all your everything into your taproot’s source of life. It is the one and only thing that will never change no matter where you go, how far you fall, or how unfamiliar everything else seems. 

Taprooted to the Source with you,

Mom (Anna Danforth)

~~~~~~~

Inspired by Ruth Van Reken‘s book Letters Never Sent, Letters Now Sent will be a collection of letters from TCKs, parents of TCKs, and system leaders to share personal stories about their experiences with TCKs, being a TCK themself, and/or raising TCKs. This book is a fusion of both memoir and anthology written in a specific “Dear [name]” format. 

Here is the Google Form link to submit a letter with additional details about length and content prompts: https://forms.gle/jQyzq3TtFqfyznvCA. The deadline to submit a letter is March 31, 2025, and the book will be launched in July 2025 at Ruth’s 80th birthday celebration. Families in Global Transition is hosting the 80th Birthday party in Chicago on July 26, 2027, and registration will be live on their website soon. You do not have to be a member of FIGT to register for this event.

Research and Resources for Improving TCKs’ Mental Health

When my book Misunderstood was published, I was immediately asked if/when I would write another book. At the time I felt I had nothing left to write. I’d put everything into those pages. Yet within a year a new idea started to form: a guidebook for Adult TCKs, showing that they are not alone in their struggles and sharing strategies for moving forward in healthy ways.

Since 2018 I have been doing both qualitative and quantitative research in aid of this project. It has been paused for multiple major medical issues and an incredibly disruptive unplanned pandemic relocation, among other reasons. During that time some wonderful resources for Adult TCKs have been released, which I regularly recommend. (These include Incredible Lives and the Courage to Live Them by Dr Rachel Cason, Belonging Beyond Borders by Megan Norton, and Girl Uprooted by Lena Lee).

Yet the dream of my wide-ranging guidebook persists. I have about 200 hours of interview recordings with 120 Adult TCKs from a variety of backgrounds, plus a survey with data I am starting to analyse. 

The survey was originally intended as a quick effort to guide my research by distinguishing which topics Adult TCKs thought were the most important to talk about. Due to my medical issues, I left it open far longer than originally intended, and it attracted over 800 complete responses. Not only that, but with such a large pool of responses from Adult TCKs of different ages, I learned some really interesting information as well. (You can find the survey information and data analysis here.)

In this post I share a few key things learned about ATCKs’ mental health, plus resources for supporting TCKs and their families.

Unresolved Grief

3 out of every 5 ATCKs said their adult lives were impacted by unresolved grief. Another 1 in 5 said their adult lives were ‘sometimes’ impacted by unresolved grief. 

While this won’t come as a surprise to anyone working with TCKs on a regular basis, it’s still a huge number. 80% of TCKs are impacted as adults by grief they haven’t processed effectively. This underlines the importance of giving TCKs of all ages (from young children through to adults) the tools to express their emotions, feel their feelings, and unstack their grief towers. 

I am so grateful that there are now excellent grief processing resources I can recommend for every age and stage! 

For young children, the picture book My Tower is Tumbling. 

For parents of children from toddlers to teens, the short book The Grief Tower, available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook, and the workshop Unstacking Your TCK’s Grief Tower. 

For both teen and Adult TCKs, Unstacking Sessions with an ATCK coach can be great. 

For Adult TCKs working through this themselves, there’s the short book Unstacking Your Grief Tower (ebook and paperback) and the Unstacking Your Grief Tower Self-Guided Course. 

For parents and caregivers who want to learn to support others, as well as ATCKs themselves, the workshops Grief Tower 101 and 201. 

For anyone at all (TCK or not), What Made That Feel So Hard? (ebook and paperback), which also has a Bible Study guide.

Depression and Anxiety

Half of the ATCKs who took my survey said their adult lives were impacted by depression, and in a separate question half said their adult lives were impacted by anxiety. Another 20% said their adult lives were ‘sometimes’ impacted by depression, and 20% ‘sometimes’ impacted by anxiety. 

This is by no means a scientifically rigorous study, but the fact that so many ATCKs feel that depression and anxiety have played a significant role in their lives should give us pause. Those of us working with TCKs have seen this anecdotally, though it can be hard to know if what you see in your work is true of the wider community or not – which is where large-scale surveys can be helpful. 

TCK Training has a whole section of resources specifically for Adult TCKs, and among the workshops available is one on Understanding Depression as an ATCK and another on Understanding Your Anxiety as an ATCK. 

For caregivers working with TCKs, there is also an annual Counseling TCKs Therapist Training (with 6 CE hours from the NBCC). The next one is coming up soon — on August 28th, 2024!

What do we do with this?

My little tester survey was never intended to be used as much more than a guide to show what needs our attention. These numbers definitely point to the importance of investigating what is happening with the mental health of Adult TCKs.

This is part of why I am so thankful for my work at TCK Training, where I am the Director of Research and International Education. We are currently collecting responses in a wide-ranging survey of Adult TCKs which includes questions about mental health experiences (both screening questions and questions about medical diagnoses) vetted by licensed psychologists and counsellors familiar with TCKs. 

So far there are 1,300 complete responses from ATCKs who are citizens of 85 countries. We would love to hear from even more Adult TCKs, so please check out the survey information to learn more and pass it on to others. The survey closes on August 31st – not much time left!

As with all our research, the analysis of this new research will be freely available with no paywall. You can read findings from our previous research and learn the latest as it appears on our research page. By the end of 2024, we should have more detailed data on the experiences of depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions in the TCK community. We believe that this data will help us as a community to better support families as they raise children abroad and to better support Adult TCKs as they move forward – no matter what their childhood experiences were.

 

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

To the Repatriating TCK: Don’t Lose Sight of Christ

by Clarissa Choo

It was August 4, 2020, Czech Republic (CZ). Without anyone telling me to, I buckled my airplane seatbelt. I had a window seat, but I didn’t want to look out, else I burst into tears. Not wanting to regret my decision, I forced my eyes to the window. The cabin doors closed. This is it. I swallowed a lump in my throat. Soon, the plane ran down the runway and took off. The scenery at my window slanted. I can’t. Blinking back my tears, I turned to face forwards.  

I wished I didn’t have to return to my passport country. I wished that I could find a job that was willing to sponsor my work permit in the CZ, so I could continue to serve in the church there. Nonetheless, I accepted that this was God’s will, and if He wants to bring me back to central Europe, He’ll do so in His own time. 

For now, He wants me to be in my passport country, Singapore. 

