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3 Reasons Why Being a TCK Sucks
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3 reasons Why being a TCK sucks
Do you think being a TCK sucks? Well, some TCKs think so. It sucks if you have restlessness, a lack of identity, short-term relationships and unresolved grief. If you’ve been on the site long enough, then you won’t be surprised to find out that some TCKs have had to deal with issues like depression, drugs, alcoholism, and self-injury.
-Do you feel like you don’t belong anywhere?
-Do you have short-term relationships and friendships (18 months to 2 years)?
-Do you have a lot of unresolved grief and sadness for breaking off relationships and friendships?
-Do you feel restless and unable to deal with it?
-Have you always felt you never got a say when your parents decided to move?
We have many hidden losses and unresolved grief. It’s time to write about them.
This post is about naming 3 reasons why being a TCK sucks. Name your losses and allow yourself to write about your deepest feelings.
“Why write about negative emotions? Isn’t that a bad idea?”
Pennebaker, a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin is a pioneer in the study of using expressive writing as a route to healing. His research has shown that short-term focused writing can have a beneficial effect on everyone from those dealing with a terminal illness to victims of violent crime to college students facing first-year transitions.
“When people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health,” Pennebaker says. “They go to the doctor less. They have changes in immune function. If they are first-year college students, their grades tend to go up. People will tell us months afterward that it’s been a very beneficial experience for them.”
So.. what did you lose? What are you really angry or sad about? What are your fears? Who hurt you and who did you hurt?
You can rant and express yourself and post anonymously if you want by logging in as “anonymoustck”.
Username:anonymoustck
Password:anonymoustck
ON THE POSITIVE SIDE: Should my children be TCKs? and What’s the best thing about being a TCK? Read reasons why being a TCK has been a positive experience.
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August 9th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 4:28 pm
Top three things that suck about being a TCK:
1) Repatriation. Doesn’t matter if you speak the same language, or not. Doesn’t matter if you look the same, or not. Doesn’t matter if you talk a lot or a little, doesn’t matter if your family’s with you or not, Repatriation is, in every way, a MotherDog.
2) When worlds mix. My mind deals well when my Haiti-world stays in Haiti, along with its friends and power-outages and difficult driving and corrupt authority and poverty. My U.S.-world sits nicely as well all by itself, with everyone complacent and naive and good-natured and not very globally savvy. But when those worlds MIX - I completely shut down. If family or friends visit from the States… I don’t know what to do. If I encounter poverty or suffering or if there’s a power outage in the U.S., I either shut down or get extremely angry. It’s because my worlds don’t justify themselves to each other. They only exist in their own paradigm.
Wow, “paradigm.” My $100-word-for-the-day.
3) Psych 101. Hearing terms like “panic attack” and “post-traumatic stress” defined and thinking - “Gee, that’s what I’m experiencing. How nice that they have clinical terms for that stuff. Doesn’t really make it any easier, but hey I’m glad that my symptoms are neatly classified here in my psych textbook next to Vietnam vets and victims of s*xual abuse.” By the way, they did not include the term “TCK” in my textbook, though, so I’ll be dealing with all these without anyone knowing it. Then I’ll walk into a counselor’s office and go through the ordeal of working up to these huge revelations over and over again. I want to just come in and give him a list - “here’s the mess we have to deal with. I’ve outlined all my trigger points and coping mechanisms and graphed my cycles of depression. It’s in bullet-point form and I included a legend and a timeline.”
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August 9th, 2008 (3 weeks ago) at 7:37 pm
LOL paradigm is my favorite word! I use it literally everywhere hahahaha such a TCK vocabulary…
i dunt remember if i did this b4 but here goes again.
1. I am more heartbroken than non-TCKs from even the shortest travelling. Because I get attached too easily.
2. We are almost ALWAYS misunderstood.
3. There’s a general feeling of insecurity haunting us inside all the time.
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August 13th, 2008 (2 weeks ago) at 1:34 pm
Hmmmm… where to begin…
Welp
1) Repatriating - Yeah, it sounds like a broken record at this point, but that doesn’t keep it from sucking. I mean, you’ve gotta love being the novelty kid in the class, with everyone asking you dumbass questions like “Did you have a pet kangaroo???” and such.
2) Directions - Picture this in your mind, if you will: Two people on opposite ends of a hallway walking towards each other. When they get to each other, they’d usually walk to their right, thus avoiding smacking into one another. Well well well, growing up with driving on the left hand side of the road for the first 12 years of my life screws with that instinct for me. Lead to many an awkward situation, it did.
