Coming Home to Nowhere: Understanding “Soul Lag” for TCKs and International Families

Sculpture: "I Viaggiatori" by Bruno Catalano, symbolizing "the void created by leaving one's country, one's family, one's people for another life."

The emotional reality of "home" visits that nobody talks about—and why it matters for globally mobile families

I just returned from three weeks in Penang, Malaysia—the island where I was born and raised until leaving for university at seventeen. It was my first time back in six years, the longest absence of my adult life. Everyone asks how it was. "Amazing," I say, because it truly was. "Life-changing," I add, because that's also accurate. What I don't mention is that I'm currently experiencing what feels like the emotional equivalent of decompression sickness—except instead of rising too quickly from ocean depths, I'm struggling to surface from depths of meaning that my regular life here in the US doesn't usually provide.

If you're reading this as part of an internationally mobile family, you probably recognize this feeling. It's the unnamed experience that follows "home" visits, family reunions across continents, or even transitions between international postings. It's the reason your teenager seems mysteriously withdrawn after spending summer with grandparents, why you feel strangely depleted after hosting visiting relatives, why that "perfect" family vacation somehow leaves everyone feeling vaguely sad rather than refreshed.

Welcome to what I'm henceforth calling "soul lag"— something like jet lag, but when the spirit, rather than the body, feels like it belongs somewhere else it has just come from—and for international families, it's not just an occasional inconvenience but a recurring reality that deserves better understanding than "you'll feel better once you shake it off."

IYKYK (If You Know, You Know)

For those of us who've grown up internationally mobile, "normal" is a complicated concept. My childhood meant navigating the peculiar identity of being half-Malaysian, half-Australian, perpetually foreign even at home—too Western for complete local acceptance, too Asian for expat comfort, too conspicuous for the anonymity that allows deep belonging.

This experience of existing between clear categories is the Third Culture Kid reality that thousands of international families navigate daily. We learn early that "home" isn't simple geography but something more fluid, complex, and provisional than our nationally-rooted peers understand.

Returning to Malaysia after six years away, I encountered familiar dislocations: shop owners constantly asking me where I’m from, cheerily bewildered when I point up the street and answer them in Malay... the sensation of being simultaneously insider and outsider in the place that shaped my earliest years. But something had shifted. The teenager who'd left carrying resentment about never fitting in had been replaced by an adult grateful for that displacement—recognizing it as accidental training in advanced emotional intelligence: loving without needing reciprocity; defining “home” as a quality of attention rather than a geographical location.

Defining “Soul Lag”

Soul lag manifests differently for internationally mobile families than for vacationers or occasional travelers, partly because our "meaningful experiences" often involve complex family dynamics across multiple time zones, partly because our emotional geography is more complicated to begin with.

When your American teenager returns from three months with grandparents in Singapore, they're not just processing jet lag but something more complex: temporary re-immersion in cultural patterns they'd been adapting away from, reconnection with extended family relationships that exist in suspended animation between visits, and the disorienting experience of being fully understood in contexts they can only access sporadically.

When your family completes a three-year posting in São Paulo and returns to "home" country, the children aren't just changing schools but mourning the loss of Portuguese fluency they'd worked years to develop, grieving friendships that will now require heroic effort to maintain, and facing the peculiar challenge of explaining their Brazilian selves to American peers.

When globally mobile parents visit elderly relatives in their countries of origin, they're navigating not just family reunion dynamics but the complex negotiations between who they've become through international living and who their families remember them being before they left.

The Expectation of "Grateful and Fine"

Here's what makes soul lag particularly challenging for international families: the cultural expectation that mobility should be purely enriching, that exposure to multiple cultures creates nothing but advantage, that globally mobile families should feel continuously grateful for opportunities most people never access.

This creates pressure to present international experiences as uniformly positive, to emphasize the privileges (which are real) while minimizing the genuine emotional costs (which are also real). Children learn early to respond to "How was your summer in Tokyo?" with enthusiasm rather than the more complex truth that included homesickness for friends back in Dubai, confusion about which cultural codes to follow, and exhaustion from constantly translating between different versions of themselves.

Adults in international careers develop sophisticated language for discussing logistical challenges—visa complications, housing arrangements, school placements—while lacking vocabulary for the emotional complexities of raising children who will never have a simple answer to "Where are you from?"