Returning to your passport country is never easy. There are ways to mitigate the challenges. You can attend debriefs, receive counseling, and read advice about reentry. These steps are helpful, increase your awareness of what’s going on, and spur you to take action for the next step. As an adult TCK, I definitely encourage you to seek this kind of help.

But even with these supports, the process is still difficult. It’s complex, as it involves your past, present and future, your identity, acknowledging grief (and sometimes unresolved grief), reverse culture shock, your sense of belonging, goals, a change in location, adapting, the search for necessities, finding a job, settling into a new school, and the list can continue. The factors can be taken apart to be studied individually, yet they’re connected to others. The process is therefore more complex than one may think.

The duration also contributes to the difficulty and complexity of the reentry process. You’re unsure of how long you’ll take. Even after a year, you may realize you’re still adjusting to the food, still processing some hidden losses of the past, and perhaps, still searching for a suitable hospital or school. Personally, although I repatriated nearly nine months ago, I haven’t completely adjusted yet.

All of the above can be overwhelming. I’m not typing that carelessly. I know it through experience as I’ve returned to my passport country twice – the first time during my early teens and the second now in my early twenties. Both times were challenging. 

During the first repatriation, I experienced a huge reverse culture shock, couldn’t acknowledge my grief, had a hard time accepting God’s will, and struggled to adapt to a country where people expected me to behave like a local. 

During the second return, I had to adjust to changes that weren’t there before (like Singapore’s strict covid measures), and I struggled with processing grief. A Czech friend died while I was in the CZ, and I was repatriated a few months later. On top of those struggles, I had unresolved grief from my childhood.    

If you’re reentering your passport country, it is easy to get lost in the complex factors, only to lose sight of the most important One in your life: our Savior. That’s right. The One who bought you from the bondage of sin so that He can have a relationship with you – Jesus Christ. As a citizen of heaven, it is so vital, so crucial, so significant that you keep your eyes on Him, keep guarding your quiet time with Him, and keep putting Him first. Stay close by His side, dear TCK. And that is not a one-time action. You need to persevere to pursue and love Jesus.

When challenges hit you with their full impact, you have two choices: turn away from God or cling to Him. I chose the first during my first reentry. As a result, I missed blessings, strayed far away, and went through much hatred, anger, and pain that could’ve been prevented if I had picked the latter.

I learned a valuable lesson and don’t want to repeat my mistake. Thus, when I was repatriated a second time, I chose to continue to be close to Christ and was blessed by the fellowship He and I had as I went through the challenges. Through them, I got to know Him deeper than before. And through them, He helped me to process unresolved grief, refined me to be more like Christ, and drew me closer to Him (1 Peter 1:7, James 4:8).

Staying by His side is worth so much more than running away. So please, dear fellow TCK, don’t let go of His hand. He is the joy amid your grief (Romans 15:13), the healer of your hurt (Psalm 147:3), the comforter when you cry (2 Corinthians 1:3-4), the strength of your weakness (Psalm 73:26), the courage of your fear (Joshua 1:9), and the guide of your path even when the valley is dark (Psalm 119:105). 

Being a citizen of heaven includes the rugged terrain of life no matter the country you’re in; it’s part of the cost of following Jesus. Hence, trusting God does not mean that your road is smooth without potholes or grief (John 16:33). Rather, trusting Him means that you’ll cling unto Him amid the happy and sad times, no matter where you are.

The comforting truth is that through it all, He is upholding you with His right hand:  “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness” (Isaiah 41:10, KJV).

 

Yearning to connect with other TCKs who are going through the same difficulties as you are? Truth4TCKs is an online conference that does exactly that. Their mission is to bring biblical truth and encouragement regarding the cross-cultural and highly mobile life to TCKs. Their theme for this year is finding what it means to be a Global Citizen of Heaven; the event takes place in May 2021. You can find out more from their website here. 

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Clarissa Choo is an ATCK and a former business kid. Although she has lived in four countries, Heaven is her only home. Clarissa is the Blog Tour Host for the online conference, Truth4TCKs 2021 in May, and the founder of the email/Instagram ministry, TCK Letters. She’s also a staff writer of TCKs for Christ, an upcoming website ministry dedicated to serving Christian TCKs. You can find her online here and on Instagram here.

Neither Here Nor There, I Do Not Belong Anywhere

by Chris Moyer

Not fully in France. Not in America,
Not by the Seine, Not by the Susquehanna.
My belonging is mixed-up, Sam, you see.
I do not belong fully here or there.
I do not fully belong anywhere!

If you are a Third Culture Kid like me, you may read the word “belonging” and feel that it is an ephemeral or even impossible concept to grasp. Endless strings of transitions leave many TCKs wondering how they could ever find a stable sense of belonging. In many ways, the TCK life feels like my adapted stanza from Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham (above).

I struggled most intensely with my sense of belonging when I was a teenager and young adult because I experienced an intense push and pull between countries and continents through those years. Each year – from 9th grade through my first year of college – I faced a new phase of starting over. In 9th grade I had my last year in French schools. Then, in 10th grade, I shipped off (of my own volition) to Black Forest Academy in Germany. Next, I had a one-year stop in America (not of my own volition) for 11th grade. Then once again, I hopped the Atlantic to return to BFA for my senior year. Finally, I moved back to the States for college.

As I typed the above paragraph, I could feel my nerves amp up, my palms get sweaty, and butterflies begin to flutter in my stomach. Even though the last of those transitions took place over twenty years ago, the overwhelming sense of dread that accompanies having to start over is a feeling I can never quite shake. Yes, I have processed – and even learned to embrace – what took place during those years. But I can still vividly recall my desperate longing for stability and for a sense of true belonging, something for which my heart ached during that time in my life.

While I was blessed to develop meaningful relationships with many special people during those years – people I never would have met had I stayed in a single, stable environment – I can still keenly feel the tension that constantly pushed and pulled at me. The tension of wanting to fully fit in with those around me, all the while knowing deep inside that I was inherently different from both my French and American peers. My desire to belong remained just outside of my grasp because I was stuck in the perpetual reality of being an outsider in both of my “worlds.”

When living as a teenager in France, many of my classmates thought it was “cool” that I was American. But their understanding was based on the American shows they watched and the American musicians they listened to, rather than inquiring what it was like for me personally to be a US citizen. Instead of questions, I frequently heard comments such as, “You are so lucky to be American!” and, “I don’t understand why you would leave the US to live here!” And, just in case there was any doubt that I was not a local, my peers even nicknamed me, “Made in USA.” In some ways I liked that I had something that other kids wanted, and yet I struggled with being different. In my heart I simply wanted what most young people desire, that is to be like my friends and not stand out.

