Third Culture Kids and Expats: When Home Is Not One Place

London is a melting pot of people from a huge range of countries, languages and cultures. People with very different backgrounds meet here every day, which means that one apparently simple question often comes up in the first few minutes of getting to know someone: “Where are you from?”

For many people, the answer is relatively simple. They grew up somewhere, have family and roots there, and then, at some point, moved and settled here. But for others, the question carries a different weight, and their answer tends to begin with, “It’s complicated.” They may have been born in one country, raised in several others and now live somewhere else entirely. They may identify with their parents’ culture without ever having lived there, or feel attached to several places without being able to call any one of them home.

At Heathwell, we often work with people whose sense of identity has developed across countries, languages and cultures, some online from different parts of the world and others in person in Blackheath. Some are third culture kids who moved internationally during childhood. Others relocated as adults for work, relationships or family life. Although their experiences are not the same, both may encounter complicated questions about belonging, identity and what it means to feel at home. What we are often working with is an identity that was built on shifting ground.

What Is a Third Culture Kid?

The term “third culture kid” was introduced by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s. It originally described children who accompanied their parents into another society, often because of a parent’s diplomatic, military, missionary or international career.

Today, the term generally refers to someone who spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ home culture or country. They may absorb pieces of several cultures without feeling that they belong entirely to any one of them. The experience can continue to shape identity and relationships long after childhood, which is why adults sometimes describe themselves as adult third culture kids.

This is not quite the same as moving abroad as an adult. It is also distinct from growing up in the same country as the child of migrant parents, although that experience can raise similarly complex questions about identity, culture and belonging.

There is no single third culture kid experience. Some children move repeatedly between countries, while others spend most of their childhood in one country outside their parents’ culture. Some become closely connected to the local community. Others grow up mainly within an international school or a tightly bordered expatriate community, with limited involvement in the culture of the country around them.

Some grow into adults who can pack a life into two suitcases with unsettling ease, who make friends quickly and have learned to say goodbye just as quickly. Others carry a low, persistent restlessness even when life looks entirely settled from the outside. These are not inevitable outcomes, and many remember their international childhood as enriching and expansive. But for some, adaptability developed because change was expected and remaining emotionally or practically prepared to leave felt necessary.

London, as one of the most international cities in the world, is full of people with these histories. Many arrived here for work or for love. Others chose London because being surrounded by different cultures allows them to feel less unusual and less pressured to explain where they belong.

The Grief That Has No Name

One of the harder things to work with clinically is that this kind of loss is rarely acknowledged as loss.

There is no funeral for a childhood spent between airports, no ritual for the friendships that dissolved when a family relocated again, and often little opportunity to process the ending of one life before the next one began. Children may be expected to adapt quickly because the move is considered exciting, necessary or advantageous.

As adults, clients can arrive half apologising for even raising it. They may be aware that international mobility is, by many measures, a privilege and feel confused about why there is still an ache sitting underneath all those passport stamps. They may have attended good schools, lived in beautiful places and had experiences that other people admired. None of this prevents repeated departures from being painful.

What lies underneath is not always homesickness for one particular place. It may be grief for the continuity that was missing, for friendships that could not develop over time, or for the version of themselves that belonged to a particular country and seemed to disappear when they left it.

There may also be a deeper uncertainty about who someone is when the ordinary markers of belonging, such as a hometown, a lifelong friendship group or a shared cultural shorthand, were disrupted, spread across different places or never fully available to lean on.

Repeated moves do not inevitably create attachment difficulties, particularly when a child has stable and emotionally available caregivers. However, frequent separations from friends, extended family members, schools and familiar communities can influence how some people experience closeness, continuity and loss. A person may become highly adaptable while also remaining alert to the possibility that circumstances, places and relationships can change without warning.

Therapy does not try to resolve this by manufacturing a false sense of rootedness. Instead, it offers somewhere to acknowledge the contingency that has shaped the person’s life and to build something meaningful from it, rather than despite it.

