At a glance
You can answer where you are from in one word, and the answer is never quite true. Both halves of that are real, and living inside the gap between them is the thing nobody around you can see. This article is about what sits in it.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The rehearsed answer. Clients who grew up between countries usually have a short version ready for strangers and a longer one they almost never get to give.
- Goodbyes nobody finished. Clients describe a run of endings that were handled practically at the time and never grieved afterwards.
- Belonging by usefulness. Clients often describe earning a place in each new group by being adaptable, and then not knowing who they are when there is nothing left to adapt to.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why is where are you from such a hard question?
Because it asks for one place, and your experience is spread across several with no centre. Socially the question is small talk. For you it is a decision about how much to explain, made in about a second, several times a week.
The short answer leaves you slightly misdescribed and the conversation moves on. The long answer turns an introduction into an interview, and you watch the other person wait for it to end. Either way you have done a piece of work that the person asking had no idea they had set, and the accumulation of that is tiring in a way that is hard to complain about without sounding precious.
What people bring me is not confusion about the facts. They know exactly where they lived and when. It is that no available answer carries the truth of it, and after 20 years of giving the short version, parts of their own history start to feel like someone else’s.
What did all that moving actually cost?
Children move when the adults move, and the emotional side tends to be handled by being fine about it. The practical side was organised for you. The rest was managed by a child who could see that the move was not up for discussion.
- Endings on a schedule. Leaving arrived as a date in the diary rather than as something that happened between 2 people, so there was nothing to be angry about and nobody to be angry with.
- Friendships with a ceiling built in. When everyone knows the arrangement is temporary, the depth that is offered gets measured against the leaving date on both sides.
- A self that keeps introducing itself. Each move meant deciding again which parts of you to lead with, and that is a skill with a cost attached.
None of this means the childhood was unhappy, and most of the people I see are firm that it was not. Grief does not require unhappiness. It follows losses, and a run of small, well-managed losses can go unmourned for decades precisely because each one looked manageable on the day.
Why does the home country not feel like home?
Because the place you are supposed to be from carried on without you, and the version you kept is the one you left with. What I hear is subtler than culture shock. You can follow every reference, use the right words, and still be read as slightly foreign by people who share your passport.
Visits make it sharper, because a visit is where you expect the belonging to be waiting, and instead you find that it has moved on without malice. In a survey of 248 adults who had lived outside their heritage culture and then returned, 97 of whom first moved abroad as children, a stronger sense of identification with the heritage culture went with easier readjustment, while conflict between the heritage and host identities went with more stress and anxiety.1 It was cross-sectional and relied on people recalling their return, so it describes associations rather than causes.
Both things stay true at the same time. This is where you are from, and it is not where you live now in any sense that helps you on a Tuesday.
Is this an advantage or a loss?
It is both, and the advantage is the half other people can see. You can read a room in a second language, hold 3 cultural registers at once, and be genuinely glad of all of it, and still have no answer to where you would go if everything here stopped.
The move that keeps people stuck is treating the strength as proof that nothing was lost. It is usually made with the best intentions, often by family, and often by the person themselves: you had an extraordinary childhood, you speak 4 languages, what exactly are you complaining about. The competence was noticed at the time. The cost was not, and it is still sitting there waiting to be counted.
In my experience the relief does not come from deciding which country is really yours. It comes from being allowed to say that the thing which made you capable also took something, without having to give up either half of the sentence.
What helps when no single place claims you?
Belonging that holds is built out of people and practices rather than out of geography, and that is something you can act on.
- Stop auditioning the answer. Pick a short reply you can live with and let it be incomplete. The accuracy you lose there is worth the energy you keep.
- Name the leavings you skipped. Listing the places and people you left without a proper goodbye is often the first time the losses get counted as losses.
- Build belonging you can repeat. A standing arrangement with 2 or 3 people does more than any decision about which country is really yours.
- Let the pieces stay uneven. You do not have to be equally at home in each language or place, and trying to even them out usually means performing in all of them.
Where that is not enough: if the question of where you belong has started to feel like a question about whether you are anyone in particular, if decisions about where to live keep stalling, or if a visit back now reliably leaves you flattened for weeks, then the material is older than the logistics and will not be solved by choosing a country. That is the ground that individual psychotherapy for people living abroad works on, and it sits inside the wider question of where you belong now that you live abroad.
Questions people ask
Is growing up between countries a reason to start therapy?
It is, when the pattern is still shaping how you settle, decide and attach. The childhood itself is not the problem to be solved; what it taught you about staying and leaving usually is.
My childhood was a good one. Does this still apply?
Yes, and that is the most common version of it. Loss and a happy childhood sit together easily, and the grief that was never needed at the time can still be waiting.
Will I have to go back through my whole childhood?
No, and I would not start there. We begin with what is live now, and the history comes in where it explains something you are currently running into.
Does it matter that you work with people living abroad?
It saves you the explaining, which is a real part of the work in this subject. The context is familiar to me, so the session can go to what is actually difficult.
Should my partner come as well?
Start on your own if the question is about you and where you belong. If it keeps surfacing as an argument about where to live or how to raise children, couples work is the better place for it.
If you grew up between countries and still ask where you are from, I speak to that question in psychotherapy for third culture adults.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
