When you uproot your life to follow your partner’s career to a foreign country, you’re forced to confront a fundamental question that many people spend their entire lives avoiding: What am I meant to do with my life?
As a trailing spouse, I’ve grappled with this question more repeatedly over the last few years since I stopped working full time. Stripped of familiar routines, professional networks, and the cultural context that once defined me, I found myself in what felt like an identity void. And when I listened to a recent episode of Hidden Brain about finding purpose, I was reminded why the experience of being a trailing spouse can feel so disorienting—and ultimately, so transformative.
In this post, I want to explore this topic a bit. How does moving abroad force you to look directly at questions of identity and purpose? And how can you dig into these things while dealing with the day-to-day challenges of navigating a new place with your family?
When everything falls away
Victor Strecher, the University of Michigan researcher featured in the Hidden Brain episode, learned about purpose through the most devastating circumstances imaginable. He watched his daughter Julia battle heart disease from infancy, only to lose her at 19. His story is heartbreaking, but it’s also illuminating.
After Julia’s death, Strecher retreated to a cabin in northern Michigan, where he describes himself as “eating and drinking myself to death” and feeling like “every atom of my body was just kind of diffusing.” He had lost his purpose (caring for Julia) and with it, his sense of direction.
While my experience as a trailing spouse obviously doesn’t compare to such profound loss, there are parallels in the disorientation that comes when the structures that once gave our lives meaning suddenly disappear. For many trailing spouses, our careers, our social roles, our daily routines (all of the things that helped us understand who we were) get left behind at the border.
Trying to cope
And like Strecher, some may find themselves coping with the loss of identity and grieving these things in different ways. In 2021, when we moved from Japan to Germany, I faced these issues for the first time. I wasn’t working for the first time since I was a teenager, and I had to piece together a new identity in a new place, all while learning German and being the primary caregiver for our son. Oh, and this was in the midst of COVID restrictions in Germany, so there weren’t events or activities to really embrace upon our arrival initially. While navigating this new reality, I found myself turning to alcohol to cope more than I’d like.
It’s fitting I find myself reflecting on this time today because exactly four years ago, I decided to stop drinking alcohol totally. Perhaps I’ll write more about this in another post, but the decision to shift my coping mechanisms from drinking to other things was transformative.
The dawn revelation
Strecher’s turning point came during a pre-dawn kayak trip on Lake Michigan. Feeling suicidal and paddling toward what he thought might be his end, he suddenly felt his daughter’s presence urging him: “You’ve got to get over this… You have to get over yourself. You have to get over your ego. You have to get over your grief, and think about things bigger than yourself.”
He turned back to shore and immediately wrote down what mattered most to him. That exercise changed his life and led him to redefine his purpose: teaching every student “as if they’re my own daughter, Julia.”
For trailing spouses, our “dawn moment” might be less dramatic but no less significant. Mine came four years ago on a random evening when I decided to stop drinking alcohol to cope and embrace our life in Germany. I could be done feeling sorry for myself and my stalled career. I realized I was so focused on what I had lost or what had changed that I was blind to what I had gained: the opportunity to rebuild my life intentionally, to choose what mattered most without the weight of other people’s expectations.
The science of self-transcending purpose
Strecher’s research reveals something crucial about purpose: it needs to be “self-transcending,” bigger than ourselves. People focused on self-enhancing values (appearance, wealth, status) don’t fare as well as those with transcending values (compassion, kindness, service to others).
This insight is particularly relevant for trailing spouses, I think, because we often struggle with feelings of irrelevance or diminished status. It’s easy to become consumed with self-focused concerns: How do I rebuild my career? How do I make friends? How do I matter here?
But Strecher’s research suggests we’re asking the wrong questions. Instead of “How do I find myself again?” we should ask “How can I serve something larger than myself?” I hope to explore this question more in the coming months as we transition into a new setting.
A few thoughts about finding your purpose
The interview with Strecher culminated with a few points that resonated with me in light of my current circumstances. The following are just a few thoughts about how these insights might connect to surviving and thriving as a trailing spouse.
