You’re struggling, and you’re not completely sure why. Things just don’t seem right. The years of effort doing all the “right things” was supposed to make you happy. But now, you feel worse than ever.
You were told that “family is everything.” And you love your family, so you try so hard to do right by them. Even when you don’t want to, you begrudgingly do it anyways. You feel this invisible string pulling you to “do the right thing.”
But sometimes, you wonder what it would look like to live a life that is truly your own.
A lot of my clients come into therapy struggling with this. After a lifetime of following rules and fulfilling obligations, they realize the life they have been striving for is not what they want. Some of these clients even struggle with not knowing what they want. All they know is that whatever they are living now isn’t it.
And it can be really hard to start choosing your own path. Because shaking things up might mean disappointing family. Or they might even get upset at you. The guilt is very real.
And it can be hard sometimes, when our family judges us for what they consider to be “bad” decisions. Explaining it to them can be hard. And they may not even want to listen and understand your perspective.
There might be cultural differences between you and your parents. Or it might be a history of your parents being too controlling. It’s a complicated thing, tied to immigration, Asian cultural expectations, and how we are taught to understand love, family, and responsibility.
So how do you become your own person without feeling like you're betraying the people you love?
The following are six possible reasons for your guilt and shame when you to prioritize your own needs and goals outside of your family’s expectations and obligations.
6 Reasons Why You Feel Guilt And Shame When You Prioritize Your Own Needs
1. You Feel Pressured To Sacrifice Your Needs For The Family: Asian Culture and Filial Piety Explained
I think you inherently understand what “filial piety” is. You feel it in your bones, the obligation towards family, and the shame and guilt that comes with deviating from this obligation. It’s a very powerful emotional response that can be immensely beautiful…or immensely debilitating. More on this later. Let us first give a better definition.
Filial piety is found in many Asian cultures. It emphasizes respect for your parents and elders, caring for your family, and fulfilling your responsibilities as a child.
In families with healthy relational dynamics, filial piety can be very beautiful. It is expressed as love and gratitude. And it fosters connection between generations of people. But what happens if our family does not have healthy relational dynamics?
This can lead to the darker side of filial piety. You might even experience some of this yourself. Your parents expect unquestioning obedience from you. Or they expect you to always put their needs first, to the point where you feel like you’re abandoning your own needs to meet their expectations. And in families with abusive dynamics, filial piety can enable this abuse by pressuring you to continue “serving” your family and the abuser.
Due to multiple factors, many Asian immigrant children grow up prioritizing their family’s needs, while sacrificing their own needs. So there is definitely a cultural component to self-sacrifice. But there are also many other factors, such as intergenerational trauma, immigration pressures, and colonialism. I explore these factors in greater depth here: Why You Self-Sacrifice in Relationships and Why It Feels Like Love.
The challenging emotions you feel (guilt, shame, anger, etc.) are so deeply related to these factors of culture, immigration, and colonial histories. Understanding these factors can help destigmatize all the feelings you experience, and give you greater perspective.
Here’s a deep dive into filial piety, how it can be weaponized, and how that can impact you: Filial Piety Explained.
2. Your Perfectionism Is Stopping You From Living Your Life: Perfectionism In Asian Immigrant Families
At the heart of perfectionism is often a fear. What that fear is might vary from person to person. But generally speaking, for many, it is the fear of others seeing your flaws. It might have to do with your intelligence, your physical appearance, how much money you make, how perfect your family is, or just your performance of any task in general. It might be all of the above.
To avoid showing our flaws, perfectionists spend a lot of time trying to act/look/perform perfectly. This might mean overediting or redoing your work. And when things get rough, perfectionists might end up procrastinating or avoiding tasks, to put off the anxiety and fears of failure or being exposed as flawed or not competent enough.
I have worked with many therapy clients who struggle with perfectionism. There are certain environmental and cultural pressures that can cause perfectionism in Asian immigrant children. Immigration itself often create huge financial pressures on the family, so children are expected to be well-behaved and help out with the family at a young age. As part of survival, many families may also be highly regimented with routines and schedules.
In such family environments, there might be an imbalanced emphasis of rules, routine, and responsibilities. These things are important, but children also need to be given space to develop creativity, self-exploration, and self-efficacy. All of this takes time, energy, and money. But in immigrant families, they may not have these resources.
