Jared Banka: So first of all, I'm going to start off with understanding the challenges of what it means to be children of immigrants. So first one, feeling caught between two cultures. So if you're born to immigrant parents, you've likely navigated this space between two cultures your entire life. And unlike your parents, your sense of self isn't solely rooted in your heritage, but it's also not completely aligned with the mainstream culture. So this can lead to a conflicted identity, one where one's experience is fundamentally different from their parents, but also different in many ways from their peers. So yeah, just to highlight sort of being caught in this sense of limbo. Yeah. 

And have you ever felt that you had a different identity around your family as you did around your friends? That's not to say that we don't all do this, kind of shift our identity depending on the social context. But for children of immigrants, this becomes magnified. And as you can imagine, it will have a huge impact on our identity formation and our sense of self. And that said, it's not uncommon at times to disown or distance ourselves from aspects of our culture, our identity, because finding a balance between our parents' beliefs and those of our peers is a challenge. 

And our second challenge is the unseen weight of internalized depression. So children of immigrants, yeah, they may face institutional racism, discrimination, microaggressions, and being exposed to these kinds of suffering at a young age can leave children of immigrants with feelings of powerlessness, worthlessness, shame, and fear. Obviously, these feelings can lead to negative self-beliefs, like, "I'm not good enough," or "I'm not worthy." And over time, these beliefs can become integrated into the structure of our personalities and persist into adulthood. So part of the purpose here today is to find some ways to validate these experiences and figure out how to challenge the belief systems that perpetuate them.

Shreya Naropantula: Another common challenge that children of immigrants face is a lack of emotional support from their parents and their families growing up. And before we get into it, I just want to highlight that parents not expressing their feelings a lot of the times is a defense mechanism. Moving from another country to a completely new environment with new culture, not knowing anyone, and knowing that you have to work to provide can be a lot for families to go through. And not expressing their emotions, and may be bottling up inside, is a defense mechanism, because they have to survive in this country. And I just wanted to highlight that before we go into it. 

So a lot of times, children of immigrants grow up with this feeling of constant disapproval from their parents. It's like nothing they do is ever good enough for them. Their parents can be disapproving of a lot of different things. It can be who you're spending time with, what you're spending your time doing, your love life, career path. So there's a lot of things that they can be really judgmental towards. And this can be really painful, because many of these choices that you're making are fundamental to who you are. It's what makes you you, and to have it being constantly criticized and constantly judged can feel really painful for kids when they're growing up.

And parents of immigrants are often coming from cultures where they aren't accepting of certain things that are normal in Western society. So a lot of this new information that you might be providing to them, it can go against their long-held beliefs, and their unconscious bias against you can be really hurtful, even if it's unintentional. These biases can come out like casual comments, disapproving facial expressions, using silence as punishment.

And another factor is the career. So, parents can often have really high expectations on their children because of the sacrifices that they have made in moving to a new country. And so, they can put immense pressure on their kids to choose certain career paths that are prestigious or successful. And a lot of the times, if you don't go into that path, it can cause a rift. So that covers the first part of constant disapproval.

Another way that there's a lack of emotional support is unmet emotional needs. So children of immigrants often have a lot of the material needs being met by their parents, but their emotional needs are often neglected. Their parents might have struggled to show their emotions, and they might not have actually modeled what it's like to actually show emotions, especially negative emotions. They were, again, like I said earlier, under immense pressure to make things work out, to make ends meet, to provide for their family, and they might have felt that there was no room for their emotions, and it would hinder their ability to work.

And so, because of these fears, they might have suppressed their emotions and either consciously or unconsciously prevented their kids from expressing these emotions. And so, when these kids are showing these emotions, being vulnerable, especially maybe expressing sadness or anger, their parents don't know how to respond. They may try to silence their kids. They may not want to actually deal with the emotions or help their kids process it, because it's scary to see those emotions. And by pushing it away, it's a way to avoid facing their own emotions.

And so, parents can often tell their kids that it's bad to show emotion, and they might punish you or silence you from being expressive. And so, you grow up feeling like your emotions are wrong and not knowing how to actually express your emotions a lot of the times. 

