third-culture kids

i read a book about "third-culture kids" over the time i was at Urbana. a "third-culture" kid is one who spent a substantial amount of her developmental years living outside the home culture of her parents. the third culture is the culture that is created from the high mobility and the cultural adaptation that exists for these families.

it was a really good book for me. it kind of named a lot of the issues or personality traits that i have seen in myself. it talks about the strengths and weaknesses that develop in the kids who grow up under these circumstances. it gave me additional language to describe my experience to others, which is always a good thing.

one thing that i discovered though is that i have a lot of unresolved grief--grief that i actually didn't experience. the book talked about "hidden losses," which are the losses that you don't even realize, so you can't grieve them. things like the sights, the smells, the different living experiences. then of course, there are the obvious losses of people & relationships that happens anytime you move away--especially where there was not the communication & technology advances that we have now (skype, IM, etc).

and i really don't think i grieved that much about the losses i felt at all. i think part of it was because i thought the work my parents were doing was so important that i didn't give myself permission to grieve. i guess that's pretty common among MK's especially.

so this actually explains why i feel things so deeply--sometimes i react with greater grief in a given situation than that situation actually calls for, because i'm making up for grief i didn't feel before. and i can't do things like watch movies about the Holocaust or visit a garbage dump community in Mexico because i know i can't handle feeling the pain of other peoples' situations. and when i lose a relationship now, at least for a time i feel all the losses that i ever had all over again.

so i'm not really sure where to go from here. there were some good suggestions in the book about just naming all the things/people that you lost so that you're aware of them. so that seems like a good place to start. but if nothing else, it's nice to understand what's going on.