The life of a Third Culture Kid therapist

By Dr Rachel CasonSociety & Culture Alternative Health Health & Fitness Mental Health

The life of a Third Culture Kid therapist episodes

August 02, 2024 123 - Red Flags, Green Flags
"I saw the signs... and I went there anyway!" I hear this so often, and it's such a familiar cry of my own heart too. We are often admonished to 'watch out for the red flags' but I'm wondering how much this is the relevant issue. Here I'm exploring what can lead TCKs to be especially vulnerable to seeing the warning signs of incompatible behaviours or values, and going there anyway. I'm also sharing why I feel getting clearer about our 'green flags' can be a more helpful tool to many TCKs.
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20 min
July 26, 2024 122 - Editing the Story
In this episode, I'm pondering associations between changes and endings. In my story recently, I realised my needs had changed and the impact this was having around my book club involvement. I quickly assumed that acknowledging this change would initiate an ending, a quitting and loss around community. But what if changes could be integrated into a new chapter? A story edited rather than lost?
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21 min
July 19, 2024 121 - Acclimatised to Discomfort
What are the implications of a life lived in adaptation? One of them seems to be a familiarity with discomfort! This can impact different TCKs different ways - some of us get super sensitive to challenge, over-saturated as we have been in early chapters. Some of us identify so much with challenge that we continue to seek it out in our adult lives. Either reaction may be working with an acclimatisation with discomfort. We can become so attuned to discomfort as our baseline that we normalise it - either in ways that keep us in it, avoidant or unclear about what changes we could make to improve our experience, or in ways that avoid comfort by seeking growth to exhausting degrees. Either way, what happens when we get acclimatised to discomfort?
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17 min
July 12, 2024 120 - Coming Home
Today I'm reflecting on coming home. As TCKs, we can often develop sensitivities and strategies for managing the leaving experiences of our lives, but I'm noticing an area I want to work on - returning. I know leaving, do I know how to return? Turns out I didn't handle my most recent return brilliantly, so this episode is walking through that experience with you!
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18 min
July 05, 2024 119 - TCKs and Selfies
So I messed up the timing of this one! Got all organised, and recorded before going away last week on holiday - then never scheduled it to post! So it's going out this week instead :)

In this episode I ponder something that comes up a lot - with TCKs and in general discourse - the Selfie! I'm always fascinated when we have a resistance against something, and I wanted to explore this as something that I think is an untapped resource in our work around belonging. Here I explore how the simple selfie can be another tool for us to use to land our Selves in context, witness to our moments of connection and ground us. I'd love to know your thoughts!
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17 min
June 21, 2024 118 - Different Modes of Me
After some creative scribbling, I feel like I've cracked something I want to now share with you - how I've seen myself privilege one version of my identity over others! This is something I hear us especially prone to doing if managing fluctuating energy levels, sometimes due to chronic conditions or illnesses. As TCKs, the pressure is often on to demonstrate our 'added value' and I share here the different contributions that my 'different modes of me' make.
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18 min
June 14, 2024 117 - TCKs and Aging
What do our TCK stories tell us about aging? And how does this impact our identities? This episode throws open this question and explores how we can use our stories as a resource to help us understand where our own (perhaps multiple) constructs of aging come from, and how we can navigate this with mindfulness and gentleness.
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18 min
May 31, 2024 116 - Initiating Change Protocol
This last week I hit a familiar feeling - low motivation, a sense of 'what's the point anyway?' and general resistance to the elements and rhythms of my daily life. As with all of my confusing feelings, I tried to look at the context around it - and realised I was coming up to my three year mark: It's nearly three years I've been in this new house and my TCK clock was getting ready to lose it.
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18 min
May 24, 2024 115- Birthday Ponderings
So birthdays can bring up a lot for people, and for TCKs, these were often affected by mobility: Who do you invite to a party when you are the new kid? How do people celebrate here? And mine tends to make me pensive around identity also - who have I been this year, and where am I at now? And so in this podcast, I invite you to ponder with me those identities we inhabit but especially those we might stop short of claiming, because we "can't do them properly" or may feel we don't have time to establish.
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22 min
May 17, 2024 114 - The Secret of Happiness
I've just read Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" and now I know the secret of happiness... and it's reminiscent of what I see Third Culture Kids doing every day in the tension they work to hold - between the "here" in my hand and the "there" out in the world.
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15 min

About The life of a Third Culture Kid therapist

From the publisher's feed

Rachel is, amongst many other things, a Third Culture Kid therapist specialising in Life Story Interview and Accompaniment, an approach she developed from her Sociological doctorial research into TCK…