by Sara Stanizai, LMFT.
In part one, I wrote about why the guilt and grief that show up when you change your relationship with your family aren't fully yours to begin with, they're often inherited, carried feelings that started with a parent and got handed down. If you haven't read that piece yet, start there.
Here's where it gets more complicated: Once you start questioning a pattern in your family, it's easy to start wondering whether you're questioning your whole culture instead.
Is This My Culture, or Is This Just My Family?
Sometimes our family is our only metric of our culture. Even when you meet other people from your culture, you'll start to learn that other people do it differently, that this was never a universal rule to begin with. Sometimes we mistake our own family system for a cultural norm.
This shows up constantly with first-gen clients, children of immigrants, people navigating two worlds and now, perhaps for the first time, thinking about acculturation directly. When you grow up somewhat separated from the broader community, your parents become your main reference point. They become the representation of "how our people do this." But they might not have the whole picture.
So when there's a pattern in your family, an expectation that you'll just handle things, that your needs come last, that somebody is always walking around behind one person with a dustpan cleaning up whatever they leave behind, it's easy to go: This is just how we do things.
In family systems terms, this is sometimes called the order of operations, when unaddressed dysfunction in a household consistently finds its way to the same person, no matter what the actual issue is. It's rarely about the dishes, or the schedule, or whatever the complaint happens to be. It's about who the system has quietly assigned to absorb whatever nobody else will.
This is not an Afghan thing (like my culture), or an Asian thing, or a Latino thing, or a Black thing, or whatever your own culture happens to be.
Then you start to question yourself. Am I wrong for pushing back? Does this mean I'm rejecting where I came from? Does this mean I think our whole culture is defective?
But here's a thought: it might just be a your-family thing. And even if it is a real cultural pattern, culture changes with time and with generations. You don't have to be held hostage by it, even if it is your culture.
When Dysfunction Hides Inside Good Family Values
As a therapist, I talk about how trauma gets passed down through families, not just through behavior that gets modeled, but through feeling states that get absorbed. A parent carrying unprocessed shame, rage, or fear doesn't just act from those feelings. They hand them to their kids, who grow up feeling things that were never theirs, with no map for where those feelings came from and only one model for what to do with them.
What makes this especially complicated in collectivist cultures and diaspora communities is that the dysfunction can hide inside genuinely good values.
Families take care of each other. Everyone pitches in. We don't air our problems. Understandable, given what many immigrant families have survived.
But "families take care of each other" and "one person silently handles everything while everyone else's needs come first" are not the same thing. One is a value. One is a dynamic that snuck in and has never been questioned, pretending to be a cultural value.
It's worth naming that this isn't only a cultural pattern, it's also a gendered one. White cis hetero patriarchy rewards exactly this adaptation: the quiet, self-sacrificing, over-functioning role gets praised as good character, not identified as a cost. That's part of what makes this so confusing to unlearn, it's not just your family, and it's not just your culture, it's a much larger system that hands out approval for disappearing your own needs. Unlearning it can feel like losing something you were praised for your whole life, because you were.
Inconsiderateness is not a value of my culture. It's actually 1,000% the opposite. Emotional unavailability is not a value. Expecting people to anticipate your needs while you contribute nothing back is not in anybody's culture. That's an individual pattern that found a cultural costume to hide behind. There is more risk of this happening in diaspora, when we become the main source of cultural information for our own kids.
Here's a small, non-family example of the same thing. I once had a job with complicated invoicing, and I'd taught myself a clunky, roundabout way to do it, because that's how it was originally set up and nobody ever questioned it. When someone finally showed me a faster way, I actually defended the old way at first. "This is fine, I've always done it like this." "My way is the easy way, what do you mean?" I didn't even question it, because it's the way my boss taught me. I didn't consider that my boss might not know the best way to do things. Just like I was with my parents. It took a few tries before the easier way stopped feeling wrong. Dysfunction doesn't always stand out when you're in the middle of it. Sometimes it's just familiar, and familiar gets mistaken for necessary.
Why Naming This Can Feel Like a Threat
When you start to see it, when you zoom out and go wait, this isn't right, it can feel like betraying your whole heritage. Therapy actually names this: the Adaptive Child, the part of you that learned to survive the family system, will often resist this kind of clarity because it feels dangerous. Like if I stop carrying this, I lose my connection to them. If I name this, I'm saying everything they gave me was bad.
That's not what's happening.