Another aspect of this is the general lack of mental health awareness that immigrant parents can have. They might misunderstand mental health problems, and they might label things like depression as being lazy, having anxiety as just being weak, and seeing ADHD as a character flaw. So they might not be actually willing to get you help, get you services to a therapist or a psychiatrist, and they might be even less interested in paying for these services. And so, a lot of the times, children of immigrants don't get the mental health support that they need.

Jared Banka: Yeah. Thanks, Shreya. So yeah, I want to move on and talk about this thing called a codependent relationship. So children of immigrants, as they grow up, they often take on immense amount of responsibility, financially, emotionally, to support their parents sometimes. And usually, they're the language mediator for them. When we think about parents, we think typically of them being responsible for caring for and providing for their children. In immigrant families, we kind of can see this dynamic become more complex. In some aspects, it becomes reversed.

Kids born in the U.S. are obviously more familiar with the culture, language, and societal norms than their parents, and they find themselves translating all these aspects to their parents. So what does this do? It forces them to take on adult roles earlier than their peers, earlier than is fair. And these struggles, they are not easily understood by their peers.

Shreya Naropantula: Yeah. And if we were to give a term or name this, it's called parentification. And parentification is basically a disturbance in generational boundaries. There can be a functional or emotional role reversal, and kids often sacrifice their own needs for attention, their own needs for comfort, for guidance, in order to accommodate and care for their family, their siblings, their parents.

And so, there are two types of parentification. The first one is emotional parentification, and what this means is the child becomes basically their parents' counselor. They can be their confidant. They can be their emotional caretaker. And a reason why this could happen is because in moving to a new country, these immigrant parents might not have a lot of outside support. They might not know a lot of people in their new community. And so, they kind of naturally end up leaning on their kids.

But this is putting this immense burden on these kids to be their parents' emotional caretaker at a really young age. And this can look like, for example, if their parents are unhappy in their marriage or dissatisfied with their lives, parents might be sharing their frustrations with their kid, might cry in front of their kid, complain about their relationships, and it's up to the kid to comfort them and to listen to these really adult feelings at a really young age.

So the second type of parentification is instrumental parentification, and this is taking on physical responsibilities around the house. It can be like helping with housework, like cooking, cleaning. It can be taking care of younger siblings. It can be managing other adult tasks. Like Jared mentioned earlier, the kids pick up the language a lot quicker, and so are translating these really adult legal documents to their parents a lot of the time, and it's a lot. It's a lot of responsibility for a kid.

And in saying all of this, it's important to understand that we're not trying to say that immigrant parents are not good parents. We're just trying to highlight the challenges that come with moving to a new country and starting your life all over again, and how these families deal with it, and the impact that it has on the kids, and how they often end up providing crucial support in this context.

Jared Banka: Yeah. Thank you, Shreya. So up until now, we've been talking about some of the challenges of growing up as a child of immigrants, not all of them. And, of course, we understand that your experience will be different. Some of these things will seem relevant, and others, not so much. So it is important to recognize that each individual experience of these struggles presents itself in its own way.

For example, I am not a first-generation immigrant. I am actually second-generation Japanese, and I grew up in a small town with very little diversity. And I can identify with a lot of the things we've been speaking about, not fully feeling a part of the mainstream culture, but also not fully fitting in to my heritage as a Japanese American.

So what does this mean? Yeah, it led to some identity conflicts, a little bit of confusion. It led to me not really embracing some of my Asian heritage until I was much older in life. Funny enough, my experience was, in school, I found I sort of gravitated toward some of the Hispanic kids and felt more connected to them. 

So what we're going to do now is we're going to break you guys out into breakout rooms, probably about five each. And I want to really invite you all to, if you're willing, share your experiences with the others. And yeah, just share thoughts, feelings, and reflections on some of these challenges that we've been speaking to.