In some Asian families, filial piety can also play a role in perfectionism. As parents define the obligations and responsibilities of a “good son” or a “good daughter,” it can lead to the children following guidelines and rules of how to behave. They are encouraged to adhere to these behaviours, and punished for not performing these behaviours, which can encourage perfectionism.
There are also other factors such as capitalism, the Model Minority Myth (anti-Asian racism), and emotional neglect that can push us to develop perfectionistic tendencies. You can read an indepth explanation of these here: Why You Feel The Pressure To Be Perfect And How To Heal.
3. You Have An Inner Critic That Believes Your Needs Are A Burden To Others
Sometimes, the way we are brought up can lead to the development of a harsh inner critic. This is a close cousin of perfectionism, and the two often come in tandem.
Having an inner critic is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be very useful to guide us in making ethical decisions, maintaining healthy relationships, and motivating us to do important but un-fun things. However, some of us develop an inner critic that might be overly critical, judgmental, and hurtful. It can get to the point where it harms our sense of self and self-worth.
And we might sometimes get to the point where the inner critic is no longer functional, and creates so much anxiety and emotional dysregulation that we can’t do basic tasks. The inner critic isn’t an enemy. It is a very healthy part of us. We’re simply trying to develop a healthy relationship with our inner critic.
But let’s talk about how our inner critic might have developed. Everyone’s inner critic is slightly different. It often takes on the messages that are sent to us from the people around it.
Often, the inner critic is developed from the criticisms of our caregivers. It is not uncommon for my therapy clients to have highly critical parents. These parents can be critical about many different things. It might be the way the child looks, how they hold their chopsticks, or how loud they are.
Sometimes, the criticism is meant to be mean-spirited and borders into verbal abuse. When this happens, it really erodes the self-esteem of the child, as the child starts to believe that they are worthless.
Sometimes, the parents’ criticisms might reflect their own anxiety. Because they don’t have the skills to regulate their emotions in a healthy way, they use criticism and/or controlling their children’s behaviours as a way to regulate their emotions. This is an unhealthy method for emotional regulation, and can negatively impact the child’s sense of self-worth.
Children with highly critical parents will develop inner critics to help protect themselves. Our inner critic will mirror the messages of our parents, in an attempt to have us behave in ways that can avoid criticism. It might be getting us to perform perfectly, or to avoid taking risks so we can avoid mistakes. It might even lead to avoidant behaviours, where we isolate ourselves to avoid criticism and verbal abuse that we know is coming.
Our inner critic ends up internalizing the messages that we receive from our parents. However, it is never too late to heal from it. I discuss the healing process here: How To Rewire Your Inner Critic: Reparenting After Childhood Trauma.
4. You Learned That Your Emotional Needs Are A Burden Or Not Important
How we relate to our emotional needs is often developed in childhood. If we’re taught that our emotional needs are important and prioritized by our parents, then we are likely to grow into adults who take care of our emotional needs without guilt and shame.
For a lot of us, we actually don’t know what “emotional needs” are. We often grow up in homes where emotional literacy is not taught. We may know the words “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” and “anxious.” But we have a hard time applying these feelings to our experiences in real time. Or we may never understand our daily happenings as emotional experiences.
Instead, you end up overthinking everything. And all this thinking might lead to angry outbursts, shutting down, avoidant behaviours, or people-pleasing tendencies. When we get stuck in thoughts, and unable to identify or understand our emotional experience, this can be a sign that we lacked emotional attunement.
There are varying degrees of emotional attunement. It might be simply that our parents did not actively teach us emotional literacy, like learning how to identify and regulate emotions. Or it might be that our parents never connected with us on an emotional level. Or it might be that our parents actively shamed us for our emotions.
It can be hard to identify emotional neglect, because it is characterized by what we didn’t get as a child. We might have all our physical needs met, but we never received the emotional care and emotional safety that we needed.
So as an adult, we might not even know what our emotional needs are. And at worse, we actively shame ourselves for our own emotions, because we were taught that our emotions are shameful or a burden to our parents. And “Western culture” isn’t exactly great at creating emotional safety either, often emphasizing on “thinking” instead.
If you’re wondering whether you may have experienced emotional neglect, you can read: Signs You Grew Up With Emotional Neglect.
5. You Learned That Your Choices Don’t Matter: Explaining Learned Helplessness
As children, we are dependent on our parents for our survival. That means we necessarily need to build connection with them, and need them to care for our physical and emotional needs.
