House Of Peregrine (01:03)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the House of Peregrine podcast. Today I am sitting down with someone who deeply understands what it means to grow up between worlds and then try to make sense of who we are. Dr. Rachel Cason is a third culture kid turned therapist, writer, and now podcaster who helps people untangle the layers of their globally shaped identities. She spent years working with expats, TCKs, and anyone who's felt caught between places.

helping them to navigate the tension between movement and rootedness. talk about what it means to live local when your heart is used to crossing borders, how story can work, can help us process our journeys and why embracing the fullness of our experiences takes real courage. Rachel is also the author of Incredible Lives and The Courage to Live Them, where she unpacks these themes with care and insight. Welcome to the show today, Rachel. I'm so glad you could join us.

Rachel Cason (01:58)
Thank so much, what a lovely introduction. I'm just like, yeah, I get to do all of that.

House Of Peregrine (02:04)
That's exactly

right. And sometimes it's easy to forget, right? I really wanted to talk to you today because you use story in a way that resonates really strongly with me. And so first off, before we dive into that, because I'm really excited to do that, I want you to tell us where you grew up and include in that, maybe start with your definition of what a TCK or third-colonial kid is, if you wouldn't mind.

Rachel Cason (02:10)
Yeah.

Sure, defining terms, always important. So TCK, in terms of how I use it, Third Culture Kid, I persist in using Third Culture Kid even for adults, the grown-up equivalents, not equivalents, the grown-up versions of us. Because for me, the kid piece signals when all of that movement and all of that crossing cultures

happened and that kind of developmental tenderness in those early chapters of life. So I keep calling myself a third culture kid, even though I'm not. I have aged, but the kid bit is where I still sit using it. Not to the extent that I'd object to anybody using another term, but that just explains my framework. And I borrow heavily from Pollock and Van Raake and I'm really guided by

their breakdown of the three cultures. Although Tanya Crossman in Misunderstood does a really nice nuanced sort of evolution of that as well. But essentially the first culture would be considered our passport culture or bureaucratic citizenship, kind of where says we belong to them basically. And that does have a really bureaucratic flavour.

And so obviously for a lot of people it can be multiple. But that's the first of the trio. And then the second would be your host cultures or the places you've spent time. And again, plural for most of us, although on a scale, right? And then the third bit is the bit that we all kind of tussle over mostly. It's that for me, and again, heavily with Pollock and Van Raken in mind,

It's that shared set of experiences that we collect around movement and around movement often between organizations and so organizational culture is a big thing for me there, making sure that's actually included in our understanding of culture and just understanding that there's a framework and a set of experiences that we often do collect and can connect with each other over.

House Of Peregrine (04:16)
and that's what I'm about. You do?

Rachel Cason (04:33)
It doesn't mean we've all experienced it the same way, but a sort of shared set of experiences is that third space that then we often find ourselves bonding over.

House Of Peregrine (04:33)
We will be right back.

Okay. And so that's the third culture.

Rachel Cason (04:50)
that's the third bit. Sometimes people will talk about it as it being a blended space. I'm not so sure it's entirely a blended space because otherwise I wouldn't have anything in common culturally with somebody who went to different countries or came from different passport countries because their blend is going to be completely different from my blend. So I think that third bit is...

the fact that we blend might be more that shared piece or the fact that we know how we feel about packed suitcases or the fact that we've engaged with different languages. They're not the same languages, but the experience of that engaging with is the shared experience, if that makes sense. And so in terms of my own TCK background, I was born and raised in Niger in West Africa.

to missionary parents and so that is its own kind of flavor of TCK experience. And then that was mostly the rhythm. Absolutely, absolutely. We do have these different organizational things. When I was doing my research actually that some subgroups have more in common with other subgroups. So for example, the kind of structured timed rhythm of mission kids might align more with military kids.

House Of Peregrine (05:44)
It's like a subgroup within a subgroup.

Rachel Cason (06:03)
and then say business kids who might be on a different timeline of rhythm and there might be less organisational structure as well. But again, it massively depends case by case, story by story. But I was essentially on a kind of four one ratio moving between Niger and England with seven months in there as a young teenager in France, Niger being francophone. So there was some French study in there.

And that was essentially my trio of countries. And then at 16 returning to England early planning on returning 18, but kind of cut a four into two of the Niger portion and came back at 16, did A levels, went to uni, studied TCKs and here we are.

House Of Peregrine (06:55)
And so what brought you to that? I can imagine that if you are growing up this way and you come back to England, you might wonder why you're so different, or did you already know?

