Sen Zhan talks with trauma recovery coach Sherry Yuan Hunter

SZ: What have you noticed in terms of how intercultural conflict might present itself in people with Asian backgrounds?

SYH: There is an internal conflict that comes from the way we were raised because our parents and grandparents were in an environment of fear and scarcity. They raised us using that as a model. They were always using criticism as a motivation to work harder, to not rock the boat, to save face.

There are a lot of traditional values that come from thousands and thousands of years of Chinese history, but specifically in a very stressful, dangerous environment that is engrained in their nervous system. They are always coming at us from a perspective of safety and yet they also want us to prosper.
           
We are constantly balancing this fear-based feeling of looking out for risks and dangers at all times with achieving, pushing for more and doing great things without a lot of accolades. Since we’re balancing different societal expectations on us, it’s very difficult to be truly authentic.
           
How does this then manifest itself? The most powerful thing is what I call “shoulda-cholicism”, which is maladaptive coping mechanism involved with neurotic perfectionism. That’s what I see in a lot of Asian moms. We’re constantly looking at ourselves and comparing every single thing that we can possibly compare to someone else who is better.
           
There is also this idea that at an individual level that that is absolutely how trauma manifests itself, but it is the collective trauma. There is less about how that has impacted Chinese people, Asian people because we’re seen as a model minority in a North American context. By that very definition of “model minority,” it implies achievement without a voice. It’s literally saying, “Work hard. Do great. Don’t talk. Don’t cause trouble.”

SZ: I want to ask you more about the individualism that is really emphasized in the West as compared to the collectivism that is emphasized in Asian cultures and how you see those two value sets coming against each other in the body and in the mind of an intercultural Asian person. What kinds of thought patterns might someone go through, what kinds of emotional experiences might someone go through because of that?

SYH: A lot of our Asian friends are traumatized by a more Western approach to therapy. A more Western approach would be saying things like, “Be yourself. Cut off your elders. Don’t pay them any mind.”
           
When your body and your nervous system feels a lot of resistance to that advice, on top of the pain of doing that, Asian/Chinese people are really fighting levels upon levels of cultural expectations that have been hardwired into us.
           
There is the shame issue, the face issue. “How can you do this to me?” I now have lost face in front of all the relatives and the village. Face is such an important part of our culture. You feel that you are responsible for the loss of face, which impacts their standing in the culture in the society.
           
I’ve been told in therapy that it is not my responsibility to bear. It’s not as simple as that. I can cognitively understand what the therapist is saying, but somatically my nervous system, I can’t handle being responsible for that. I can’t undo that I feel responsible.

SZ: What are some ways that an Asian person who is just starting to look at the inner conflict can understand themselves and start to work with that conflict or trauma?

SYH: One of the first things is really just to be able to acknowledge and validate that all feelings are real and valid. That has to start with ourselves to start feeling safe feeling that.

SZ: We shouldn’t say, “I’m not allowed to feel shame. I’m not allowed to feel anger. I’m not allowed to feel sadness.” “I should be happy. I should be optimistic. I should be cheerful.”

SYH: That is repressing. You’re gaslighting yourself when you say, “I shouldn’t feel this way.” You’re saying that the experience is not real and that you don’t have a right to feel that way.

SZ:  Because we’re internalizing something that has been told to us from someone who was in a position of authority over us when we were little.

SYH: Not only that we intensify it. We then actually gatekeep even more than the original voices might have intended.

SZ: What are some protective elements when it comes to the young people who are going through this inner conflict? What are some thing that can help them strengthen themselves?

SYH: It’s really about finding a community where things that you say are understood and everyone can collectively breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Yes, that’s hard.” It’s about your own feelings but also having people around you support you.
           
That’s hard a lot of times, especially for immigrants. You might be arriving in a place where you don’t have a network, or you might be arriving in a place where there are huge amounts of networks, but they are exactly like they were back home. The networking is so important and finding people on your team to give good advice, to listen, to hold space for you, to talk to, and to call you out if you need to be called out.

You have to develop your ability to listen to yourself, feel your feelings and learn how to get through discomfort or it will become a cycle that happens over and over again because it’s unconscious in your nervous system.

SZ: If there are people who are listening who want to be support allies to their Asian friends who they see are going through a hard time and a little confused, what are some things that you wish you had when you were going through that experience?

