Detached Aloof Pattern

There are four or five common emotional patterns found in adult missionary kids. I am currently recovering from (among other things:)) the "Detached Aloof" emotional pattern. David L.Wickstrom describes it this way:

"One frequently observed set of behaviours in adult MKs is the detached aloof pattern. They have been hurt many, many times and decide they are never going to get hurt again. The picture that is often presented is: "I am independent; I don't need anybody; everybody can rely on me, but I don't need to rely on anybody else." The person may be very friendly and easy to talk with, but even after spending considerable time, you feel you don't really know who they are.
Many adult MKs have this detached aloof pattern, but it is even more common in adult MKs who attended boarding school as children and decided at some point, "I'm never going to get hurt again; I will be separate from other people and nobody is going to touch me. I am a rock that can handle anything." And many of them do. They are successful, strong, and very good at what they do, but they are also detached and aloof-untouchable. On the surface they may appear very stable; below the surface the reality may be that they don't let themselves feel."

You don't have to have attended boarding school to default to this pattern. You don't have to have experienced trauma or parental separation. This pattern is common to varying degrees in people who have said a lot of goodbyes or experienced cultural isolation at a very young age.

I recognized this pattern in myself when I realized that I NEVER process my feelings in real time. This has made for quite a build up which I have spent the last two years deconstructing and attempting to separate out strands of grief, loss, anger and trauma. I have recently had the opportunity to grieve cleanly, in real time, alongside people whom I have allowed into the process. What a difference!

"I have often felt like a refugee in my own country. However, when I finally began a conscious effort to reconcile this contradiction (in my late thirties), my heritage turned out to be quite different from the rootless, maladjusted stereotype I had accepted. The more I examined the distinctive combination of grief, alienation,and nostalgia that I associated with the TCK legacy, the more I noticed that many of these "unique" characteristics were also shared by immigrants and refugees. A greater portion of American blues,folk, and rock and roll lyrics seem to be motivated by a nagging sense of loss, a desire for wholeness that is often phrased as a longing for home. Then I began to notice that the Christian sacrament of Communion- by its very name a celebration of community- expresses these same yearnings: "Do this in remembrance of me" Share and be made whole. Be assured that you will find your way home.
My own pilgrimage to remember and be reconciled with a fragmented past has been no less of a redemptive experience- and one equally dependent on the power of community. Instinctively, I understood that to connect more fully in the present- to feel at home- I had to reconnect with my past. My "formative identity", I discovered, included not only the experience of international living, with the attendant cycles of uprooting and reentry, but also the particulars of history and place."

"Rediscovering a Sense of Place"
Paul Asbury Seaman