All right. So yeah, and an important thing to highlight here is that a lot of what we're speaking about, it is important to kind of bring in the perspective that there is some evidence-based research that can point to the things we're talking about. We just kind of highlighted these two studies, one done in 2020, finding that second-generation immigrants have almost double the prevalence of psychological distress compared to first-generation immigrants, and then this other one from 2018, finding that among Asian/Pacific Islanders and Latinos, the children of these immigrants had significantly higher disruptive behavior and depression compared with the nonimmigrant participants.

Shreya Naropantula: So we spoke about the challenges, and now we're going to talk about how this can impact kids of immigrants. And the first one is the trauma of needs not being met. So children of immigrants, they grow up oftentimes with a decent amount of safety and security. But it's important to remember that besides having this safety, security, material and financial stability, which can also be case by case - it can depend, kids also have this need for emotional... They have emotional needs as well.

They have fundamental needs, like being recognized for who they are, being listened to, feeling connected, having the space and ability to make their choices on their own, having their emotions be validated and reflected. So it's not just safety and security that these kids need. They also need these emotional needs to be met. And when these go unmet, it can lead to trauma, even if that trauma is not really that visible, because it's hidden behind maybe some material wealth, academic success. There can still be trauma of needs not being met.

And I think when we talk about trauma, it's important to remember that we talk a lot about things that happen to you that cause trauma. But a lot of the times, there are certain things that should be there but wasn't there that can also be traumatic. And having your needs not being met, your emotional needs not being met, can leave these kids with a lot of anger and resentment towards their families on top of just the trauma. And I also want to be mindful that this is just an aspect of the trauma that kids of immigrants might face. It's not the whole trauma. We're not going to be talking too much about other types of trauma right now. Yeah.

Jared Banka: Yeah. So, suppressing emotions. First of all, what are emotions? Emotions are a lot of things. They are feelings. They're what motivates us. They're what draws us toward or pushes us away from people. The biological perspective of emotion from Charles Darwin, he describes them as an indispensable source of motivation to initiate action. He says that emotions give shape and direction to whatever we do. The primary expression of emotions is through facial expressions and body language and posture. For example, angry expressions signal caution. Sadness, it attracts care and attention, and fear signals helplessness or signals danger. 

Later on, we'll talk more about how to connect and experience our emotions more fully and deeply. But for now, I'm just going to outline some of the negative aspects of suppressing them, specifically in the context of immigrant families.

So yeah, what we see a lot in immigrant families is this suppression of emotion. It could be due to the pressure to assimilate into the new culture. Immigrants will often avoid expressing anger or fear out of fear of rejection or isolation. And children will do the same thing. They'll internalize these emotions for the same reasons, fear of being alienated. So showing vulnerability is so important in life, but it is usually scary. It's always uncomfortable, but it can be especially so when learning to navigate a different culture where you already are feeling like an outsider. 

One thing we know about emotions is that suppressing them, pushing them down, pushing them away, avoiding them doesn't make them go away. Likely, they become internalized, and they'll come up at some point down the road. And what this really does is it contributes to all kinds of suffering, mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, paranoia. Yes. All of this to say is, it's so important to be able to acknowledge and express our feelings, because if we don't, we struggle to communicate our needs. We struggle to assert ourselves, and we really struggle to build meaningful relationships.

Shreya Naropantula: Yeah. And so, another point under the impact that these challenges have on kids of immigrants is a diminished sense of self-worth. And tying back into what we said about parentification, when children are assuming these adult parental responsibilities really early on in life, they can feel really overwhelmed and really confused, and they start to believe that their value lies only in how useful they are. And they don't feel loved for who they really are, but just for how useful they are, what their utility is.

And so, when they're growing up without their authentic selves being acknowledged, it can lead to lifelong struggles. It can cause identity confusion, and it can cause low self-worth as well. And bringing back the constant disapproval piece in, having everything that makes you you being constantly criticized and disapproved of can also lead to diminished sense of self-worth.

And so, as adults, these experiences can result in excessive guilt, an exaggerated sense of responsibility for other people - and with that responsibility, can also be resentment in relationships. You can have difficulty making decisions, setting boundaries, and a lot more. And so, in severe cases, these challenges can also contribute to physical health problems. It can come about through persistent stress, anxiety, hypervigilance that children of immigrants might be carrying throughout their lives.