How It Colours Everything Else

Most people do not book an initial session because of their third culture or expatriate background. They come because of infidelity, because they have recently received a diagnosis of ADHD or autism, because a relationship is in trouble, or because they are experiencing anxiety, low mood or a particular relational trauma. Their international history may be nowhere in the first thing they say about why they are there. But it can colour the presenting issue all the same.

Anxiety may be harder to settle when no single place has ever felt entirely safe or permanent. Another relocation, a visa problem or uncertainty about where someone will be living in several years’ time can activate fears that are difficult to understand in isolation.

A late neurodivergence diagnosis can land differently for someone who spent childhood being told that their differences were caused by culture shock, language or repeated changes of school. Difficulties with social communication, sensory processing or attention may have been interpreted differently in each country, or overlooked because everyone assumed that the child was simply adjusting.

Infidelity or relational trauma can reopen older questions about whether closeness was ever meant to last. The end of an important relationship may also represent the loss of a home, a language, a social community or the person’s legal right to remain in a country. What appears to be one loss can therefore contain several others.

This does not mean that every current difficulty can be explained by someone’s cultural history. It means that relocation and identity form part of the context in which the difficulty is experienced. At Heathwell, we work with what someone actually brings into the room while remaining attentive to the quieter thread of cultural identity and belonging running underneath it, even when it is not named directly.

Rootlessness and Relationships

Questions about belonging and permanence often show up most clearly in relationships.

Growing up across countries can shape how a person approaches closeness, although not in one fixed direction. Some find that relationships end repeatedly without fully understanding why. Others experience the opposite pattern and hold on tightly once a meaningful connection finally forms. Some become skilled at establishing intimacy quickly but withdraw when a relationship begins to require greater dependence or commitment.

For others, frequent moves have little negative effect on their adult relationships. Family stability, temperament, the timing of relocations and the opportunities a child had to maintain important relationships can all influence how the experience is carried forward.

For some children, closeness was built less around extended family and longstanding local relationships because grandparents, cousins and family friends were often a plane ride away. A sense of belonging may instead have developed through shared culture, language and tradition within an expatriate community.

These communities can offer genuine support and connection. At the same time, they are often transient. Families arrive and leave, friendship groups change and the possibility of departure remains present even during periods of apparent stability.

Someone can spend an entire childhood in a country without ever feeling fully part of its culture, particularly if they lived mainly within an expatriate enclave with its own school, social circle and unspoken rules. This can shape not only how they relate to place but also how they relate to people. The skills developed for making friends quickly within a temporary community do not always translate easily into building relationships that are expected to deepen slowly and last.

At the same time, these experiences can produce genuine relational strengths. Many third culture kids develop curiosity about other people, sensitivity to cultural difference and an ability to understand situations from more than one perspective. The same history can contain both loss and possibility.

When Home Enters Adult Relationships

For adult third culture kids, questions about home and belonging do not necessarily disappear once they settle in one place. They can enter friendships, intimate relationships and decisions about where to build a future.

A partner may ask a seemingly ordinary question such as where they would eventually like to live, and find that there is no simple answer. The country on their passport may not feel like home. The place where they spent the largest part of their childhood may no longer be accessible to them, or may have changed beyond recognition. The country where they currently live may feel important without yet feeling entirely theirs.

These uncertainties can become more visible when a relationship grows serious. Decisions about marriage, children, language, proximity to family and where to settle require someone to define what home means in practical terms. A person who has previously been able to carry several identities without choosing between them may suddenly feel pressured to make one country, culture or community primary.

For some adult third culture kids, a relationship becomes the most stable sense of home they have experienced. This can create deep intimacy, but it can also place considerable emotional weight on the relationship. Conflict, distance or the possibility of separation may threaten not only the bond with a partner but also the person’s sense of stability and belonging.

Others may remain cautious about depending too heavily on a relationship. If important friendships and communities repeatedly ended because of relocation, they may have learned to adapt quickly and avoid assuming that closeness will be permanent. They may be warm, socially confident and able to form connections easily while finding it harder to remain emotionally present when a relationship requires vulnerability or long term commitment.

