The Holistic Counselor Journal
Growing Up Between Cultures: How Immigration, Family Expectations, Faith, and Belonging Shape Mental Health
Growing up between cultures can create strength, adaptability, and pride—but also a painful disconnect within. A reflection on code-switching, family expectations, faith, healing, and belonging.
Growing Up Between Cultures: How Immigration, Family Expectations, Faith, and Belonging Shape Mental Health
What happens when belonging requires you to edit parts of yourself? A personal reflection on code-switching, inherited survival patterns, inner-child healing, cultural pride, and the freedom to examine the stories that shaped us.
How much of yourself did you learn to edit in order to be loved?
Maybe you changed the way you spoke.
Maybe you learned which parts of your family story were safe to share and which ones needed to remain hidden.
Maybe you became the strong one, the successful one, the grateful one, the good Christian, the good daughter, or the person who never needed help.
Maybe you learned how to move between cultures so well that other people never noticed what it cost you.
But somewhere beneath all that adapting may be a younger version of you who still wants to be seen, understood, respected, and held.
I know that disconnect because I have lived it.
The Disconnect Within
I am the daughter of a single immigrant mother. I grew up surrounded by unhealed adults who were doing what they knew how to do with the stories and resources they had.
There was strength in the village that raised me. There was sacrifice, survival, culture, spirituality, patriotism, and the belief that being born in America gave me opportunities my mother did not have. She taught me to memorize my Social Security number when I was around five years old. She repeatedly reminded me, “You are an American.”
I remain grateful for the determination she placed inside me.
There was also pain.
As a child, I needed love, understanding, respect, and a hug. I did not always receive them in the ways I needed. Like many children, I adapted before I had language for what I was doing.
The child at the center of this story - deserving of love, understanding, respect, and safety.
That adaptation followed me into adulthood.
It took years of personal work for me to understand why I used drugs, slept around, made painful choices, and searched outside myself for something I could not yet name. I was eventually labeled with anxiety and depression. I have also lived with autoimmune illness. Today, I do not reduce any of those experiences to one simple cause. Human beings are more complicated than that.
What I can say is that learning about trauma, attachment, the body, family systems, and my ancestral stories gave me new ways to understand myself. The CDC explains that adverse childhood experiences can have lasting effects on health and well-being, including the body’s stress-response systems. That knowledge did not give me someone to blame. It gave me context—and context gave me choices.
I began to see that there was not something inherently wrong with me. There were parts of me that had learned how to survive.
Code-Switching Before I Knew Its Name
Growing up in the 1970s, most of the images I saw in American magazines and television centered people with access, money, and whiteness. When Latinas appeared, they were often portrayed as criminals, maids, or the lowest members of the social order.
Children notice who is celebrated and who is diminished.
When I moved to Florida, I worked hard to lose what I thought of then as my New York or Nuyorican accent. I learned to speak in a way that helped me blend in and sound like what others expected an American girl to sound like.
Long before I knew the word code-switching, I was learning how to adapt in order to belong.
Later, people from within my own broader community called me a sellout or a “coconut”—brown on the outside and white on the inside.
At the time, I was confused. Now I can understand that their reactions often reflected their own discomfort, pain, or limited understanding. But the message still landed: I could be too different for one group and not authentic enough for another.
I have felt caught between worlds for most of my life.
Today we might call some of this code-switching: adjusting our language, behavior, or presentation according to the environment. Code-switching can be resourceful. It may create safety, access, opportunity, or connection. It can also become exhausting when acceptance seems to depend on hiding parts of who we are. Research has connected code-switching with the need to belong, stereotype threat, social connection, and the ways people navigate bias. Studies of multiracial and multiethnic adults have also described masking and code-switching as responses to feeling that one does not completely fit within any one group.
Sometimes what looks like confidence is constant calculation:
How should I speak here? Which version of me will be accepted? Is it safe to tell the truth?
Pride Can Be a Shield—and a Wall
Cultural pride can help a person survive.
It can preserve language, food, music, storytelling, family bonds, faith, humor, creativity, and the wisdom of those who came before us. It can remind a child that their people are more expansive and beautiful than the stereotypes presented to them.
