The other day, I was talking to my mom about my uncle, her older brother, who has stage four lung cancer. My mom was venting about how upset she was that her brother's kids weren't jumping at the opportunity to pay his hospital bills. She said, “he sacrificed his whole life for them. How could they do this to him?” I said, “I mean, they have their own lives too, mom. One of them has a little kid. It's not exactly cheap to raise kids in Korea. So, I don't know, it feels fair to me that they're talking about what they can or can't afford.”

My mom was not having it. She said, “they have their whole lives to be there for their kid, but their dad, he doesn't have that much time left. They should do everything they can to support him.”

Wait, were we talking about love or money?

My mom knew there was a difference, right? After a few back and forths, I just asked her the question that I really wanted to ask. Do you think uncle feels like his kids don't love him because they're not giving him money? It wasn't just a question about my uncle and his kids. It was a question about me and my mom, about love and sacrifice. After all, isn't our willingness to sacrifice the ultimate measure of our love?

Hi, and welcome to I Feel That Way Too, a podcast where we ask some of life's trickiest questions and together find the courage to unpack them one story at a time. If you've ever wondered how life could be different but didn't know where to turn, I'm here to tell you, you're not alone. I Feel That Way Too.

Ever since I was young, I felt responsible for taking care of my single mom. You know, growing up, seeing her sacrifice so much for me and my younger sister. When I got older, I just thought, yeah, that's my job now. That's just what you do, right? Whether it was taking a soul-sucking corporate job or using my savings to relocate her from Korea, I took the responsibility for caring for her seriously. I took pride in it.

Whatever sacrifice I had to make felt appropriate given how much I love her and how much she'd given up to raise me. But as an adult, I've been struggling with this more and more. If the only way I can express my love is by showing how much I'm willing to sacrifice, then how can I ever prioritize my own desires and needs? What do I do with all the guilt and shame and resentment that comes from feeling burdened by this responsibility?

Have I become so Americanized that the idea of filial piety feels suffocating? Am I a bad daughter?

I mean, that's such a common experience. This can be even more complicated in immigrant families because often we have those values, right? Asian values of filial piety, or we see familism as a really big value in immigrant households. So putting other people first, prioritizing the family over the individual.

That’s Sahaj Kaur Kohli. She's a therapist, writer, and founder of Brown Girl Therapy, the first and largest mental health organization for children of immigrants. I've been following her on Instagram for years now, and I love the fact that she's making mental health relevant and accessible for Asian Americans like me. Like learning about words like enmeshment.

So enmeshment is this idea that there are very loose or no boundaries within a relationship. So in the family system, if we're talking about families, there are no boundaries. There is research that suggests that immigrant families tend to be more enmeshed because they're actually trying to protect themselves and their loved ones, creating these insular communities and families from harm from the dominant society. So it was adaptive initially.

But of course, just because it's adaptive doesn't necessarily mean it's healthy. We can see now that that kind of loose boundaries can lead to people feeling really dependent on one another. So often that it's hierarchical in immigrant families. So it's a top down of dependency, but then children are being dependent on more depending on your birth order, your age, your gender, you're being dependent on in different ways.

Becoming someone my mom can depend on was kind of my life purpose for a long time. My attention was always on what she needed and how I could provide that. As a kid, I rarely asked my mom for anything that wasn't practical or necessary. She was a single working mom and I could see how hard she was working just to keep us afloat. Instead, I tried to help however I could. I'd hand over my New Year's allowance from my aunties and uncles

Whenever we went out to eat, I'd always check the prices on the menu to make sure I wasn't picking something too expensive. I worked hard in school, got good grades, and told myself, this is how I can help. I'll get into a good college, land a good job, and make enough money to take care of her. That's exactly what I did. Right after college, I jumped into corporate America instead of chasing my passion for social justice. Because at the time, what mattered most was bringing my mom to the US and supporting her financially.

And honestly, I was proud of myself for that. Starting so young, being able to help my mom, it felt good. Looking back though, I realized that I never really let myself just want things, know? Like things just for me. And then in my 30s, something started to shift. I found myself really struggling with our relationship. I was having trouble differentiating my desires from her needs.

So in the Western world, we talk about individuation. When you're an adolescent, you are growing up and you start to build your unique interests and you start to prioritize your friends and you start to be your own person. A lot of us immigrant children didn't really get that. We were still expected to do X, Y, and Z. So we didn't really get that chance to individuate around that age, you know, as we're 12, 13 up until 19, 20, 21. And so a lot of us are doing that later in life. I work with clients who are 30, 40, 50 years old who are like, wow, this is the first time I'm doing something for myself.

