Good at Beginnings, Good at Goodbyes: What Happens in the Middle
Adult TCKs get plenty of practice at arrivals and goodbyes. The middle is the part nobody taught us, and it is where most of what we wanted gets left.
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Writing Our Way Home: Integrating a Scattered TCK Story
Most adult TCKs I work with have never listed their moves in order. When they do, they are often surprised by what they find. This is about integration, what writing makes possible, and the choices we have now.
What We Learned About Sex, and Where We Learned It: Sexuality across the cultures and families that raised us, and how we come home to our own bodies.
For Third Culture Kids, messages about sex and the body came from many cultures at once, and often contradicted. On sexual shame, gender, and coming home.
Untangling Where We’re From: The Cultures That Shaped Us, and the Search for Wholeness Across Worlds
For most, “where are you from?” is everyday conversation. For Third Culture Kids, it is often one of the most challenging questions we face. This past weekend, people from Lithuania, the UK, Germany, France, Finland, Norway, Taiwan, Canada, and all over the United States gathered to talk about that question. That conversation was a…
Untangling Where We’re From: Journal Prompts for TCKs on Culture and Belonging
Where are you from?” is never a simple question for a TCK. Here are five prompts on the cultures that shaped us, the assumptions others make, and what it might mean to feel whole across all of them.
Same Family, Different Childhoods: On TCKs and Siblings
TCK siblings can grow up in the same family and come away with different childhoods. A reflection on our June call: why siblings diverge, the grief of the one left behind, and being each other’s only witness.
When Numbing Becomes a Pattern: TCKs, Ritualized Comfort-Seeking, and Finding a Way Through
What do you reach for when life gets hard? (Not what you think you should reach for…What you actually reach for.) For some of us, it’s alcohol. For others, it’s work, the kind of relentless busyness that feels productive right up until it doesn’t. It might be food, or screens, or the urgent, consuming search…
Reparenting Resources for Adult TCKs: Books, Meditations & Where to Start
Reparenting is one of those concepts that sounds clinical until you actually understand what it means. It is simply the process of learning to give yourself, as an adult, what you needed as a child and didn’t fully receive: safety, validation, consistency, and the sense that your feelings matter. For many TCKs, the experience of…
Self-Compassion Resources for Adult TCKs: Books, Meditations & Free Tools
Something that came up in our community calls recently: the question of how to be kinder to yourself when you don’t quite know how. For many TCKs, self-compassion isn’t a default setting. We learned to adapt, to read the room, to put others’ needs first. Being gentle with ourselves can feel unfamiliar, even wrong. These…
All of the Above: Understanding TCK Identity — And Why Chaos Is the Point
All of the Above: Understanding TCK Identity — And Why Chaos Is the Point By Andrea Frey Clark, MS, LPC “Our identity is an anti-identity; the only way we can define ourselves is how we are not.” — TCK interview participant (Walters & Auton-Cuff, 2009) Has anyone ever told you that you’re indecisive? That you…