3) Food - I MISS YOU SO MUCH, TIM TAMS.
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August 14th, 2008 (2 weeks ago) at 3:00 pm
First off, I want to say that I believe this is a valuable exercise which will lead to more writing and a proactive healing experience. I have done a lot of writing and burning but not specifically for grief and loss. I think it’s a good time to begin.
1. LACK OF CONTINUITY
My memories are very scrambled. I often can’t remember what happened when or where, when looking back toward a particular event or period of my life. This very disconcerting. Yep, it definitely sucks. I have trouble actually making sense of my life for the 13 years I experienced the military brat lifestyle.
When I am visiting my family, there are times when I talk about something and my mother will say, “that didn’t happen there, it happened in _______.” Or, “you’ve got such a bad memory!” I try to explain that my memories were those of a child and that hers were from an adult perspective. (Of course there may be differences in what we remember, but I don’t like getting caught up in right or wrong thinking, either.) There was an objective timeline that that period spans, but human memory has great subjectivity, no matter the age. That doesn’t mean we would *agree* on the memories, anyway, because our personal truths about specific things may differ or did differ.
So, someone nailing me because of my ‘poor memory’ is a pet peeve. My memory after 13 is fairly constant and that says plenty. So, it is very hard for me to simply *have* a scrambled memory, aside from others who disagree with what I do or don’t remember. It makes me feel ungrounded. I’ve written down a chronology of all the places I’ve lived and the individual house in each state or country, but I don’t always refer to it. Sometimes I’m not around the list when a memory hits or I don’t think of the list and there I am…stuck with another porous memory or question mark about what or where or when.
When I heard Donna Musil speak during the teleconference, she said something about the brat lifestyle and PTSD. I think that must have been the onset of mine, some time back then. I remember when I was 13, but I have no memory at all of repatriation or its effect on me. That makes me realize I may well have blocked the memory. I know stress has a strong effect on memory.
I have steady access to a series of vignettes and I can remember these clearly, but the order is iffy and the connections are absent. Yep, that definitely sucks.
2. FLEETING CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIPS
Who were all those people and where are they?
I wonder where Charlie and his sisters are and what about Michtilde and Hans, and Vickie – the one in Florida and the one in Germany; where’s Bailey and Danato?
I think about all those children I knew up until I was 13 and it seems like they are like sand running through my fingers. Yet, we had fun experiences, strong experiences, were friends, good ones, and our friendships were graced with tangibility and continuity *while we were there*.
Evidently, I need to mourn the loss of them, to connect with and honor that part of myself. Then let it go. And forgive anything needing forgiveness and then accept. The five stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler Ross made known. Here, I just looked them up: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
When I was in high school, I became friends with four girls. To this day, I am still friends with them. Decades have past and we are still connected. They are TCKs, a fact we learned some time after we’d become friends. We were the ones we were attracted to for friendship, the ones where the friendship offered the most and where the friendship ’stuck’ and cemented. I am very grateful for this experience and don’t really know where I would have been without it. My angels were watching over me….
But, I sometimes wonder about the ghosts…the children and adults, I guess, who came before… the ones who are now actually living and breathing through their existences elsewhere…and, perhaps, at times wondering about me.
3. PEOPLE PLEASING & LACK OF AUTHENTICITY
I have to be very careful with myself, careful to not be a chameleon, to not deny who I am and where I’ve been. To not tell people who we are, when it’s time to appropriately share that information, is so Third Culture. Instead, easily and automatically, we tend to try to to fit in. We are hardwired to arrive, then blend in. Arrive, then blend in.
The key word is *trying* to fit in, instead of being. Simply being…being authentic.
I am constantly working on the issue of not trying to please other people…and it was during one of the teleconferences where the speaker, maybe it was Donna Musil, identified that lifestyle issues/ways of being related to alcoholics or drug addicts are also pertinent to military. I think she was pointing out, at least in part, codependency. I don’t know if this is a full spectrum TCK issue, but it’s worth investigating.
So, one of my main values is authenticity and I pursue it and strive to live it because my military brat self learned to strip that away and makes me a chameleon. If we are chameleons too long or too habitually, we don’t even know who we are. Our identity is unclear, fragmented.
