The Fruit of Unresolved Grief Makes a Nasty Jam
A recent client shared with me the following: (any identifying phrases changed to maintain confidentiality): “I don’t have any friends and I don’t have the energy to make friends. I don’t want to leave my apartment, so all I do is sleep, eat junk food or watch tv. I have to drag myself to work. When I am at work, I eat alone at my workstation and listen to my music on my headset so I don’t have to listen to the shallow chit chat in the next cubicle. I hate superficial conversations. I wish I could find a job where I could work from home and not have to deal with people. They are so egocentric in this country. To be completely honest, I just want to go back to Europe where my life had meaning and I had deep conversations with my friends. I know I am depressed. But I really can’t come up with a reason why I am so down, except that I don’t have any friends here nor do I like living here. I think I need your help.”
How often have you heard these words, or similar words, voiced by an adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK) presenting for therapy in your office? As they talk, they slump into your couch, eyes filled with tears, their voice filled with intense emotions and they have that forlorn look like they have been engaged in a long emotional battle with themselves. Your office is their last hope. They feel shame for having to get help when they pride themselves for having the skills to face any challenge they encounter, in any part of the world. But their “home” country has served them their own broken heart on a silver platter and they don’t know what to do with it. They have lost the battle of trying to outrun a low-level depression.
But their “home” country has served them their own broken heart on a silver platter and they don’t know what to do with it.
Yes, many folks move in this new world of globalization. But for the TCK and their family, the moves were chronic, and at times sudden or severe, as they were repeatedly launched into their parents' next global assignment. They, as a family, often did not know how to or did not take the time to talk about the grief of leaving all they knew before they moved on to the next new assignment location. As a result the TCKs were often taught, either by expectation or example, to stuff their feelings of loss and only focus on the excitement of the new home, the new food, the new life they could carve out for themselves in this new location, and the potential for new friends.
But today, as an ATCK, life is markedly different. All the moves and new experiences have stopped! They are stuck here, and worse yet, they are in your therapy office, not sure how to overcome the depression, anxiety, or addiction they have tried over and over to pull out of. Underneath the surface of their understanding, they often feel a deep exhaustion from a lifetime of going through the risk of making and then saying goodbye to friends over and over again. This understandably had even greater impact for TCKs who were introverted. For them it was an ongoing nightmare. Now as ATCKs, if they give in to the weariness, the result will be an even deeper loneliness with no end in sight. They dare not believe the lie that something must be wrong with them. They are convinced they have only a few friends, and those they have would not understand or care about their authentic self if they were to make themselves vulnerable to them. They are taking a great risk by revealing their hidden struggles to you, the therapist. They fear you might not understand them at all either and thus would give validity to the shaming statements they are using to try and beat some sense into their wounded self. Yet, if the grief is not acknowledged, named or shared, it gets tucked away only to reappear at a most inopportune time. The fruit of unresolved grief makes for a very nasty jam.
They fear you might not understand them at all either and thus would give validity to the shaming statements.
With each transition to a new place or harsh careless statement on their uniqueness as an ATCK, they feel like the little world traveler kid again. That insecure child traveler had to rebuild their entire support system over and over. That child has followed them today to this new place they are supposed to call home. How often can they put themselves out there without a complete shut down and not take on any more risks? How often must they be vulnerable in order to risk making a friend? How often must they experience rejection when they reveal a small part of their soul to a potential friend? Beneath the smile, the familiar refrain plays its continuous loop of, “You are just weird; no one will EVER understand you. Don’t make yourself vulnerable. They won’t like you.”
Someone made the statement, “The more you love someone or someplace, the deeper the grief of leaving them.” We, as parents involved in international work, encourage our children to make friends wherever our international assignment takes us. We want our children to fall in love with this new country and we take pride when we hear our young TCKs become fluent in the local language and see them befriending local kids in the park or kids from other cultures in their international school. We congratulate ourselves for being a good parent, and feel less guilt for moving them far away from their extended family. Yet along with this, we could be setting them up to grieve over and over again, when we ask them to move with us to yet a different place and blend into the local culture. We, as parents, must teach, model, and support our children in the process of how to grieve well as they and we transition between countries so there is less likelihood of their carrying this grief into their adult years where they will at some point have to deal with the then complicated grief of their accumulated multiple unresolved past losses experienced abroad as children. Parents who take the time to grieve the normal losses associated with an international move and allow time, space, support, and a model to help their children do the normal work of grieving all the people, pets, culture, activities, and special things about this current place, not only help them to be better prepared for the next place, but teach them the very valuable skill of dealing with current life issues as they arise, healthy expression of and working through normal loss and grief, and how to do the active work of transition well. This then also prevents the huge burden of unexpressed and unresolved grief to be carried into adulthood and teaches them life skills to also navigate as a young adult that very difficult transition to a passport country, that is perhaps the most “foreign” place they have ever lived.