SYH: Over the past couple of years during COVID when there was a rise in anti-Asian sentiments in North America, I actually had a couple of friends specifically reach out to me and just say, “Hey, I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but I noticed this is happening and I just wanted you to know that I am here if you want to talk about it. I see it. I see the pain. I see how this might impact you.”
           
That was in and of itself incredible and the fact that they actually then did a little more reading so that we could actually have some discussions and that they didn’t feel offended or triggered by some of the things that were coming up for me that might actually feel like an attack on them. That’s not how I meant it. That was just what was coming up for me.
           
Being able to hold space for that was amazing. Holding space just meant that I was not going to be offended by anything that they say. “This is a safe space for you to express what is coming up for you and we can unpack it together if you want to or I can just listen.”

SZ: So, recognizing that their role is not to challenge your experiences but rather to let you have your experiences without them needing to make sense of it for you.

SYH: Yes, or for themselves even because that’s the hard part. If they want to help me make sense of it, I actually don’t mind. If we’re having a conversation where being inclusive about the conversation is great. It’s when it gets turned and people start saying, “I’m not like that,” or as soon as somebody starts talking about “I,” that space-holding falls apart.

SZ:  So, to remember that they are there to be supportive of you which means that it’s not about them in that moment.

SYH: It is not about them. That’s where allyship can run into problems. If you’re trying to hold space but it’s not your turn, you’re wondering when it is your turn, but right now we’re entering a phase in our history in North America where it is the turn for many and we really all need to be looking at this together in the workplace, in society, in schools, amongst friends. We have to be looking at this.

SZ: Sherry, thank you so much for your time and your expertise today. I think our conversation is just beginning.

SYH: Always. You are amazing to talk to. Thank you. You’re such a great host.

Sen Zhan talks with Iris Chen, author of  “Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent”

SZ: Can you talk a little bit about what is filial piety?

IC: Filial piety is the belief that children should obey and dutifully respect their elders. There is a hierarchy of relationships and a way that relationships should work. Those who are older or who have more power should take care of and lead those who are younger or those who have less power and those who are younger should respect and honor and care for their elders.

It can end up being a very rigid system of relationships. It’s so foundational to the way that many Asian families operate and the dynamics within the family and it goes unquestioned. It ends up causing a lot of relational harm because there is no wiggle room. There are many expectations and so many frustrations and conflicts that we have in our relationships are based on these unrealistic expectations. Those are things that I think we really need to examine and question. Are these expectations valid?

SZ: This notion of filial piety and how families relate to each other with a certain kind of expectation or power, how does that get heightened when there is an Asian community or Asian family that lives in a Western society where they don’t pay so much attention to that value of filial piety, where the Western society is already much more permissive.

IC: Often times, the first-generation immigrant family are trying to hold tightly to their traditional values because they have left their homeland and they are trying to create a new life in a Western-dominant society whereas the younger generation is living in that liminal space between both worlds and trying to navigate their homelife and those values as well as the other values that they experience in the outside world. It can feel like we are not being given the autonomy that we desire, the freedom to express ourselves. We can’t experience happiness in the same ways.
           
I lived in China for many years, and we taught university students. When we asked them about their relationships with their parents, the vast majority of them said that they had really positive relationships with their parents which really surprised me because in my community of Asian North American peers that wasn’t necessarily the case.
           
Seeing the social expectations of the environment that you’re growing up in can really affect how you relate to your parents and how you perceive that they relate to you.

SZ: You touched on this other notion of model minority and this myth of meritocracy where the idea claims to equalize people, to give equal opportunity to people who work hard and as long as you work hard, then you merit the opportunities that you get, and you merit success, and you merit a better life for yourself and your loved ones. What you say in the book is that it is a myth. Can you speak a little bit about why it’s a myth and where this idea of meritocracy comes from?

IC: It’s very much rooted in the myth of America where people feel like they can come to America and make a life for themselves, a rags to riches story is the fantasy, the American dream, but what that ignores is all the systemic injustices that are imbedded in the systems of government of America where certain people are allowed to rise in rank and to succeed but other groups really struggle.
           
Those who make it believe that they have done it based on their own merit without realizing that there are so many policies, so many systems in place that actually supported them in doing so.
           
Buying into the myth of the model minority makes us unaware or where we ignore the realities of the injustices in the system and we uphold these unjust systems whether that’s applying for jobs or universities, we feel like the systems are fair instead of recognizing that they are not, that injustice is implicit in the system and challenging the false belief that they are objective.