At every crossroads in my career, my decisions were often tied to one question. How will this affect my ability to support my mom? Can I quit my job? How much money do I need saved up to cover both of us for six months? Even little decisions like whether to make a frivolous purchase came with this gnawing sense of responsibility. That kind of mental math had become second nature. But prioritizing my own joy and abundance,

Well, that always came with a side of guilt. It felt like my entire life was split in two. One part lived for me and the other for my mom. And as I got older, the tension between the two only grew, becoming harder to navigate and more emotionally draining. Sahaj calls this parent-child role reversal, parentification.

At the root of it, there are two types of parentification. There's instrumental parentification, which is more about taking care in more practical roles of the family. So maybe, you know, cooking for sick relatives or making sure your younger siblings are okay. Or if you were a latchkey kid left at home alone, you know, going to school on time, making your bed, all of these things that you had to do for yourself or for your family, because maybe your parents were out working or just weren't able to do it.

And then we have emotional parentification, which is more about taking on those emotional roles. So being the family mediator, maybe taking on the role of a parent or a spouse for one of your parents because either one parent isn't more present or because emotionally they don't have the type of relationship where they speak to each other more emotionally or vulnerably. So a parent might use a child to do that. It's also about generally managing your parents' feelings.

One year after many years of working with my therapist, I mustered up the courage to set some financial boundaries with my mom. Not necessarily because of money, but because I needed to shed the guilt. That gnawing feeling that whatever I was doing was never enough and that there was always more to give.

I thought, if I can get my mom to tell me the exact amount that she actually needs, then I can finally know that I'm meeting her expectations and I don't have to wonder if I'm not doing enough. I could handle the financial responsibility, but I didn't want to carry the emotional weight anymore. So one day at a posh new Indian fusion restaurant that I thought she'd like, I mustered up the courage to ask her.

Can you tell me exactly how much you need monthly so I can better budget my own finances? Up until then, I was paying her rent and giving her allowance in random amounts, paying for whatever needs arose at various times throughout the month. She was visibly perturbed by my question. Without looking at me, she said, just give me whatever you can. I insisted, no mom, I want you to tell me what you need and want.

She replied, I just want you to do what feels good and right for you. I said, I don't know what that is, so I need you to tell me. I was getting frustrated. She was getting uncomfortable. So I said, okay, fine. So if I said $500 per month, that's okay with you? She looked visibly worried. See, so you know what you need.

Why won't you just tell me? Make my life easier. She burst into tears. Why are you making me say an amount? You want me to feel shame? I already feel bad. Now we were both cry yelling. People at other tables were exchanging awkward glances. She said, Don't make me say an amount out loud. I want you to support me because you love me.

And because you want to, not because I'm asking you to.

At this point, my voice was near full volume, tears dripping down my face from knowing I had caused her pain. But somehow, my untamed anger kept spilling out despite knowing full well that I had done enough damage to my mom's heart. I desperately needed her to see my pain too. I shouted, I do love you and I'm asking for your help. Why can't you just help me?

I never got my mom to say an amount. It was as if I'd spoken the very thing that needed to remain unsaid. And by speaking the unspoken, I had broken the delicate dance we'd been doing for decades, where love meant anticipating needs and quietly fulfilling it to save face. Where protecting meant pretending not to see the weight we each carried, because naming it would make it all too real.

Silence had become our shared language of care, but now we were at a loss for words. We packed up our untouched food without speaking and left the restaurant. And I never brought up the topic again.

And here I was wanting her to tell me exactly what she needed so that I could feel less guilt for feeling like I'm not doing enough, even though I was doing a lot. And so we were at this crossroads and we couldn't see past each other's pain and our own pain in being able to connect to one another. And since then, I've been really hesitant to bring up any conversations around money or boundaries with her because first and foremost, I'm terrified of her feeling like she is not loved.

That somehow if I bring this up, she's going to feel more like she's a burden and she's going to stew in her own shame, knowing that I don't think she has the capacity and the skill set to be able to hold her emotions right now. And then I feel resentful that I have to think through what she needs before I can just be a child and tell her to meet me where I am for once, right? And so then the cycle just continues and I am not sure I know how to get out of it.