When in America I looked and sounded like my peers, which on the surface felt good. But on the inside, I felt like a zebra running among horses. Zebras sound like horses when they run, and outside of their black and white stripes, they even look like horses. But zebras and horses are different species. Try as I might, I could not ignore or fully hide my stripes. I did what I could to blend in like a cultural chameleon, but just as zebras cannot be tamed, so I could not suppress my multicultural identity.

At BFA, we were ALL zebras! Our base color (passport cultures) may have been different, as were our stripes (our host cultures), but within this community I finally found my “herd.” This offered me the sense of belonging I had been looking for and longing to find for so long. But before I knew it, graduation came along and we all went our separate ways. Many of us were once again living as zebras among horses.

TCKs do not have the power to change what makes them different from their peers in either their passport or their host countries. And now, as I parent three TCKs of my own, I want to help my children successfully navigate the treacherous path of belonging. While one side of the TCK “coin” represents challenges, the flip side to this is an intense richness that can only be found in this reality. Together, we will celebrate the beauty and accept the losses that come along with the multicultural life they did not personally choose for themselves.

It is my desire to lead my own TCK children to learn, as I did, that you do not need to fully belong to fully engage with those around you. No, you won’t ever “belong” to just one group or culture. And while that can be hard, it is ok. Understanding, acknowledging, grieving, and celebrating are all joined together to create the jumbled richness that is multi-cultural living. While I always felt different from my monocultural peers, coworkers, and family, I grew to accept these differences, while learning to belong — at least mostly. To explain what I mean by “mostly,” I highly recommend watching this short video from Michèle Phoenix: MKs & BELONGING – Three Options to Consider – YouTube

Below are three things (this is not an exhaustive list) that you can do to help your TCK(s) learn to mostly belong wherever they may be.

 

1. Process their sense of belonging with them.

For older TCKs, asking them reflective questions can draw out what is going on beneath the surface of their desire to belong:

  • Where do you feel you most belong?
  • What makes you feel like you belong there or with those people?
  • What it is like for you when you feel like an outsider?
  • What do you do when you feel like an outsider (look for specific behavior that helps or inhibits their desire to belong)?

For younger TCKs, you can still try to ask reflective questions like the ones above, or you can read a book like Swirly, which will draw out feelings and desires through story.

 

2. Help them make decisions that grow a healthy sense of belonging (be sure to process #1 with your kids before moving to #2).

As Michèle Phoenix says in her video, some TCKs will do whatever they can to blend in. They will forsake their heritage for the sake of belonging. While TCKs need to grieve what they have left behind, suppressing where they come from will create additional challenges of unresolved grief along the way.

Because of the mobile nature of their parents’ employment, some TCKs will experience short transition periods such as the one I had in America for my 11th grade year. I did not want to be in America that year, and my attitude and behavior clearly matched my disposition. It can be tempting for TCKs, when they know they will only be somewhere for a short period of time, to stay withdrawn and be unwilling to invest much into their momentary place of residence. This was my approach to my stop-gap year in America for two reasons. The first was that I longed to be back with my friends at BFA. The second was that I knew I was going to be leaving and did not want to get close to people for fear of how hard the goodbyes might be.

Whether TCKs are in a short transitional period, or whether they are in a more permanent phase of life, it is important to help them make conscious decisions that lead them to connect with others. Understandably, it is hard to move toward others when you feel like a cultural outsider, when you are in the middle of grief, or when you’re just plain tired of “putting yourself out there” yet again. But, relationships with peers are a crucial first step to a growing sense of belonging. Below are some ideas (again, not exhaustive) of how to help your kids connect with other kids:

  • Encourage them to invite a classmate to your home to play. If your TCK does not want to risk rejection, be the one to take initiative and invite their classmate’s family over for an afternoon snack or a meal.
  • When possible, have your TCK get involved in something they love to do. In our family we chose to forego extra-curricular activities during our first year in France because we thought the language barrier would be more stressful than the activity would be beneficial. However, after our initial “waiting period” we’ve witnessed our three kids blossoming more and more since beginning their hobbies here.
  • If your TCK(s) goes to local schools, check in with them regularly about how well (or not) they are connecting with their classmates. Some kids naturally jump into new settings with both feet. But others may be shy and insecure about finding their “place,” as we found was the case with one of our children who needed regular encouragement to move toward others. With time and some gentle nudges this kid has really grown in their ability to initiate with others, and as a result, their sense of belonging has been strengthened.

 

3. When possible, gather with other expat families.

There is a good chance that your TCK(s) will feel their greatest sense of belonging when they find themselves with other TCKs. They will likely no longer feel like a zebra running among horses when they come together. There is a comfort, often an unspoken one, through a mutual understanding that comes with being alongside of others from their “herd.” In light of this, make every effort to meet up with other expat families when possible.

When it is not possible to meet in person, whether because of where you live or because of the current global pandemic, your TCK(s) may enjoy having online gatherings with their TCK peers. Our youngest loves to connect with a TCK friend in Eastern Europe and do a “show and tell” with him. Our older kids simply enjoy sitting across the screen and chatting with their TCK friends.

Lastly, let me encourage you to find conferences/retreats to attend with other expat families. There are some great events put on by educational service organizations, mission organizations and others that will be like a breath of fresh air for you and your TCKs. These types of events were some of the biggest highlights of my childhood and I know my kids have loved the handful of retreats they have attended with their TCK peers.

 

In the end my hope is that we can see our kids mostly belong and that the adapted stanza from Sam I Am changes to:

Mostly in France. And in America
By the Seine and the Susquehanna.
I belong mostly, Sam, you see.
I belong mostly here and there.
I belong mostly anywhere.

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Chris Moyer grew up in France and Germany as the child of missionaries. After spending nineteen years in the States and serving as a counselor and then as a pastor, he returned to France in 2018 with his wife, Laura, and their three children to serve in church planting and global member care with World Team. Chris loves running, biking, following his favorite sports teams as a faithful “phan” (all teams from Philadelphia and France soccer), and travelling the world. You can read more of his reflections on his personal TCK experience and on parenting TCKs on his blog TCKonnective.

To My Adult TCK Self: I See You

by Rachel Hicks

When you’ve spent your whole life as a cultural chameleon, you end up not knowing what color you were when you started, who you might have been had you been from someplace, what it feels like to belong fully to a people, a tribe, a neighborhood, a city. What it feels like to nod knowingly at those around you and say, well, around here we all… you know how we do things…in our neck of the woods…

You don’t know if you’re a desert person, or a mountain person, or a beach person. You’re all three at different times, but no matter where you are, you’re never all there. You always realize that you’re on the outside looking in.

