Growing Up Between Worlds -

Third Culture Kid (TCK)

A personal story for expats in Mexico

Being a TCK, Living Abroad, and Finding Your Own Inner Home

There’s a unique kind of complexity that comes with growing up between cultures — the mix of adaptability, confusion, resilience, and invisible grief that often follows us into adulthood. I know this experience intimately. Not only because I work with Third Culture Kids (TCKs) and expats today — but because I am one.

My Story: Growing Up in Three Worlds

My path to becoming a therapist has been anything but linear — and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I spent my childhood moving between Australia, South Africa, and Canada, absorbing different worlds, different rules, different emotional atmospheres. That constant shifting shaped my understanding of identity and belonging long before I knew what the term TCK even meant.

Like many TCKs, I learned early how to adapt, how to read a room, how to blend in anywhere… and also how to hold the quiet ache of never fully belonging anywhere. That “in-between” feeling becomes a world of its own. A third culture. A culture inside the self.

The Hidden Emotional Life of a TCK

If you grew up between cultures and now live abroad again — especially here in Mexico — the TCK story doesn’t disappear. It resurfaces in new ways:

• Feeling connected yet strangely isolated

• Adapting so quickly that you lose touch with your own needs

• Longing for belonging, even in beautiful places

• Struggling with “Where is home?”

• Navigating relationships that feel intense, transient, or confusing

• Carrying a sensitivity that is both a strength and a burden

Many expats don’t realize they’re living with a lifelong emotional pattern — one that started in childhood. And because it’s always been “normal,” it can be easy to overlook how deeply it shapes the present.

The Inner Challenges I Carried — And What They Taught Me

My TCK journey didn’t unfold in a straight, polished way. Like many people who grow up between cultures, I’ve lived through my own share of emotional challenges, identity questions, and difficult life transitions.

These experiences didn’t break me — they shaped me. They deepened my empathy, strengthened my resilience, and taught me how profoundly human connection, presence, and emotional autonomy can transform us.

Living in between worlds often comes with emotions that don’t have clear names: a quiet grief, a longing for belonging, a restlessness that makes it hard to settle. I understand these experiences not just professionally, but personally — and they’re part of why I accompany others with such warmth and depth today.

Mexico: A Place of Reinvention, Reflection, and Return

Before becoming a therapist, I spent over a decade working as an early childhood educator and later as an English teacher here in Mexico. The cultural contrast, the warmth, the chaos, the constant movement — it awakened something familiar in me.

Mexico holds a special place for many TCKs and expats: it’s vibrant yet grounding; foreign yet strangely comforting and full of contrasts, just like us.

Living here can surface questions TCKs have carried since childhood: Who am I outside of adaptation? Where do I belong? What is home for me now? For many adults, these questions only become clear once life slows down, or once a crisis, illness, or transition forces a deeper introspection.

Returning to My True Calling

A few years ago, chronic illness changed the trajectory of my life. It forced me inward — toward gentleness, presence, and honesty. It became the doorway that led me back to what I had always wanted but never allowed myself to pursue.

I returned to school and completed three years of advanced training at CRAM, specializing in humanistic and person-centered therapy. There I learned to trust what emerges when:

• presence becomes a way of relating

• emotions are welcomed, not evaluated

• the person’s wisdom leads the process

• the relationship becomes the healing ground

Mindfulness, meditation, and the quiet truth of authentic connection became steady sources of strength. And now, they guide how I work with others.

The Heart of My Work With TCKs & Expats

Today, I bring together both my professional training and my lived experience to support people who feel caught between worlds — internally or culturally.

For TCKs and expats living in Mexico, therapy can be a space to explore:

• identity and belonging

• cultural mixedness

• emotional autonomy

• relationship patterns shaped by early moves

• grief, loss, transitions, and rootlessness

• the search for “home” within yourself

• creative expression through writing, speaking, and presence

You don’t have to explain your cultural background. You don’t need to justify your complexity. You don’t need to simplify your story to fit someone else’s frame.

Your experiences make sense. Your feelings make sense. Your longing for grounding makes sense.

Finding Home — Not in a Place, But in Yourself

If you are a TCK or an expat living in Mexico, and you feel disconnected, misunderstood, or emotionally overwhelmed — it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means you’re human. It means you’re carrying a layered history. It means you deserve a space to unpack it all with warmth, compassion, and depth.

Online therapy can offer that space — wherever you are in Mexico, and wherever your story began.

If this resonates…

You’re welcome to reach out for a free 15-minute introductory session — a gentle first step to see if we’d be a good fit. You don’t have to navigate identity, belonging, or emotional transitions alone. Together, we can explore what it means to build a sense of home — not in a country, but within yourself.