profound truth

What’s it like down your neck of the expat woods? Exhilarating? Challenging? Tough? Isolating? Life-enhancing? Alienating? All these things wrapped up in a bow? You are not alone. We live in a global village where it has never been easier to pitch a tent in a foreign field. But it’s a sprawling village of brain-aching complexity and diversity, which can stump even the most adventurous and resilient. Janssen has managed to capture the very essence of what it means to try a different culture on for size, assembling an exhaustive toolkit to help the expat explorer adapt and prosper. It’s quite a coup.

Have you ever tried to explain something to your children in the hope they would just listen and take your word for it? That they wouldn’t have to find it out the hard way by actually experiencing it? Welcome to a parental treasure trove. In writing this book, Linda Janssen takes us under her parental wing and invites us to do just that: listen. Browse this book before you move. Flip through its pages while unpacking boxes. Open it randomly in the fall, winter, and spring. When you reach the end, start all over again. These pages contain a well-written harvest of wisdom, both Janssen’s own and that of many wise others, gleaned from many fields of human experience. As with any food rich in nutrition, this book is best sampled regularly and digested slowly. If Janssen had had a book like this at her disposal, she might not have had to write this herself, meaning we wouldn’t be able to read it. Go figure. That must be the power of emotional resilience.

The topic of emotional resiliency is near and dear to my own heart, and in The Emotionally Resilient Expat: Engage, Adapt and Thrive Across Cultures, Janssen has written a comprehensive guide to help expats navigate the multiple challenges and stresses that come with living overseas. Reading this will help parents to become more aware of the experiences their children and adolescents might face, and find tools that will help their families to become more resilient. School personnel and therapists who work with Third Culture Kids will also benefit from reading this book if they want to truly understand the joys, as well as the tribulations, of life outside one’s home culture and country.