Boundaries is such a trigger word for so many of us, right? When you hear the word boundaries, you're like, no, all of a sudden that door closes and you say, this is not something that's gonna speak to me because it has this reputation of being like, cut people out, saying no, protect yourself. And those narratives really don't speak to so many of us who come from collectivist backgrounds where we want to maintain a lot of these relationships. We just don't want it to feel as bad as it does.

And so disentangling and learning how to disentangle our feelings and our values from our parents is often the work I do with my clients. And it takes a long time, right? Because you are sitting down sifting through a basically a pile of values, norms, expectations, feelings, and saying, okay, this one belongs to me. This one belongs to my mom. This one belongs to my dad. And trying to figure out where does that leave you? And how do we move forward and build the sense of self with things that actually feel true to you? And a lot of that work is painful.

Trying to disentangle my definition of love from my mom's isn't the only thing that's been painful to navigate. It's also the realization that so much of my upbringing fundamentally shapes the way I live today.

At its best, parentification can lead to having a lot of pride, developing really good work ethic, being really mindful of your role and your family and leaning into that. But at its worst, it can be a form of emotional neglect. And I think that's really important because in my work with children of immigrants, a lot of times, a lot of us don't realize that we have different needs when we're growing up. And sure, maybe you had a roof over your head. Maybe you were sent to school. Maybe you always had food on the table. And these are really big, significant needs that were met.

But were you also cared for emotionally? Were you allowed to express your emotions? Were you modeled and nurtured emotionally? So just being taught that even emotions weren't something that was safe to have. And so in that way, that's when parentification can become a sign of emotional neglect. So as by definition, parentification is taking on adult-like roles or roles that are older than you are developmentally at a young age. And it can lead to people pleasing. It can lead to perfectionism.

It can lead to constantly monitoring our parents or other people's emotions or feelings, right? Those are very common long-term consequences of being parentified children because we've never really learned how to take up space.

People pleasing, perfectionism, hypervigilance. Yeah, I've been dealing with all of them pretty much my entire life. One of my core memories from when I used to live in Korea was being invited to a friend's house after school. We were supposed to do homework together and her mom sat with us going over everything and helping us out. I remember feeling so reassured like...

Finally, someone was helping me in a way that made me feel safe and cared for. And because I wanted to be invited back, I was always on my absolute best behavior. I didn't want her to feel like I was being a burden or a nuisance. So I made sure to take my shoes off in the neatest way possible. I made sure to wipe off any crumbs off the table, and I even offered to do the dishes. Y'all, I was barely 10. But I felt like I needed to be liked to be helped.

The truth is, I am resentful. I resent that I never got to just be a kid. I'm angry that I couldn't tell my parents that I was sad or hurt or scared. I'm angry that I thought care and attention were earned by making myself small, likable, and pleasant. I'm angry that I couldn't allow myself to rest or stumble because I knew there was no safety net to catch me.

and that I thought it was easier to not want than to be disappointed. But for the first time in my life, there is something I want just for myself.

I want to heal. Desperately. I want to shed this weight so I can finally be my most authentic, free, and expansive self without needing to prove anything to anyone. I want to access the safety, abundance, joy, and ease that I didn't have as a child. Talking to my parents about my childhood wounds feels really hard.

Not only because I'm worried about how it'll make them feel, but because deep down, I truly believe that they loved me the best way they knew how. So, how do I even begin to tell them that their best wasn't enough to protect me from harm? How do I share that I feel resentful for the child that I never got to have without breaking their hearts in the process? And the hardest part?

Even now, I catch myself prioritizing their feelings over my truth. It's like this unshakable sense of responsibility where their comfort feels more important than my pain. How do I even untangle that?

You deserve joy and peace and ease. I mean, ultimately, so many of us aren't able to give ourselves permission to be able to work towards joy and peace and ease because we don't believe we're deserving of it. And that is a product of, you know, these family dynamics, but also guilt and shame and not knowing the difference between those two and then feeling like we automatically are bad if we aren't constantly pleasing other people. So many of us also struggle with that binary mindset, you know, if I feel this way, it's wrong. If my parents are disappointed, I'm a bad child. And that's not true. We have to learn and you have to decide at what point you're willing to accept that it might not change and then decide what you're willing to tolerate. And that's the acceptance and grief work that is so hard. And grief, I call it grief for a reason because grief never goes away. There's no resolution in grief. It's learning to build a life around it. Yeah.