Rachel Cason (07:03)
think I already knew, and I think this is something quite central to the TCK experience, is that we already know that we are different wherever we go and we already know that we're not staying. And that feels particular to the migration experience as opposed to kind of we are migrating, we are doing life here now.

even if there is sort of return visits this is our settled point for most TCKs wherever we are we know we're not staying on some level which yeah

House Of Peregrine (07:34)
Yeah, on some level. Which

affects how you experience everything, both positively and potentially negatively, both ways. So attachment-wise, you never fully attach to a place, you never fully arrive. Well, and that's a question I have, is do you see in yourself and others that there's a different kind of attaching to a place?

Rachel Cason (07:46)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'd say it's more a different kind of attaching than a not attaching. In fact, because I mean, say for my example, I'm probably one of the most settled because of the back and forth in the variety of TCK. So I would go back to the same host country, whereas a lot of people are going on. So in that sense, there was a real sense of this is the base, even though I know it's not.

I know that at some point in my teenage years I will leave, it's there at the back of my consciousness. But you also know that if there's political instability or there is hardship in the country, you have an out. You're going to be plucked from that place. So in terms of attaching, however fond you are, however close you are,

you don't get to keep it and you know that you don't share the same trajectory as people staying there. So there is this kind of a apartness that can show up. Now saying that we can end up incredibly heart attached and incredibly identifying with certain elements of culture. Some TCKs get really into language and that massively increases connection possibilities.

So then that loss on leaving is felt. It's not a not attachment. It's just we know we don't get to keep

House Of Peregrine (09:12)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And so when you were at university, did you, you knew you wanted to study this. What, what, what brought that out? How did that?

Rachel Cason (09:25)
Not entirely, actually. Yeah, so what happened was I did a dual honours degree in sociology and French. Not a linguist, but felt kind of this duty to pursue the language that I'd had a leg up in for as long as possible and found a university that would let me combine those two. And then during the sociology, I'd fallen in love with sociology very early on. I'd had been lucky enough to have access to it through my GCSEs and it just

it explained everything. It's like, oh, this explains why my identity is multiple. This explains why the way I do this identity here is different from how I do this identity there. It just sort of gave a framework that made it all make sense. And there was a module on diaspora in my kind of migration strand of sociology, and we were supposed to choose

a group to kind of do a presentation on and of the list provided, TCKs were not there and I thought well, I wonder if I can get away with this and just put them there and do it on that because I could see an awful lot of overlaps in sort of the definitions of what qualified and I got away with it and my professor looked at it at that point and said there's a doctor in this because

like with many people they know TCKs, they might be TCKs but they didn't have a framework or an ideological framework to hold that as a phenomenon in itself. So that became the project was then okay how do we do this because in the States there's already much more going on around that than in the UK when I was doing it which is a while ago now.

House Of Peregrine (11:14)
Yeah.

And so it gave yourself as well as others, a identity or a framework in which to view their cultural experience or their combined cultural experiences, which is really cool. So that kind of became something of your passion. that it's been with you for a long time, studying of what third culture kid, what might be happening.

Rachel Cason (11:26)
Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah.

House Of Peregrine (11:38)
in the Third Culture Kid movement or the migration, however you, there's lots of words we use. Some people adopt some, some people don't. So I'm always, I'm open to all of them, because as you said, there's so many different layers to this. And in fact, as many people as there are, there's probably that many layers. So, yeah.

Rachel Cason (11:45)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, and where I'm positioned now more therapeutically, I can sit in that kind of what words make sense to you, let's explore why they make sense to you, let's go with that. On an academic side of things, the the terms becomes really critical to making the study make sense. I get to kind of go over here now and just kind of whatever makes heart sense to people.

House Of Peregrine (12:13)
the point.

Yeah. So tell

me about that journey from academia to you are a licensed psychologist in the UK.

Rachel Cason (12:29)
So this is one of the fun games of international work on any kind of therapeutic front. So I'm not a psychologist and we don't have a licensing system for counsellors in the UK. So our training program is entirely different. We have standards and we have ethical boards and we have professional groups and we have supervision and we have rigorous training.

but we don't have a licensing medicalised system around counselling in the UK. So I am a trained counsellor in but I did that after I started the Life Story work actually. So it all began for me working out a framework.

born entirely of my research. So when I was looking at doing research on TCKs, I was like, how do I do this? I am a TCK, I'm researching TCKs, any TCK, I hear a lot from TCK researchers and it's just, it's a very familiar battle for all of us. You are what you are studying. And I was very conscious. didn't want, I had a particular TCK story and one of my interests was to try and...

create as much scope for multiple TCK stories as possible. I was feeling frustrated myself with a sense of profiling at the time and I didn't want to contribute to that. So I was looking around for methodology that would allow for scope and interrupt any of my own biases and I landed on Life Story Interview. So with Life Story Interviewing, it's a beast to code.

