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

My Problem

"My problem is that I'm twenty-three years old and I've already had the experience of a lifetime."

Young foreign aid worker returning to passport country after two years in Colombia.

Re-Entry

"When I go back I know I shall be out of it; we fellows who've spent our lives out here always are."

Somerset Maugham The Gentleman in the Parlour

Adaptability

"Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation."

Mohandas Gandhi

Closure

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art of ending."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend."

Shakespeare

Ruth Van Reken's Article on Obama's TCK Team

Look at this interesting article on Obama's selection of TCKs...

MK Prayer

Father God,

You have planted us in soil far from our ancestral homes. You have asked us to walk your map and you have led us around the world and back again. We have seen your hand at work and we have felt your presence: in Venezuela, in China, in Indonesia, in Papua New Guinea, in Guatemala, in Japan. We have seen our parents follow your compass and chart their lives by your maps. We thank you for your presence and for your provision. Even as we are grateful we ask for your mercy.

Father God, we, missionary kids from every tribe and culture ask for your comfort. Would you enlarge our hearts to encompass the loss we have experienced? Would you comfort us and remind us of your presence as we say goodbye to friends and family, countries and cultures. We are weary of goodbyes. Sometimes we are weary of hellos.

Would you please draw near to us as we bear witness to a world in turmoil and darkness. We so often inhabit the last outpost,the "last homely house", the no man's land between the light and the pit. We have seen much and experienced much and the scars are on our hearts. Would you please release your healing on eyes that have seen too much too young, on tired and wounded hearts?

Precious Father, most importantly, would you daily remind us of who we are? Please root us in Yourself. Remind us that we find our identity in You alone and in the knowledge that we are strangers and aliens on this planet, passing through and on our way HOME.

Father God please use us for your Kingdom, as your Bridge People, as Restorers of the broken and the fragmented, as your Peacemakers, as those who offer your Comfort and your Healing. Please use our many languages, our many relationships, our longing for adventure, our love and respect for culture and for difference, our passion for the dark and forgotten places on this planet, our heart for the underdog and the marginalized. Please show us how to use our heritage for your purpose, for your kingdom. May it come quickly!!!

Amen

This short film was created by a TCK and does a great job of showing the complicated cultural bridging that a TCK must do to form a cohesive identity. It is GREAT!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfOtZ0Fp1-U

Garden of Exotic Gifts

"To children who successfully navigate a lifetime of change, the world is a garden of exotic gifts, a house of treasures to explore and take in. Transferred from place to place, young and porous, they collect and absorb experiences, their personalities amalgams of those cultures they internalize and claim as their own. Perched for a while in a new environment, they experience each move as an occasion for growth, a chance to blossom in new ways.
These children see the world in all its richness and variety. Theirs is a privileged life, filled with opportunities to extend and enhance their knowledge of the earth and its people. Bilingual or even multilingual at an early age , immersed in an interrelated, interdependent world community, they are able to enjoy a broader and more mature perspective than many of their more rooted peers. Theirs is a global education. Though they may regret the loss of a unifying tradition or history, they are grateful for the variety of experiences to which they have been exposed."

Unrooted Childhoods- Memoirs of Growing Up Global
Faith Eidse and Nina Sichel

Ahh.....Re-Entry

"My advice about coming home? Don't."
Japanese businessman

Boundary States

" Transformation is the true destination of transition, whether it occurs in a myth or in an individual's everyday life. How transition does that is a mystery, but it somehow involves being in a boundary state, where you spend time near a boundary between one state and another, or one life-phase and the next. The borders of Oz are everywhere, although the price of passage to the other side is often nothing less than your life- at least your life as you have known it. "
The Way Of Transition- William Bridges

" Boundary surfaces are everywhere the places where living formative processes can find a hold; be it in cell membranes, surfaces of contact between cells, where life forces are mysteriously present; in the great boundary surfaces between the current systems of the oceans, where various currents flow past each other in different directions- these are known to be particularly rich in fish; or at the infinitely extensive surfaces of the natural and artificial filter systems of the earth, where the water seeping through is purified and given back its vital qualities."
Theodore Schwenck

" Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination."
Andre Gide

Heritage

Critical to the development of an MK's identity is an awareness and acknowledgement of our spiritual heritage. One remarkable member of our tribe is the late Ruth Bell Graham, evengelist Billy Graham's wife. Ruth was a missionary kid to China and attended boarding school in North Korea. She re-entered the U.S. to attend Wheaton College where she met Billy Graham. They married and had five children. Ruth credited her sacrifical sharing of her husband ( with the world!)to her heart for the lost which was kindled at a very early age in China. Ruth's faith sustained her during her long separations from her husband. The poem below shows the depth of her character and her awareness of her identity in Christ as she departs China for the U.S. to attend college:

Test me, Lord, and give me strength
to meet each test
unflinching, unafraid;
not striving nervously to do my best,
not self-assured, or careless as in jest,
but with Your aid.

Purge me, Lord, and give me grace
to bear the heat
of cleansing flame;
not bitter at my lowly lot, but meet
to bear my share of suffering and keep sweet,
in Jesus' Name.

Ruth Bell Graham
Aboard the S.S. President McKinley, leaving China for college in America. 1937