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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
- Cultural Views of Respect and Breaking Cycles
- Gender Norms, Religion, Culture, and Mental Health
- How Family Structures and Culture Impact Mental Health
- How to Start Setting Boundaries and Find a Balance with Family
- How Values Can Help Us Navigate Culture and Mental Health
- How to Navigate Cultural Differences Within Relationships
- How to Support Biracial Children Through Cultural and Identity Journeys
As a therapist living in one of the most multicultural cities in North America, I’ve seen the role the way that culture and mental health intertwine.
We are all raised with our own family’s views on life, relationships, and roles, which often come with specific gender norms. But we can’t address mental health without thinking about culture, which brings in added layers that relate to parenting, respect, boundaries, and family patterns.
Moms of color often juggle an additional invisible load—navigating the line between culture and tradition and their own personal and family values. Culture shapes our identity, sometimes in great ways, and other times with extra challenges.
Our individual upbringing and the culture we were raised in impact the way we show up as parents and the way we approach our own mental health.
It’s important to listen to voices in this area who understand firsthand the nuances of culture and mental health, breaking cycles, and carving out individual paths as moms. One of those voices is therapist Sahaj Kaur Kohli, founder of Brown Girl Therapy—the first and largest mental health and wellness community organization for adult children of immigrants. Her new book, But What Will People Say analyzes the role of culture on mental health, relationships, and parenting.
This week on The Momwell Podcast, Sahaj joins us to unpack the relationship between culture and mental health and its impact on parenting.
Cultural Views of Respect and Breaking Cycles
Different cultures approach parenting in different ways—and this can be difficult to navigate from generation to generation, especially for parents who are also children of immigrants. It can feel like a big cultural clash to be parenting in a society that often emphasizes responsive parenting after growing up in a culture that values top-down respect.
Sahaj pointed out that this is a very messy gray area, but that as individuals we have personal agency to change dynamics within our family. She pointed out that in collectivist households, where families tend to have strong interdependence, the way people show respect is often dictated by gender, birth order, and age.
For example, in her home growing up her father was not an emotional participant—he was someone she only really communicated with when things were not good. It created a chasm that she had to navigate in order to build a different kind of relationship with him as an adult—and it took a lot of work to get there.
Sahaj said that in her practice with immigrant families, she often works with parents who find themselves triggered when their children push back or exert independence in age-appropriate ways. This can often bring up something for parents from their childhood that they haven’t healed or worked through.
The way we show up as parents is a reflection of what we haven’t healed in ourselves.
She said that when we are trying to break cycles, it’s important to be mindful of how we show up as parents, because it’s a reflection of what we haven’t healed in ourselves.
This can feel like a lot of pressure—but Sahaj pointed out that it’s not about perfection. It’s about being present. If we can be present, show curiosity, show compassion, and be mindful, we can build stronger relationships with our children than we could if we just go off of instinct and parent based on unhealed parts of ourselves.
Gender Norms, Religion, Culture, and Mental Health
Sahaj pointed out that we are all byproducts of a patriarchal system, regardless of our religious upbringing or culture—and we were all raised with gender norms of some sort. But there are places in the world that have more of a strict view of gender and roles.
For Sahaj, it’s often difficult to parse out religion versus culture, although they are separate things, because her religion was so strongly tied to her cultural upbringing. Her family came from India to Virginia when she was a child, moving near a friend of her dad’s, who also practiced the same religion, Sikhism.
Their cultural community became interwoven with their religious community, and built the foundation for Sahaj’s cultural identity.
But within that community, Sahaj saw strict gender norms, with women being the ones cooking meals, and men being the religious leaders. She said that it felt like gender norms were so internalized that they permeated every part of their lives, including religion and culture.
Gender norms exist beyond religion or even culture—research has shown that intensive mothering, the belief that moms should sacrifice all of their time, resources, and energy for their children and find ultimate fulfillment from their motherhood role—impacts most moms in Western societies, regardless of race, religion, cultural upbringing, or socioeconomics.