I love mountains, you say. But then you go there and you see mountain people, and you know you don’t know or love mountains like they do. You vacation at the beach; you imagine yourself living there, because that’s what you do, everywhere you go: you observe and you think, Could I live this way? What is it like to be part of this community?

And because you’ve been vacationing in Thailand and southern India and Sri Lanka for years and years, the familiar gives you that tiny taste of home: yes, I remember the smell of green curry; I know this taste of fresh pineapple on a stick; the motorbikes racing by and the tuk-tuk horns and the orchids and everyone in flip-flops (which you called chappals for years and years because you didn’t know they had any other name) and the beach vendors and the 80s ballads playing from tikki bars on the beach every night and the all-but-naked European tourists and the lush green hills, the markets, the everything.

It’s all lodged in tiny places all over the body of your memory since you were a baby so that you are a part of it… But, you’re not. Not by a long shot.

And when you’re an adult in your passport country taking your daughter to the dentist and the chatty hygienist begins to pry it out of you in bits and pieces that you’re not ready in that moment to share, you want to bury your head in the magazine you’re trying to read and cry. Because she is saying isn’t that neat and aren’t you adventurous and how was China and you know she’s trying, but it’s not the day for this conversation.

You’re too scattered today—you’re missing your best friend who lives in Doha and whom you only see every three years; you don’t know how to know others and show them how to know you when there is that much difference—all the pieces of backstory, frames of reference, are too different—and you feel needy and misunderstood. The daily reality of wearing the mask to fit into this place, with these people, wears you so very thin.

When you go out to find some authentic mattar paneer and dosas because you just have to taste your childhood again—you close the eyes of your imagination and remember reaching out for glasses of chai through the train windows, eating aloo parathas and spicy omelettes for breakfast, mopping up your curry with nan that drips with ghee—the charade also feels thin, breakable, a farce.

You’re not there. You’re not actually—really—from there. But it’s your birthplace, the birthplace of your first sensory memories, and surely that must count for something? You walked the foothill paths just below the Himalayas as a small child, holding your dad’s hand while he pointed out the langur monkeys overhead. The smell of smoke in the air from woodburning stoves is your earliest scent memory. Your ayah taught you how to wrap your first sari. But you can’t speak the language anymore, and when you pull out your shalwar top to wear with jeans you wonder if people will think you are appropriating someone else’s culture.

And how do you get back there, now? How do you find the funds, the time, the reason to justify both? And that makes you think of all the roads that are—or seem to be—closed off to you now: almost every place you lived, that burrowed into you and left an imprint on your singular soul, is inaccessible, at least in the way that truly matters. Could you secure a visa? Get on a flight? Yes, but what would you find? You’ve tried it a couple of times and you came away feeling twice-exiled. Everything had moved on, and the little lines that tethered you to that place, to people there, were cut and floating free. You’re not from here, you hear in your head. What made you think you ever were? What made you think…?

Recently you realized, with a sort of regret mixed with wonder, that you’ve lived in your current house for more consecutive years than you’ve ever lived in another dwelling in your life. How can it be? You wonder why that realization feels like another mini out-of-body experience: I, lived in this house for 3 ½ years? Shouldn’t it feel more a part of me, then? Shouldn’t my feelings for and attachment to this place be stronger—shouldn’t I feel it throughout my body in more visceral ways and places?

You keep coming back to the sojourner paradigm. There are many days when it helps. Some days it doesn’t, and you have to remember the paradox that place matters to God, and that He expects us to identify as sojourners here, who have no continuing city but await the one to come. He’s put eternity in our hearts, but also shades of home.

You think of all the ways you try to describe your life, yourself: cultural chameleon, mosaic, a river with myriad tributaries leading in a thousand directions, a mutt. Then you think about how most often you don’t even try to describe your life or yourself: you just keep quiet. If you don’t know how to talk about it, how can you expect anyone to listen?

Yet you just wish that one day someone you know in your current physical location would surprise you and pull out the map or photo album, say: show me where you’ve been, what was hard about that, what did you lose, what did you gain, where in this world is the place you love best, the place that feels most like home? Because then she would see your chameleon skin begin to change to purple against the yellow background, and you would emerge, visible, for a brief, glorious moment.

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Spread the map on the table with the coffee stain;

put your finger on the places, show me where you’ve been.

Was that California where your teardrops dried?

You drew a circle round Georgia—can you tell me why?

Every tear brought you here, every sorrow gathered,

It’s history, and every mile mattered.

(Nicole Nordeman)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rachel E. Hicks was born in the foothills of the Himalayas and spent the bookends of her childhood in India, with moves to Pakistan, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Hong Kong in between.  She married her college sweetheart and managed to live in one place for seven whole years (Phoenix, Arizona) before God’s call moved them and their two young children to East Asia. There, they lived and taught holistic ministry alongside a local partner for another seven years. They repatriated to the U.S. in mid-2013 and now live in Baltimore, Maryland.  Rachel writes poetry, fiction, essays, and blog posts and works as a freelance copyeditor. A few of her favorite things include: electric scooters, spicy Sichuan food, hiking, and unhurried time to read. Read more of her writing at rachelehicks.com.

7 Thoughts for Graduating TCKs

Dear Graduating Senior,

This spring I hugged you. I cried with you. I said goodbye to you. And then I looked into the faces of your parents as they said goodbye too. How can I express the depth of my love for you and your parents? I don’t know. All I know is that if we were sitting down to coffee again, these are the things I’d want to tell you.

They’re the things I’ve mostly stumbled across on my journey as an Adult Third Culture Kid, though they’re by no means comprehensive or applicable to all people. Much like every other human on the planet, I’ve had to sort through my childhood as an adult, and these are the things that have helped me along the way. I hope they help you too.

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1. IT’S OK (AND NORMAL) TO HAVE DELAYED ISSUES

When you were young, home was where mom and dad were (or perhaps where grandma and grandpa were), and most likely, you were almost always with one of those people or in one of those places. But TCK angst is something that tends to catch up to people later in life. That’s the way it was for me, anyway.

Issues of home, belonging, and identity are all higher level, more complex topics. And now that you’re launching out on your own, your old idea of “home” probably won’t be as accessible. The Third Culture world of your childhood will be out of reach, and these issues might come crashing down on you. All of this is OK.