That's so real and so hard, that whole acceptance piece, right? Knowing that it's going to take time, but also that there may need to be a time where you start to accept your parents for who they are and what they have capacity for and what they don't. What's been really difficult for me is the acceptance of the reality and my desire to heal.

Part of me feels like I can't heal until I get the acknowledgement, until I get the validation, until I feel seen in my entirety by my mom and by my dad. And sometimes I feel like that just sets me up for more disappointment and sense of betrayal and resentment because I am not getting the very sort of human and childlike need from my parents. But knowing that that may never come and I can't depend on that for my healing, but that's been really hard to accept.

I was just going to say that makes me really sad because I'm hearing you like deny yourself something that you deserve because you're still waiting for your parents to give you permission for it when you can give yourself permission for it yourself, but for some reason you don't feel like you have enough agency or you're not allowed to be the one who decides I can't heal even without my parents acceptance. And that's a lot of the inner child, like reparenting work of like, you know, thinking about little Michelle and what she needs and how do you give it to her? How do you find power and strength in being able to be the adult who can say, fine, if you're not gonna take care of this little girl, I am, I'm gonna take care of her. And it's really hard, right? And it's really painful, but it hurts me to hear you say that you won't be able to do this until you get that permission because the reality is you may never get that acceptance and acknowledgement you're looking for from them.

In high school, when I came out as bisexual to my dad, he just ignored it. He pretended he didn't hear me, changed the subject, and that was that. We never talked about it again. And honestly, I was fine with that at the time. He didn't want to hear more, and I didn't want to share more. We lived under the same roof, but how much did we really know about each other anyway?

Fast forward many years later, I was on my way to a date with a woman I just met. I was on the phone with my dad and thought, maybe this is a chance to let him in on my life, just a little. So I told him where I was going and casually asked, what would you do if I ever brought a girl home? I don't know what I was expecting to hear, but I definitely wasn't prepared for his answer. Don't come home, he said.

It's very challenging and I think I just recently had these conversations with a couple clients of mine where, you know, sometimes we have to ask ourselves, the greatest gift we can give people we love is letting them see us for all parts of ourselves, right? Every part of who we are, that's the greatest gift we can give someone we love. And not everyone deserves that gift, especially if they are not tending to it, nurturing it. And I see you like, as like a younger version of you, like vulnerable and raw and saying, love me, love me, love me. And it's not just you, it's all of us, right? We have these experiences.

It wasn't until one Thanksgiving back at my dad's house that I realized just how much I did crave my dad's acceptance and love. Thanksgiving is one day that we all gather at my dad's house. We ordered a Thanksgiving family meal from Boston Market that no one really likes, chit chat and eat for no more than 40 minutes, and migrate over to the living room to watch a movie of someone's choosing, usually me or my dad. This has been our way of bonding for as long as we started gathering.

The movie that my dad, the same man who stonewalled me when I came out to him in high school, chose for us to watch was Boy Erased, a movie about a gay man's search for acceptance from himself and his family. Without making eye contact, he said, have you seen this? I thought you might like it. It's about a gay person. As someone who's never been interested in anything LGBTQ related,

This was his clumsy way of inching closer to me.

My dad didn't throw me a coming out party. He didn't wear a rainbow pin or proclaim how proud he was to be an ally. There was no tearful heart to heart about acceptance, apologies, forgiveness, or unconditional love. And you know what? At that moment, I realized I didn't need any of that. Sitting side by side on that Costco couch of his, I understood exactly what his silence was trying to say.

And that's what happens in high context cultures, right? It's not about being direct. It's not about being explicit. It's more about what the contextual clues are. I think behaviors is where it all comes down to. So that might have been your dad's way of saying, I accept you in the way that I know how, and me watching this with you is my way of showing that. In the same way that my dad, never growing up or through my 30s, only recently started to say, love you. But growing up, I would go home and he would leave me newspaper clippings about mental health or about something I had told him about. And those would be on my bed every time I would visit home. And that I knew was his way of saying, I love you. Right. We have the cut fruit anecdote that everyone has in an Asian household. Our mom's way of loving us is through food and by caring for us and caretaking for us, because that's the role they knew how to play.

