Global Cross-Cultural Worker Family Member
Which best describes you and the therapy that you're looking for?
Spouse or Partner
Even if you are, yourself, a Global Cross-Cultural Worker, if your spouse/partner is a Global Cross-Cultural Worker, you are a spouse/partner of a Global Cross-Cultural Worker. There are challenging life experiences that you may share with your spouse/partner and there are challenges with having been the spouse/partner of that person overseas. You may also have been a parent overseas, which had its own challenges. Or maybe you live locally, but your spouse/partner travels regularly and you (and your children, if you have them) are left behind.
Therapy may be helpful to:
- Address symptoms
- Clarify your concerns
- Identify ways to address challenging life circumstances and relational issues so that you can:
- Increase feelings of closeness, security, and satisfaction in your relationship
- Increase social support (including a sense of community or fellowship with others)
- Identify ways to communicate important needs, preferences, and concerns with your spouse/partner or important others and/or ways to increase your enjoyment of and overall satisfaction with life (whatever your context).
You might also find this page helpful:
Therapy for Global Cross-Cultural Workers
Therapy for Local Christian Workers
Third Culture Kid (TCK)
Most likely, you are an adolescent or a parent or another concerned adult searching for help. The TCK experience is a mixed bag (with good, bad, neutral, or mixed experiences each of which contribute to a TCK's development).
A common experience for TCKs is grief and loss (often, about experiences as yet unidentified). Therapy can help TCKs to work through challenging experiences, grief, and loss and strengthen their ability to make meaning after painful experiences so that they are more likely to improve resilience and experience growth, rather than be caught in less resilient narratives that might make it difficult to thrive in the present and in the future.
Other concerns might include transitioning to California from where your family lived previously. While making this major life transition, a person (TCK or otherwise) might experience symptoms of depression or anxiety. Identifying practical steps to help navigate a different culture, language, money system, transportation, etc., can help, as can finding ways to plug in socially.
Therapy can be a place where important concerns can be identified. Many concerns can be addressed directly in therapy. Other concerns, once identified, may require help from someone besides the therapist. The therapist can help the TCK to explore who might be able to help them, to develop options for reaching out, and to address anxieties or other concerns that the TCK might have about asking for help.
Since the caregiving context surrounding a young person's development is critical, therapy for TCKs often benefits from parental involvement, particularly for younger children. Together, we can identify practical means to support your TCK and work to address their needs. We can also discuss ways to provide a healthy developmental environment and everyday practices to increase resilience and help your TCK to thrive.
College/University-Aged TCK
Often, college/university-aged TCKs make a big transition from the place where the family is serving to their passport country for education. Sometimes, a TCK's family may return to their passport country when the TCK makes this transition, but often, the TCK might find themselves in a new country navigating a foreign environment that can be difficult for even students who grew up near the school.
Among other things, therapy can help to:
- Grieve and process losses
- Manage stress
- Reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety
- Identify practical steps to increase comfort and confidence in a new place
- Find your people (identify friends, professors, mentors, church, community to ease loneliness and culture shock, increase your sense of connection, and feel seen, known, and cared for in this new place).
Adult TCK
Are you bewildered (or irritated) by the customs of people who might (or might not) look like you, but certainly don't share your perspective or common assumptions. Do they seem just as puzzled about you as you are about them?
Under the best of circumstances, ATCKs are resilient and equipped with many skills to thrive. You likely have language, intercultural, and travel skills. Let's celebrate this together and explore how you can best use them.
But you also may experience difficulties with deepening meaningful relationships, blooming where you're planted, and knowing skills relevant to your current situation, but for which you haven't been trained because they weren't necessary where you grew up.
ATCKs can find it difficult to set down roots. It might not have seemed worth the effort to work through problems in relationships while you were growing up, since you knew another move was always on the horizon. If you didn't learn and strengthen this skill, keeping meaningful, healthy relationships might be hard.
Therapy can help you to clarify what's happening your inner life and learn and practice skills that can help you to build and maintain healthy relationships and a vibrant community life so that you won't be trapped in a cycle of disconnection, alienation, and loneliness.
You might also have complex feelings about "home," "identity," your parents' work and choices, God, or other things.
Therapy can help with the following things, among others:
- Transition into a new life or educational context
- Gain new skills to live in a new context
- Explore your past experiences and personal identity
- Grieve losses
- Heal from traumatic experiences
- Increase your ability to tolerate challenging emotions
- Support you as you learn to stay in a place and work things through
- Support you as you learn how to trust more deeply and show up more authentically while deepening and strengthening important relationships.
Family Member left behind (parent, grandparent, sibling, etc.)
It's not just the Global Cross-Cultural Worker Families who experience challenges. As a family member who has been left behind, you have your own needs when it comes to transitioning to life without them. Family members left behind may experience anxieties and concerns. You might be concerned for your loved ones' safety. Perhaps you're concerned that they're not making wise financial decisions. You might worry that they won't be available when you need them. You may also grieve what experiences you'll miss because your family member(s) are overseas. It's also likely that you just miss their presence, their participation in activities, their advice. Maybe you're struggling with added responsibilities, like being the sole caregiver of an aging parent because your sibling is overseas.
The challenges of navigating a life without an important family member are many and varied. It's best not to weather the storms of life alone.
In therapy, we can:
- Explore your feelings about your family member(s) who is (are) serving overseas
- Grieve losses
- Explore alternative ways to address practical and emotional concerns.
This will set you up to face challenges with as many practical and relational resources as possible. You have the potential of coming away from therapy having grieved well and having built a social network that is strong enough to support you when you need them and for you to rest assured that, while you may still miss your family member(s) who is (are) serving overseas, you are not alone.
Couple or Family Therapy
Sometimes, family members of a person in therapy might be included in sessions from time to time, not for therapy themselves, but as part of the therapy process of the client. Other times, families need couple or family therapy. This may be because the couple or family have all experienced a certain loss or traumatic experience together and would benefit from a shared therapy experience or because a couple or family could benefit from a special focus on relational dynamics between family members.
Therapy for Couples and Families