This ideology reinforces gender norms, often without us even realizing it, and it has a big impact on our mental health. It is difficult for many moms to recognize the gendered roles and restructure them in a way that works for their family—but for moms of color or those who were raised in specific religious sects or cultures, redefining these roles for themselves is often even more difficult.
We often have to unlearn ideas and messages passed down to us and find our own way forward.
We often have to unlearn ideas and messages passed down to us and find our own way forward.
Sahaj said that the more we can at least build awareness of our upbringing and the gender norms we’ve been shown, the more we can question them and decide whether or not they work for us within our individual family systems.
How Family Structures and Culture Impact Mental Health
Another area where culture often plays a strong role in our mental health is boundary setting and family structure.
In some cultures, we are very individualized and separate from extended family. In others, family members are very close and connected even outside of the immediate family, often with a sense of filial piety—a cultural set of norms and values regarding how children should behave toward and show respect toward their parents.
Sahaj said that there is value in cultural aspects like filial piety, which can lead children to have a sense of pride and contribution and help ensure that everyone is protected and cared for. But like anything, if taken to an extreme, to the point where you feel like you have to forego your sense of self or your own relationships, it can become problematic.
Sometimes families become “enmeshed,” where boundaries with each other might be unclear or nonexistent.
Sahaj said that we can think of an enmeshed family like a loofah—made of many tiny threads that interweave to become one thing. All of the people within the family are fully integrated into each other’s lives, and it functions as one system.
A Western family system that is not enmeshed might be more like a big bubble, where everyone exists together, but separately, within the family.
Sahaj said that enmeshment can become problematic because it leaves people feeling like they can’t advocate for themselves, but helping people work away from this situation doesn’t mean they have to forego the closeness or break away from the family system altogether.
You can still be integrated into the family system while also making room for yourself.
She helps clients transition from existing within the overlapping circles of their family members to moving toward a Venn diagram—where they can still be integrated into the family system while also making room for themselves.
How to Start Setting Boundaries and Find a Balance with Family
Research shows that immigrant families are more likely to be enmeshed, and it comes from a protective place. Enmeshment likely allowed them to form communities to protect themselves and each other, creating an environment that was safe and secure for their children.
Sahaj said that viewing her own family in this light helped her see that the strictness she grew up with came from a place of love—her parents were scared that she would forget her roots or make choices that would lead to less safety and security.
She also said that when we look at enmeshment from this standpoint, we can have compassion and understand why boundaries might feel scary within some cultures and families. In the Western world, we are often taught to be explicitly, direct, “just say no,” or advocate for what we need.
And while Sahaj says that advice is helpful, and that setting boundaries is important, we also have to remember that this is very difficult, because communication is used differently depending on your culture.
If you grew up in a culture where there are specific people within your family that you aren’t allowed to be direct with, or in a culture where you feel that strong sense of responsibility toward your parents, building boundary-setting skills might not be easy.
Boundaries work is about building a sense of agency and protecting yourself.
She said that sometimes her clients need to practice not just verbal boundaries but also behavioral ones, limiting time with people who are triggering them or setting a boundary on the length of conversations or whether they have to answer the phone every time a family member calls, even if they are busy.
Her work with these clients centers around building a sense of agency in their relationships and doing what they need to protect themselves—it’s not about changing the other person or abandoning their culture.
How Values Can Help Us Navigate Culture and Mental Health
Sahaj said that starting with values work often helps weigh out those cultural components and determine where we want to draw boundaries. Values, or the core principles that matter most to us as individuals, can help us discern what is being expected of us versus what we want.
She often asks her clients to think about:
- Their own top values
- The top values they think their parents might have
- The top values they think align with their family’s culture
- The top values they think align with American culture
- The top values they think their best friend might have
- The values they would like to live by
- And the values they are currently living by
When we take the time to answer these questions and map them out on paper, we can start to identify overlaps and differences—and it can also uncover our beliefs, or our assumptions about the world based on our values.
