Therapy for Asian Americans & Children of Immigrants

When you’re the one everyone counts on

You are the competent one, the person everyone counts on, the one who has it all together. You read a room before you walk into it, you know what everyone in it needs, but you are much less sure what you need yourself. You have been the one who is fine for a long time, and lately being fine is taking more out of you than it used to.

You may also be tired of explaining. Why you cannot simply set a boundary with your mother. Why the thing your father said at dinner landed the way it did. Why leaving the job everyone is proud of feels less like an option than a betrayal. That explaining takes energy, and it is part of why people look for a therapist who will not need it spelled out.

Achievement, family expectations, and staying safe

Many of the Asian Americans and children of immigrants I work with grew up always knowing what the family needed and setting aside what they wanted themselves. Achievement was often how you stayed safe, or how care got expressed in a house where it was not said out loud. So you did well, and doing well worked, until at some point it stopped being enough.

Guilt, obligation, and independence

You were raised with obligation to family as the highest value, but you live in a culture that treats independence that way, and it is not obvious how to reconcile that for yourself. Wanting something for your own sake can feel selfish in a way that is difficult to explain even to yourself. There is also what came before you. Migration, whatever your parents were carrying when they arrived, and everything they gave up to get here, all of it shapes a household, and the guilt that comes with knowing what it cost them.

What therapy for adult children of immigrants looks like

In therapy, we slow down and look at how all of that took shape, what those early roles cost you, and what it takes to know your own wants clearly enough to say them to the people who matter to you. There is often grief in this work too, in coming to terms with the possibility that these relationships may never look the way you wanted them to, and in figuring out how to live with that. These patterns are not flaws to correct. They are adaptations that made sense, and understanding them is what begins to loosen their hold.

Much of my work is with Asian Americans, including second-generation and 1.5-generation immigrants. I also work with children of immigrants from every background, and with anyone who grew up inside a family that expected a great deal. What tends to matter more than where a family came from is what it expected, and what it was like to grow up inside that.