because it's so open. But that was a brilliant experience in itself. But essentially, I'd sit down and block out a two hour gap. And most interviews landed around there and just went, tell me your life. And they would start at birth to present day. Some people would go generations before birth because we know with TCKs context is key. So to explain to you why I was born in this place, I need to give the background.

of my relationship to that place before I even existed. And so we would start wherever made sense to that person and they would come up and that gave this incredible flexibility for people to bring all of the fragments of self into the room at the same time. And so while I was getting all this fabulous data for my study, I was also noticing the experience for the participants.

which was a very unique moment where they weren't filtering or censoring or chopping up their story to try and figure out which bit would make most sense to me and how to like gauge it. A, they knew I could kind of grasp the particularities of their experience, but they could also just bring it all together in a kind of...

coherent timeline and the coherence started to emerge as they were talking. They would join dots, they would find themes, they were sort of self-therapizing, if you like, in that framework. And that was really exciting to see, really, really exciting. And so by the end of the research, I'm like, OK, that is something I could take forward as a simple service to adult TCKs. There's lots going on for younger ones and even college age, but for

House Of Peregrine (15:24)
Yeah.

Rachel Cason (15:40)
adults and older adults to have space to simply bring their story and watch the magic happen from that process. I thought well what would happen if I created a structure and a space for that with all the boundaries of confidentiality and care and just that's what happened and that started to snowball and that built into a business and then later on I decided to train as a counselor

which I can then do for UK citizens here in the UK. And then just recently I finished coaching training as well, which is a worldwide thing. Again, I can do like the live story, but a slightly different focus again. So there's sort of three hats that I wear. Yeah.

House Of Peregrine (16:23)
Yeah. I want to go back to

the life story thing for a second, because when you do this, I think when I've talked to people about this, when you introduce yourself, something as simple as introducing yourself is not straightforward because you're always, you're always gauging what the other person can understand, what they want to be here, what they mean, what they're trying to get out of the interaction, because there isn't a straightforward answer that they're looking for. And so do you think

There's therapy just in being able to answer the question honestly.

Rachel Cason (16:54)
Yes, absolutely. And making that shift, like you were just expressing, we're constantly thinking about what they need from the interaction. And I remember reading Goffman's work, sort from the 50s around presentation of self and identity. is sociologist that frames it as a performance, essentially. He talks about being on stage. And if the audience...

doesn't understand what's happening on stage, the actors are the ones who are shamed, typically. And that feels very present for TCKs. Instead of, okay, they just didn't get it, we feel like we've done it wrong. And that matters. And that keeps our focus very much on what the audience needs, rather than on what we're actually wanting to do, what we're wanting to tell the story, rather than writing our own script.

essentially. And so for me the process of storying centers us as authors so that we can come to a place of going you didn't get it? Okay. Feel free to ask questions, I can give you some notes after the show or just that's okay. You can be confused. I'm so confident in I am who I say I am that you not understanding doesn't actually shake that. That's okay.

House Of Peregrine (18:08)
Wow. That must

lead to a lot of, so not having that must lead to a lot of loneliness.

Rachel Cason (18:16)
Yes,

yeah, because you're constantly pruning pieces off in case people don't get it, in case they don't connect with it. And of course in the process we're disconnecting from it as well. And so finding ways to really, I often feel like when I'm watching somebody work through their story we're kind of going back into the past and we're gathering them up and kind of bringing them back into the present with us.

House Of Peregrine (18:26)
Yeah.

Rachel Cason (18:41)
we'll often have this sense of I don't know who I am as if there's a void but there's just so much of us and finding a way to kind of bring all of those pieces in and let them integrate and let them play nice with each other and find appreciation and expression for all of them and let them be big and occasionally confusing that's okay

House Of Peregrine (19:01)
Yeah, because it is big. It is big

to start life in a new place. It is big to have different languages, different cultures that you're aware of, you have a deeper understanding of. So there actually, in a way, is more of you.

Rachel Cason (19:13)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think of this in terms of, this is where sociology was so brilliant for me, because we could go, okay, so there are roles, there are social roles. have, am woman, I am sibling, I am parent, I am white. And you could go on and on, I'm this age or whatever. And then we take each one of those and we apply them to each one of the cultures we have inhabited. So I am woman in Niger, okay. I am woman in England.

I am woman in France. Those are three different ways of womaning already. So each one of these points multiply out. Like that's how much we're holding within us and negotiating between. so naming them, observing them, understanding them as characters at play, and then making conscious choices about how we interact with them. It's just so powerful.

House Of Peregrine (19:43)
Thanks for listening.

Yeah. And do you find, I can imagine, that once people have recognized that they're holding more than maybe the average person can understand, that makes it feel better that they don't understand, that there's nothing wrong. Yeah.

