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.”
Elizabeth Vahey Smith is a TCK mom who spent 5 years in Papua New Guinea as a missionary. Now her family explores the globe full-time as worldschoolers. Elizabeth works remotely as the COO for TCK Training, traveling often for work and always for pleasure. She is the author of 
Abigail Follows has lived on three continents and listened to the life stories of 