But pride can also become a wall.
If strength means never admitting pain, we cannot heal what we refuse to witness. If family loyalty means silence, harmful patterns remain protected. If resilience means enduring everything without help, survival can become its own prison.
This is the tension I have learned to hold: I can honor the strength of immigrant women, the beauty of brown skin, and the wealth carried within different cultures while also believing that emotions deserve honesty and respect.
Being witnessed is not weakness.
Grieving is not betrayal.
Asking for help does not erase our resilience.
Sometimes it is the next expression of it.
Telling the Truth Without Creating a Villain
I did not learn how to grieve deeply until my late forties.
By then, years of education in psychology and years of sitting with other people’s stories had taught me about boundaries, trauma, and patterns. But professional knowledge does not exempt a therapist from being human. I still needed to do my own work.
That work included EMDR, becoming informed by Internal Family Systems, learning about the science of the body, exploring my family and ancestral stories, practicing forgiveness, and developing a different relationship with my inner critic.
Most importantly, it included having a witness—a skilled, educated therapist who could sit with what was true without needing me to minimize it, rush it, defend anyone, or remain trapped inside it.
Healing did not require me to turn my mother or my culture into villains.
My mother caused pain. She also carried pain. She gave me wounds, and she gave me strength. She passed down survival strategies that made sense within her own story, even when some of them no longer served mine.
Several things can be true at the same time.
Understanding is not the same as excusing. Forgiveness is not pretending something did not hurt. Boundaries are not revenge. Grief is not disrespect.
The goal is not to stay stuck in hatred, resentment, or blame. The goal is to become honest enough to feel what happened, compassionate enough to understand its context, and responsible enough to choose what happens next.
Faith That Can Survive a Question
My spiritual story also unfolded between worlds.
I was raised around Catholicism and exposed to Santería within my family. Eventually, while studying women’s studies at Florida Atlantic University—a non-Christian college—I began taking a deeper look at Jesus for myself.
I kept asking why.
Why did so many people think only in black-and-white terms? Why did every group seem convinced that its interpretation was the only correct one? What had Jesus actually said and modeled beneath the inherited systems, cultural additions, fear, and power?
As I studied, my soul awakened.
I encountered Jesus not as a mascot for a political tribe or a tool for controlling people, but as the one I wanted to follow—the guide who showed humanity another way through the mess we have created.
Religion exists on a spectrum. A faith community can become a healthy place of belonging, humility, service, and growth. It can also become an unhealthy or narcissistic system, depending in part on its leadership, use of power, and willingness to receive questions.
For me, examined faith is not faithlessness. It is a decision to take responsibility for what I believe and for the fruit those beliefs produce in my life.
Listening to understand instead of listening merely to respond is part of that fruit.
So is the humility to disentangle scripture from nationalism, political identity, algorithms, echo chambers, and the traditions of the village that raised us.
Galatians 3:28 reminds me of our unity in Christ. Psalm 139 reminds me that each human being is intimately known. I can believe we are spiritually equal while also respecting that our histories, bodies, cultures, opportunities, and experiences are not identical.
Unity does not require sameness.
From Inherited to Examined
At 54, I can say something I could not have said when I was younger: I would not change my story.
That does not mean every part of it was good. It means I have learned to become curious about what pain and emotion can teach me. I have learned to let the inner critic sit down while I listen to what is happening inside me.
I am still evolving.
The parts of me that once coped in painful ways are not parts I need to hate or exile. They were trying to help me survive with the tools they had. Through therapy, faith, education, grief, and practice, those parts can be witnessed and integrated into a fuller self.
This is why I believe in therapy. It is also why I am so passionate about The Holistic Counselor Podcast.
I want curious people to encounter information that helps them understand they are not alone. I want clinicians to remember that cultural responsiveness is not a list of facts or stereotypes to memorize. It is the humility to remain curious about the actual person sitting in front of us.
Research with BIPOC women has found that cultural humility and a strong therapeutic relationship matter to therapy outcomes, while racial and gendered microaggressions can undermine both. A good therapist does not have to share every part of your identity. But they should respect your worldview, listen without defensiveness, recognize what they do not know, and be willing to learn.