Rachel Cason (20:17)
Yeah,

there's nothing wrong and it's not necessarily rejection either. But also actually the more precise we can get about the more we're holding, the more likely we are to find connecting points with people from vastly different experiences. So I can sit here and go, well, I've got all these different ways of being woman. Well, the person down the street who has lived in the same street their whole life is probably negotiating with multiple gender expectations as well, actually.

House Of Peregrine (20:43)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Cason (20:45)
But if I can get precise that that's what I'm actually doing, it's not that, I'm negotiating with African gender identities or expectation. I'm negotiating with just gender identities and expectation. I can get precise. Now I can connect. Now we can both actually find that thread between us. There's something about getting the big and getting it really specific that actually really does connect us. very, it's very excited.

House Of Peregrine (20:58)
Yeah.

And

it strikes me that maybe the better you know yourself, the more you can connect with others. And having a framework to understand your experience, such as a life story, like exercise, is connecting you to yourself so you can connect to others as well. But it's not available in school. Like, there's not like they're like, hey, everyone.

Rachel Cason (21:16)
Absolutely.

House Of Peregrine (21:30)
everyone who's from different cultures, you we're going to teach you a language, we're going to identify that maybe you're not as good at the language or give you extra support that way, but just the concept of your life is not really given to us this way. So that's really interesting. And history is also complicated. Every part of learning history is then suddenly you're on different sides of it. So I can imagine that this is a very, very nice exercise. And so when you're working with people, so a good example, so I just realized after I moved,

So I've only moved to one country from the US to the Netherlands. I started realizing my story in a whole other context as well, because my ancestors came across the plains as Mormon pioneers. And so they came from England to, you know, across in the boats and then the hand carts and then the struggle and the religious persecution and all of these things I heard growing up and they shaped who I was. And then suddenly I'm leaving the States.

Rachel Cason (22:09)
Right.

House Of Peregrine (22:23)
Luckily, I wasn't running away. was running towards something. I wanted my kids to be bilingual and I wanted to live abroad. That was a goal of mine. But when I got here, I realized I was reversing their story in a way. And so that was a really powerful moment of realizing how stories, how strongly stories affect the stories we hear about our country, ourselves, our family, our religion, our other people's religions.

They shape how we live our lives. so for me, story has always been such an important thing, but I just didn't have any awareness. I'm returning my family to Europe. This is a big deal. This is generational potentially, like you said. And that was just such a moment of recognition.

Rachel Cason (23:07)
stories make meaning right? Stories hold all of the characters at play and become the way we frame our experiences so the more consciously we do it the more conscious we are of the themes at play, the more power we've got in that to give it the meaning that is actually useful to us and propels us and motivates us and excites us and offers compassion for ourselves as well.

House Of Peregrine (23:30)
Yeah.

Rachel Cason (23:31)
That was pretty powerful.

House Of Peregrine (23:31)
Yeah. And so when you're talking to people about this, are you able to, well, I guess my question is, are you able to, with the story, the life storytelling, that's one modality that's really powerful. Maybe if people are

struggling or when do they usually come to you for this type of experience?

Rachel Cason (23:52)
So typically people have already explored some kind of therapeutic process and found it beneficial when targeting specific challenges or maybe a specific event that they found difficult. People come to me when they're looking for context for all of that generally. unlike traditional counseling, we're not going in with a particular problem at play that's really

specific, we're often looking at a general sense of, I think I'm sensing patterns relationally, I've got a career decision coming up and I'm remembering how I've done other career decisions and I'd like to be more conscious about how my background might be impacting this. So it's taking a broader view and a lot of it is exploratory rather than fixing or mending even.

So it's a slightly different tone to the work typically. Now within that things might happen and there might be specific things that come up and get named but it's you're looking at this context that then informs everything else and then everything else seems to fall into place much more easily actually because you're holding that of course this is a thing of course I do it this way of course these are the options I would consider.

now what? Now how do I consciously either perpetuate that story, lean into it or change it?

House Of Peregrine (25:14)
Yeah. So it's almost like navigating

your life differently, knowing what's inside of you. Yeah, cool. And what does that process look like? Is it very much like you're in a two hour session with you, or is it an ongoing process? How does that look?

Rachel Cason (25:21)
Yeah, absolutely.

So it's however people... I'm very TCK about this in the sense that it's whatever works for you. We've done so much moulding and so much adapting. I make it my job to keep moulding and adapting to the TCK so that they don't have to anymore. it's set by people's expectations and needs. If somebody wants to come for one session, two sessions, great. We make space for that.

we do the story bit and we maybe notice some themes and then that's enough. That's all people want. Typically what happens is that there's a longer term piece of work because, and this surprised me actually when I started, I thought 12 weeks, we'll go to the story, we'll identify some themes, we'll dig into it a bit and then off people will trot. A lot of people sit longer and when I've been observing that happen, I think it's...

an unusual thing to be able to sit as a witness with somebody through the changes they're making in their own story. So it's, we tell the story, we have an initial two hour session, sometimes we get to up to date in that two hour session, sometimes we're still eight years old and we put a pin in it and we carry on and that's fine. Again, people can take as long as they want to over that.

