Healing Intergenerational Trauma in Asian American Families

"And though my parents took us far away from the site of their grief… certain shadows stretched far, casting a gray stillness over our childhood… hinting at a darkness we did not understand but could always FEEL." — Thi Bui, Vietnamese American graphic novelist and illustrator

As a psychodynamic therapist and psychiatrist, I have helped many individuals whose suffering had remained unspoken and unconscious for decades— not just their own, but also the deeply buried emotional wounds carried forward from their parents, grandparents, and ancestors.

Asian American trauma is a particular kind of suffering—silent, internalized, and often invisible. It does not always present with overt grief or distress. Instead, it can manifest as high-functioning anxiety, an inner voice of relentless criticism, shame, perfectionism, a scarcity mindset, and a chronic sense of disconnection or alienation. People often describe difficulty feeling joy, discomfort with vulnerability, feelings of self-doubt, and a belief that their worth has to be earned. It can also show up as a hesitation to speak up or inability to offer oneself self-compassion or self-acceptance. Beneath these issues is a hidden story—fragmented or silenced— of inherited trauma, shaped by family histories never fully spoken aloud or processed.

The Inheritance of Silence

Trauma is often unnamed, and even minimized or erased, especially in Asian American and immigrant families. The weight of immigration, racism, war, and loss becomes absorbed, passed silently across generations. These experiences of conflict, exclusion, poverty, loss, and scarcity can go unacknowledged for decades.

The “unsymbolized experience”—emotional experiences that have never had a chance to be put into words— means that for many Asian Americans, these experiences accumulate across generations. A parent who endured discrimination may turn to emotional withdrawal or overworking as a coping mechanism, dissociating from their own emotional life. A grandparent who lost family in a war may never speak of it. These are legacies of survival, even stories of resilience and success, but they can take a profound toll on families and relationships.

In therapy, this trauma translates into difficulty accessing one’s emotions, especially grief, anger, vulnerability, and self-compassion. It can surface as chronic anxiety, burnout, and emotional numbness. It can show up as feeling empty or unfulfilled after decades of self-sacrifice or ignoring one's own needs or self-care.

Five Reasons Trauma Stays Silent in Asian American Families

Psychodynamic therapy illuminates and reverses the silencing of intergenerational trauma. Here are five reasons why trauma stays silent in Asian American families:

1. Parents cope with their own trauma through compartmentalization and silence. This silence comes at a high cost— it a breeding ground for shame, perfectionism, anxiety, and a focus on external success at the expense of emotional integration. There is also "organized forgetting,” or the omission or erasure of historical and cultural trauma from public consciousness, which can occur at the societal or individual level.

2. The importance of saving face reinforces secrecy and silence. This means you have to put on a good face and hide what is really going on. In Chinese, the need to focus on social image is known as mien tze. Putting on a good front reinforces secrecy and a focus on external appearance, which feeds shame and self-doubt.

3. There is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and being deferential to parents and elders. Communal values can be strengths, but it also means if parents are using silence as a way of coping, breaking this silence is seen as disrespectful or a betrayal. Many Asian cultures tend to prioritize collective interests, social conformity, and mutual dependence rather than the more American values of individualism, autonomy, and independence. So Asian Americans may be caught between these two cultural value systems.

4. Labeling experiences as “trauma” can feel wrong or disrespectful. Labeling difficult early experiences of emotional neglect or physical abuse as "trauma" can feel disrespectful to parents or caregivers who provided a home, food, and other resources. It can feel like it is going against the duty to express deep respect for parents and older authority figures. The emphasis on filial piety can make it even harder for people to acknowledge that parents or family members were neglectful or hurtful. But healing begins with the permission to name the full truth, without minimizing or rationalizing.

5. Shame, punishment, and self-criticism are normalized as ways of motivators. Success and achievement is often seen as redemption from hardship,  a solution to "overcoming the past." However, the underlying emotional trauma remains unaddressed. The honor and pride of enduring pain can be a strength, but it can also lead to high-functioning anxiety, imposter syndrome, and burnout. Therapy helps people untangle achievement from self-worth while still maintaining ambition and motivation for self-improvement.

Toward Healing Through Psychodynamic Therapy

When trauma is unnamed, it cannot be grieved. And when it is not grieved, it continues as a silent undercurrent fueling family conflict, disconnection, depression, and anxiety. Untreated, the cycle continues through generations.

But in psychodynamic psychotherapy, naming these invisible ghosts and understanding our emotional inheritance releases us from the past and old patterns. We learn that we do not have to carry these burdens alone and have the opportunity to move from emotional survival to emotional freedom, transforming these ghosts to ancestors. 

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