Lately, I’ve been sitting with a specific kind of confusion coming from community members and clients: feeling deeply cared for by their family — fed, supported, protected — while simultaneously feeling emotionally invalidated, even dismissed.
Maybe you’ve felt it in your family/community too. You try to set a boundary, or assert a need, or when something is unfair or hurtful…only to be met with:
“After everything we’ve done for you?”
“You’re too sensitive.”
“Why are you making problems out of nothing?”
“That’s not how we raised you!”
“You’ve been influenced by Western ideas. You’re forgetting your roots.”
This is cultural gaslighting — a specific kind of emotional dismissal that lives at the intersection of love, control, sacrifice, and generational trauma. It’s when these cultural values, norms, or expectations are used to dismiss, deny, or distort our emotional reality — often in the name of love, tradition, or respect.
It happens when our feelings, boundaries, needs or even identity are invalidated because they go against what’s culturally acceptable, and then you are made to feel like they are wrong, ungrateful, or disrespectful for simply naming their truth.
And it’s more common than we talk about. In fact, in this bonus episode you’ll hear two community member’s experiences with this.
Cultural gaslighting can leave us with:
Guilt for even having emotions
Confusion around whether we’re “too sensitive” or “too much”
Feeling ungrateful for wanting more than survival
Fear of being “bad” daughters or sons or kids for challenging our family
We learn to minimize our own reality. To accept silence as love. To ignore our instincts in favor of peace. And this shapes how we show up in every relationship that follows.
This conversation isn’t about vilifying our families. It’s about naming harm so we can interrupt its repetition.
Many of our caregivers were doing the best they could within a system that gave them very little. But survival parenting isn’t the same as emotionally attuned parenting. And both things can be true:
Your parents loved you deeply.
Your mental health was still neglected.
Naming this doesn’t erase their sacrifice. It expands the story to include your needs, too.
Now, let’s be clear: American/Western culture does this too.
Immigrants are expected to be grateful, hardworking, and silent. We're told it’s our duty to assimilate, to succeed without complaint, to prove we deserve to be here. When we speak up about racism, cultural differences, or intergenerational trauma, we’re told we’re “too sensitive,” “playing the victim,” or “holding onto the past.”
I uncover allllll of this in today’s episode + tips for working through this.
This work is hard. It’s heavy. But it’s also a powerful kind of liberation. When we stop gaslighting ourselves, we open the door to a new way of being — with our families, with our healing, and with ourselves.
Always in this with you!
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