And different neurotypes will approach the story process differently as well. Some people are kind of analyzing as they go, in which case it will take longer. And some people are telling it and then going back. Again, your brain dictates that process. I roll with it. And then after that, some people are noticing what they want to be different, noticing that they're making contact with their sense of self in a new way.

And I get to be an ongoing witness to that in a way that a lot of TCKs just haven't had ongoing witnesses. Which I didn't anticipate when I started, but it feels like a real privilege actually as part of the work. That I don't time limit work, people tell me when they're done with me. And that means they're in control of the ending as well, which in and of itself feels like part of the work.

House Of Peregrine (27:34)
Resonant. Yeah. Being

in charge of endings. Being a witness is an age old practice for elders or for medicine people in different traditions. Witnessing sometimes some people call the trees a witness. And so having a witness is actually a really powerful concept that we can't, you can't always

Rachel Cason (27:38)
Exactly, Yeah.

Yeah.

you

House Of Peregrine (27:55)
like explain, but can it's it's a shifting it shifts people's inner worlds in ways that actually are really difficult to explain.

Rachel Cason (28:05)
Yeah and especially because TCKs are often still in a space of movement in their adult life, I might witness them through multiple changes of country, through a change of career, through changing relationships, through their own inner change as they position themselves differently to their story. And that can be really challenging for people but they lean into it because

To keep showing up and let somebody see you who knew you is a different shape. That's new for a lot of us. Like we left, we moved, we did the change, ta-da, here's a new us. And so to let somebody in, to keep bringing them with you can be really unsettling and grounding at the same time, that makes any sense. It's a sort of uncomfortable new, yeah. Yeah.

House Of Peregrine (28:50)
Yeah, no, it's a new kind of relationship. Because unless you move around with your family

as a kid, even then, everyone's changing so much, it's probably hard to have a witness or an okayness or a... Yeah. You said something interesting that I wanted to just go back to. So different neuro types. I've heard it said, and I don't know if it's true, I don't know if there's research, that there's actually a larger population of...

Rachel Cason (28:58)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

House Of Peregrine (29:18)
people who have different neuro types in the international community or TCKs. Have you found that in any of your research?

Rachel Cason (29:24)
So not in my research. It wasn't something I was looking for or particularly aware of at the time. But what I have noticed is I feel like proportionately, I'm working with quite a high number of people who identify or who have been diagnosed as not neurotypical, shall we say, neurodivergent. But there's a few reasons that could be. A, it's

more challenging to walk through the world if you don't fit the standard expectation of ways of thinking and being and so we're more likely to end up in a therapeutic context in the first place so there could be like a self filtering to increase that proportion. But also I mean my hunch is that look who parented us, people who just decided to leave the country.

and do life completely differently somewhere else. Or who joined organizations with quite strict structures and formats and rules. And you could make a fairly intuitive argument there for self-selection on a genetic front. And of course, then they're going to have children. So that could be part of the play as well.

The other piece, of course, is that there can just be presentational overlap. So we often talk about TCKs as restless. We often talk about ADHD as restless. It could be for entirely different reasons, but the presentations might look very similar. From where I'm sitting.

House Of Peregrine (30:50)
pattern recognition.

Rachel Cason (30:53)
Yeah, We talk about TCKs being really good at reading the room and kind of intuitively knowing how to manage people. Hello, trauma, vigilance, reactions. Again, lots of overlap. Where I sit is much more, let's look at what's happening, let's look at your experience and let's accommodate around that and whatever labels, diagnoses work for you. Yes.

let's do it. If it doesn't work for you it kind of doesn't matter because we're going to stay so focused on you anyway and your story. That's how we're going to frame it is entirely based on what works for you anyway. So but yeah it's something I'm noticing.

House Of Peregrine (31:29)
Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah.

And another thing from my past that I think you might find interesting is the culture I grew up in, and I'm not religious, but I did grow up in Utah, Mormons write their stories in journals. That's a big cultural thing. They write, they write, they write, they write. And so I now, as looking back, I can see that as a form of finding yourself in time and space.

Rachel Cason (31:48)
Right, interesting.

House Of Peregrine (31:56)
recounting stories over and over again. Of course, it's another way to get people to tell history over and over again the way you want them to, but it strikes me that this could be very helpful for a population of people who were uprooted many times.