So now, we've spoken about the challenges, and we've spoken about the impact. So what can we do about this? How can we try and make this a little bit easier? We're going to be talking about a few tools that we thought would be useful.

Jared Banka: Thought it might be fitting here to begin this section with a mindfulness grounding activity. So what I'll do, this will take several minutes, is - I'll just guide us through a mindfulness grounding exercise, and I really invite you to interact with it to see what comes up for you. I know it can feel kind of uncomfortable participating in this. You can keep your cameras off, everything.

And yeah, I just welcome you to follow along. I'll guide us into it, and here we go. I'd like you to just kind of sit comfortably, kind of take a few breaths. Yeah. Just try to tune into the in and out of your breathing. Maybe notice the rising and falling of your whole being as you breathe in and out. And maybe notice any tension in your face, in your shoulders, in your arms. Notice what that's like. And let it go.

And stay in tune with the rising and falling. Maybe in a way that makes sense, try to visualize creating space inside yourself, space that expands when you exhale. And in this space, just notice any thoughts, feelings that are there. Just notice them and let them go. And maybe you can notice the thinking process itself. And when you're ready, you can start to let go of the practice, kind of come back into the room. Just notice what's there.

So, mindfulness. What is mindfulness? It's staying calm and alert amidst the full range of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Mindfulness is, it's tuning into our body and mind in the present moment. And really, in a big way, mindfulness shows up in many types of mental health therapies. Has anyone heard of acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT?

So ACT, it helps people accept their thoughts and feelings rather than fighting against them, and this is kind of the foundation of mindfulness. It then encourages people to take meaningful actions based on this knowledge, based on their values. And a big part of ACT is embracing your inner experiences in a way that allows you to make positive changes in your life. So kind of want to highlight that ACT has six main components, but I'm only going to talk about three of them here, and these three are mindfulness-based.

We've got present-moment awareness. We've got psychological acceptance, and we've got cognitive defusion. So yeah, present-moment awareness. What's that? It's just that. It's awareness of the present moment. It's noticing the constant flow of thoughts and feelings. It encourages us to create space for these thoughts and feelings.

The second one, psychological acceptance. It's adopting an open and willing posture towards all thoughts and feelings, whether they're painful or pleasant. It's noticing that thoughts are not good or bad. They're not right or wrong. They're just thoughts. We're allowing thoughts and feelings to be present without trying to change them. 

And that's very similar to what this term cognitive defusion is, which is, it's noticing these thoughts and feelings for what they are, just thoughts, but not giving so much value to the content. It's not taking our thoughts to be literal truth. So an example of this is, when I was in high school, junior year, I literally thought if I don't get an A in this algebra class, it means I'm stupid. It means I'm a failure. And I actually believed that for a while. And to think about it now, it's ridiculous, but it's easy to see how this way of thinking can influence our actions, our sense of self.

And so, how is this relevant? In the context of being in an immigrant family, when we talk about these conflicted identities, when we talk about not being able to express our emotions, often it's helpful to be able to tune in inwardly and look inside ourselves, and actually know how we're feeling so that we can express our needs. We can communicate our needs, and receive the support that we need.

Shreya Naropantula: So tying back into psychological acceptance, it's really all about honoring your emotions. So how many of you guys here have seen Inside Out, either 1 or 2? You can just put a thumbs up if you have, or a heart. Yeah. So I think a few people have seen it. All it's really about is about how all of our emotions are important. It's about how each emotion has a place, and that's really what we're talking about here.

Growing up as a child of immigrant, you can have a lot of emotional invalidation as a child. You're taught that your emotions are too much. You're being silenced for them. And so, you grow up thinking that you aren't allowed to give space to these emotions, that these emotions are bad, having these emotions is wrong. But what are emotions? It's just your body's way of communicating with you. It's just giving you information. It's just trying to tell you something.