Maybe you felt settled in life before, but feel unsettled now. Maybe you thought life was good or even great before, but feel lost now. Maybe you were part of a happy, healthy family as a child and now find yourself dealing with some thorny emotional issues as a young adult. Don’t worry; it doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you.

Or perhaps you’ve already experienced a lot of transition and upheaval in your life, and you’ve already had to grapple with issues of belonging, identity, and home. That’s ok too. You’ll probably still find that TCK issues pop up in your life over the next several years, often when you’re not expecting them. This is normal. It’s part of the process of growing up. I just don’t want you to be surprised by it.

 

2. SYSTEMS ARE A HELPFUL LENS

Growing up as a military kid, I didn’t have a vocabulary for what was happening in my life. For example, why was civilian life so different and so hard for us?? Answer: because we had suddenly exited a military system (or culture) and entered a non-military one. I didn’t know that back then, but I know it now, and the idea of viewing the TCK experience through the lens of a system has been very helpful to me.

This is one way to explain the idea: your parents made a conscious choice to enter a system (whichever system it was), but much of your TCK experience was then dictated by that system. Even graduating from high school and having to leave your childhood home — as painful as that can be — is dictated by the system you’re living in. You can even be part of more than one system. There’s your third culture system with other TCKs. Then there’s your parents’ organization’s system. And there are probably more.

Being able to see my life as part of a system (or systems) with a lot of moving parts has allowed me to look at some of the TCK issues I’ve faced as an adult without faulting my parents. Yes, the many moves were traumatic for me (and in ways I didn’t realize, feel, or fully understand until I was an adult), but I don’t see that trauma as being inflicted on me by my parents. Yes, they chose the military, but it wasn’t their fault when the military moved us mid-school year. It wasn’t their fault when kids at my new school didn’t accept me right away. Rather, it was a result of the system I was in.

The ability to have conversations without shame or blame is vital to moving forward. And the more we can understand the systems we’re in, the easier it is to talk about our experiences and make connections instead of disconnections. So remember that you’re living in (and have lived in) a system. Remember that accepting your TCK experience doesn’t mean you have to become estranged from your family. Admitting that you struggle to find belonging or to define home or self doesn’t mean you’re labeling your parents as “bad.” These things are results of your systems.

 

3. ALL PEOPLE ARE SINNERS, SO REMEMBER TO GIVE GRACE

While it’s true that you don’t need to blame your parents for the challenges of TCK life, it’s also true that they are human beings. They’re sinners, just like you and just like me. And they may have made some mistakes in life as well as in parenting. Forgive them.

There’s no way around the fact that human parents do hurt their human children: all humans hurt other humans. So while you don’t have to carry around some burden of thinking your parents “ruined your life” with their nomadic choices, you probably also need to forgive them for things. All children — mobile and non-mobile alike — are faced with this question.

I love my parents deeply, and they deeply love me, yet we still found it necessary to have these kinds of conversations. We avoided it for a long time, perhaps for fear of conflict or discomfort, but the healing never came until we did. So talk to your parents. Have conversations with them. Process through the painful stuff. Wade into the murky waters, and find healing and wholeness together. Your parents are invested in your continued health and healing, so let them be a part of it.

Your situation may be more complicated than what I’ve just discussed. Someone may have hurt you deeply, even abused you. In that case, you need more than simple conversations with your parents or other trusted adults. You also need to get some outside help. You need to find trustworthy, compassionate counseling. Both Lisa McKay and Kay Bruner have good insight on how to find a counselor in general and while living overseas. I pray you find someone to guide you through the healing process.

 

4. GET COMFORTABLE WITH PARADOX

As you pack up your boxes and your suitcases, there’s one more thing I want you to pack. That thing is your ability to accept and even embrace paradox. Most likely, your life has been neither one hundred percent good, nor one hundred percent bad. The truth is, TCK or not, no one’s life is one hundred percent one thing. So resist the temptation to spin the story of your childhood in only one direction, either all good or all bad. Don’t pit the good and bad against each other in a futile effort to discover which one outweighs the other.

You don’t have to minimize the bad in order to accept the good. And you don’t have to minimize the good in order to accept the bad. Simply hold them both in your hands and in your heart, and accept them together, side by side, as the things that have shaped you into the person you are and as the things that are continuing to shape the person you are becoming.

We can’t strain the bad out of the good or the good out of the bad; we can’t separate them like cream from milk. They’re a package deal, a paradox, the “and” of this life. So let’s agree together not to outlaw the good or outlaw the bad. Let’s accept all the parts of ourselves, even the parts that make us (or other people) uncomfortable.

 

5. GRIEVE YOUR LOSSES

About those negative experiences . . . I know this has been talked about before, but it’s so important I’m going to say it again: you’ve got to grieve your losses. List out your losses, and then mourn them. Grieve the hard things that happened to you.

Maybe it was leaving your passport country to move to your host country, or moving between host countries, or within the same host country. Maybe it was losing a close friend or teacher to transition or even death. It’s probably graduating and leaving your host country this summer. Regardless of the cause, there have been so many goodbyes in your life, and you need to acknowledge how hard they’ve been for you.

Grief follows us wherever we go; we can’t outrun it. So spend the time now, on the front end, to grieve your TCK losses. You need to learn this skill because you’ll have to use it again later. We live in a fallen world, and bad things will keep happening to you, whether you’re living cross-culturally or not. That means the need to process grief is ever-present, regardless of who you are or where you live.

Learning to grieve well now will help you for the rest of your life. And you might have to grieve some of your losses more than once. You may feel old losses cycling back around again, and you’ll have to stop and re-grieve them. That’s ok. Be gentle with yourself and grieve them again.

 

6. GET SOME OUTSIDE HELP: TCK COUNSELORS AND MENTORS

I personally used to think something was wrong with me. Why did I have all these problems fitting in? Why did I feel so rejected all the time? I thought the problem was me. Then — and this only happened a couple of years ago with a counselor who specializes in TCKs — I began to see that the trouble I had fitting in was a consequence of something that happened to me.

It wasn’t me that was the problem; it was all those moves and having to fit in someplace new over and over and over again. But learning how to fit in takes time, and there’s always a period of uncertainty before friends are made and acceptance is granted. I cannot even explain how much that realization helped me. I felt less like a broken object and more like a person who’d had experiences that shaped me but who wasn’t inherently and eternally screwed up. I had previously faced a lot of insecurity and social anxiety in my life, but when I started seeing their roots in my nomadic childhood and addressing them that way, the fear and insecurity stopped trailing me so doggone much.