Rachel Cason (32:08)
Absolutely, absolutely, because you are creating the container for yourself to make sense in. Rather than kind of that sense some of us can carry of like being pulled from stage to stage to stage and the stage is set and you're thrust a script and on you go. We can start to understand that stage, we can start to mould it, we can start to decide what goes on it. We're creating it much more actively and that's a power shift.

House Of Peregrine (32:35)
Yeah,

that's amazing. And so the last question I want to ask you about this before we move on to your book and the rest of your work is, I'm a parent. I'm the one that said, OK, we're going to try a new life. And that comes with a lot of guilt and a lot of pride, like both of those things, because I think my kid's life is amazing. they have had to, they've taken the brunt of our move, basically. So I haven't learned Dutch. I didn't go to school in Dutch. I'm trying, but I'm not forced to.

They went straight into Dutch school. They have taken on the language and all the cultural differences there are, because there are many, even though we might think there's no culture shock. That couldn't be further from the truth. what is their advice you can give parents? Being a witness is one of them, it sounds like, just deeply listening to help kids make sense of their experience. Because especially if you've never done it as an adult,

You might not understand what's going on for your kids if you are in this situation. So do you have any other words of wisdom for us that way?

Rachel Cason (33:34)
think that's the key actually is to recognise that your children are culturally different from you. And I've walked that in the inverse in that I'm the TCK raising a non-TCK. So they're a different culture to me as well. And to allow space for that deep listening and to allow there to be the impacts that the kids say there are. So rather than having...

House Of Peregrine (33:43)
in which you have that in a half-toothed teacake raising, non-toothed teacake. So, the hair is in my college there.

Yep.

Rachel Cason (34:03)
We get very attached to the stories we want our children to hold of our family, of our relationship, of their life. One of the big things that I hear is a barrier for TCK seeking support is that they are very conscious of privilege and gratitude and there's a strong narrative of what a great life they have actually often presented to them as contrasted with their peers back in their passport country.

So they've got to make sure their life is better than that because otherwise why did they leave that? Like, what was the point? So they're often presented this kind of, I have a better life than them, which is already debatable, but it's also a certain amount of pressure. So to just allow impact to just be, allow them to tell and to allow that story to change, I think feels really important.

House Of Peregrine (34:43)
I'm not going to do that.

Rachel Cason (34:52)
to hold it lightly while you're making space for it so that it's got space to breathe and grow and the child isn't over identified with the story they're telling. But the point is that they're the author and they're telling it and they get to retell it and they get to tell it differently and they get to change it. And we're just holding that and observing it. That feels the important bit from where I'm sitting.

House Of Peregrine (35:10)
Yeah, we're holding space. And so in practice, that would look like letting them say, I hate it

here. One, say they're younger kids. I hate it here. And then suddenly change it to, I don't hate it so much here. And not going back to, I thought you hated it here. Yeah. So it's really just evolving.

Rachel Cason (35:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah, absolutely. Letting it evolve and getting curious about it without trying to change it. So inviting specifics. What is it that you're hating? Okay, because that helps the child get their story more developed. So it's not to contradict it, but it's helping them notice themselves.

So when we pay attention to the child, they're paying attention to themselves. You hate everything. You hate every blade of grass. Or is it this particular dynamic or this weather or this language? Like, what is it? Not again, not to argue with it, but to just get it fleshed out in the same way that if a child presented us a story with the cat sat on the mat, we go, could we describe the mat? What kind of cat would be inviting that fleshing out? So the story becomes more real for them as well.

House Of Peregrine (36:17)
Yeah,

that makes sense. so acting as a witness to your child's experience while keeping in mind your own triggers, because it is very triggering for your kid to be having a hard time when you're the reason they moved. That is a big... And then you're already questioning, have I ruined their life? Have I made it worse? And even if it's going to get better, and this is what I had to tell myself, watching kids learn a language in a culture is excruciating when you know you could have prevented it.

Rachel Cason (36:30)
Yeah. Yeah.

House Of Peregrine (36:46)
but that you have to keep in mind this is going to make their life better. This is what I want for them. This is what, you know, that was a really hard thing for me to keep. It wasn't hard, but it was necessary to keep in mind that where they are now eight years in, they're so happy they're bilingual. They're so happy they're growing up in Amsterdam, both A, because they're used to it. They know nothing else, but they now see the advantages. But holding on for those eight years was quite intense.

Rachel Cason (36:48)
Yeah.

House Of Peregrine (37:15)
And it's part of parenting in general, but I think unique to if you've by choice moved and you're not forced or something. And so that's really good. So being a witness for your kids.

Rachel Cason (37:23)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah. But also witness yourself in that. So I think one of the best things we can do as parents is be really conscious of the stories we're telling about ourselves as parents. So am I framing my success as a parent based on this, this and this? Is that actually within my power? Am kind of dooming myself here or putting a lot of pressure on there?