SZ: One other cornerstone of the Chinese value system is Chi Ku, eating bitterness, which is my personal favorite because it’s the one that was told me most often as a child that I had to Chi Ku. Everyone has to Chi Ku. Everyone needs to eat bitterness and eating bitterness is what builds character. It helps you to become a strong, responsible person. I would love to hear your thoughts on why this value exists in Asian culture and why it’s so important.

IC: Chi Ku is a way that generations before us have learned how to survive in a harsh world where there was famine, where there was war, where there was oppression. The acceptance of resilience, the ability to survive suffering to eat bitterness so that you can continue on.
           
Just thinking about all the suffering that my grandparents had to endure and my own parents, but because of their ability to eat bitterness, I am where I am today. I can honor it and value it for what it is.
           
But then see that I need to move on from there too because what this idea of eating bitterness does to us is that it doesn’t allow us to have compassion for ourselves or others who are suffering. If we normalize suffering so much, then we don’t feel any motivation to help change the suffering of others or to validate when others suffer.
           
If people are suffering, we’re like “that’s just the way life is”. It’s something that I can honor, have compassion and understanding for and yet learn how to deal with my own suffering with more wholeness, more wholeheartedness where I allow myself to feel, I allow myself to weep and to grieve, to feel depression, to feel lonely and to find strength in the feeling instead of strength in the not feeling.

SZ: This is such a huge turning point, to find strength in allowing yourself to feel difficult things rather than believing that your strength is in your stiff upper lip. It’s keeping my face calm and pretending to the world that everything is fine.

IC: Imagine how much courage it actually takes to be vulnerable. That is actually such a huge sign of strength where we just know that our love and our worth is grounded enough where we can show our weaknesses to other people and not feel threatened and insecure.
           
It’s because I know that I am loved and I am worthy that I do know that I have something to offer the world, not from a place of not knowing if I’m worthy and doing things to earn my worthiness. I do believe that all of us have something to offer the world. It doesn’t have to look superhuman, but just us being ourselves is such a gift.
           
If we could all realize how amazing we are and come from that place of rootedness in our deity, in the godlikeness in all of us, that’s where the power comes from. That is not based on our performance, it’s just who we are. When we can come from that place, all of us can feel more free to offer what we have to the world with joy and love and all those positive things instead of out of lack.

Sen Zhan talks with psychiatrist, Dr. Julian Xue

JX: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I have such a hard time with my Chinese patients. One of the things psychiatrists and psychologists in the West say about people still mired in traditional culture is that they are not psychologically minded. I think it’s hard for the West to see how strange it is to be psychologically minded.

SZ: What does that mean to be psychologically minded?

JX: We say someone is not psychologically minded when they have trouble identifying their internal emotional states, articulating their internal thoughts, doing introspection that psychotherapy depends on, having a hard time taking a third person view of themselves and looking at themselves as an object or scientific specimen.
           
But it is only with the ability to go outside of oneself to look from the outside in that we are able to dissect our mind, dissect our thoughts, dissect our emotions. This is where a lot of the power of healing comes from, this dualism, mind versus matter. This is very unique to the Western world, and I think that the Western world doesn’t realize that we are to treat our own minds as a third person perspective.

SZ: What is so strange about that?

JX: I have realized from working with Chinese people and people from other communities that this is not something that is instinctive. This is not something that people not exposed to the West easily access. Some of them make the switch really quickly if they had a lot of Western influence growing up.

For example, working with older Chinese people, it’s very hard for them to make the switch. When you are trained in the Western point of view, it’s hard to see any other point of view, but I have come to realize that this point of view is actually very hard for someone who didn’t grow up with it.

The Western power is that once you can identify that within yourself, you can change it around, but this is a very odd idea to people who don’t take this view because to them it’s in the world and you have to change the world.

SZ: I want to pause there and ask a bit more about this. I think this is really quite an essential understanding, why people from the Asian diaspora community might have difficulty touching what in the West we would call emotions and feelings and owning them. What might be happening if they experience those things but they’re not able to link that to an emotion that is happening inside?

JX: It’s the inside part that’s really, really hard. For example, the standard Chinese understanding of emotion of is Ching, which is our emotions, but its secondary meaning is reality. Foundationally, what Chinese people define Ching as is nature in action.

SZ: So, it’s like reality.