Likewise, you may need a counselor who is familiar with the TCK world. In fact, in her book Belonging Everywhere and Nowhere: Insights into Counseling the Globally Mobile, author and counselor Lois Bushong tells us that a counselor who is not familiar with TCK issues may not know how to treat an adult TCK struggling with depression. In actuality, he or she is probably dealing with unresolved TCK grief, a completely normal response to a globally mobile childhood. (Incidentally Lois is also responsible for my understanding of systems.) So if you are in any way “stuck” in your emotional, mental, or spiritual life, consider finding a counselor who understands TCK life. 

Counseling has been massively helpful in my life, both for TCK-related issues and non-TCK-related issues, and I highly recommend counseling to all people who are breathing. But sometimes you just need someone to talk to, someone who will listen to you and empathize with you and even pray for you. Just talking to an older, wiser adult TCK whom you trust can be very helpful in sorting through your thoughts and feelings. In fact, I’ve done that a lot with Marilyn Gardner, fellow writer and editor on this blog. So if you do nothing else, find a fellow TCK friend to talk to.

 

7. YOU SHOULD PROBABLY EXPECT SOME FLARE-UPS

I can give you all the advice in the world — advice you might even follow — but you might still turn around one day and be taken by surprise at the intensity of your feelings of loss and isolation and lack of home and belonging. When this happens to me, whether it’s triggered by the yearly May & June goodbyes or by feeling the sting of some rejection, my husband usually asks me, “Is your TCK acting up again?”

Yes, I tell him. The answer is almost always yes. Yes that my TCK is acting up again. Yes that events from my childhood creep into my adulthood. Yes that from time to time issues I thought were settled and resolved feel suddenly unsettled and unresolved.

But simply naming it can take the edge off the pain. Then I can go back to the truths I’ve learned about myself and about God. And you can do that too. When you find your TCK acting up again, name it. Grieve what you need to grieve, and then remind yourself of the truths you’ve learned over the years. Be kind to yourself when this happens, and remember to give yourself some time to recover.

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Even though there was pain, I don’t regret my TCK experience. For me every experience (in the end) brought me closer to Christ. Though at times it might have seemed a wandering path, every wound was a road leading straight back to God. The relationship I have with God primarily because of painful TCK “issues” is something I wouldn’t give up for anything.

So take heart. If you let them, the questions of home, belonging, and identity that your TCK childhood has asked you to answer can take you deeper into the heart of God than ever before. If you’ll take the time to look for Him, you’ll find Jesus on the other side of every question you have. Only Jesus can help you live an unhindered life. His is the face of love, and He is the answer to every question you’ll ever ask. So go with Him: there is redemption on this road.

An Open Letter to Parents of Missionary Kids

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By Danica Newton

Dear Parents of MKs,

Hello. It’s me, an MK. I write this on behalf of other MKs who haven’t found their voices yet, who are still in the midst of constant transition, who haven’t sorted through the confusing and complex joys and sorrows that come with growing up MK. I write this on behalf of my own MK self, to say the things I didn’t know to say, things that were buried deep down and that, as a kid, I could only access through intuition, through approaching carefully sideways in order not to stir up the vortex of emotions. I speak as an adult MK, raised with one foot in Polynesia, another in Melanesia, and a hand straddled all the way over the Pacific, planted firmly in Texas. If the world were a Twister mat, we MKs would be pros at maneuvering ourselves into epic contortions as we shift right-foot-yellow to left-hand-blue.

Parents of MKs, this is what I want you to know.

Transition causes trauma. We know this from academic research across fields. Transition because of divorce causes trauma. Transition because of health diagnoses causes trauma. Transition because of death causes trauma. Transitions from village to town every six months, and then to the States every few years, definitely causes trauma.

During the London Blitz, children were trundled off to the English countryside for their own safety. The philosophy of the time dictated that children were better off not knowing what was happening, that more information would be detrimental to them psychologically. In fact, some of the advice to parents was to tell their children that they were going on holiday to the country, or even, not to tell their children anything about what was to occur. This may have helped the adults not have to struggle to find explanations for the changes their children were experiencing, but it wasn’t helpful for the children experiencing the change. The problem with this way of approaching necessary transition, in short, is that it stems from the perspective and needs of the adults, the ones who already have power and control in the situation, the ones who already have a voice.

Parents of MKs, this is what I want you to know.

Your children are not experiencing the transitions you take them through in a vacuum. Just because they may not be verbalizing the trauma, or expressing it in ways that are easily understandable, does not mean they are not experiencing trauma from the transition. When I was sixteen, I stayed behind in Texas while my parents and younger siblings went back overseas. I remember that time as confusing and dark.  But years later, adults who were close to me at the time have told me things like: “You seemed so mature,”  “You handled it so well,”  and “We had no idea it was so hard for you, you seemed fine.”

I seemed fine because at that point I had spent the majority of my childhood in transition. Moving from village to town and back again. Moving from town to America. Moving from America back to town, back to village. Every transition required that I assume the cultural mores, dress, language, and customs of the place I was moving to. By the age of sixteen, I was an adept cultural chameleon. But how was I able to put on a new skin for each new place? I became an expert at compartmentalization. I carefully packed each place, with its friendships, food, smells, sights and sounds, into its own suitcase in my mind. Into the suitcases also went my feelings connected to the place. My love for the people. My pain at the heart bonds being broken. My anger at having no control. The compartmentalization is why I presented as so mature and well-adjusted to the adults around me.

Parents of MKs, this is what I want you to know.

Your MK may look like they are doing well.  Your MK may even say they are doing well. Please consider that your MK may be very adeptly doing just what MKs do best – assimilating the culture they are in. The culture that says all things happen for the good of those called according to His purpose. The culture that counts it joy when hardships are faced. The culture that counts everything as loss for the sake of following Christ. The culture that celebrates the leaving of father and mother, the leaving of brother and sister, to follow the Call.

Your MK may look like they are doing well. They may even say that they are doing well. But please consider how long they have been in transition. Consider that it’s only when we feel safe, when we have been stable and settled for an extended amount of time (for some, it takes years) before we can begin unpacking the suitcases and examining the emotions that were previously too difficult to process. If your MK moves every few months or years, they may still be in self-preservation mode. Like it was with me, they may not be able to examine the trauma of transition except by carefully looking sideways at it, from an emotional distance.

Parents of MKs, this is what I want you to know.

Your child needs you. They need you to listen, with no judgement or defensiveness, to their feelings. They need you to lay yourself low, to make yourself nothing for their sake, to humble yourself even to the point of death of self. They need you, as the person with all the power and voice, to create space for their fledgling voices. They need to be able to say, “This hurts me.” They need to be able to say, “I don’t want to leave.” They need to be able to say, “I miss _____.” They need to be able to mourn, to be angry, to rage against the dying of the light.

