Parents Are Not All Good and All Bad: From an Asian American Therapist
Alex Ly, Asian American Therapist on Parental Relationships
In this featured podcast on The Atlantic, I am interviewed to give my perspectives on family estrangement and how to deal with it.
My portion begins at 16:15.
For a full transcript of the podcast click here.
I talked with Alex Ly, a therapist from Fremont, California, who focuses on therapy for Asian Americans dealing with challenging family relationships. He spoke with me about how to navigate that tricky middle ground with your parents and how family tensions can affect mental health.
Alex Ly: Every family needs to maintain, in therapy terms, what we call a sense of homeostasis: a sense of what is normal. Sometimes what is normal in a family could be potentially what’s not healthy. So you may have, say, a controlling parent who wants to do well for their kids, and so they maybe micromanage their kids. Or parents that are very absent, because both parents have to work. Also the parental mental-health issues come up if you know the parents struggle with a personality disorder or if they have extreme depression.
Khazan: So let’s say a client comes to you and says, “I can’t handle how controlling my family is,” or, you know, “I’m an adult, and the way my parents treat me—I need to change something about it.” How do you decide the best way forward for them?
Ly: As a therapist, I don’t necessarily tell them what to do. What I slowly try to pick up on is roles that you might play in the family. Have you ever seen a baby’s crib before, and you’ve seen a mobile? The way I describe it is, when you pull a piece of a mobile, the thing kind of shifts a little bit, right? And then when you let go of it, the mobile kind of just snaps back into place. Everything is all balanced. When you change one piece of this family system, it causes the whole thing to shift.
Khazan: I feel like a lot of people, when they are told to set boundaries with their parents, it’s like: “Hey, when you say stuff about that, it makes me feel really hurt.” “Well, what are you, the thought police? You’re going to tell me what to say in my own home? I’ll have you know, I bought this home, and I paid for it, and I raised you in this home.” Tell me what the step two of the boundary-setting is.
Ly: I teach clients how to empathize, reflect back what they’re saying, so that you can put feelings back on them. Sometimes if it gets too much, teaching the clients how to disengage. That’s the thing: There’s not necessarily a formula with this. You could leave the room. You could also keep reinforcing the boundary—saying, like, “Hey, I don’t really appreciate you talking to me like this.” It’s not about what to do. It’s more about: How do I take care of my internal world and then act in a way that honors myself?
Khazan: Why is it that setting boundaries with our parents can be so hard? For me, I’m one of those people who has no issue breezing past those people with clipboards on the sidewalk getting signatures. I completely ignore those people and feel no shame. But it’s very hard for me to set boundaries with my own parents. And I’ve always wondered why that is?
Ly: What’s the difference between your parents and the clipboard people?
Khazan: I mean, on some level, I want my parents to agree with my points of view and think that I’m smart and good—and I don’t really care what the clipboard people think.
Ly: Absolutely. You have a relationship with your parents, and the clipboard people, you don’t. And you care about what your parents think—you want their approval. That’s a natural, good thing to want. You want your parents to approve of you. I validate that experience is a good and healthy thing.
When there’s unconditional love in a family, that should come naturally right. How sometimes it works is that, Well, no. You don’t get that unconditional approval, right? I can’t unconditionally support you. And sometimes there’s a cultural survival element to that. If I think about a lot of immigrant families—“I can’t have you just do whatever you want, because you need to succeed in this country.”
Khazan: Would you ever tell someone to just detach from their family?
Ly: So one first thing: You’re not estranging. You’re making space for yourself. It’s more about you. I’m going to make space for myself. So I’m going to detach from my family. It may not always be permanent. I’ve run into this all the time with my clients. “I can’t just abandon my family—my parents need me; my parents don’t speak English! I can’t do that.” And it’s like, “Okay; well, that sounds like that’s not an option. We need to try something different.”
Khazan: I feel like a lot of people get trapped between “My parents are wonderful; they did everything for me” and then also resentment that they have to off-gas.
Ly: Yes, that is a very real thing. The truth is that most parents—unless they are all completely like 100 percent abusive, awful people, right?—parents are not all good and all bad. And part of that healing process is to have clients recognize that my parents did so much for me and they also damaged me. At some point there’s an invitation for my clients to kind of bring it together and kind of say your parents are both—they’re human!
See a Culturally Affirming Asian American Therapist
Navigating between two cultures, and setting boundaries is difficult. As an Asian American Therapist, I get how challenging it is to deal with family dysfunction in a way that honors both yourself, your cultural heritage, and your family. I help adults who struggle with family dysfunction, and toxic dynamics navigate these issues to find freedom. You do not have to struggle or settle for less. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to learn more.