You are allowed to ask a potential therapist:
How do you include culture and family history in your work?
Are you comfortable discussing faith and spiritual experiences without imposing your own beliefs?
What experience do you have working with immigrants, children of immigrants, or people with intersecting identities?
How do you respond when a client tells you that you misunderstood something about their experience?
Will there be room here for the parts of my story that do not fit neatly into a diagnosis?
Fit matters. You deserve care in which you do not have to amputate pieces of yourself to be understood.
You Have Agency
If you recognize the disconnect within yourself, you do not have to solve your entire life today.
You might begin by noticing one family message you inherited. You might write about the version of yourself you learned to perform in order to belong. You might reconnect with a cultural tradition that feels safe and meaningful—or create a boundary around one that does not.
You might allow yourself to rest without calling it weakness. You might pray, make art, move your body, tell your story, or speak with someone capable of witnessing it. You might begin looking for a therapist who respects your culture, faith, values, and lived experience.
Your history matters, but it is not a life sentence.
You can respect where you came from and examine what you inherited. You can love your family and tell the truth. You can be resilient and need support. You can grieve and remain grateful. You can carry multiple cultures without proving that you belong to only one.
You can move from unseen to understood.
And you can participate in what happens next.
That is hope.
That is agency.
Continue the Conversation
The original artwork I created for Episode 2 in February 2024.
Watch Episode 2 on YouTube or visit the complete Episode 2 page for the full show notes, listening options, and mental-health resources.
Episode 2: Beyond Politics—A Heartfelt Navigation of BIPOC and Immigrant Mental Health explores how culture, immigration, discrimination, family history, faith, and intergenerational trauma may shape mental health.
Free companion: From Unseen to Understood: A Whole-Story Reflection Guide is available through the email signup on this page.
If this article helped you feel seen—or helped you understand someone whose experience differs from your own—please share it.
Challenge the status quo. Think deeper. Become a better human.
This article and The Holistic Counselor Podcast are provided for educational and informational purposes only. They are not psychotherapy, diagnosis, medical treatment, or individualized clinical advice. Reading or listening does not establish a therapist-client relationship. If emotional distress is affecting your daily life, consider seeking support from an appropriately licensed professional.
Growing Up Between Cultures: How Immigration, Family Expectations, Faith, and Belonging Shape Mental Health
What happens when belonging requires you to edit parts of yourself? A personal reflection on code-switching, inherited survival patterns, inner-child healing, cultural pride, and the freedom to examine the stories that shaped us.
How much of yourself did you learn to edit in order to be loved?
Maybe you changed the way you spoke.
Maybe you learned which parts of your family story were safe to share and which ones needed to remain hidden.
Maybe you became the strong one, the successful one, the grateful one, the good Christian, the good daughter, or the person who never needed help.
Maybe you learned how to move between cultures so well that other people never noticed what it cost you.
But somewhere beneath all that adapting may be a younger version of you who still wants to be seen, understood, respected, and held.
I know that disconnect because I have lived it.
The Disconnect Within
I am the daughter of a single immigrant mother. I grew up surrounded by unhealed adults who were doing what they knew how to do with the stories and resources they had.
There was strength in the village that raised me. There was sacrifice, survival, culture, spirituality, patriotism, and the belief that being born in America gave me opportunities my mother did not have. She taught me to memorize my Social Security number when I was around five years old. She repeatedly reminded me, “You are an American.”
I remain grateful for the determination she placed inside me.
There was also pain.
As a child, I needed love, understanding, respect, and a hug. I did not always receive them in the ways I needed. Like many children, I adapted before I had language for what I was doing.
The child at the center of this story - deserving of love, understanding, respect, and safety.
That adaptation followed me into adulthood.
It took years of personal work for me to understand why I used drugs, slept around, made painful choices, and searched outside myself for something I could not yet name. I was eventually labeled with anxiety and depression. I have also lived with autoimmune illness. Today, I do not reduce any of those experiences to one simple cause. Human beings are more complicated than that.