House Of Peregrine (37:29)
as parents who's being conscious of the stories we're telling to our own self as parents.

based on this business.

Rachel Cason (37:45)
happiness or their facial expressions or their grades or whatever it is. And where's that coming from in my story? Where can I make that again, the more specific we can get, the more we can allow our stories to be separate and kind of go, well, what if there's a world in which them being bilingual actually sucks for them? Maybe that's maybe that's allowed. Maybe that's a potential story I can allow to exist, but I can still hold my story of

House Of Peregrine (38:06)
Yeah.

Rachel Cason (38:14)
I made these decisions with the best information in mind and the open heart that just hoped that it would be great. And that still makes me a great parent because I tried, you know, and we can kind of hold the intention and we can hold the care without grasping an outcome, which is actually part of their story. So sort of keeps us in ours, lets them have theirs and then just hugs hard.

House Of Peregrine (38:39)
Yeah. Well, and I think

that was what the awareness that came to me earlier maybe than it would have if I had. So it was very apparent that their story was going to be their story very early from when they were like three or four when we moved here even before. But that was it's it's confronting. Right. And usually we confront it if we if we don't already in teenage years. Right. But this was very confronting this other way.

Rachel Cason (38:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

House Of Peregrine (39:07)
Your kid speaking a language you don't understand is such a deep experience. Both good, bad, terrifying, exalting. Like there's so many feelings in it. But I've really enjoyed that process. It's helped me learn a lot about myself, I think. But yeah, that's really cool. Any other tips? Because you've done it. So now that you are a parent who's not kid moving around as much as you did, how is that for you? What are you learning?

Rachel Cason (39:30)
Oh, humility, I think, largely. Learning a lot. It's been a real eye-opener about my own strategies for moving through the world. So if we take relationships, for example, as TCKs, a lot of us circle around anti-conflict, but also a certain immunity.

to it to a degree in the sense that we're leaving or they're leaving so we don't have to deal with it very long it's kind of like okay so we don't really like them but we can kind of sit with it and or just lose them and it's fine because there'll be a new batch coming so we can go a few different ways with that but whereas for a settled child they're conscious of sticking around this

there's in my observation and it's you know a little case study of one but where I might as a parent be kind of observing fractious friendships and kind of like well maybe this is a moment to just step away and there's plenty of other people in your class and you could get to know them and to have my could go what no I like them I'm gonna I'm gonna it'll be fine I'm just gonna wait for a few weeks and see how it works out what

What? What is this? What is this patience and this grace? It's kind of like just wait and seen us. A lot of TCKs we don't carry are just wait and seen us. We don't have time for that. It's like decisions or just hunker down. But this kind of this nuanced kind of active engagement and sort of a I don't like this, but I'm not going to.

House Of Peregrine (40:46)
Hahaha

I appreciate it.

Rachel Cason (41:12)
leave it either. I'm just gonna try and assert who I am in a co... what is that? So just a lot of okay, my advice might be somewhat unhelpful here actually because I come from a whole other context and relationship with teachers was entirely different in an international mission school context. I was homeschooled till I was 11 so you know I'm kind of there going well they're just humans we could just have a conversation and my kids going...

House Of Peregrine (41:22)
Ha

Rachel Cason (41:39)
That is social death. What are you talking about? They are, of course, in other species. there's these kind of, my gosh. OK, how do we how do we do this? Keeping a learning head on.

House Of Peregrine (41:49)
Yeah, have my own.

Dutch schools, at least the ones my kids are in, they stay with the same kids from when they're six on.

Rachel Cason (41:55)
you

Right, okay. Yeah.

House Of Peregrine (42:00)
That is, and I'm not Dutch, so their

conflict resolution is totally different than mine. We went from a private school to a public school here. It's insane how unhelpful my advice is in general.

Rachel Cason (42:16)
I think that's just a really honest place to sit as a parent where you're like, well, here's what I've got. And we can just ignore that if that doesn't work. Okay. And again, coming back to witnessing and going, okay, well, you seem to have a grasp of the situation and I have a grasp of you so I can hold you

House Of Peregrine (42:21)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm gonna help you become who you want to be.

It makes you more of a collaborator. Yeah, it makes you more of a collaborator at a very early age. Yeah, but it's also really beautiful. So that's fun. Okay, I want to talk about your book. It came out last year. Tell us the title and then what it's about. What caused you to write it?

Rachel Cason (42:38)
letting them be different. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

So, it's called, I wrestled over this title and it's still too long really, but it's called Incredible Lives and the Courage to Live Them. And then of course the academic in me put a little tagline, Thoughts of a Third Culture Kid Therapist. I wrote it because, well, for several reasons. One was that people kept telling me to write a book. So I thought, okay, fine, I'll do it.