I’m going to say something now, Parents of MKs, that you probably don’t want to hear. But what I share with you, I share from my own experience, and from that experience I can reassure you that although this will be difficult to hear, there is hope for redemption.

My parents’ choices brought me pain. I didn’t know how much pain until I found myself, sobbing and unable to breathe, in the grips of powerful flashbacks that hit me out of nowhere and threw me in a little ball onto my bedroom floor. All of the goodbyes and hellos, the shifting and the changing, all of the transitions and the leavings, finally caught up with me.  This breakdown precipitated some conversations with my mom and dad, who are still on the mission field.  Conversations that had to wait until they could get to me. But once they got to me, my mom and dad presented me with the greatest gift they could give.

That gift was listening.  They listened to me, with a complete abandonment of self and agenda. I had years of loss to deal with, and my mom sat with me on my front porch, twin cups of coffee steaming in our hands, as I cried and talked and she cried and listened. She never once tried to justify her choices. She simply acknowledged my pain, and acknowledged that it was caused by the life she had chosen for me. My dad listened, too. We took long, cool walks through the expectant predawn stillness, him quietly receptive by my side as I poured out the pain in my heart. He apologized for the pain his choices had caused me.

I talked to God, too. My parents’ empathetic response to my pain opened space for me to be able to voice the very scariest thoughts that I kept buried deep, deep down. One day, heartsick and angry and alone, I looked up to God and shook my fist in his face. “Why, God?” I asked, tears sticky on my cheeks. “Why did my family have to suffer? Why did you make MY family suffer for YOUR gospel? Couldn’t it have been some other family? Why, God? Why MY family?”

As I sat, raw and trembling, I felt his warm, gentle touch. I heard him whisper so sadly and kindly to me, “I know. I’m sorry. I hear you. I’m here.” And that was enough.

Parents of MKs, this is what I want you to know. 

You need to check your defensiveness at the door. You need to acknowledge that your choices brought pain to your child.

When my parents came to me, and acknowledged the trauma my siblings and I had experienced, when they apologized for the pain they had caused, they did not negate the Good Work they have done. They did not negate a lifetime of service for the Kingdom of God.  They did not negate the fruit they had harvested for the King. Instead, they further confirmed Christ to us. The humble Man of Sorrows. The One who laid down His life. The One who sought out the voiceless, the weak, and lifted them up.

Even though your choices to answer the Call of Christ have caused trauma for your children, and believe me when I say that they have, your choices to give space for their pain can make way for their healing. I ask you, on behalf of my fellow MKs both grown and still growing, to give this gift to your child.

Sincerely,

Danica Newton

(an MK)

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13161296_10156874097135022_561442390_oDanica is an MK from the Solomon Islands, who now has found her own little village in the mountains of New Mexico. She lives there with her husband and three children, three goats, two dogs, and an assortment of chickens. Danica has a degree in special education, and is currently working on a master’s degree. When she’s not writing papers for school, she enjoys playing mad scientist in her kitchen, rereading her collection of LM Montgomery books, and working on her yoga moves. Danica sometimes finds time to write about her experiences and feelings, at www.ramblingsofanundercovertck.blogspot.com.

The Radical Spiritual Art of Staying Put

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By Stephanie Ebert

If any group of people has a long and convoluted history with evangelical church traditions, it’s missionary kids. Like pastor’s kids, the emotional baggage around church is piled higher than the lost luggage corner at the Johannesburg airport. We tend to camp out either around the “wounded/bitter/cynical” baggage claim belt, or the one labeled “guilt-ridden/never question anything/just be good.”

But then, of course, since we were missionary kids, we carry more cultural baggage as well. Because unlike our pastor’s kid peers, we were always hyper-aware of the cultural trappings of the “Industrial Church Complex” (as author Sarah Bessey calls it). The difference is while we were “outside” the church enough to criticize it; we weren’t “inside” enough to be a part of making any changes. And besides, the churches paid our bills. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

When people ask me to talk about my church tradition, I have a hard time answering. My “church-culture” story has its foundation in the Zulu church we attended in South Africa, but also has strong threads of the American evangelical Christian sub-culture that came through from my parents, other missionaries, and our trips back to the States.

I grew up going to a Zulu-speaking church where we were the only white people. I could understand most of the songs and smatterings of Zulu, but services were long, hot meetings that ran from morning to well past lunchtime. The world’s best singing and the world’s longest sermons. My friends would whisper translations of the sermon (or whatever they wanted) to me. We met in an old, dusty school building, and our Sunday School curriculum was flannel-graph from 19-something left behind by some other missionaries. My mother spent hours re-coloring Jesus so he wasn’t white. As I got older, I saw church as a place you went to serve not a place you went to ‘get fed.’

When I read things written by people a generation or two ahead of me about their evangelical upbringing, I can relate to so much of it. The time-capsule of life overseas means culture gets preserved. Through hand-me-downs from retiring missionary garage sales I absorbed a lot of pre-1970’s Christian culture. Missionary biographies, books about angelic kids who invite other children to Sunday school, and a handbook on being a good Christian woman (that involved diagrams on how to walk, appropriate hair-styles, and the contents of a good Christian girl’s purse). Our home-world was early 1980’s American Christian culture. Because, you know, that’s when my parents left the States, so that’s what was in our time-capsule. We sang choruses as a family from my parents’ grass-roots “getting back to Acts” church they left behind in Austin, Texas, along Dennis Jernigan, Amy Grant and Second Chapter of Acts (all on tape, of course).

Then every four years we’d go to the States and encounter the American Industrial Church Complex. Our furloughs home were like snapshots of the changes American church culture has gone through in the past two decades:

Fourth grade: Love it. Love it, love it. Anywhere where I can get animal crackers, walk into a brightly colored room smelling of whiteboard markers, earn badges for memorizing Bible verses, and be done in 45 minutes is my kind of church! Dad, why can’t we move to America and go to this church always?

Seventh grade: Hate it. Who invented middle-school Sunday School classes? Torture chambers. Oh, and all our supporting churches are having church splits over music now. What’s their problem–who cares if it’s hymns or a rock band, it’s all in English right? Can’t they all just sing along? And everybody is canning their old sanctuaries for convention centers in the name of seeker sensitivity.

