May 9, 2025 | Jessica Chong, AMFT
Finding Healing in the Both/And
Confessions of an Asian American Mental Health Therapist
Author’s note: Personally, May is a special month for many reasons. It is Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Month and Mental Health Awareness Month—two pillars of my identity and work. In honor of the intersection of Asian American mental health, I want to share from my experience as an Asian American and child of immigrant parents, including parts of the healing I have found in my journey. My hope is to offer curiosity, connection, and perspective to those who may find echoes of their own story in mine.
For nearly 40 years, my parents ran a Chinese restaurant. They opened it before I was born and continued until my junior year of high school. To me, the restaurant wasn’t just a business but rather a living, breathing member of our family. It was the focal point of our family’s life where our livelihood, identity, and sacrifices converged. As first-generation immigrants, my parents poured everything into that restaurant because it was their path to the American Dream. It was an opportunity for financial stability, security, and a better life – not only for them, but also for their children. Unknowingly, their pursuit came with an emotional cost.
Restaurant Kid
As a young child, I remember waiting for my mom to pick me up from school during the restaurant’s afternoon break. I’d be the last one standing outside. Then a teacher would escort me to the front office, where I’d call my mom and sit there waiting. I felt a quiet mix of embarrassment and worry, but I also told myself I couldn’t be upset because she is coming from the restaurant.
This reason became a source of comfort and justification. It was always the excuse I landed on because I knew my parents were working hard to provide for us. Relief would finally hit when I would see her rushing through the school doors. She’d profusely apologize to the front staff as they sighed and said not to let this happen again. (Of course, it likely would, as it was a frequent occurrence.)
As I grew older, being the last kid at dismissal evolved into being a latchkey kid entering an empty house after school. I’d wait with anticipation for my mom or dad to check up on me during the restaurant’s afternoon break. When I would finally hear the whirring of the garage, relief came as I knew that I wouldn’t be alone. But my relief was short-lived. During their break, they would tell me what to do for dinner, sneak in a short nap, and then rush back out to the restaurant for the dinner shift.
I often felt a mix of sadness and frustration, but I never complained. I kept silent, never expressing how I felt out of fear of dishonoring their hard work and sacrifice. They have to work. They have to go to the restaurant. They’re doing this for us. I swallowed my loneliness and confusion out of reverence and guilt. Especially during the economic downturn of the Great Recession, I watched my parents come home defeated and exhausted. I made sure to keep myself in line, to be good and obedient. In other words, to be quiet and not a bother.
The Wrestling
Years later, I found myself sitting on my therapist’s couch. She asked me where my beliefs about not being good enough and being a burden came from. I felt a familiar pit in my stomach and tightness in my chest, making it difficult to articulate what was going through my mind. My instinct was to protect my parents. I jumped into the narrative of their sacrificial love, of their hard work and efforts. I would play mental gymnastics to uphold my loyalty and reverence for my parents (hello, filial piety). As we continued to build safety in the therapy room, my fear of dishonoring my parents eventually softened. I was finally able to slow down this narrative. For the first time, I realized I had been so focused on honoring my parents that I overlooked another important person in the story — myself.
Attachment Always Wins
In The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté writes that trauma is not just what happens to us, but rather what happens inside us. Children have two essential needs: attachment (a secure relationship with our primary caregivers) and authenticity (the development of our truest selves). But when we sense that our authentic selves might jeopardize attachment, we learn to suppress our feelings to stay connected, even if that connection is incomplete or painful. As he puts it:
“If the choice is between hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need and being myself and going without, I’m going to pick the first option every single time. Thus, our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical and emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel.”
That was me. I internalized the belief that I had to shrink myself and sweep what I felt under the rug to honor my parents’ sacrifice. For years, it worked—until it didn’t. I felt the fragility of my mental health as it rested on this shaky foundation of a story I told myself for so long.
Therapy gave me a space to finally confront the feelings I had buried: the loneliness, the sadness, the confusion, and the anger. I must admit, I was shocked by how much anger there was. Then, from the shock of the anger, I felt guilt. I teetered between anger and guilt, trying to find someone or something to blame. C.S. Lewis once said, “I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.” I recognized that my deeper emotion was, in fact, grief. Grief for the parts of my childhood I had silenced, grief for the emotional needs I had ignored, and grief for the version of myself I had abandoned.
Embracing the Both/And
Grief was a necessary part of the process to see things for what they were and finally accept them. And through that grief, something softened. Eventually, the intensity of the anger and the guilt began to wear down, and the two versions of the story I oscillated between no longer felt fitting. I began to see my story with new eyes—not of blame or resentment, but of complexity and compassion. This is when a third version of the story emerged that included both my parents and me. I discovered a powerful shift in my rationale and experience: both/and thinking.
Both/and thinking honors nuance. It allows room for contradiction, complexity, and truth to coexist. It freed me from the binary thinking that forced me to choose between honoring my parents or honoring myself. The reality is that multiple things can be true at once. The power of both/and thinking isn’t just something I have witnessed in my own story. It is where many of my Asian American clients find healing when they learn they can hold both love and pain at the same time.
Examples of both/and statements that have helped me and many others on the journey:
- I can love my parents and still feel angry about what I didn’t receive emotionally.
- I can understand the trauma my parents carry and still hold them accountable for how they parented me.
- I can honor their sacrifices and pursue a life different from what they envisioned.
- I can see that emotional expression was not modeled in my family and still learn to express myself freely now.
- I can feel guilt for setting boundaries and know that they are necessary for my healing.
- I can honor their cultural values and still unlearn the silence or shame I was taught around mental health.
- I can heal from my wounds and still hold space for my family’s complexities.
- I can disagree with some cultural values I was raised with and still respect where they came from.
- I can feel gratitude for my upbringing and acknowledge the need to heal from parts of it.
- I can feel like I don’t fully belong in either my Asian culture or my American culture and still create a sense of belonging for myself.
- I can cherish my family’s resilience and work ethic and still seek gentler, healthier ways to live.
Being an Asian American or child of immigrant parents is not about resolving contradictions that we often may find ourselves straddling. It is about learning to live in the contradictions, making room for nuance in a world that often demands clarity. This is a key component not only for Asian American mental health, but for everyone who feels torn between two truths. It is not an easy journey. But, with intention and care, we learn to expand our story to include all of it—our pain and our power, our grief and our gratitude.
Knowing Your Story
This is the sacred work of healing: looking inward and sitting with discomfort to unearth beliefs that no longer serve us and to reclaim the parts of ourselves we left behind. In doing so, we begin to plant new seeds of acceptance, perspective, and compassion that lead to the fruits of living more wholly, more freely, and more authentically than ever before.
Your story is still being written, and you don’t have to write it alone. Having someone to guide you through the process of embracing the both/and in your life story can be a powerful starting point. If parts of my story resonated with you, consider taking the next step toward deeper healing.
If you’re ready to explore the both/and in your own journey, Individual Therapy provides a powerful starting point.
If you’re seeking to break intergenerational patterns, Family Therapy offers a path to healing for you and your whole family.
Jessica Chong, AMFT
Jessica Chong specializes in working with preteens/adolescents (10-18) and adults navigating different life circumstances from anxiety, depression, life transitions, relationship challenges, identity exploration, trauma, and more. She works with individuals and families through Waystone Therapy’s Whole Family Healing approach. Before her career as a therapist, Jessica taught middle school science in the Atlanta Public Schools. Her experience as an educator brings a practical and compassionate approach to therapy. As a second generation Asian American, she values the impact of cultural identity on mental health and personal growth. In her free time, she enjoys being outdoors, reading, and exploring local coffee shops.