House Of Peregrine (43:07)
So, I'm ready.

Rachel Cason (43:18)
But essentially I used a lot of the writing that I'd already been doing for my blog. So it's a kind of compilation and edited edition, if you like, of writings over about a seven year period that I'd been putting together around different themes that kept coming up in my own life as a TCK and then in my work with TCKs as well.

House Of Peregrine (43:41)
We should.

Rachel Cason (43:41)
and they're very short chapters. I wanted it to be a kind of dip in, dip out. There's a lot of material out there for TCKs in the how to raise them, how to educate them, quite a few more academic research pieces coming out in terms of dynamics and themes and observations at play and quite a lot of advice books as well. And I wanted to bring something a bit different, something that was a

I see you, you're not alone kind of emotional touch point. And so that's the tone that I was going for with this book. And it's available on Amazon and it's available via Kindle and I recorded the audio book as well, which was an amazing experience. Again, neurotypes, a lot of people just take in better in an audio format and I love reading aloud. So that was a fun process. So it's available.

House Of Peregrine (44:34)
Awesome.

We'll link that below. And then lastly, I wanted to talk about your podcast.

This is coolest thing, recording this, and it's the coolest thing ever.

Rachel Cason (44:39)
Yeah, so you asked me before we started recording when I started it and I was like,

it must be at least a year now. And I looked it up and it was five years. Five years has been going. My sense of time has collapsed. I'm living in one place.

House Of Peregrine (44:50)
Yeah, before you tell me about it, tell me about how that

is for third culture kids often. You identify with the place and if you don't move, don't know time has passed the same way.

Rachel Cason (44:57)
yeah, yeah.

Exactly. A lot of people organise their stories by which house they were living in, by which country they were living in. That's how memories seem to organise themselves for a lot of us, is we time track with those kind of visual landscape stamps. And then when we've been in a place for a longer period of time, it just sort of moshes. That's certainly my experience.

I've been in the UK for a very long time now and trying to figure out what happened in what year is just not something my brain is very good at at all. But yeah, the podcast has been going for five years now. I've had periods with slight gaps, but the 147th episode is going out on Friday. And yeah.

House Of Peregrine (45:40)
what is it called and then

what do you talk about on there?

Rachel Cason (45:44)
Yeah, so it's called The Life of a TCK Therapist or Third Culture Kid Therapist and it's a bit similar in tone to the book if you like because it's short episodes about 15 to 20, 25 minutes long sometimes where it's mostly just me sharing experiences and insights I'm gleaning from my own day to day.

and themes that are coming up in my work with TCKs as well. So it might be around belonging or conflict or identity or travel or language or pets. The list goes on and on. But it's again, it's an emotional touch point of here's a thing that we might feel or do. Does this resonate?

if it does resonate here are my observations about why that might be going on and what might be a way into holding that. We might talk about grief and offer different ways into expressing that. It snippets and accompaniment I suppose, a little voice in your ear that says you're great and you're not alone.

House Of Peregrine (46:39)
Nice.

Yeah, your experience makes sense.

So it's like a little therapy in your ear every week. Nice.

Rachel Cason (46:51)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, they mostly come out on Fridays.

House Of Peregrine (46:54)
Okay,

cool. Well, I love the work you're doing. I think it's very, very resonant and important, but also I just think that having this framework gives more than that. It gives people the ability to tell their own story and identify and connect more in the world, which I love that. That's my favorite thing in the world is connection. So to yourself and to others and House of Peregrine, that's why we're doing what we're doing.

Rachel Cason (47:16)
Absolutely.

House Of Peregrine (47:21)
I love that you're helping people connect with themselves. How is the best way for people to reach you if they would like to work with you or consume your content? We'll put it all below, but tell people the best way to find you.

Rachel Cason (47:32)
Yeah it's probably my website is the best hub because everything's kind of linked in from there so sort of explore life story um.com I'm going to check that how often do you actually go to your own website and on there there'll be links to my Instagram and my Facebook as well I'm on LinkedIn.

Yeah, explorelifestory.com will have everything there. There's a little shop on there so you can find my book on there as well. I'm slowly adding to that hopefully some free resources and there'll be some nominal payment resources on there eventually as well when I get around to doing it. That's actually the portal by which people can send me an email if they want a consultation, although there is a waiting...

situation at the moment but I can happily get back to people. The podcast is linked on there, yeah, it's sort of central.

House Of Peregrine (48:25)
Okay.

All right. Thank you so much for coming on today. And I am really looking forward to continuing to follow what you're up and yeah, send people your way. So thanks so much for coming on and thank you everyone for joining us today on the House of Peregrine podcast. We will see you next time.