I work with a lot of clients who’s physical needs are taken care of, but not their emotional needs. This might be emotional neglect, as mentioned before. Some might have overly critical parents, or emotionally immature parents. In some cases, their parents might be emotionally abusive, manipulative, and overly controlling.
As child, we are not able to leave situations of abuse. This is a situation where the child would often feel powerless and helpless. A lifetime of feeling powerless and helpless will negatively impact the way a person learns to respond to life situations.
We learn that no actions we take can change our circumstance/situation. So we stop trying. To the point where we don’t even realize that the situation can actually solved or changed. For example, a child who learned that staying silent is the safest way to manage their parents’ verbal abuse will also react similarly as an adult. So when a workplace bully derides them, they will go silent.
Or in my own experience, I was conditioned to believe that air conditioners were a waste of money and electricity, and we can show our toughness and moralness by enduring the summer heat to save money. So as an adult, I never used my air conditioner. Our small decisions as trivial as using an air conditioner can sometimes be linked to our childhood.
You can read more about my air conditioner situation and learned helplessness here: Learned Helplessness In Asian Immigrant Families.
The challenging part of learned helplessness is the emotions that it elicits. It might be fear, shame, guilt, anxiety, dread. And these emotions make it hard for us to live the life that we want.
6. You Were Raised To Be A People-Pleaser
I’ve heard people discuss people-pleasing as a character flaw. But it’s not. It is actually a protection strategy. When we grow up in a family where it isn’t always safe, we might learn that people-pleasing can be a way to keep us safe.
There are many ways that we are taught to people-please as a child:
Your parents praised your cousins for their academic achievements. You wanted that praise and love too, so you worked hard to please your parents by over-achieving.
Your dad confided in you about his discontent with his marriage. You learned that if you listened intently and agreed with him, he would continue to give you positive attention.
Your mom often loses her temper, so you learned to constantly scan your mom's body language and facial expressions to read her mood. You would pre-emptively make jokes or show her affection to de-escalate her before she lost her temper.
Your parents asks you what you wanted for dinner, but you knew they would get angry if you said something they didn't like. So you learned to be easy and told them you wanted whatever they wanted.
Your parents often criticized even the smallest things that you do. So you tried to behave perfectly to avoid criticism.
Your parents might blame you for something that you feel is not your fault. But if you talk back to them, you would be shamed for being disrespectful and will be beaten. So you learned to stay silent and nod, even when you don't agree with them.
Given these circumstances, people-pleasing is what kept you safe. Perfectionism is a similar type of behaviour. And the inner critic is often active to facilitate your people-pleasing behaviours.
Even if you know that you have people-pleasing tendencies, it’s not as simple as telling yourself to stop. I explore this further and provide journal prompts here: Understanding People-Pleasing And The Nice Guy Syndrome.
These six reasons are by no means an exhaustive list. They manifest differently for each individual. And they are also no a life sentence. Change is possible. We just need to know how.
How To Rebuild Your Personal Agency
The answer is simple: practice. But the process is quite difficult. That’s because you’re trying to overcome a lifetime of programming that has led you to your behaviours and responses…people-pleasing, learned helpelssness, inner critic, perfectionism, etc.
It is also difficult because these behaviours are linked to emotional dysregulation. And so many of us were never taught how to identify the bodily responses linked to our emotions. We live our lives in dysregulation, and it just feels normal because it is our status quo.
There’s too much to cover in this article. But luckily, I’ve written a bunch of other articles on actions and mindsets that can be helpful in rebuilding personal agency:
It’s hard to feel empowered when we are constantly stuck in our trauma responses. Trauma responses is the antithesis to authenticity. We are stuck trying to protect ourselves, rather than being ourselves. Many of us grew up in homes lacking safe opportunities to explore who we are, our values, our identities. It’s no wonder so many of us have a hard time pinpointing what we want, or feeling like something is “off” all the time.
That’s why I advocate for all of us to nourish our inner child. For me, that was throwing birthday parties. It might be different for you. I explain it further here, and provide some journal prompts to help you reflect: Learned Helplessness And How To Rebuild Personal Agency.
If you recognize yourself in some of these patterns, I created a free interactive guide called Why Do I React Like This? to help you understand your emotional reactions and explore what they might be trying to protect you from.
Hi, I’m Harry, a psychotherapist in Toronto. I work with 1.5 and second generation Asian Canadians who are trying to understand patterns around anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, relationships, family, and self-worth.