What I can say is that learning about trauma, attachment, the body, family systems, and my ancestral stories gave me new ways to understand myself. The CDC explains that adverse childhood experiences can have lasting effects on health and well-being, including the body’s stress-response systems. That knowledge did not give me someone to blame. It gave me context—and context gave me choices.
I began to see that there was not something inherently wrong with me. There were parts of me that had learned how to survive.
Code-Switching Before I Knew Its Name
Growing up in the 1970s, most of the images I saw in American magazines and television centered people with access, money, and whiteness. When Latinas appeared, they were often portrayed as criminals, maids, or the lowest members of the social order.
Children notice who is celebrated and who is diminished.
When I moved to Florida, I worked hard to lose what I thought of then as my New York or Nuyorican accent. I learned to speak in a way that helped me blend in and sound like what others expected an American girl to sound like.
Long before I knew the word code-switching, I was learning how to adapt in order to belong.
Later, people from within my own broader community called me a sellout or a “coconut”—brown on the outside and white on the inside.
At the time, I was confused. Now I can understand that their reactions often reflected their own discomfort, pain, or limited understanding. But the message still landed: I could be too different for one group and not authentic enough for another.
I have felt caught between worlds for most of my life.
Today we might call some of this code-switching: adjusting our language, behavior, or presentation according to the environment. Code-switching can be resourceful. It may create safety, access, opportunity, or connection. It can also become exhausting when acceptance seems to depend on hiding parts of who we are. Research has connected code-switching with the need to belong, stereotype threat, social connection, and the ways people navigate bias. Studies of multiracial and multiethnic adults have also described masking and code-switching as responses to feeling that one does not completely fit within any one group.
Sometimes what looks like confidence is constant calculation:
How should I speak here? Which version of me will be accepted? Is it safe to tell the truth?
Pride Can Be a Shield—and a Wall
Cultural pride can help a person survive.
It can preserve language, food, music, storytelling, family bonds, faith, humor, creativity, and the wisdom of those who came before us. It can remind a child that their people are more expansive and beautiful than the stereotypes presented to them.
But pride can also become a wall.
If strength means never admitting pain, we cannot heal what we refuse to witness. If family loyalty means silence, harmful patterns remain protected. If resilience means enduring everything without help, survival can become its own prison.
This is the tension I have learned to hold: I can honor the strength of immigrant women, the beauty of brown skin, and the wealth carried within different cultures while also believing that emotions deserve honesty and respect.
Being witnessed is not weakness.
Grieving is not betrayal.
Asking for help does not erase our resilience.
Sometimes it is the next expression of it.
Telling the Truth Without Creating a Villain
I did not learn how to grieve deeply until my late forties.
By then, years of education in psychology and years of sitting with other people’s stories had taught me about boundaries, trauma, and patterns. But professional knowledge does not exempt a therapist from being human. I still needed to do my own work.
That work included EMDR, becoming informed by Internal Family Systems, learning about the science of the body, exploring my family and ancestral stories, practicing forgiveness, and developing a different relationship with my inner critic.
Most importantly, it included having a witness—a skilled, educated therapist who could sit with what was true without needing me to minimize it, rush it, defend anyone, or remain trapped inside it.
Healing did not require me to turn my mother or my culture into villains.
My mother caused pain. She also carried pain. She gave me wounds, and she gave me strength. She passed down survival strategies that made sense within her own story, even when some of them no longer served mine.
Several things can be true at the same time.
Understanding is not the same as excusing. Forgiveness is not pretending something did not hurt. Boundaries are not revenge. Grief is not disrespect.
The goal is not to stay stuck in hatred, resentment, or blame. The goal is to become honest enough to feel what happened, compassionate enough to understand its context, and responsible enough to choose what happens next.
Faith That Can Survive a Question
My spiritual story also unfolded between worlds.
I was raised around Catholicism and exposed to Santería within my family. Eventually, while studying women’s studies at Florida Atlantic University—a non-Christian college—I began taking a deeper look at Jesus for myself.
I kept asking why.
Why did so many people think only in black-and-white terms? Why did every group seem convinced that its interpretation was the only correct one? What had Jesus actually said and modeled beneath the inherited systems, cultural additions, fear, and power?
As I studied, my soul awakened.
