For many children of immigrants, growing up involved an unspoken contract: our parents sacrificed everything—their homeland, their comfort, their language—so that we could succeed. Our role in this contract is to be grateful, hardworking, and, above all, okay.
To struggle with mental health, to experience depression or paralyzing anxiety, feels like a breach of that contract. It feels like enormous ingratitude.
If your parents survived war, poverty, or systemic discrimination to get you here, how dare you feel sad when you have a roof over your head and food in the fridge? The weight of that historical comparison can be crushing. It silences the individual experience.
In many Asian cultures, there is also the concept of “saving face”—the idea that one’s actions reflect not just on oneself, but on the entire clan. Mental illness is often viewed through a lens of shame, a private weakness that must be hidden to protect the family’s reputation.
This creates a profound loneliness. You have these massive feelings—the hollowed-out exhaustion of depression, the vibrating static of anxiety—but you have nowhere to put them. The family structure, built for collective survival, often lacks the language for individual emotional articulation. Sometimes this is literal; many heritage languages lack direct translations for clinical terms like “depression” or “anxiety.”
So, the pain gets somatized. It becomes headaches, stomach aches, fatigue—physical ailments that are culturally acceptable to discuss.
Navigating this is incredibly delicate work for Asian Americans. It is a process of translation. We have to learn to translate our internal Western emotional vocabulary into something our Eastern-oriented families can understand, without rejecting the culture that raised us.
It involves recognizing that our parents’ silence wasn’t necessarily an absence of love, but a survival strategy they inherited. They couldn’t afford to fall apart, so they learned not to feel.
Healing, then, is about recognizing that we can build an addition to our own house. We can honor the collective strength while also carving out a space where it is safe to not be okay. We can begin to gently break the silence, knowing that our pain does not diminish their sacrifice. In fact, healing ourselves may be the ultimate way to honor it.
Seek An Individual Therapist at Yellow Chair Collective in Los Angeles or New York
If you are seeking therapy specifically tailored to your needs, consider reaching out to the therapists at Yellow Chair Collective. We understand that there may be unique contextual factors that may influence your experiences.
At our Los Angeles, CA, and New York City, NY-based therapy practice, we have many skilled, trauma-informed, and culturally sensitive therapists who can provide an empowering therapeutic experience. For your added convenience and simplicity, we offer online therapy for anyone in the state of California or New York. We know that navigating your mental health journey can be challenging, and we want to support you along the way. Follow the steps below to begin.
- Fill out the contact form to get connected with us.
- Get matched with one of our culturally sensitive therapists.
- Start the next step in your healing journey today.
Other Services at Yellow Chair Collective
There are many options for treatment using online therapy in California and New York, it just depends on what you’re needing. And while we certainly service Asian American folks, we also work with individuals from other cultures, too. So, whether you’re needing support in overcoming anxiety, burnout, trauma, or PTSD, we can help. Likewise, we serve teens and couples in need of support, too. So when you start online therapy with us, you can bring your whole self, including past struggles, cultural impacts, and more.
