“Where are you from?”
For most people it’s small talk. For me it has always been a small trapdoor. I can feel myself working out which answer this person needs, how much of the story to tell, and whether it’s worth it.
I’m a couples and individual therapist. Recently, two clients have come to me specifically because they are third culture kids and suspected I would understand. They were right. Working with them has made me look again at my own childhood, and I want to write about it here, both for anyone who grew up the way I did, and for the partners and families who love them.
My story: always in the wrong country with the wrong accent
My father was a diplomat. We moved to London when I was two, New York when I was five, and New Zealand when I was eight. Then came Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, back to New Zealand, and Japan. Seven countries by the time I was fourteen.
I’m 61 now, and I’ve lived in 58 houses.
The hardest thing wasn’t the packing or the flights. It was that I was always in the wrong country with the wrong accent. Wherever I arrived, I sounded like the last place. That made me an easy target, and I was teased, hassled and bullied for it more times than I can count.
And then there was the feeling at the classroom door. Here we go again. A new school, a new country, a new set of rules nobody explains to you. Who’s in charge here? What’s funny here? How do I talk so I don’t stand out? I’d study the room, adjust, try to make friends, and slowly work my way in.
About a year or two later I’d hit the sweet spot. Friends, a place in the group, a sense that I knew how things worked. And then we’d move again.
What is a third culture kid?
The term “third culture kid” (TCK) was coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem and brought into wider use by David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken in their book Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds. It describes children who spend a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture, often because of a parent’s career: diplomats, military, missionaries, international business.
The “third culture” is the one we build in between. We absorb pieces of every place we live, but we never fully belong to any of them, including the country on our passport. Pollock and Van Reken call it being a hidden immigrant: you look and sound like you’re from somewhere, but on the inside you’re not quite a native.
That was me every time we returned to New Zealand.
The grief no one names
When people talk about a childhood like mine, they tend to focus on the adventure. And there was plenty of it. But what the TCK literature keeps coming back to is grief, and it’s the part I recognise most.
Every move is a loss: friends, a school, a house, a dog, a favourite street, a language, a version of yourself. But nobody dies. There’s no funeral and no ritual. There’s just a plane, and then that part of your life is gone. The adults are busy and stressed with their own transition, and the message a child picks up is simple: be positive, it’s an adventure, you’ll make new friends.
Psychologists call this disenfranchised grief: loss that isn’t recognised, so it never gets mourned. It doesn’t disappear. It gets stored. Decades later it can show up as restlessness, a low background sadness, or a completely out-of-proportion reaction to a small goodbye, when a hundred old ones come through at once.
The strategies we build to survive
Children are brilliant adapters. When you move as often as I did, you develop some very effective strategies. They got me through. They also cost me.
Reading the room. I became expert at scanning a new environment and working out what was expected. Where to sit, what to say, what not to say. Many TCKs become chameleons, shapeshifting to fit every new setting, until you’re not sure which colour is actually yours.
Being good. As a diplomat’s son there was a quiet understanding that my behaviour reflected on the family, and in some sense on the country. Add the constant need to be accepted by a new group, and you get a boy who learns that being good, pleasant and impressive is the safest way to belong. Performing becomes a way of life. This is a large part of how I came to understand my own Nice Guy patterns, the ones Robert Glover writes about in No More Mr Nice Guy: seeking approval, avoiding conflict, hiding needs, trying to earn a place rather than trusting that you have one.
Not getting too attached. If everything ends, a part of you learns to hold something back. You’re friendly with everyone and close to few. Some TCKs start pulling away before a move, or before anything can end at all.
Keeping moving. Uncertainty became normal to me, and stability could feel strange. Fifty-eight houses isn’t only circumstance. There’s a restless part of me that has always been searching for home, and that isn’t sure it would recognise home if it found it.
Signs you might be an adult third culture kid
You may recognise some of this:
- “Where are you from?” makes you tense, or you have a rehearsed answer that leaves most of the story out
- You feel most at ease with other people who’ve lived between cultures
- You’re good with strangers but find deep, lasting intimacy harder
- You get restless after a year or two in one place, job or relationship
- Endings hit you harder than seems reasonable, or you feel strangely numb at them
- You adapt so well that you’re not sure who you are when no one needs anything from you
- You feel a pull to be good, useful or impressive in order to belong
- You long for a home but aren’t sure where, or what, it would be
The gifts, honestly
I don’t want to paint this as all loss. Growing up across seven countries gave me a lot: curiosity, adaptability, comfort with difference, and a finely tuned ability to read people that I use every day as a therapist. Many of my adult third culture kid clients are highly capable, cross-culturally skilled and successful.
But the gifts and the wounds often come from the same place. The ability to read a room was born from needing to survive one. Recognising that isn’t ungrateful. It’s what lets you keep the gifts without paying for them indefinitely.
How IFS therapy helps adult third culture kids
My main way of working is Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS sees the mind as made up of different parts, each trying to help in its own way, and a core Self that is calm, curious and compassionate.
For third culture kids this fits remarkably well. The chameleon, the good boy, the one who never gets attached, the restless mover: in IFS terms, these are protectors. They aren’t problems to get rid of. They took on their jobs for very good reasons, and they deserve our gratitude.
Underneath them are usually younger parts still carrying the losses: the five-year-old leaving New York, the eight-year-old mocked for his accent, the teenager saying goodbye again. Often each move has its own young part, frozen at the age and place where the goodbye never happened.
IFS gives us a way to go back and meet those parts, to let them finally show what it was like, to say the goodbyes that were skipped, and to let go of beliefs like nothing lasts or I have to earn my place. As they heal, the protectors can relax. The search for home starts to change too, because a sense of home is something that can grow inside you, not only a place on a map.
How we might work together
If this resonates, here are some of the areas I work on with adult third culture kids:
- Unresolved grief: giving the losses of a mobile childhood the attention they never got
- Identity and belonging: exploring who you are underneath the adaptations, and what “home” means for you now
- Nice Guy and people-pleasing patterns: loosening the need to be good, perform and earn your place
- Relationships: understanding how the old strategies of holding back, moving on or shapeshifting show up with a partner. Couples where one or both partners are TCKs often find these patterns at the heart of their conflicts
- Restlessness and big decisions: telling the difference between a real calling to move and an old part that gets anxious when things settle
- Leadership and expat life: many of my clients are executives who are still living internationally, and some are now raising third culture kids of their own
I work online with individuals and couples around the world. If you grew up between worlds and you’re ready to look at what it left you with, I’d be glad to hear from you.