The Invisible Systems We Live Inside: Dr. Katja Aegerter on Family, Stress & Life Abroad

Some of moving abroad photographs beautifully. The rest lives underneath — the grief of leaving, the pressure to make it worth it, the quiet way one parent's stress becomes the emotional weather of the whole home.

In this episode, Mickelle welcomes back Dr. Katja Aegerter — psychologist, researcher, and self-described serial expatriate — for a conversation that gives elegant language to what globally mobile families carry but rarely say aloud. Katja was one of the very first guests on the podcast, back in Episode 6, where she and Mickelle first explored third culture kids, grief, and identity across borders. She returns now with something new: published, peer-reviewed research proving what so many families have only ever felt.

Across nearly ten countries and two third culture kids of her own, Katja has spent years studying how transition stress moves through a family system. What emerges is a portrait of the accompanying spouse as the quiet architect of a family's success — and a gentle, rigorous case for seeing the whole family, not just the person whose name is on the assignment.

In this episode

• Stress ripples through the whole family system — consciously or not. What one person carries doesn't stay neatly contained; it moves into the home, the school, and the workplace.
• The overlooked value of the accompanying spouse — and the real cost to companies and governments of cutting the support that keeps a family (and an assignment) intact.
• Moving toward something, not away from something — reframing a move as intention rather than escape, and why your own attitude shapes how your children digest the change.
• How much you truly want to integrate — and why getting honest about that, especially in short postings, protects you from getting lost in the process.
• Knowing your own rhythm — introvert or extrovert — and building the network you actually need rather than the one you think you should want.
• Turning lived experience into research — how Katja made an invisible experience visible and academically legible, so families no longer have to prove their entire existence every time.

About the guest

Dr. Katja Aegerter is a psychologist, researcher, and self-described serial expatriate with nearly twenty years of international mobility experience. She has lived in almost ten countries across three continents and raised two third culture kids across four of them, which means she understands this life from the cultural side, the academic side, and the very human side of trying to hold a family steady while everything around it is changing.

She supports globally mobile families through her own psychology practice, and through workshops and trainings for parents of third culture kids on behalf of several European ministries of foreign affairs. She is trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and now sees clients in person from her new practice room in Bern, as well as online. Her two peer-reviewed papers — including a conceptual expatriate family stress model built for other researchers to test and expand — are published open access.

Find Katja and everything she's offering:

• Katja's HOP Link (all of Katja's links in one place): https://www.houseofperegrine.com/@katja

You can also revisit Katja's first conversation with Mickelle in Episode 6, and watch Mickelle's TEDx talk on the uncounted work of women in the economy — a thread that runs quietly through this whole episode.

Next steps

If you've ever laid awake wondering how a move is landing on the people you love, this conversation will feel like being seen. Listen to the full episode, then take Katja's invitation seriously: get to know yourself, name what you need, and give it to yourself, because a family is a system, and you are not a footnote in it.

Wherever you are in the world right now, may you move toward something and may you never have to do it from zero.