May is both Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Mental Health Awareness Month, and as a 1.5 generation Asian therapist, this intersection feels especially meaningful in
my work.
I feel honored to be an Asian therapist, bridging cultural identity and emotional healing. I often see how deeply values like harmony, filial piety, and self-sacrifice shape AAPI lives and hold families and communities together. At the same time, they can make it harder to recognize
our own needs, express vulnerability, set boundaries, or know ourselves beyond the roles we carry. Mental health work is not about rejecting these cultural values. It is about creating space to reconnect with ourselves within them.
In many of our cultures, harmony is how we stay connected. We learn early to read the room, avoid conflict, and care for others before ourselves. Love is often shown through responsibility, sacrifice, and quiet acceptance. These values sustain families and communities, but they can also lead us to set parts of ourselves aside in order to maintain connection.
Over time, this can create a quiet disconnection from authenticity—not because anything is wrong with us, but because there is often little space to explore who we are beyond our roles. Many of us also struggle to distinguish our own needs from family and collective cultural expectations.
This can make vulnerability feel unfamiliar. Asking for help, naming emotions, or expressing needs may feel difficult when harmony and responsibility have been prioritized over emotional expression. Many of us grow up highly attuned to others while less connected to our own inner world. We may carry a strong pressure to meet parental expectations, where love, duty, and responsibility are closely intertwined. The fear of falling short can shape us quietly over time.
This can feel like not fully knowing ourselves outside of roles—daughter, son, caregiver, the responsible one. Authenticity becomes harder to access when identity is shaped through expectation, and vulnerability becomes harder to practice when emotional expression is not fully
supported.
This may look like feeling unsure how to ask for help, carrying family expectations alongside guilt and responsibility, fearing not meeting parental expectations, and struggling to name emotions
beyond “stress” or “tired,” feeling uncertain of identity outside of roles, and finding it difficult to set healthy boundaries.
Honoring our culture does not mean abandoning ourselves. And learning to recognize and honor our own needs does not mean rejecting where we come from. It means gradually expanding what
is possible within it.
Therapy can be a space where this begins to shift—where authenticity and vulnerability can exist safely, where your experience can be expressed as it is, without needing to be reshaped or judged, and where belonging and a sense of self can exist together.
I deeply value this work of supporting others as they explore and reconnect with themselves, while continuing to do the same work myself.
You are not alone in holding both the love of your family and the longing to know yourself more fully. As we honor both AAPI Heritage Month and Mental Health Awareness Month, may we hold space for both where we come from and who we are becoming.
Written By: Catherine Mok, LCSW