I encountered Jesus not as a mascot for a political tribe or a tool for controlling people, but as the one I wanted to follow—the guide who showed humanity another way through the mess we have created.
Religion exists on a spectrum. A faith community can become a healthy place of belonging, humility, service, and growth. It can also become an unhealthy or narcissistic system, depending in part on its leadership, use of power, and willingness to receive questions.
For me, examined faith is not faithlessness. It is a decision to take responsibility for what I believe and for the fruit those beliefs produce in my life.
Listening to understand instead of listening merely to respond is part of that fruit.
So is the humility to disentangle scripture from nationalism, political identity, algorithms, echo chambers, and the traditions of the village that raised us.
Galatians 3:28 reminds me of our unity in Christ. Psalm 139 reminds me that each human being is intimately known. I can believe we are spiritually equal while also respecting that our histories, bodies, cultures, opportunities, and experiences are not identical.
Unity does not require sameness.
From Inherited to Examined
At 54, I can say something I could not have said when I was younger: I would not change my story.
That does not mean every part of it was good. It means I have learned to become curious about what pain and emotion can teach me. I have learned to let the inner critic sit down while I listen to what is happening inside me.
I am still evolving.
The parts of me that once coped in painful ways are not parts I need to hate or exile. They were trying to help me survive with the tools they had. Through therapy, faith, education, grief, and practice, those parts can be witnessed and integrated into a fuller self.
This is why I believe in therapy. It is also why I am so passionate about The Holistic Counselor Podcast.
I want curious people to encounter information that helps them understand they are not alone. I want clinicians to remember that cultural responsiveness is not a list of facts or stereotypes to memorize. It is the humility to remain curious about the actual person sitting in front of us.
Research with BIPOC women has found that cultural humility and a strong therapeutic relationship matter to therapy outcomes, while racial and gendered microaggressions can undermine both. A good therapist does not have to share every part of your identity. But they should respect your worldview, listen without defensiveness, recognize what they do not know, and be willing to learn.
You are allowed to ask a potential therapist:
How do you include culture and family history in your work?
Are you comfortable discussing faith and spiritual experiences without imposing your own beliefs?
What experience do you have working with immigrants, children of immigrants, or people with intersecting identities?
How do you respond when a client tells you that you misunderstood something about their experience?
Will there be room here for the parts of my story that do not fit neatly into a diagnosis?
Fit matters. You deserve care in which you do not have to amputate pieces of yourself to be understood.
You Have Agency
If you recognize the disconnect within yourself, you do not have to solve your entire life today.
You might begin by noticing one family message you inherited. You might write about the version of yourself you learned to perform in order to belong. You might reconnect with a cultural tradition that feels safe and meaningful—or create a boundary around one that does not.
You might allow yourself to rest without calling it weakness. You might pray, make art, move your body, tell your story, or speak with someone capable of witnessing it. You might begin looking for a therapist who respects your culture, faith, values, and lived experience.
Your history matters, but it is not a life sentence.
You can respect where you came from and examine what you inherited. You can love your family and tell the truth. You can be resilient and need support. You can grieve and remain grateful. You can carry multiple cultures without proving that you belong to only one.
You can move from unseen to understood.
And you can participate in what happens next.
That is hope.
That is agency.
Continue the Conversation
The original artwork I created for Episode 2 in February 2024.
Watch Episode 2 on YouTube or visit the complete Episode 2 page for the full show notes, listening options, and mental-health resources.
Episode 2: Beyond Politics—A Heartfelt Navigation of BIPOC and Immigrant Mental Health explores how culture, immigration, discrimination, family history, faith, and intergenerational trauma may shape mental health.
Free companion: From Unseen to Understood: A Whole-Story Reflection Guide is available through the email signup on this page.
If this article helped you feel seen—or helped you understand someone whose experience differs from your own—please share it.
Challenge the status quo. Think deeper. Become a better human.
This article and The Holistic Counselor Podcast are provided for educational and informational purposes only. They are not psychotherapy, diagnosis, medical treatment, or individualized clinical advice. Reading or listening does not establish a therapist-client relationship. If emotional distress is affecting your daily life, consider seeking support from an appropriately licensed professional.