How To Feed A Ghost
Therapy Notes From An Adult TCK
In Mandarin the word for ghost is guǐ (鬼) and can be used as a curse word. Japanese Kanji uses the same character to mean a fierce and relentless demon. In Euro-American lore ghosts are often sinister too, but a ghost is primarily an unreleased spirit. Ghosts are spirits unable to cross into another life because something remains unresolved in their past. Living people can also get trapped in an old life.
You know that feeling that events are moving faster than you have time to give them proper attention? It’s tricky to decipher what things can be left in the past and which things I need to go back and tend lest they become heavier and heavier weights. My fear was that I’d be stuck in the past forever, trying and trying to resolve it but ending up a little haunted. It can make you sick, a haunting.
A poem by Phil Hall:
as of old a ghost haunts a house you've lost buy the house back feed the ghost
Not feed it like wood on a fire, feed it like soup to a sick body.
Mollie Adler likes to shift mental health questions from “what’s wrong with me” to “what happened to me?” While I was sick and haunted, it felt like a diagnosis would validate the pain I was in. A pain that I couldn’t make sense of. I was in weekly therapy for 8 months, and while a diagnosis can be helpful, ultimately I believe there isn’t anything wrong with me,1 but I did have a ghost to feed.
Therapy isn’t accessible to everyone, so I want to share some ideas and practices that I learned. Reading about or listening to other people’s breakthroughs has helped me immensely, but working through your own story with a therapist undoubtedly helps even more. My therapy took a surprising-to-me turn toward addressing my childhood in the context of being a TCK (Third Culture Kid).2
Research focused on TCK and ATCK (Adult TCK) mental health is pretty new, as are resources specific to care. TCKs tend to have significantly higher ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scores than their average American counterparts, and higher ACE scores translate into some additional struggles in adulthood, including higher rates of anxiety and depression.3
The ghost analogy is my own twist on the concept of the inner child. Unresolved grief is a huge thing among TCKs, including a sense of loss of place (or even displacement), so a disembodied spirit is a rich metaphor for us grown up emo-goths.
A Big Deal or Not a Big Deal?
I did not come to some of these conclusions linearly, but a logical place to start is how to figure out whether your ghost needs attention or not. Trauma, as its been explained to me, is one’s experience of an event rather than the event itself. I didn’t want to identify as traumatized because:
I want to think I have more control over my feelings.
I can point to a lot of other people who have suffered events that I see as considerably more awful than what I’ve experienced.
I felt embarrassed that my life has been pretty good in lots of ways but somehow I can’t stop being haunted by sadness.
I think people won’t believe me that I’m hurting. (Sometimes this is true!)
A person in psychological distress can’t always tell whether what they’re going through is a big deal or not. In hindsight, what would have been the greatest support to me was for someone I trusted to sit with me while I navigated the healthcare system to set up therapy. Since it’s something I was technically capable of, I didn’t ask for support during that process. My sister pointed out that “just because you can technically get out of bed doesn’t mean you’re not severely depressed” (oopsies!).4 Later, I saw a friend ask for and receive help finding a therapist from another friend, a wonderful act of non-invasive care.
If someone comes to you in psychological distress, do not: try to tell them how they’re feeling, ask why they didn’t say something sooner, call the police, or make any suggestion that they don’t ask for or that you haven’t personally been through.5
A great part about resolving grief with fellow TCKs, or any good therapist, is that they don’t question that the hurt is real. I needed to give that to myself too: I may not understand how or why yet, but I accept that things that I think shouldn’t have made me sad nevertheless made me feel very sad. Instead of “big deal” or “little deal,” just start with “it is some kind of deal to me.” I am worth the time and attention to take this seriously in myself.
This conversation about CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) resonated with me. I do not have (nor did I seek) a diagnosis for CPTSD, it was enough to allow this to be a helpful framing for my experience. CPTSD makes a category for what I like to call “death by a thousand papercuts.” Rather than a glaring most traumatic experience, prolonged trauma with a variety of sources can still make you sick.
When I had a period of severe depression and anxiety in 2023, I felt frustrated and confused about why now, when a lot of factors in my life were improving. I had a lightbulb moment of clarity after hearing the CPTSD episode: It is because of some improved factors in my life that my subconscious feels safe enough to let trauma that needs addressing come to the surface. I had the time, support, and resources to fall apart, even though I was never going to instigate it consciously.
At first it felt like my mind betrayed me, but later it felt like my body trusted me.
What a gift to have a safe place to not be okay, for an uncertain amount of time.
