Asian American Cultural Issues

Sometimes, it helps to have a therapist who is familiar with your cultural background, enough so that you can speak about your family issues on a deeper level.

Over the years I’ve developed extensive experience working with Asian American adult children of immigrants who are suffering from the impact of conflicts within their family of origin that lead to separation, emotional distance, deep resentment or estrangement. The emotional pain from these conflicts is extremely painful to bear alone or silently.

From my years of longterm work with individuals and couples, I have developed a familiarity with many different Asian cultural backgrounds (including Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Singaporean, Japanese, Filipino, Hmong, Indian, and mixed, adopted, and multiracial heritages). I seek continuous culturally informed training and supervision on all of my cases.

In therapy we speak about the role of cultural expectations and beliefs, filial piety towards parents and elders, the effect of language barriers in communication, immigrant parental stressors and pressures, caregiving, establishing boundaries, intergenerational impact of displacement, war and trauma, gendered family roles, sibling order roles, silence and shame around sexuality, money and wealth, silence and avoidance of addressing taboo topics like mental illness in the family.