We are grieving and feeling a tremendous amount of pain and fear. The escalating rhetoric and violence against Asians culminated in a mass shooting in Atlanta last week where eight people were killed, six of them Asian women, four of them Korean. They were murdered as they worked to support themselves and their families.
In the last year alone, there were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents reported, mostly against women and elderly. We need to acknowledge this is traumatic and it is taking its toll. We must call ourselves forward and deal with this head on. What can we do to build our cultural resilience as we navigate all this?
How do we build resilience?
Resilience is the psychological quality allowing us to bounce back in the face of trauma. It’s finding a way to change course, emotionally heal, and continue pressing forward in our goals. Cultural resilience is realizing how our cultural values and beliefs impact how we face adversity and deal with trauma.
As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, I tell folks that resilience isn’t extraordinary or an “x” factor that you’re born or blessed with. Resilience is ordinary. Resilience can be learned and developed. It’s about being proactive and understanding that we must work diligently at maintaining our mental health hygiene daily like we do with our physical hygiene. After all, we’re talking about the health of our mind which is our emotional, social, and psychological wellbeing. Mental health is important all the time, at every life stage.
There are protective factors and risk factors of our cultural resilience.
- Protective factors include turning to your community, asking for help, or seeking help professionally. This takes courage, especially knowing the stigma surrounding mental health in our Asian culture. Asking for help also improves communication which is an essential life skill.
- Risk factors include repressing thoughts and suppressing emotions to show face and save face which are acculturative stressors embedded in Asian culture. We are surrounded by the harmful and false narrative of the model minority myth and we need to dismantle that myth once and for fall.
5 Ways we can help ourselves and our community build cultural resilience for healing trauma:
1. Identify and claim your grief.
Grief is very personal. It can be from the deaths of the victims of violence, the loss of trust or feeling betrayed by authorities or those in law enforcement, or it can be any other change that has altered your life as you know it. Recognize that grief is a cycle so you may be dealing with endless patterns of emotions that come and go. That is okay.
2. Be mindful that experiencing anxiety is normal.
Anxiety is a reaction to stress which is a normal part of life and the human experience. We need to dismantle cultural beliefs surrounding distress. Being anxious or showing anxiety is NOT a sign of weakness. Expressing your emotions is NOT burdensome to others. Talking about your struggles or how you’re struggling does NOT mean you’re being ungrateful or disrespectful.
The paradox here is that accepting your anxiety helps you disengage from it, putting you more in control.
3. Understand the dualities at play.
I often point out to my clients dialectical emotions and thoughts, where you can be experiencing polar opposite emotions, and thoughts and perspectives all at the same time. That’s normal. After all, you can’t shut off an emotion to make yourself feel another one. It makes sense to feel extremely angry about the anti-Asian hate and racist attacks, but also feel sad and guilty for the Black community and want to acknowledge Black Lives Matter. Guilt (and shame) are deeply threaded throughout our Asian culture which outlines the dualities of everything we feel or think.
However, it is not good for your mental health to minimize the Asian experience for the sake of others. There’s a powerful intersectionality of identity and mental health. Having good mental health is being mindful of our Asian identity. Our own narratives help make sense of our reality. We are the expert of our stories.
4. Embrace allyship.
We need our allies for systemic change. There is strength in numbers. Teamwork makes the dream work. My Black female friends are the ones who cheered me up the most this week and I’ve heard similar stories from many others as well. Our community, our relationships, our support systems are what we need now more than ever. Research across the board (such as the Harvard Happiness Study) points out that having a sense of belonging and not being lonely is the KEY to HAPPINESS.
Allyship is about reciprocity. How can you also be the best ally to other ethnic minorities and marginalized groups in your community? What can they do to help you? Make it your goal to answer these questions to be outcome oriented for change!
5. Focus on what gives you hope and strength.
It’s human nature to look at the negative, but that doesn’t help our mental health hygiene. What you focus on gets magnified. Focus on what makes you feel empowered, hopeful, happy, and encouraged and make that a part of your daily life as best as you can. Each day ask yourself what helps you cope? Then do more of it!
The last thing we need is to NOT engage in activities or spend time with people because of our distress. Engaging is the very thing we need the most now more than ever. Understand that having good mental health hygiene is your strongest ally to fight the good fight here and be effective and healthy in all aspects of your life.
Bonus
Lastly, please be self-compassionate and show yourself loving-kindness at this time. Doing so allows you to show it to others. Hence, it creates a ripple effect of empathy and compassion in building our cultural resilience together.
Jeanie Y. Chang, LMFT, CMHIMP, CCTP is an international mental health speaker, AAPI mental health expert, and #1 bestselling author of “A is for Authentic: Not for Anxieties or for Straight A’s.” She and her husband have four kids ages 14-20 and reside in Raleigh, NC
