Adult Third Culture Kids in New York: What ATCKs Carry Into Adulthood | Queer-Affirming Therapy NYC — Leila Zhanybekova, LCAT, ATR-BC

I am fortunate to be part of a peer supervision group with a few treasured colleagues. We met at a training some years ago and meet to practice together, seek consultation where necessary, and provide support. In one of our meetings, we started talking about upbringing, and I mentioned I grew up going to an international school away from my parents. My colleague surprised me by asking, “How did that affect you, do you think? There’s so much that happens in those years developmentally, and if you weren’t forming the connection with your parents in those years, how did that affect your relationship with them? Or with everyone else?”

You may shake your head in disbelief, but I had made it into my thirties and well into my career as a therapist without ever asking myself this particular version of that question. I kept returning to it in the days after, wondering how much of how I operate regularly is impacted by a part of my life I’ve largely trained myself to look past as a “necessary” experience – something that had happened because I had an incredible opportunity that my parents never had, something that I was privileged to be able to do, something that took a lot of sacrifice from my family. Notice the narratives here, the parts of me immediately showing up to protect my family.

I had a therapist once with a similar enough lived experience who referred to this group of feelings as “the immigration machine.” That phrasing stayed with me too. If you are someone who grew up between countries, between cultures, between versions of yourself, I wonder if you’re curious to spend some time with me in this post exploring how lived experiences of third culture kids impact the way we move through the world as adults.

What is an Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK)?

Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK) is someone who has spent a significant part of their developmental years living in a culture different to that of their birth country and their parents’ culture. People who identify as ATCK tend to develop an individual cultural makeup that is a combination of their heritage culture and their host cultures, which is what we refer to when we say third culture. ATCKs often are from families that were immigrants, diplomats, academics; they may have developed that identity as a result of being a student, living with a host family in a different culture away from their family, forced relocation; the list continues.

Relocations and changes in formative years

ATCKs tend to be very adaptable to change. As a consequence of frequent relocations of a temporary nature, they may struggle with forming lasting connections, or putting down roots, or feeling a sense of belonging to any particular culture or place. Many describe struggling to claim an identity as theirs entirely, rather finding bits and pieces of belonging in their different experiences.

Global mobility during attachment-forming years: Moving schools every two to three years during childhood means forming deep friendships with the knowledge that they will end, which can lead to a pattern of connecting quickly and deeply, then detaching before being left, or leaving before the other person can; often shows up decades later in adult relationships without the person connecting it to anything
The international school bubble: Many ATCKs grew up in international school communities that were internally diverse but externally insulated from the country they were living in. You may have attended an American or British curriculum school in a country where you never had local friends outside your classmates, while simultaneously adapting to a different educational and cultural system within that school, often with no available authority figure who shares your identities; often can lead to internalized burdens
Passport country alienation: Returning to your passport country and finding it foreign can feel incredibly isolating. It’s the “both/and” and “neither/nor” feeling, but it’s also a sense of disconnection from an identity that is “supposed to” bring you comfort; can lead to questioning and isolation in formative years and beyond
Racial and ethnic identity: For ATCKs of color, the third culture experience intersects with racial identity in many specific ways that often keep getting unpacked as time goes on. Many clients share wishing that they had the language and self-understanding they possess now as adults to help themselves when they were children and had no such guidance around them.
Language as home: Many ATCKs have a complicated relationship with language: fluent in several, fully at home in none, different emotional registers in different languages. The person who finds it easier to discuss certain topics in one language because the vocabulary for them developed there (hello to my fellow Central Asians learning how to talk about your feelings in English). The person who dreams in a language they no longer speak daily. or realizes that they at some point stopped dreaming in the language that used to feel closest. The person who loses words in their heritage language and grieves it as a loss of self, and loss of connection with their family of origin.

Some of the topics that may come up in the therapy room

Restlessness and difficulty settling: The ATCK who has been in New York for eight years and still cannot shake the feeling that this is temporary and who keeps a small part of themselves ready to leave, feels a particular anxiety when life becomes too stable, as if stability itself is a setup for loss
Relationships that plateau: The pattern of deep early connection followed by distance once the relationship becomes established: noticing that friendships never quite deepen past a certain point, not because you don't want them to but because the capacity for conflict resolution and ongoing building of relationship is something that you’re still figuring out how to do
High functioning as a coping strategy: Many ATCKs became exceptionally adaptable, socially skilled, and self-reliant early. While these are genuine strengths, they are also, in many cases, the product of learning to manage transitions without adequate support.
Grief and ambiguous loss: Persistent sense of loss and melancholy that has no particular event or trigger
Identity code-switching: For ATCKs who are also BIPOC, AAPI, queer, immigrant, or otherwise hold intersectional identities, the code-switching of adjusting identity across race, culture, language, gender presentation, and sexuality simultaneously can be taxing and confusing.
Fitting in and adapting: Many ATCKs are skilled at learning languages and resonate with many different cultures, leading them to be highly adaptable and empathic to people from all backgrounds. On the flip side, some aspects of the ATCK experience can lead to ATCKs subconsciously (or consciously) trying to remain unseen to avoid adapting or standing out

A couple journal prompts to try when you’re ready

What does belonging mean to you? What are some moments, real or imaginary, that feel like belonging?
What are the parts of your life story that you look away from? If we were to suspend the family sacrifices, the opportunities and luck, all of the narratives that are related to your experience, just long enough for you to take a peek at what’s behind them, what feelings do you notice? What thoughts emerge?

What therapy for Adult Third Culture Kids can address

IFS: The parts that formed during specific moves, specific losses and relocations. There may be a part of you that makes connection with others easy and keeps a parachute packed. There may be a part that needs to know the answer before you’ve had the chance to ask the question. There may be a part of you that never moved, that stayed behind. In the therapy room, we can hold space for parts of you that haven’t felt welcome in therapy, and help you understand and connect with them more.

EMDR: The specific memories that did not get processed: goodbyes that happened too fast, friends you never saw again, memories of growing up in different places and all the emotions and self-beliefs that got internalized along the way. EMDR can serve as a way of getting in touch with emotions stored in the body, and many clients report it helps them stay with the feelings rather than pushing them away.

Art therapy: Making something about a place, a memory, a version of yourself that existed in one country and not in another. For ATCKs whose sense of identity is highly verbal and cognitive, image-making can access material that doesn’t come up in talk therapy.

Start working with a culturally responsive and trauma informed therapist in NYC

There’s a lot of warmth and witnessing that happens in the therapy room when parts of you that may have gotten used to self-editing begin to feel comfortable to share the full story. If something on this page resonated for you, I would be happy to talk further and see if we could be a good fit.

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What is an Adult Third Culture Kid? Identity, belonging, and therapy for ATCKs in New York