Another idea I read that is helping change my perception of own feelings is, “stop measuring your strength by how much pain you can endure.” This stood out to me especially because I couldn’t think of how else to define personal strength! I do not need to prove myself in the hardship Olympics.
So far, I have not found diagnostic terms to be helpful in determining “big deal” from “not a big deal.” Instagram-psychology quickly leads me to feeling that my personality is a conglomerate of symptoms. For example, “Oversharing as a defense mechanism? That’s ADHD!” I’m not professionally qualified to comment on the accuracy of that statement, but it’s not helpful because it encourages a “what’s wrong with you” outlook and makes me hyper-anxious about how I present to other people. If I ask “what happened to me” instead, I start to see that maybe I’ve felt ignored in my attempts to communicate things of importance. Or maybe it’s not actually a flaw that I open my mouth (!!!).
How To Grieve
I wish, for all our sakes, that I had a lot to say about how to grieve. I’ve had a lot of practice, but don’t feel good at it. Grief has a different face at every turn.
An obnoxious theme of the therapy I’ve done over the years is the reminder that I can’t control or change other people, I can only tend to myself. So much pain comes in relation to other people. There’s grief in accepting that restoration isn’t always possible. Or that some things that hurt aren’t anybody’s fault.
The poem says: buy back the house you lost, feed the ghost.
In one therapy session, I was describing a situation that felt eternally unresolved because other people didn’t grieve it the way it deserved to be grieved. My therapist asked me to set some time aside that week to actively grieve that particular loss. I more or less acted out a funeral, by myself. At first it felt contrived, but in the end it was a matter of dedicating my own attention to that grief instead of having my attention always drawn to other people’s faults. As much as you can, give yourself the thing you didn’t get that you needed.
With childhood loss and displacement in particular, looking at pictures helps me. It helps me remember things I’d forgotten (losing memories compounds the feelings of loss). It helps me see goodness and beauty and fun when my active memory focuses on pain. Pictures help me feel closer to people who are gone.
In my religious background, there’s a lot of wariness about spirits and any sort of communing with the dead. Subsequently, we have a pretty sterilized relationship with death. So I’ve started a sort of shrine - it’s just pictures of deceased family and one incarcerated friend. It’s a way to remember them more actively, to acknowledge death and separation as part of life. It’s a physical and visual space where I can invite my kids to place tokens of feeling - whatever they want to grieve can go there for however long they want it to stay there. Sometimes acting makes more sense than talking about grief.
And Now You’re Grown
I was surprised by how much a makeshift solo funeral helped. It wasn’t even for my ghost, but it did help me realize how much I was under a spell of feeling that to honor something lost requires grieving continuously. If I let this wound heal, I will forget, and how can I love what I forget? That idea had kept me revisiting, but not resolving, plenty of things.
There’s a common Millennial joke about “adulting” and how few Millennials perceive themselves as responsible adults (whatever that means). In fact, some social development does happens later for most TCKs than their monocultural counterparts, and it’s an excellent illustration of how asking “what happened to me” can destroy the shame of assuming “something’s wrong with me.”
Teenagers are classically rebellious, which is a necessary and good part of growing up. Rebellion is a testing of the boundaries of your relationships and society, and you find a place in society as you integrate feedback from that testing. In healthy home environments, a teenager can test out their personhood with a backdrop of love and safety from the adults in their life.
TCKs often delay rebellion, sometimes well into adulthood years, because it is not developmentally safe earlier. Researcher Tanya Crossman illustrated this through a scenario about making eye contact in a classroom setting. In most Western cultures, a teacher expects eye contact from students to confirm that the student is listening (“One, two, three, eyes on me!”). In many Asian cultures, a child making direct eye contact with an adult is disrespectful.
TCKs are praised for their adaptability, but adaptability or mirroring solidifies into a survival tactic that feels socially dangerous to outgrow. TCKs learn to assess every setting they’re in and choose the behavior that best fits the culture, because getting it wrong can be alienating, embarrassing, or even harmful.
I’ve changed a lot in the past few years. My location, my beliefs, my culture, my relationships, my interests, my stuff. Most of these changes were unplanned. As I’ve been learning to let some of my childhood self rest in childhood, I was also feeling a loss of my sense-of-self. I’ve had emphatic likes and dislikes my whole life, but as that source of identity has mellowed and depression further muted any general interests, I wanted to rally around my own core. But I couldn’t find her! I felt embarrassed to be having a teenage identity crisis.
It’s terrifying to be nothing, but exciting to be anything.
