Children of Immigrants
As a child of immigrants who grew up in a region populated by peers with similar life experiences, an important clinical focus of mine is working with individuals with this background.
Here are things I hear often from my clients:
Grief: “I can’t believe how much of my life I’ve lived without knowing what I want and need. I’m so good at knowing what others want and need.”
Perfectionism: “Perfect is enough; anything less than perfect is highly stressful and frightening. Striving for perfection makes me really anxious while feeling comforting and familiar.”
Commitment to family: “I’m not interested in demonizing or cutting off my family members, culture, or community. What I do want is to feel happier in my relationships with people I love and/or a community I want to be a part of. Right now I don’t know how to make this work better.”
Shame: “I’m never enough. I never know if I’m loveable on my own. I don’t know how to feel good about myself sometimes if I make mistakes.”
Dissonance: “Am I just making up all of my unhappiness if I’m also doing well at work and showing up for my kids and friends and partner? Am I imagining this?”
Confusion: “I don’t even know why I feel the way I do. I get very overwhelmed by my emotions so I try to shut them down, but I react anyway - it leaks out and I don’t feel good about that.”
Breaking Patterns: “I don’t want to pass down what was given to me. And I don’t like the state of some of my relationships. I don’t know how to be different, and want help exploring that.”
Our work with these experiences and others will focus on understanding your experience and applying the tools below for anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress with the understanding that you may have a less individualistic approach to growth and change that you want to take (for example, not engaging in automatic cut-off; honoring intergenerational strengths and joy in addition to trauma; and navigating culturally appropriate styles of communication that focus on the “we” rather than “I”)
Here are some of the tools I use:
Being nonjudgmental and frank about naming your patterns in therapy, such as apologizing repetitively or seeking reassurance. Usually these are ways you learned to survive real and scary and hurtful things; and, they’re usually what’s now keeping you anxious, distressed, obsessive, or traumatized
Being interested in the emotions, physical sensations, and memories that come up for you when you share with me
Radical acceptance of where and who we are, together
Providing psychoeducation to help you feel educated about your emotional patterns and what I observe with you in session
Helping you find coping tools from Somatic Experiencing Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy that work for you when you’re dysregulated emotionally
Coaching you on interpersonal communication using tools from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
Highlighting times that I see you grow in case you miss them
Encouraging the lifestyle pieces that are crucial to recovery - sleep, food, laughter, emotional connection, nature, and exercise
Validating where anxious and depressive symptoms are a healthy response to ongoing stress, boundary violations, and the state of the world, and signal the need for change
Note: I refer out for moderate-to-severe substance use disorders and disordered eating, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, in order to help clients move toward care from clinicians who have years of training and experience in these presentations.