Finding purpose in the margins
Living abroad as a trailing spouse actually offers unique opportunities for self-transcending purpose. We exist in the margins between cultures, which gives us perspective that locals and even other expats might lack. We understand what it feels like to be outsiders, to struggle with language barriers, to feel disconnected from community. I wonder if this marginality can become a superpower for service.
The headstone test
Strecher advocates for what he calls “the headstone test.” This involves asking yourself what you’d want people to say about you 100 years from now. What would you want your headstone to say? What is your legacy? This exercise cuts through the noise of daily concerns to focus on lasting impact.
For trailing spouses, this test can be particularly clarifying. Do I want to be remembered as someone who spent her expatriate years complaining about visa restrictions and missing Target? Or as someone who used the unique opportunity of living between worlds to make those worlds a little more connected and compassionate?
The shift and persist strategy
One of the most helpful concepts from Strecher’s research is the “shift and persist” strategy. Instead of trying to control everything (which often makes things worse, like “struggling out of quicksand”), we learn to accommodate stressors while maintaining focus on our larger purpose. This approach requires both an awareness of how you’re feeling and your situation as well as the agency to take steps to change things.
For trailing spouses, this means accepting that some things about expatriate life will always be difficult. I’m looking at you: bureaucracy, language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and career limitations! But instead of letting these challenges consume us, we can acknowledge them while persisting in pursuit of what truly matters.
The art of golden repair
Strecher references kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, treating “breakage and repair as part of the history of an object rather than something to disguise.” I really like this idea in relation to living and adjusting and adapting. Changes and repairs and adjustments are a huge part of life, and they are a part of what makes us who we are.
The trailing spouse experience often involves significant breakage as well. For example, we might experience broken career trajectories, social connections, and assumptions about how life should unfold. But perhaps these breaks, when repaired with intention and purpose, become sources of unique strength and beauty.
My pre-expatriate life was whole, but it was also narrow. The breaks that came with moving abroad, though painful at times, created space for new growth, new connections, new ways of serving the world. The golden repair work of building a purposeful life abroad has created something more complex and meaningful than what I had before, I think.
Side note:
This all reminds me of an episode of another of my favorite podcasts! In this episode of Short Wave, they talk about Roman concrete and how it basically healed itself due to the composition and ratio of limestone to volcanic material and water. The connection for me is in the idea that the concrete is so strong and has remained structurally sound for a really long time because it adapts and heals itself. There’s something there.
Practical steps forward
Drawing from Strecher’s research and my own experience, here are some practical ways trailing spouses could cultivate purpose:
- Identify your core values beyond career achievement or social status. What matters to you at the deepest level?
- Write about why these values matter to you. This self-affirmation exercise helps clarify your foundation.
- Look for ways to serve these values in your new context. How can your expatriate experience become a vehicle for what you care about most?
- Practice the headstone test. What legacy do you want to leave from your time abroad?
- Embrace your marginality as a source of insight and service rather than a limitation.
- Connect with other trailing spouses not just for support, but as potential collaborators in purposeful work.
The gift of displacement
Victor Strecher found his purpose through unimaginable loss. As trailing spouses, we find ours through voluntary displacement. Both experiences strip away the familiar structures that once defined us, forcing us to rebuild from the foundation up.
This rebuilding process, though challenging, is also a rare gift. How many people get the chance to consciously choose their purpose, freed from the expectations and assumptions of their former lives?
The experience living outside of your passport country asks us the same question that confronted Strecher in his darkest moment: Will you focus on what you’ve lost, or will you turn toward something larger than yourself?
For those of us privileged enough to live this internationally mobile life, the answer seems clear. We have been given extraordinary opportunities to serve as bridges between cultures, to model resilience and adaptation, to use our unique perspectives in service of a more connected world.
In doing so, we honor not just our own potential, but the hopes and dreams that brought us to foreign shores in the first place. We become not just trailing spouses, but leading examples of what it means to build a meaningful life from the ground up.
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