And I even had an interesting conversation with my mom where I asked her, I think this was a while ago where I asked her, what else do you want to do? Like stop trying to do my laundry when I come home, get out of the kitchen, we'll just order food. But then I realized it made her sad. And I realized I was actually taking away her agency to love me in the way she knew how, because that's not how I need to be loved. I've also asked my parents, did your parents ever say I love you? When was the first time or the last time you? You heard them say that to you. What was that like for you? Oh, that must have been really sad that your parents didn't even say, love you. You know, that impacts kids. And then using that as a frame of like, are you thinking about how you don't do it with me? Like sometimes it takes these little kinds of games before we can get to a place where we feel like we can get that conversation going. But even then, where can we find beauty in the relationship with our parents? I'm sure if we, you know, really wanted to dive deep into it, you would be able to think of like strengths in your relationship with your parents, ways that they do love you or see you, even if it's not what you want, the way that they love you is still a way that they are showing you that they love you.

When I think about my younger self, I sometimes find myself imagining my mom and dad when they were young. What were they like growing up? How many crushes did my mom have as a teenager? When did she start sneaking cigarettes and what made her start? Who was there for my dad when he lost his dad as a child? Who told them they were loved? When was the last time someone asked them about their hopes and dreams?

What did they long for?

Growing up in Korea with my mom, she often told me her parenting philosophy. I want us to be like friends, she'd say. She'd tell me stories about how she was always afraid of her mom, how strict my grandma was, how she never got the chance to fully explore her passions and curiosities. One day when I was in elementary school, she just said, you're not going to school today. And instead of taking me to school,

She drove me and my sister to a farm outside the city. She told us, real life experiences are more important than what you learn in textbooks. She didn't want us to live inside the same box she'd grown up in. She wanted something different for us. She'd say things like, date as many men as you can before you marry. Travel as much as you can while you're young. Learn to drive as soon as you can. More than anything,

She wanted us to be free. Freer than she ever got to be.

the way my parents love me and the way I love them. It's not something you'd find in some textbook. It's messy. It's complicated. It's nuanced. And it's big. It's so big.

It's not the kind of love you see in those Hallmark movies where white parents hug you and say, love you at least 15 times a day. But I feel it. I feel it in the everyday moments. Like when my mom insists on doing my laundry with her permanently sore back. Or when she likes every single thing I post on Instagram. I feel it every time she sees me and says, you're so pretty with genuine awe in her eyes.

Listener 1 29:33

Berna here. I am calling in from Oakland, California. A unique thing about this side of the family is we love to gather and we love to party. Even shortly after we were asked and everyone was and all the difficult things were done. To the love and the laughter and the sharing memories and this is how we process, this is how we show love and I think it's the way that Lula does like it, continues to like it and always has. That's it.

If you liked what you heard today, please tell your family, tell your friends, tell your people. Subscribe to our show and leave us a review.

Listener 2 30:07

My name is Liana, calling from Portland. As a Korean transracial adoptee, family has never looked traditional for me. When I met my Korean mom, she held my hands for what felt like forever. No shared language, but in her eyes, I saw the mirror I never had. My adoptive mom shows love by listening, staying curious and never giving up on me. And then there's my chosen family, my adoptee family. They're the ones who love me for who I truly am without needing to hide any part of myself. Their love feels like home, one we built together on our own terms.

Want to hear more from me and Sahaj? Watch the full interview on the I Feel That Way Too YouTube channel. And while you're at it, subscribe to our newsletter on our website at www.IFeelThatWayToo.com.

Listener 3 30:53

Hi, my name is Michelle and I'm from Massachusetts. I have two teenage sons and a husband who's young at heart. I'm a serious person and my guys are always trying to get me to laugh by sharing jokes and funny stories. If they get me to crack a smile, they consider it in for the day. For me, this is a big act of love.

Thank you to Sahaj Kaur Kohli, whose brilliance lights the way for so many of us. To learn more about Sahaj's work, check out her book, But What Will People Say? or find her on Instagram at BrownGirlTherapy. Sahej also has a brand new podcast, So We've Been Told, available wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was produced by Geraldine Ah-Sue, Eunice Kwon, and me, Michelle MiJung Kim.

Written by Michelle MiJung Kim and Geraldine Ah-Sue. The sound designer is Katie McMurran. Music by Joyce Kwan, Katie McMurran, and Jiyeon Park. This podcast is brought to you by Asian American Futures. Today, I'm grateful for my mom and her love. And I'm grateful for my sister, who's been doing a lot of emotional labor for both of us. And I'm grateful for you, for us, that we're in this together. Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time on I Feel That Way Too.