Therapy for Creatives

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Navigating Cultural Expectations and Finding Support as an Asian American

Understanding your identity as an Asian American—shaped by cultural values, received messaging, and societal stereotypes—can be confusing, isolating, or even overwhelming. You may want to succeed in a way that reflects your true self, while also honoring your roots. Yet at times, you might feel caught between cultures, disconnected from your heritage, or unsure how to integrate your values into the demands of everyday life.

Balancing individual goals with cultural traditions can create tension. Academic pressures, societal expectations, and family responsibilities may pull you in different directions. Common challenges can include:

  • Academic performance pressures

  • Conflicting societal and familial expectations

  • The demand to appear endlessly resilient

  • Loneliness and isolation

In a culture that often prizes independence over community, this disconnection can be especially draining. Mental health support doesn’t have to be “out of the ordinary”—it can be a path toward reconnecting with your deeper values, strengthening your identity, and building relationships that give meaning to your life.

I offer compassionate, culturally-attuned therapy for Asian Americans navigating identity, belonging, and cultural expectations. Together, we can explore your personal and cultural values, find ways to integrate them into your larger life, and create space for you to thrive authentically—in connection with both your heritage and your own individual path.

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Navigating Cultural Expectations and Identity

You want to succeed in a way that reflects your authentic self, while still honoring your cultural roots. Maybe you’ve felt disconnected from your heritage or out of alignment with your cultural values. It can be exhausting to focus solely on individual goals when they pull you away from the traditions and connections that matter to you.

Common stressors for Asian Americans can include:

  • Academic pressure

  • Societal expectations

  • Familial and cultural demands

  • Pressure to be endlessly resilient

  • Loneliness and isolation

Mental health struggles aren’t a sign of weakness—they’re an opportunity. Therapy can help you reconnect with your deeper values, strengthen your sense of identity, and create a life that feels both authentic and connected to the people and places that give you meaning.

Balancing Family, Tradition, and Your Own Path

When we grow up with certain messaging from our family and culture of origin, it tells us how to operate in the world. Understanding how familial roles and expectations affect your emotional landscape can give you agency, and even self-compassion. We can understand our own separateness from our family and culture, while still honoring them and our own roots.

Many received messages are specific to culture of origin, and not necessarily representative of how our individual-focused culture operates. We can stress to meet the expectations of our families, but find those same values are not resonating in the outside world. If you feel taken advantage of, minimized, or even commodified as an Asian person in public or work settings, or in relationship to others, it can manifest as feelings of confusion or even distress. Talking about your experience as an Asian American can help you figure out what this means for you, and how you show up in the world.

Healing from Intergenerational Trauma

If your family has witnessed or experienced cultural violence, displacement, or oppression, the symptoms can be serious and passed down. Many Asian families don’t talk about these experiences openly, and it can result in overt tolerance towards oppressors, emotional repression, stress, or depression. Some of us can experience our family’s symptoms in anger, or even passive-aggression. Our family may want us to go above and beyond, and to rise above the realities of oppression or their intergenerational trauma, instead of processing these traumas and discussing them directly. Families can be broken apart in having such deeply-rooted expectations for their children and future generations.

In therapy, I understand the impacts of intergenerational trauma on family systems. This is an opportunity to discuss and map out how trauma has impacted your family, and you as an individual. When you understand the lineage of your family’s trauma, there is an opportunity to break the cycle of trauma and heal it, and to be a trailblazer in your own right.

Managing Stress, Shame, and Perfectionism

Shame is an integral part of the Asian American experience, yet it is hardly ever talked about within families. When we feel the shame of not doing enough, we feel a need to do better. Asian Americans often talk about the realities of not feeling good enough as just par for the course.

The unfortunate reality is that American culture can often be shameless. A culture that promotes personalities, appearances, and in-your-face financial success, is not a culture that wants, or necessarily understands, the impact of cultural shame.

A more complicated reality exists that shame can be specific to our family and culture of origin, while another kind of shame exists in the broader world. We have the shame of needing to be good enough in the eyes of our family, and the shame of not belonging in the outside world. There is the shame of being successful enough in our academic performance, careers, and lifestyle choices in the eyes of our family, and the shame received in the limits of capitalism and a society that gives unfortunate racial preferences.

Discussing shame in the contexts of your family, as well as the wider world, can help delineate your bicultural existence, and help you understand the complexities of being an Asian American. Navigating shame and all its nuances can give you the confidence to understand what is yours, and what isn’t, and give you the confidence to succeed in different spaces.

Some of the themes we may explore include:

  • Sense of cultural belonging

  • Your experience of intergenerational trauma

  • Your experience of oppression

  • Bicultural stress

  • Being 2nd or 3rd generation.

  • Internalized messages from dominant culture narratives.

  • Code-switching

  • Being invisible

These are all realities to explore as part of your lived experience, and how these forces live in the body and impact your day-to-day life.

This approach means not pathologizing your responses to oppression, but understanding them as adaptations to real systems. It means honoring your personhood, and exploring all aspects of it. There may be aspects of your cultural existence that have yet to be discussed or explored, or even repressed. Our upbringings are not always kind to who we are and where we come from. Our present realities often neglected our multiculturalism.

This is about a commitment to seeing your whole story—including what the world around you hasn’t always seen or valued.