And so, honoring your emotions is all about giving yourself the permission to have these emotions, and trying to remove the judgment that we place on these emotions, especially when it comes to negative emotions like anger and sadness. I think people tend to put a lot of judgment on feeling that way, and how, "Okay. Let me immediately fix this. Let me immediately be happy. Let me immediately make this feeling go away."

But it's important to remember that these emotions are not our enemy. It's not a liability. They are telling you something just as much as the positive emotions, and they deserve to take up as much space as the positive ones, and they deserve to be expressed. And so, often, when you run away from these emotions, you end up bottling them up. They're getting suppressed, and they're not actually helping you deal with the problem.

It makes more sense to allow these emotions to exist, to honor them. Let them take the space it needs. Cry if you need to, be angry if you need to, and then let it pass, because in the long run, pushing your emotions down is not actually solving the problem. It's not making it go away. And so, really, what this is all about is, your emotions are valid, no matter what they are. All of your emotions have a place. They have a purpose, and they deserve that space to be expressed.

Jared Banka: Yeah. Thanks, Shreya. Yeah. So a lot of the time, the way we talk to ourselves can be extremely negative. We can be pretty harsh on ourselves. And so, that's where self-compassion comes in. So we'll be talking about, in this section, mindfulness self-compassion, which is another great coping tool to kind of help cope with basically challenges in anywhere in our life, but can be particularly useful in the context of immigrant families.

So self-compassion, it involves treating yourself the way you would treat a friend who's having a hard time, who's feeling inadequate. They're trying to cope with a tough life challenge. Yeah. If your friend were struggling, would you tell them, "You suck. You're worthless. You must do better. What's wrong with you?" or would you offer them support and kindness?

I think most of us would find that we are naturally drawn toward compassion, to offering them that support and kindness. However, why is it that when it comes to ourselves, we do just the opposite? We treat ourselves like we're worthless. We're really harsh, and we generally don't treat ourselves as well as we do with our friends and family.

So self-compassion as a practice is basically learning just that. It's to be a good friend to ourselves, to become an inner ally as opposed to an inner enemy. Yeah. And so, you'll see this in an immigrant family, some of the challenges we've spoken to, trying to understand oneself, trying to figure out one's identity, feeling conflicted, caught in between two cultures. This sort of anger and resentment feelings that can be there can really get in the way of us fully connecting to who we are.

So there'll be three components to mindfulness self-compassion that we'll talk about. Mindfulness, we've already talked about. Self-kindness, yeah, it's what I just said. Instead of being critical, being kind to ourselves. And then the third one, we haven't spoken about, common humanity. It's just when we can recognize that what it means to be human is to not be perfect. No one is perfect. We all have our flaws. We all have our shortcomings, our insecurities. And if we can see those in others and we can see them in ourselves, we're naturally moved toward compassion, toward wanting to offer support. And it really makes us all feel connected, like we are all part of something bigger than ourselves.

So what does this practice look like? We thought at this point in the presentation, it would be useful to kind of do an experiential activity with it. We've got the steps on the slide here. And if you're willing, I would like to invite you again to participate in kind of a mindful self-compassion activity with me. And what I'll say here is, let's just take 10 or 15 seconds, and I invite you to think about an area of your life where you struggle.

And as you think about that area, maybe you can connect to what it feels like to think about yourself in that way. So in a mindful way, you can close your eyes and kind of take a few breaths to create some space inside, and really feel what it's like in this area of your life that's difficult, where you struggle. And maybe there's a feeling there inside. Maybe there's some thoughts. And if you're willing, just tune into what that feels like.

And we'll take a moment here to let that go. In a way that makes sense, maybe clear some space inside yourself. And now what I'll ask you to do is think about a friend or a close family member, and think about that area of struggle, that same one, and place it on them. What does it feel like to see them suffering in that way? Maybe there's some thoughts, feeling. And then now, maybe you can move some of that compassion you might have for your friend, and maybe you can place it on yourself.