For example, just because two people both value family doesn’t mean that their beliefs around family are the same. A mom might have one belief about what it means to be a “good daughter,” while her daughter might have a very different belief.
Our beliefs are often rooted in our cultural identity.
Sahaj said that these conversations all require identity work because our beliefs are often rooted in our cultural identity, ancestral elder experiences, and immigration experiences.
She also pointed out that self-esteem work is a big piece of working through the impact of culture and mental health. Someone from an individualist background might feel good about themselves when they make decisions that are good for them or put their needs first—and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But for those raised in a more collective background, having high self-esteem often comes from how well they fulfilled their roles within the groups, families, and communities they were a part of. Self-care or taking care of your needs might look very different in this situation—but it is still very important to make space for yourself and understand your own needs.
Sahaj said that often her clients have been conditioned to need external validation, to be people-pleasers, that they might not even know what they need or what makes them happy. Understanding this is a key component before they can address their relationships.
How to Navigate Cultural Differences Within Relationships
It can be difficult for interracial or intercultural couples to navigate differences in culture, especially when it comes to core ideas like family systems.
Sahaj often works with clients who feel like they are expected to integrate into their spouse’s family, but if they were raised in a more individualized society that can be uncomfortable. Navigating the differences and finding a balance is hard.
She said that it often requires a level of compromise on both ends—it can’t always be one person compromising because then it becomes a sacrifice.
The answer isn’t that one cultural idea is right or wrong—it’s about how it affects each partner.
The answer isn’t that one cultural idea is right or wrong—it’s about how it affects each individual and how it impacts the relationship. This is very individualized—what feels healthy or acceptable to one person within a family might not be the same as their sibling or a different family member.
We are all different people with different levels of tolerance and acceptance, and those things impact the way we set boundaries, what we’re willing or not willing to do, and how we feel about the level of enmeshment in our relationships and families.
Creating that Venn diagram for ourselves in a way that feels comfortable, while maintaining open communication within a relationship or partnership about how it affects the other person, can help us forge healthy patterns and find the pieces of our culture and tradition that feel right to us on an individual level. But it often takes learning boundary-setting skills, taking baby steps, and plenty of self-work.
How to Support Biracial Children Through Cultural and Identity Journeys
Navigating different cultures within one family also brings up challenges when it comes to parenting. Many parents are unsure of how to bridge the gap and help their child find their own identity in both cultures while still being true to themselves.
Sahaj said that the first thing to do is to get on the same page so that the children don’t feel that each parent expects different things.
It’s also important to communicate with your partner about what you each want to pass down from your cultures, whether it’s language, music, traditions, or whatever components matter to each of you. Sahaj pointed out that you can’t force your partner to be connected to their heritage in the way you might want them to—so these ongoing conversations to understand their point of view matter.
Creating a family system that honors the traditions and cultural aspects you each value is important.
But Sahaj also said it shouldn’t feel like each parent is “in charge” of passing down their culture. Creating a family system that honors the traditions and cultural aspects you each value is important.
Most of all, Sahaj encourages parents to support curiosity in their children. Allow them to ask questions, to explore different aspects of culture, to talk about why different family members might do things differently. Ask them questions about the way they feel about their culture and how it plays into interactions with peers.
She said that it’s okay for them to have experiences that make them feel shame and experiences that make them feel pride—we want to leave room for all of the feelings. But we also want to help them lean into the pride piece wherever possible.
Sahaj said that the goal is to be on the journey with our children as they blend and find their own identity and where they belong, without pushing them or forcing them into anything. The key to this comes down to exposure—to foods, books, TV shows, or traditions. She also said to focus on quality over quantity and encourage curiosity along the way.
The more we can expose our children to cultural aspects and normalize the idea that people look differently and have different relationships with their identity, the more confident they will be in exploring their cultures and carving out their own identity.
If you’re struggling with boundary-setting, understanding your own values or beliefs, communicating with your partner, or navigating your own upbringing, culture, and mental health, our therapists are here to help. Book a FREE 15 minute consult today.
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