These patterns are not inevitable, and growing up internationally does not automatically cause relationship or attachment difficulties. Many adult third culture kids develop stable and lasting relationships. However, their histories can influence what permanence means to them, how they respond to separation and what they need in order to feel secure with another person.

Partners may also come from very different relationships to place. One may have lived in the same town for most of their life, surrounded by family and longstanding friendships. The other may have spent childhood moving between countries and learned to experience home as something portable. Neither relationship to home is more legitimate, but each person may initially struggle to understand the other.

For the adult third culture kid, returning to a childhood country can also be emotionally complex. They may speak about it with affection and regard it as home, while knowing that they no longer have the legal right, social position or community ties required to live there. A partner may not immediately understand how someone can feel so deeply connected to a place they do not intend, or are unable, to return to.

Individual or couples therapy can help someone explore how these different experiences of home enter their relationships. The aim is not to interpret every difficulty through their international childhood, but to understand when earlier experiences of movement, separation and cultural transition are shaping what is happening in the present.

Building an Identity Without a Fixed Address

What tends to help is not pushing someone towards choosing a single cultural identity, as though belonging were a matter of picking a team. It is finding a way to hold the different parts of their history together without feeling that one must cancel out another.

This can begin with recognising that uncertainty about belonging is not evidence that something is missing from your identity. Your identity may simply have been formed through several countries, languages and cultural environments rather than one. It can be helpful to think about which parts of each culture feel genuinely yours, rather than asking which culture you belong to completely.

It is also important to make space for the losses that came with moving. This might include friendships that ended, places you could not return to, languages you became less fluent in or versions of yourself that belonged to a particular time and country. These losses can coexist with gratitude for the opportunities and experiences that international life provided. Acknowledging what was painful does not mean rejecting what was valuable.

Looking for continuity can also help. Rather than searching for one place that feels entirely like home, it may be more useful to notice what has remained meaningful across different places. This might include particular relationships, family traditions, languages, food, music, religious or cultural practices, personal values and ways of understanding the world. Returning to these can create a sense of stability that does not depend on remaining in one geographical location.

Maintaining relationships with people who understand different periods of your life can be valuable too. Third culture kids sometimes have friendships spread across several countries, with no single person knowing their whole history. Staying connected to people from different stages of your life can help those parts of your identity remain accessible. Meeting other people with internationally mobile backgrounds can also offer a form of recognition that may be difficult to find elsewhere. There is often relief in not having to explain why “Where are you from?” is such a complicated question.

It can also help to notice how quickly you begin preparing to leave. Some people find that they hold back from investing in friendships, communities or their surroundings because part of them expects another move. Putting down roots does not have to mean committing to one place forever. Joining a local community, developing regular routines, making your home feel personal and allowing relationships to deepen can create a sense of belonging in the present, even when the future remains uncertain.

For some people, the most useful question is not “Where is home?” but “What allows me to feel at home?” The answer may involve certain people, languages, routines, values or ways of living rather than a particular country. Home can become something carried across places without becoming meaningless or temporary.

For some clients, London itself becomes the first place that ever feels genuinely theirs, not because it resembles home, but because it is where they finally stopped waiting to leave.

At Heathwell, many of our clients have international backgrounds. Some work with us in person at our Blackheath practice after settling in London, while others work with us online from wherever they are living. We regularly support clients based in Monaco, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UAE, as well as people who have moved between several countries and do not experience any one of them as an uncomplicated home.

Many of our therapists also have international backgrounds. They understand third culture and expatriate experiences through their clinical work, and several also bring their own lived experience of moving between countries, cultures and languages. This means that questions of identity, belonging and cultural difference do not need to be treated as unusual or explained from the beginning.

Therapy can offer a place to bring together the different parts of your history, grieve what was lost through repeated transitions and consider how those experiences continue to affect your relationships and choices. The aim is not to decide which culture is truly yours, but to help you develop a sense of identity broad enough to include all the places and experiences that have shaped you.

If you grew up between countries and have never felt fully anchored in one place, you can work with us in person in Blackheath or online internationally, where the therapist’s professional and insurance requirements allow. Get in touch to discuss your therapy needs and find a therapist with the experience and understanding most relevant to you.