end of the day, we had nothing to show for it. What’s interesting, though, is that neither of us blamed God for any of these failures. Instinctively, we knew that the failures were actually human.
He’s a trauma therapist who wrote a wonderful book called “My Grandmother’s Hands.” He says that trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualized over time, looks like culture. This is an apt way to describe
You know what some people say? It’s a luxury that we can even talk about trauma, and I would actually push back against that and ask, really, is it easy to heal from the most painful things that have occurred to our families, or is it easier to stay silent and to keep your head down and just carry on? Which one is actually easier? In fact, it’s no luxury at all, that we have an opportunity to talk about trauma. I would say that it’s a responsibility, and it’s a difficult responsibility to bear. Now, since learning about trauma,
read this quote in The New York Times by Steven Young, the actor, and he was talking — I think he was interviewed by J. Caspian King — and he said that, you know, sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you. I was shocked when I read this quote, ‘cause I was like, I’ve felt this my entire life, and here he is just naming it so poignantly. What’s fascinating to me is that this idea of invisibility, which describes part of our experience as Asian-Americans,
We can’t even talk about ourselves without feeling like we’re being selfish or too self-absorbed, or sort of displacing what or who we should think, or how we should think about ourselves in God’s eyes. Then, I mentioned before, we sort of have this really difficult relationship with emotions to the extent that I’ve heard from the pulpit my entire life that emotions are not to be trusted, but rather feared, disregarded, or abandoned. If you put all these together, no wonder it’s so hard for Asian Americans to grapple with our mental health and have a healthy view of ourselves. The difficult thing about neglect, though, is that part of the coping or survival response is to bury, hide, or erase
A lot of us have difficulty acknowledging parts of our past, parts of our stories, because it feels like we’re betraying the people we love so dearly. I just wanted to say I want to create space to say we can hold two truths here: that on the one hand, our parents did do the best they could, and they set They sacrificed so much for us and are worthy of love and respect, endlessly for that. At the same time, there were times when, as children, we didn’t get what we needed. Both of these things can be true, and it is not a betrayal of our parents to acknowledge both truths.
Perfectionism is a big issue for a lot of us in the church. Perfectionism can actually be seen as a chronic low-grade stress response; it’s our attempt to control the terms of acceptance, validation, or love that wasn’t consistently present growing up. The idea here is that if the person is perfect, then there’s never a reason for them not to be loved or appreciated. Validation can also develop if a person only received validation, acceptance, attention, or a sense of safety whenever they did something good. There
Self-sabotage, particularly in relationships, is a big issue. Self-sabotage is significant, because the relationship might be going well, but the threat of the other person leaving fills the person with such Intense fear and anxiety often lead people to torch their relationships first or do everything they can to make the other person dislike them.
