Living Between Cultures

Between Cultures

There's a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being slightly foreign in every room. Not unwelcome — just never entirely at home. If you grew up between your parents' culture and the one outside the front door, or moved somewhere that runs on rules nobody explains, you know the feeling. It's easy to carry for years without ever naming it. 

​Therapy offers the space to reflect on your experiences. 

Having moved between cultures myself, I've found this comes up in therapy more often than people expect. Not usually as the presenting problem — more as something running underneath the presenting problem. Which parts of yourself belong to your family, which to the place you live, and which to you. What obligation you owe, and to whom. What it cost to become fluent in a culture your parents never fully entered, and what it costs them that you did.

For some, there's a deeper displacement underneath — the sense of being cut off from a place where your family was rooted, where life had a continuity you can feel the shape of even if you never lived it. That loss can sit under a lot of things without ever being named.

People often arrive at some version of the same thing: not choosing one side, but sorting out what in each is actually theirs. Many come to value the double view eventually — the ability to see how any given world works from slightly outside it. That usually isn't how it feels at the start.

If this is familiar, I offer a free [15-minute] consultation call  You can leave a confidential voicemail at 805-307-7066.