Eleventh grade: Why are these churches building more and more buildings but only sending the youth group on short-term missions trips, and cutting funding for long-term missionaries? Why are there graphic designers employed by churches to make glossy bulletins that everyone just throws away? The high school group serves coffee and bagels, and they go to Florida for Spring break missions-trip-vacations. I call them all “cookie-cutter churches” this year. I enjoy making cutting critiques of it all with my siblings (while smiling and talking about God’s work in South Africa to everyone else, of course).

College: I’m in rural Indiana at a Christian college, and I stumble into an African-American church. Best of all possible worlds. It’s English, but they know how to sing, and they don’t have a massive building fund campaign. It’s long enough that I feel like I’ve “been churched”, but not so long that I’m fainting from hunger. My soul has room to breathe again. For the first time, I go to church not to serve, or because I have to, but because I want to.

When my husband and I move back to South Africa, we attend an English speaking church. All my friends have moved on from the Zulu church I grew up in—and besides, my husband knows less Zulu than I do. The people are very friendly. But the disjunction of going to an English church that caters to white, upper-class families when we’re working in an impoverished community just minutes away sometimes feels as painful as peeling off my skin with a cheese grater. I find myself getting more and more frustrated by so many of the ways we “do church” in western culture, but again I don’t feel like enough of an insider to voice what I think.

We hike El Caminio del Santiago in the north of Spain for a month on our way back to the States for my husband to start a two-year masters program. No church, no responsibility, no commitments, wandering in and out of Catholic mass in Spanish. I don’t even speak Spanish. But we memorize the Lord’s Prayer, and follow along with the Gospel readings in our Bibles. Spring-time in the Basque country. I could live like this.

Now we’re in small-town Texas, where there are 33 Baptist churches in a seven-mile radius, and we’re church hunting once more. And once again I’m asking myself, “Why do we do this?! We’re not missionaries. We don’t have to get these people to like us so they’ll send us money. Can we just opt-out for the next two years? I like Jesus, it’s just churches that drive me nuts.” (Yes, I know these thoughts are dysfunctional, but this is the way I think sometimes).

And then, my husband reminds me that we’re the church. As a TCK, I like wandering, I like putting myself on a pedestal and looking down my nose. I like opting-out. I like sarcasm. That’s easy. That’s my default.

In her chapter on church in her book Out of Sorts, Sarah Bessey says she came to realize that, “I didn’t need to pretend allegiance to everything, but I did need to be part of a community…I practiced the radical spiritual art of staying put.”

That’s what we’re focusing on right now. Community. Staying put. We haven’t been in here that long, and knowing we’re on our way out in a few years sometimes makes me question the effort of trying. Small-town Texas is probably the biggest cultural adjustment we’ve ever faced, and church in this context feels just plain crazy at times. I can’t pledge allegiance to the cowboy boots and the gospel of evangelical-political-power that’s preached on Sundays. But maybe I don’t have to. That’s some baggage I don’t need to carry.

But I do still need community. I need the body of Christ no matter how weird I think it is. So we’re attending a Sunday school class but skipping the country music worship service for an online Tim Keller sermon. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. That’s what we’re trying to figure out with church right now: how to give ourselves permission to sort through and let go some of the baggage (after all, we don’t need to pledge allegiance to everything) so that we can practice the radical spiritual art of staying put.

 

square faceStephanie Ebert is a TCK from South Africa and America. Married to a Minnesotan, she and her husband David have spent the past three years working in South Africa for the non-profit iThemba Projects. Right now they are experiencing the cultural shock of moving to a small Texas town for David to complete his masters degree. Steph continues to work for iThemba Projects online. She blogs about social justice, missions, race, and finding hope at bridginghope.wordpress.com

Particle Physics Finally Explains Third Culture Kids!

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Some of you know I’m a science lover. Our friends back in the States know this too, and a couple times a year they send us a package with their old science magazines (along with other treats). I love Magazine Arrival Day.

Earlier this year I cracked open the September 2014 issue of Discover magazine and read about neutrinos – tiny, subatomic particles I don’t even pretend to understand. I’m a chemist, for goodness sake, not a physicist. My scientific understanding only goes down as small as protons and electrons, and not a quark smaller. Neutrinos are smaller than that, and also, extremely secretive.

As I read (largely uncomprehendingly) through the article, one particular section caught my attention, and I paused. Are we sure we’re talking about tiny subatomic particles here?? Because to me, this paragraph sounded more like the description of a fellow Third Culture Kid than anything else. Or, to enlarge the conversation a bit, it sounded like a Cross Cultural Kid (CCK) or Third Culture Adult (TCA) — terms I first read about in Lois Bushong’s insanely helpful Belonging Everywhere and Nowhere.

Check it out:

Neutrinos are notorious shape-shifters. Each one is born as one of three types, or flavors – electron, muon, and tau – but they can change flavors in a few thousandths of a second as they travel, as if they can’t make up their mind what to be. Neutrinos, like other subatomic particles, sometimes behave like waves. But as the neutrino travels, the flavor waves combine in different ways. Sometimes the combination forms what is mostly an electron neutrino and sometimes mostly a muon neutrino. Because neutrinos are quantum particles, and by definition weird, they are not one single flavor at a time, but rather always a mixture of flavors. On the very, very rare occasion that a neutrino interacts with another particle, if the reaction appears to produce an electron, then the neutrino was an electron flavor in its final moments; if it produces a muon, the neutrino was muon-flavored. It’s as if the shy neutrino’s identity crisis can only be resolved when it finally interacts with another particle.

So let’s break that down a bit and see if we can find any similarities:

  1. Neutrinos are shape-shifters. Or, as the TCK literature says, we are “cultural chameleons” who can shift between cultures and adapt to new ones more easily.
  2. Neutrinos can change flavors as they travel, as if they can’t make up their mind what to be. Again the chameleon quality is shining through. TCKs may have divided loyalties, and we might not want to choose one culture over another.
  3. Neutrinos are quantum particles and by definition, weird. TCKs often feel different from other people – “weird,” if you will. (And for me, that differentness has sometimes left me feeling lonely.)
  4. Neutrinos are not one single flavor at a time, but rather always a mixture of flavors. Likewise, TCKs aren’t one single culture or flavor; we’re a mixture.
  5. It’s as if the neutrino’s identity crisis can only be resolved when it interacts with another particle. Not only do we often struggle with identity crises – who am I?? – but TCKs can also be so good at adapting that we take on the culture of whatever people we most recently interacted with.

 

If you’re a TCK (or you love someone who is), did you find yourself or your loved one in any of these descriptions of the neutrino? Or am I just plain crazy to see this metaphor??

Do you have any other TCK metaphors? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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for a more contemplative TCK metaphor, click here

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