Maybe you can notice what that feels like. Maybe you can find the two corners of your mouth, the right and left side, and lift them towards your eyes. And when you're ready, you can let go of the practice, come back to the room. Yeah. And hopefully, you notice something. I appreciate you coming along. And what comes up for me is that it's a lot easier to have compassion for someone else struggling with my own shortcomings. And why is that?

Shreya Naropantula: So the last tool that we have for you is reparenting. And I think this is relevant for kids of immigrants. It can be relevant for immigrant parents as well, because a lot of us have these past traumas that our inner child, our younger self is carrying, that maybe didn't get the chance to be heard and expressed. And reparenting is all about allowing your inner child to express those feelings, your younger self to have that space to express what they were feeling at that time when maybe it wasn't safe for them back then. And it's really about giving them now, as you're an adult, giving them what they needed but couldn't receive. 

And so, how do you do this? If we were to break it down, make it really simple, there's just three steps to reparenting. And the first step is connecting, and this is about acknowledging and connecting with your younger self, the inner child that all of us have inside of us.

And we can try to think about as many details as we can about what we were like back then. What did we do? What did we spend time on? Who did we spend time with? What were we like? You can also speak to people that you knew back then. Maybe look at old photographs of yourself, try to really get in touch with what you were feeling as a child.

The next step is to communicate with your inner child, and you can do this through journaling, meditation, or even just visualizing your inner child in your mind's eye, really allowing them to show up, exist, see what age they are, what they're wearing. And it's all about giving them the space to have their feelings, express their feelings, tell you what they're going through without you judging them, without putting any judgment on it. And you can try to ask them questions like, "What is going on right now? What are you feeling? How can I support you? What do you need?" And really tuning in and seeing what your younger self needed.

And the third step is giving them what they needed, and this can be comfort. It can be holding their hand, giving them a hug, allowing them to cry, holding them while they're crying, stroking their hair, telling them that they'll be okay, that things will get better. It can also be validating their feelings. It can be giving them unconditional love. And it might be hard to fathom how you can hug your inner child, but I would say maybe try to picture it in your head.

What would it look like to hug them, maybe give yourself a little hug? In this moment, what you're doing is you're being the loving parent that your younger self needed. And I think for children of immigrants, immigrant parents, immigrant families, there's a lot of trauma that we might be holding from our childhood. And so, in doing this, it can be really impactful and really healing.

Jared Banka: Yeah. Thank you, Shreya. That brings us to the end of the material that we had prepared, and we wanted to set some time and space aside to allow for any discussion, thoughts, feelings, reflections, questions, anything that's came up. And what I'll say here is, I spoke with Shreya during our break, and what seems so moving from some of the things, the discussions we heard earlier in the breakout sessions was that when we originally designed this workshop, we had in mind sort of the child's growing-up experience of being an immigrant.

And what we found is so many parents in here too, showing up out of compassion and concern for their kids, and that is just moving to see that. And yeah, I just wanted to acknowledge that, and thinking, "Yeah. This workshop, in the future, we may try to incorporate more of what that experience is, and making meaning from that."

Shreya Naropantula: So I just want to leave you with a couple of resources that I think can be helpful to have, and one of them is The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. We got a lot of our self-compassion stuff from that workbook, and it's really - a way that it’s outlined is how to build self-compassion. 

And in saying that, I also want to acknowledge that all of the things that we discussed today are skills, and they're not going to be something that you're going to be immediately able to do, because you spent your whole life being maybe mean to yourself in your head. And so, to completely do a 180 overnight is not possible. And so, it might be frustrating when you start to practice this the first time, but it is a skill, and it is something that will come easier with more practice. 

And The Best We Could Do book, it's written by an immigrant, a child of immigrants, whose family moved here from South Vietnam in the 1970s, and it's really about exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that immigrating and moving to a completely new country and culture, the impacts that it has on a child and their family.

Jared Banka: Yeah. Thank you, Shreya. Yeah. Thank you so much. I appreciate seeing you all here. Yeah. And Shreya and I will hang back for a moment at the end if anyone had any questions, or on how to get connected to any resources, anything like that. Thank you.