It is often said that students in international schools experience 40% turnover of staff and fellow students each school year. This ongoing transition of relationships even in the years where they themselves don’t move is another often unrealized major stressor for TCKs. Thus, they must choose to either stop making deep relationships because it is just too costly because they wonder whether that person too will leave within a year or go through the huge effort to build yet another relationship nearly yearly knowing they will likely have to say goodbye at some not-too-distant time.
Unresolved grief, or stuffed grief, too frequently stays buried until life and transitions slow down. It then unexpectedly but typically resurfaces as a low-level depression with all that tags on to these feelings of being lost and alone, i.e. anxiety about making friends or career choices, relationship problems or an addiction in an attempt to numb the feelings. Just like the client presented in the opening paragraph of this blog, ATCKs often don’t know why they are depressed. When questioned about their overseas experience, they can quickly rattle off the many benefits of growing up “in other worlds”. They recite the list of benefits painted on the walls of their mind years ago - living a life in private schools, traveling the world, having friends from all over the world, and visiting places and experiencing things that most of their peers would only see on tv or on a computer screen saver. I have often wondered if that is really THEIR list of benefits, or something they heard their parents repeat over and over to worried grandparents or friends back in their home country.
They recite the list of benefits painted on the walls of their mind years ago
Some ATCKs are very hesitant to get close to others, thinking that they or their new friend will surely move, and a fragile heart that is already held together with an over-used Band-Aid will once again be ripped off and lose all of its stickiness. Each time someone moved in the past, it was like the untimely death of yet another close friend. They just can’t do it anymore so instead choose to withdraw from this current new world. Often, they then find themselves stuck in a low-level state of depression without knowing what to call it or how to get out of it.
As a therapist working with an ATCK client, one of the greatest services you can do for them is to gently question them about the possibility of unresolved grief and then take the time needed, often over several months, to guide them in doing the hard work of grieving all of those lost friendships, places, schools, teachers, sport teams, identities, joys, experiences and loves. It is often heart wrenching to help them allow those cherished, lost memories of loss to bubble to the surface once again. It takes skill to not only guide them to name each loss out loud but also help them do the work of allowing themselves to go back into the painful pit of grief and emotionally acknowledge, perhaps for the first time, that these loved ones are probably gone forever. Their heart groans in anguish and they feel out of control! But it is necessary to feel or they won’t rise out of the depression. It is necessary to walk through the rubble of grief to get to the solid ground of resolution and a good transition, rather than trying to continue to ignore it. This is what heals and calms their heart after being broken over years of successive losses and then helps them take the risky, but now healthy step, of becoming a caring, compassionate friend and neighbor one more time in this current place. Only by helping them work through their often unacknowledged and little understood griefs will they reach their therapeutic goals of overcoming their present life issues, including depression, with you, the therapist. As they realize that it is okay to let their emotions be expressed, rather than push them away, they will achieve peace within their multicultural heart. Through this process of walking the grief journey in a healthy, proactive way they finally learn experientially that grief is not a sign of weakness but it is a healthy natural response to transition. They are freed and their strengths and experience are allowed to blossom in new ways as they realize that grief need not break the heart; rather, the heart will enlarge to embrace the grief.
In 2015, a great movie was produced by Pixar entitled, “Inside Out”. It is about the hidden grief experienced by a little girl who made a major move with her parents. She was not at all happy about it, even though she tried to act like all was well. It is an excellent tool to use with your ATCK clients in order to facilitate a discussion regarding the various feelings surrounding a major move. My clients love the movie and really get into going in depth in relating it to their own lives of transition.