Know that you being healthy and happy is also a way to honor your parents. This mechanism may be bigger than both of you, and holding each other down isn't the only, or the best, way to honor them.
It's Not Always Inherited
Sometimes this isn't generational at all. Sometimes it's from your own present-day or childhood experiences. And sometimes it's simply the differing rates of acculturation between immigrant parents and their kids: parents tend to acculturate slowly, kids tend to do it faster, and that gap creates relational friction on its own, without anything needing to be "trauma" at all.
You do not have to cut off your family to stop this pattern. But you may have to disengage from parts of it. There is real grief in not being able to bring all of your family, and all of their expectations, with you into the life you're building.
Sometimes carrying a parent's feelings is actually a way of staying close to them, a kind of spiritual company you've kept without realizing it. So handing the feeling back isn't just relief, it can also open up real grief, guilt, or loneliness, because you're losing a way of staying connected, even if that way was never healthy. Sometimes your main way of connecting with your family has been through these very dysfunctional patterns, and you may not be able to build new ways of connecting in their place. Which means you may have to let some of that go, and it may feel like they've become more like strangers.
Yes, you can love your culture in the larger sense and still set boundaries with your family. Many therapists will tell you that you can choose the parts of your culture that still resonate with you and with your family. I agree with them.
How This Plays Out With a Partner
This rarely stays contained to your family of origin. Whatever pattern you carry in usually gets replayed with a partner, sometimes as who you become, sometimes as who you're drawn to.
The person who learned to over-function, to handle everything so nobody has to ask, often ends up either with someone who lets them keep doing that, or with someone who tries to do the same thing, and then the two of you quietly compete over who gets to carry more. Either way, the relationship becomes the new place the pattern lives.
This is actually one of the most useful places to do the work, not despite the relationship, but because of it. A partner who's paying attention can offer something your family of origin couldn't: Real-time correction. If you're used to being the one who handles it, a partner can practice actually taking something over instead of just saying "let me know if you need help." If you're used to feeling guilty every time you ask for something, a partner can learn to practice noticing the ask and meeting it without you having to justify it first.
This is also, often, where couples get stuck without knowing why. Two people can bring two completely different versions of this pattern into the same relationship, and the fight that looks like it's about dishes or plans is actually two old systems bumping into each other. Naming that out loud, this isn't really about tonight, it's an old pattern showing up again, is usually the first real shift a couple makes.
This Stops With You
You can love your culture deeply and still refuse to carry what was handed to you without your consent. You can honor your parents and still say: This specific feeling, this specific pattern, stops with me. You're not throwing out where you came from. You're getting clear on what was actually yours to begin with, and what was just handed down because nobody before you had the language to do anything different.
You don't have to fix your whole family or rewrite the whole culture. You just have to incrementally change your own branch of it. That's not rejection. Remember in part one, I said this isn't a clean sweep? This is what it actually looks like instead. And it's still the most loving thing you can do for everyone who comes after you.
One small, practical tool if the guilt won't quiet down: treat the thought "I'm being a bad child, sibling, or family member" as something to actually test, not something to just accept as fact. Ask what evidence supports it, and what evidence doesn't. Most of the time, the thought is a leftover script, not an accurate read on what you actually did.
Frequently Asked Questions
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No. You may need to disengage from specific parts of the dynamic, and that can bring real grief with it, but this isn't about estrangement. It's about being clear on what's yours to carry and what isn't.
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First of all, every couple is intercultural in some sense - gender, class, family style, even when there's no difference in ethnicity or background. The more meaningful variable isn't how different you and your partner are, it's whether you can name the pattern together once you see it. Second of all, I would want to know if you love your culture or avoid your culture, and how that impacts your choice of partner. And third, to answer the question, neither, automatically. It can make the pattern more visible, since two different family systems colliding tends to surface things that stay invisible when both partners share the same unspoken rules. But it can also mean more compassion, since you're already used to translating between two ways of doing things, which is a skill that helps here too.
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Yes. You're allowed to keep the parts of your culture that genuinely resonate with you while setting boundaries around a specific, unhealthy family dynamic. One doesn't require rejecting the other.
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No. Dysfunction can hide inside real, good values, families take care of each other, everyone pitches in, but the dysfunction is the distortion of that value, not the value itself. Plenty of families from your same culture don't operate this way. This is usually a specific household pattern wearing a cultural costume, not evidence against the culture as a whole.
Read more about therapy with Sara here.
Read part one of this series here.