But soul lag is real, and for internationally mobile families, it's not an occasional inconvenience but a recurring feature of lives lived across cultures, time zones, and competing definitions of home.

Trusting the Process

What if we approached soul lag not as something to overcome quickly but as a natural consequence of living richly across cultures? What if temporary disorientation following meaningful international experiences isn't evidence that something's wrong but proof that something profound occurred?

During my Malaysia visit, morning sunrises from my parents' jungle-side porch became an education in presence—reminding me that attention itself is worship, that home isn't something you possess but consciousness you cultivate anywhere. Buddhist temple visits taught spiritual discernment: appreciating complex traditions without adopting entire frameworks—perfect preparation for honoring multiple cultural inheritances without being overwhelmed by competing loyalties.

Even getting sick for a few days in the middle of my homecoming trip became a teacher about integration, showing how meaningful experiences require processing time, how depth demands rest rather than pushing.

The Hidden Gift of International Soul Lag

The beautiful secret about soul lag for internationally mobile families is that it often contains exactly the medicine globally mobile children need: permission to feel complex about experiences that others assume should be purely positive, validation that living across cultures involves genuine emotional labor, and recognition that international privilege includes both opportunities and challenges.

Many internationally mobile young adults report that their most important insights about cultural identity don't emerge during dramatic international experiences but during quiet processing periods afterward—in those somewhat depleted moments when defenses are down and truth has room to emerge about what "home" actually means when you've learned to create it anywhere.

Soul lag might be the internationally mobile family's system giving everyone exactly what they need: time to actually receive what cross-cultural experiences are trying to teach, space to integrate multiple cultural selves without choosing sides, and permission to feel the full complexity of lives lived between cultures rather than performing gratitude for others' comfort.

The Larger Question, and Invitation

Understanding soul lag might be particularly crucial for internationally mobile families because it acknowledges something we rarely discuss: that global mobility involves genuine emotional sophistication, that raising culturally complex children requires different parenting strategies than monocultural families typically need, and that internationally mobile families deserve support systems that understand the actual complexity of their experiences rather than just celebrating their opportunities.

At Bennett International, we see this daily in our work with relocating families. The logistics of international school placement are challenging enough, but the emotional dimensions of helping children integrate multiple cultural identities while maintaining family connections across continents requires different expertise entirely.

The families we serve aren't just changing addresses; their children are navigating identity questions that would challenge most adults, maintaining relationships across time zones that test even strong family bonds, and developing resilience for lives that will likely involve continued mobility rather than settled belonging.

Soul lag points toward larger questions for internationally mobile families: How do we structure international lives to include meaningful cultural connections without constantly experiencing jarring transitions? How do we help internationally mobile children develop healthy relationships with multiple cultures without overwhelming them with competing loyalties?

Maybe the answer is that your family's consciousness is doing exactly what internationally mobile systems need to do: taking time to properly digest cultural complexity rather than immediately returning to surface-level adaptation. This temporary emotional complexity isn't international family failure but evidence that you've touched something real about cultural identity, something that deserves more than casual processing.

The beautiful exhaustion your family might be experiencing comes from having lived fully across cultures, from having shown up completely for experiences worthy of your full cultural presence. That's not weakness—that's what happens when globally mobile families engage authentically with the cultural complexity that defines their lives.

Welcome to the sacred space between profound cultural experience and ongoing international life. It's emotionally complex, it's rarely discussed in international family circles, and it's absolutely necessary for healthy cultural identity development to occur.

The integration continues, one conscious breath at a time, one cultural bridge at a time, one internationally mobile family learning to honor the full complexity of lives lived beautifully between cultures.

By Johan Harvey

For internationally mobile families seeking education support that understands the full complexity of global mobility, Bennett International Education Consultancy provides school placement and advisory services that honor both logistical and emotional dimensions of international family life. Because we understand that international education isn't just about finding good schools—it's about supporting families whose children are learning to create home anywhere while maintaining connections everywhere.

For over thirty years, we have worked worked with hundreds of corporations across the globe, many of them Fortune 500 companies, providing domestic and international school advisement & placement services - preschool through university - to the dependents of relocating employees. In addition to education placement, our team provides customized consulting for corporations with a range of education issues: education policy writing & benchmarking, tuition studies, group move advisement & planning, and remote education solutions.