Tanya talks about decision paralysis for TCKs. TCKs get a high volume of input in childhood which makes “anything is possible” a lived reality. Not only is anything possible, but different ways of doing things have equal moral weight for many TCKs because we are taught multiple sets of social expectations. These various sets of social expectations often have conflicting moral codes. TCKs also experience that change is inevitable. So no matter what I choose, at any time, it will likely go against at least one lived cultural norm and potentially upset someone who knows me in that context. The inner child recognizes that as dangerous.
I made a cultural map with my therapist. She gave me a blank piece of paper (anything is possible) and asked me to label my cultures.6 Then she asked me to match different values and expectations and rules I’d learned to their corresponding culture. It felt almost impossibly difficult because I don’t really know where I got some stuff. I had to make it up a little bit, which turned out to be the point. Rather than being fully adapted or loyal to one culture or, impossibly, multiple cultures at once, I was asked to choose the things from each culture that I want to keep.
That is developmentally adulting - looking at your childhood and your history, letting go of the protections you needed then but don’t need anymore, and claiming and nurturing the things you want to be defined by. Paradoxically, this is where I release my adult self from identifying strongly as a TCK. I gave the ghost attention, I fed her, I let her feel so much mysterious sadness, I acknowledged her worries.7 I know how much you wanted to be good, with so many opposing signals about what good was. You did good, babe. You did so good. And then I released that spirit, because I grew up. I remember her and I love her, but I choose a different life.
A similar core-finding therapy exercise was organizing values cards. My therapist had a deck of about 40 cards, each with a word (such as Creativity, Freedom, Cooperation) and a short description beneath it. My job was to rank them by importance. I started out with about 35 of them clustered by “more important,” but I had to narrow them down, ever so painfully, to my top 10 (still too many, though I tried to tell her about containing multitudes).
I stared for a long time at these wonderful, extraordinary things that I have, and that I am. I stared so long that the therapist had a chance to ask, “what feelings are coming up?” Ugh! I hate when the thing that pops into your head is not what you were expecting or wanting, but you’ve got to say it. I cried because the extraordinary word soup made me feel lonely. Not alone, but not recognized in some way that I wanted.
Enter another adulting breakthrough, practicing self-validation. Children look to their surroundings and the adults in their life to gauge what behaviors are acceptable. I was still doing that a lot as an adult, then feeling very vulnerable and hurt when other people criticized me. It’s confusing to try and please people operating from separate codes. Self-validation is the same principle that helped resolve some grief: give yourself the thing you wanted from someone else.
When I express something that elicits pushback from someone else, I don’t need to rush to explain or defend myself. Instead:
I silently acknowledge that my feelings are hurt.
I give that feeling a little time to be felt.
I silently acknowledge that someone else’s criticism, even of my feelings, doesn’t invalidate my feeling or whatever opinion or information that I expressed.
Self-validation isn’t the same thing as being convinced I’m right about everything, it just prevents me from being derailed by other people’s input about my feelings. This has greatly improved how I feel about many relationships because I’m no longer disappointed that I’m not receiving what was never theirs to give.
Is this…enlightenment?8 Lol.
I looked up the phrase “giving up the ghost,” which I always thought was a euphemism for death. It actually means to give up on something because you no longer think you can do it successfully. Giving up my TCK ghost was needed because I can not successfully be her. That house is lost to me. It’s been so good to revisit so I can help that spirit cross over and say a better goodbye.
Again, there definitely ARE brain chemistry and situational components that cause illness, but it’s not “something wrong with me.”
My therapist is an ATCK (total coincidence!), as is my friend and TCK researcher Tanya Crossman, both of whom I’ll reference repeatedly.
More explanation about research on TCK ACE scores beginning around minute 27 on this podcast episode. If you listen to this episode, make sure to also listen to part 2 which is the good news that follows the bad.
Weeping in bed drawing by Edward Gorey in The Hapless Child (1980 edition).
In a life-threatening situation, if I didn’t already have a therapist, my first call would be to a non-police response team such as Durham’s HEART program. Second would probably be a suicide prevention hotline. However, there are no risk-free options that I know of and contact with institutions and authorities in the USA can add danger, especially for people of marginalized identities.
You can do this by yourself and let whatever realizations come, come. There are no rules - my cultural labels weren’t a 1:1 ratio with the names of countries, I chose hyphenated terms that included race and religion in some cultures, but not others.
Bonus mantra: “Does this still serve me?” I developed a special routine around grocery shopping during lockdown that was a great coping mechanism at the time, but can now make me anxious if I don’t follow it exactly. Lockdown is over. Does that routine still serve me? I’ve always been extremely anxious about money because I needed to be that careful. Some circumstances have shifted, does scarcity mindset still serve me?
Kant’s 1784 definition: emergence from self-imposed immaturity.