JX: That’s correct! It is not only reality, it is ultimate reality. It is more real than all the rest.

SZ: So, if you feel something, even if you don’t recognize it as an emotion inside yourself, you will perceive that as reality.

JX: When you get angry, the universe literally changes. This feeling thing, there is not a sharp barrier between my flesh and the universe. It’s human nature in action.

SZ: I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about what happens to the experience of a person like yourself and myself, 1.5 Generation Asian Immigrants when they have to balance two value sets.

JX: Salman Akhtar, one of the most brilliant writers on this topic wrote an absolute classic of a paper called A Third Individuation, the idea that kids grow up, they have on phase of individuation and realize who they are and then they get into their teenage years and find out who they are, so there is the second individuation, and immigrants get round three. You get plucked out of your original culture and put into this new place and you’ve got to make up your mind to figure it out.
           
Salman Akhtar’s point is that it doesn’t matter if it happens in your 50s, suddenly it’s a cost versus benefit. The benefit is that you have all this freedom. You have to make up your own mind about all these strange new topics, what to keep of the old, what to take from the new, how they will interact together in your life and there really isn’t a drawing board.
           
The pro is that there is a lot of freedom, the con is that you might mess up and find a new organization of your character, of new ideas of virtue and vice. You might also come into really original solutions that people like.
           
What happens is that it is a period of disorientation that every immigrant experiences. Slowly sorting out the orientation in the new world and trying to come to some moral conclusions for themselves of what is worthwhile of the old world and what is worth taking in of the new world.
           
Frequently after that period of disorientation, we see a tremendous period of anger because people feel like their old world deceived them or the new world is evil. It’s hard to get away from these points and both of them make people very upset.
           
Then, if we’re lucky, people get beyond that, but it’s a long period of making sense. If we are lucky, the person comes up with creative solutions for their own life that works out.
           
We have to see it from a Chinese point of view as well. Of all the Chinese traditions, the one that I’m going to speak to is Confucian which is ren. The idea is that we need to be humane. It’s usually explained as two people treating each other as human beings, being humane to each other.
           
It’s our highest virtue which makes it very different from the Greeks who prize reason as their highest virtue. Chinese people don’t do that. We take the whole thing, the whole of humanity and ask what it is. Well, we don’t know what humanity is, so let’s observe humanity.
           
Every human being is born loving his or her parents. Empirical observations, very profound. Freud makes the same observations. We cannot hold good, generous, loving relationships with our parents our humanness is broken and therefore filial piety is the highest of the virtues because our attachment to our parents if our original attachment. You get this right and everything else will flow a lot better which is honestly the same insight that Freud said and that is why filial piety is so important.
           
The second observation that we can make of children is that they love to learn. Chinese people have realized that humans are cultural animals. Learning has a distinct joy. It is our ability to participate in humanity and so Confucius in his first work, the analects start with learning. Learning is a joy and therefore learning is a way to become more fully human. This is the Chinese perspective on why these things are so profound and hold great importance in our lives.
           
The Western person has a lot of trouble understanding Chinese values. They see these as hardbound hierarchical practices of oppression and trauma. Yes, all of those things are there, but that is not why they are there and that is not the only thing that they are.

SZ: We have someone who is starting to touch this disorientation and anger recognizing that either the old culture was deceptive, or the new world is crazy, and they don’t see themselves in it. How do people start to make sense of that and go through the process of recombination of their values so that they can integrate into this new life?

JX: This is what I am trying to work through as well. I can tell you how I make sense of it. I was able to not get angry at my culture of origin because I have an active memory. I remember where it all came from, the rationale, the morality and things that are absolutely mind-boggling awe-inspiring in traditional Chinese philosophy, things that the West has not touched on, not even today. Insights like that shake me to my core.
           
Then when I see intergenerational trauma, I can start to see that it is not only trauma, it is a corruption of something that was foundationally aimed to be really good, but it has been corrupted and that prevents me from getting too angry at the old world because I can see what it was used for and in fact, I find it inspirational.
           
In the new world, I do very much of the same thing. I start to see how unusual the West turned into this duality. I also see more impulses in the West that brought us here, to Descartes, to this inward turn as people call it. I think by this active memory of both worlds for me at least, I managed to make sense of them and see that they were both rooted in the best parts of humanity. That’s how I made sense of it going forward to the extent that this is how I help patients make sense of it.