Someone posted their Myers Briggs type and that brings me to mine, INFP. According to David Keirsey, the goal of the INFP is *to become*.
I identify strongly with what he said and recognize my own pattern of becoming that I’ve been doing that my entire life. The pursuit of becoming is fundementally related to my TCK self and issues. To not become what others want me to be, to not become trapped in others’ definitions of me.
There have been several times in my life when I’ve lived alone. I don’t mean lived by myself, I mean gotten away from it all. Completely alone. Once, in my 20s, I was the caretaker of a small horse ranch in the mountains. During that time, I started coming home to myself because no one else was there. The owners were absent and groceries were brought to me from the city every other weekend and dropped off. I didn’t realize that the experience I’d signed on to meant I would face myself in a primal way. I thought the job would only entail the physical aspects. I was a period of extremely painful self-confrontation, as it was the first time I’d ever been completely alone and I was forced to reckon with myself, who I was. By myself and on my own terms.
About ten years ago, I spent a half a year alone in a cabin on a lake. I spent my time doing yoga and meditation. I really went within and I came home to myself.
The TCK life are the cards that were dealt and the porosity and chameleon nature, the tendency toward blending in really sucks. Without the root that tied me to a particular patch of dirt, my work has been cut out for me…becoming authentic.
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August 16th, 2008 (2 weeks ago) at 5:12 pm
Jan,
I am glad that you had those 4 girls who are TCKs when you were in high school. Back then you didn’t know you were TCKs but it must have been so invaluable to have understanding friends to support one another.
It looks like your memory from before 13 has been blurred and mixed and you seem to have frustrations not remembering well. And you have come to the authentic self through the alone times when you were isolated from many others and came into meditation. These times must have been both good and bad. While having so much that is lost and cannot be grasped from the past, you are becoming true to yourself and finding the real person you are..not to please anyone else, not to become a chameleon. I find these very vital to coming to good terms with the past memories and forgiving those people in the past and even to forgive ourselves. I am grateful that you are sharing this and I can resonate with you.
Thank you.
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August 16th, 2008 (2 weeks ago) at 5:21 pm
bdbhaiti, you said,
“But when those worlds MIX - I completely shut down. If family or friends visit from the States… I don’t know what to do. If I encounter poverty or suffering or if there’s a power outage in the U.S., I either shut down or get extremely angry. It’s because my worlds don’t justify themselves to each other. They only exist in their own paradigm.”
It must be so devastating to see the different worlds crush before your eyes, the worlds that haunt bad memories in the past and bring mixed feelings that provoke anger. It must be difficult to go through all this. I wished before that they included TCK in the psych textbooks. Someday there will come a time when TCKs need not explain why we feel so different from non-TCKs and that many of us feel post-traumatic stress that burdens and eats our heart.
Bless your soul, bdhaiti. We all need healing don’t we?
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August 16th, 2008 (2 weeks ago) at 5:25 pm
mmmmmm, paradigm is one of my favorite words too. Paradigm shift happens so often when I adopt myself into a new environment. It applies to the high mobility life that I have as a TCK and also it is apparent when I get insights from readings. hehe
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August 25th, 2008 (2 days ago) at 1:30 am
I lived ‘abroad’ between the ages 3-18. Basically when I ´returned´ to Holland it was a completely foreign country to me. I have lived in Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong and now Holland.
My top 3:
#1 Identity issues. With every move I reinvented myself to fit in. Who am I and what’s important to me?
#2 Grief; unresolved grief. With regards to several different areas, but esp. friendships. Friends have always been my life. I have had many really good friendships and, even though I have also had to say goodbye to so very many of them, I can’t live without good friends. I need them like I need water. But saying goodbye has really hurt me deeply and also left me with a lot of ANGER.
#3 Memories. I´ve had a great childhood, lots of fantastic experiences and yet so few memories of it all. Which is weird and disconcerting. Also makes it more difficult to understand me past, explain anything to others, find unresolved grief etc.
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Yesterday at 11:04 pm
TheATCK,
I am still learning what it means to be a person. We all have emotional needs and to be comforted for what happened, especially for the losses that we’ve had. The hidden grief after saying good-byes to so many of our friends, important ones, families… When the very good memories seem few and divided into pieces and we are angry at our past.. angry with what happened, i think it is bittersweet to think about all the blessings we’ve had due to these experiences.
Where do you reside now? I hope you will find this online community a place to freely express how you feel.
Thank you once again for sharing this with us.
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