One important point regarding grief, and the depression which accompanies it, is that your ATCK can thoroughly process each grief event only to later have a seemingly small event trigger a new wave of tears or sadness. When that happens to your client, remind them they have not regressed back to the starting point again. The unanticipated trigger has simply stirred up another smaller, yet unexpected, bubble of grief to the surface. This will happen and it is a normal part of the process. They have worked through the grief. The last step is the smaller but equally important work of working through the normal sights, sounds, pictures, interactions, or situations, that will suddenly trigger memories of that now resolved grief. Teach your client to stop, allow themselves to feel the grief, figure out what was said or done or experienced that activated the grief trigger, then name it, work through it, and perhaps do something physical (walk, draw, garden, etc.) to clear the emotions from their body and spirit, and move on. This is all part of the entire package of doing grief well. The experience of unexpected grief triggers happens to all of us who have had major losses in our lives. This does not mean we haven’t worked through the grief. It’s the last needed step of applying what we’ve worked through to our daily life. The triggers, if named and worked through when they occur, will likely not recur. There are no total number of different triggers one will experience. And one becomes increasingly confident and skilled at naming and working through them, whether it’s just 2 or 3 or 9 or 10. The key is not to worry how many more there may be, but to rejoice at each one dealt with healthily when it occurs.
I remember a number of years ago being seated in the second to last row on the far-right side of a small auditorium in the Lilly Center in Indianapolis and hearing David Pollock speak. I had not heard him speak before nor had I met him. It was before he and Ruth Van Reken wrote their book, “Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds.” David began to talk about grief and the TCK. There, scrunched down in my seat, I began to cry. Tears flowed as I tried to write down every word he said. He was talking about me. This was the first time I had heard about unresolved grief or how my life as a TCK was impacted by constantly being uprooted and moved beginning in my first year of life. A year later, when I heard him give the same presentation again, I cried all over again. Only this time I was prepared with Kleenex and I noticed that I was not the only one in tears. This time, I found David after the presentation and shared my tearful unorganized comments with him. He listened, cried, comforted and gave understanding to my grief as he did with so many of us ATCKs. It was the start of a close friendship as I knew he saw my heart. He helped me recognize and name the unresolved grief in my own life as an ATCK.
Many years later, after the untimely death of my friend, David Pollock, I wrote in my own book (“Belonging Everywhere & Nowhere: Insights into Counseling the Globally Mobile”) on how to help adult Third Culture Kids: “It is through listening, understanding, comforting, and validating that we help our clients move (out of their depression) and towards healing. ...comfort gently touches the feelings. Once the feelings are affirmed and soothed, then the cognitive areas of the brain can be engaged into action to make sense of the loss….As a therapist or a friend, the best skill you that you can employ is sitting and listening to your ATCKs talk about their losses. If you attempt to reframe their losses as gains, the result is feelings of shame (guilt), withdrawal or anger. The result may be more hidden, delayed, or unresolved grief and less willingness to proceed with therapy (or the friendship).” (p. 72) This is what David had done for me.
Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest from the Netherlands, made this statement regarding comfort and grief, “When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.”
An ATCK recently told me, “I have come to realize that my addictive behavior over the years has been due to my depression. Whenever I have tried to describe my depression to my friends, their response usually has been, “Your life is so amazing, how can you be depressed?” But with all of the constant goodbyes to friends and places, being an introvert who had to operate as an extrovert in order to survive in the cross-cultural life of a military family, it all took a toll on me. I feel like such a hypocrite. My past and current friends do not know who I am deep inside. By engaging in my addiction I have the energy to keep playing this game of being an ATCK in a foreign land.” There it was AGAIN. She had just verbalized what I had written for this blog earlier in the day. Unresolved grief among ATCKs is real if their parents didn’t help them walk through it as a child as they were transitioning. Taking the time to do the hard work to walk though it now as an adult, with the help of a skilled, understanding therapist helps them free themselves to move forward into all of the wonderful opportunities they have before them to impact their world(s).
I am thrilled to see the wealth of information that is available to the TCK counselor or parent today. In addition to skilled therapists who have experience in ATCK issues, there are many groups, webinars, workshops and books about TCKs and grief. There are also re-entry programs for TCKs graduating from high school and returning to their passport country that have sessions focused on processing the normal grief of this major transition in addition to previous transitions. There is also more training for teachers in international schools on this important topic. You can also find Facebook pages, websites and coaches who specialize in grief therapy with TCKs.
Since most of these resources have only become available in recent years, I had to be creative in my own training by taking generic grief counseling classes and adapting it to my ATCK clients. Below are a few of my favorite books. I hope you and your TCK client can together create a wonderful new recipe with these fruits carefully harvested from around the world.
Books -
“The Grief Tower: A Practical Guide for Processing Grief for Third Culture Kids” by Lauren Wells.
“Finding Home: Third Culture Kids in the World” by Rachel Jones.
“Emotional Resilience and the Expat Child” by Julia Simens.
“Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global” by Faith Eidse & Nina Sichel, Editors.
“Letters Never Sent” by Ruth Van Reken.
“Strangers at Home” by Carolyn D. Smith, Editor.
