It's okay to resent your immigrant parents...

Conversation clubs in September will be held on September 10 and September 24 at 7pm ET. Paid subscribers will get the link day of!

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I can’t believe it’s September! Anyone else ready for light sweater weather, hot coffees (just kidding, I’m always an iced coffee girl), cozy reading evenings, and nature walks to see changing leaves?

Well, even if you aren’t I have some good stuff cooking for you here at Culturally Enough. This month we are going to discuss two emotional experiences that are very common in this community but are also very hard to process and work through: resentment and anger.

September Schedule

It's okay to resent your immigrant parents...

Openly discussing our not so positive/good/super enthusiastic feelings toward our parents can bring up lots of different internal experiences. But I want you to know that it’s all okay! You are allowed to feel your feelings. You are allowed to let them tell you what you need.

Two things can be true at the same time. You can love your parents. You can have compassion for their experiences. You can understand why they are the way they are

AND

You can feel disappointed and lost and grief at how they have treated you, or about your childhood, and about the fact that your relationship may never be what you actually want it to be.

Resentment is often built up over a long time and can be rooted in anger (which we will talk about next week). It’s not something you feel immediately but rather is something that builds upon itself due to invalidation, disrespect, injustice, disregard and so on.

It’s a normal part of being human. It’s okay to resent your immigrant parents, but what we don’t want is for it to be left unaddressed (because that’s what tends to happen).

So this month, we will discuss why we feel resentment, why anger is built up into resentment, and then how we can process and move through these difficult and painful emotional experiences.

Did you know: Envy and resentment are very similar emotions.

We can’t really talk about resentment without talking about envy. Envy often says I wish I had what you had; whereas, resentment often says, why do you get that? Why don't I deserve this? While they are not the same thing, they are similar and they are rooted in personal feelings of inferiority or personal feelings of something being unjust or unfair.

I see feelings of resentment in the immigrant community a lot. Why do my siblings get treated differently? How can my elders live in denial or avoidance? Or I even notice how immigrant parents may feel resentful of their kids because they have access to different opportunities and resources that they don't have. I didn’t get that, so I resent that you do.

Most of the time, the emotion and the feeling of resentment is never really explored, identified, or communicated, and instead it comes out as anger, depression, sadness or even, jealousy.

I’ve gotten into many a tiffs with my own immigrant parents because they don’t quite understand when I'm communicating my own needs or feelings or why I feel like I need to access things that they didn't have access to — like therapy or mental health care or self care or sick days. Sometimes when I'm validating their feelings or talking to them about these issues, it comes out that they didn't have access to these things because they were too busy living in survival. Instead of it coming between us and building a chasm between us, I try to talk about it with them and validate that maybe it’s not fair they didn’t have these things. I try to encourage them to make up for lost time in other ways now and remind them that one person accessing something doesn’t take something away from them.

I've been lucky to have these conversations with my parents to the point where my mom will sometimes tell me that she's really proud of me and that she finds and draws strength in herself from me (by living vicariously through me). I feel lucky that we have gotten here but it doesn’t mean the resentment doesn’t creep back in.

Let me be vulnerable with you and share 6 things I sometimes resent in my own life (and 7 additional reasons you may experience resentment too)