What We Call Strength in Brown Families: Is Often Untreated Trauma
If you read last week's newsletter about Mother's Day, you may still be sitting with some of what it opened. The grief that builds before a difficult day. The complexity of loving someone and mourning the relationship at the same time. The particular ache that South Asian daughters know, where love and loss exist side by side without resolution.
This week, we go one layer deeper. Because what we felt last week, the heaviness, the ambivalence, the grief that does not have a clean name, almost always has roots that go further back than we think.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And if there is one message I want to carry through this entire month, it is this: mental health awareness is not just about naming anxiety or depression in ourselves. It is about understanding where those patterns come from. It is about being willing to look at what was handed to us before we had any say in the matter. It is about recognizing that the communities most in need of mental health support are often the ones least likely to be told they deserve it.
In South Asian and immigrant families, that truth runs especially deep. And this article is my contribution to that conversation this May.
She went through so much and never complained. We say it at funerals. We say it at kitchen tables. We say it with pride in our voices and tears in our eyes. We mean it as the highest compliment we know how to give.
And almost no one stops to ask what it cost her. Or what she passed down.
This is the conversation we have been building toward in this series. We have talked about the invisible load. About the good girl tax. About the money stories we inherited before we had a dollar. Now we are going to name the root underneath all of it.
In many Brown families, strength was not a personality trait. It was a survival strategy. And survival strategies, when they are never examined, become inheritance.
The Story We Were Told About Strength
In South Asian households, in immigrant families, in communities shaped by partition, migration, and the daily labor of building something from nothing, endurance was not just admired. It was required.
You did not talk about what hurt. You did not burden others with your feelings. You kept going because stopping felt like a luxury the people around you could not afford. And if you watched your parents do it, you absorbed the message without a single word being spoken: this is what love looks like. This is what a good person does.
The problem is not that those people were not strong. They were extraordinary. The problem is that what looked like strength from the outside was often unprocessed grief, suppressed fear, untreated anxiety, and a nervous system that had learned to live permanently on high alert.
And children do not inherit the strength. They inherit the nervous system.
"We did not inherit their resilience. We inherited their adaptations. And adaptations are not the same thing as healing."
What Untreated Trauma Looks Like When It Is Called Something Else
One of the most disorienting parts of growing up in a family with intergenerational trauma is that the symptoms were never labeled as symptoms. They were labeled as personality. As culture. As just the way our family is.
SILENCE CALLED DIGNITY
Your mother never talked about her feelings. Not once. She kept the household running, she cooked, she managed everything, and she did it without ever telling you what any of it cost her. You learned early that asking how she was really doing was an intrusion. Emotions were private. You carried that lesson into every relationship you have ever had, wondering why intimacy felt so impossible, and why you instinctively make yourself smaller when someone asks how you are.
ANGER CALLED PASSION
Your father's temper was explained away. He cared deeply. He worked hard. He was passionate. Nobody named it for what it also was: a man who never had a safe space to process fear, grief, or helplessness, and so it came out as rage instead. You grew up reading the room before you entered it. You called it being perceptive. What you were was a child whose nervous system had learned that other people's emotions were your responsibility to manage.
HYPERVIGILANCE CALLED RESPONSIBILITY
You were always the one who noticed everything. Who managed the room. Who could read the tension before anyone said a word. People called you mature for your age. What you were was a child whose nervous system had learned that safety required constant monitoring.
EMOTIONAL ABSENCE CALLED BEING STRONG
Priya is 36. Her mother never cried in front of her. Not when Priya's grandmother died. Not during the years of financial hardship. Not once. Priya grew up believing that needing comfort was weakness. She is now in therapy learning, for the first time at 36, how to receive care without apologizing for needing it.
A moment to reflect:
Which of these sounds like someone in your family? Which one sounds like you?
Why This Is Hard to See
Naming a parent's unprocessed trauma as trauma can feel like an act of betrayal. Like you are calling them weak. Like you are undermining the sacrifice that kept your family alive.
It is not.
Understanding that your grandmother's emotional unavailability came from a lifetime of being required to endure without support is not a criticism of her. It is the most honest form of honoring her. It says: I see what it actually cost you. I am not going to pretend it did not cost anything.
And it says something else too. It says: I am going to try to do something different. Not because she failed, but because she gave me the first chance in this family's history to have that option.
"Understanding where the pattern came from is not blame. It is compassion. For them, and for yourself."
Why Mental Health Awareness Month Matters for This Conversation
Every May, the mental health community asks people to talk more openly about anxiety, depression, and the importance of seeking help. It is a necessary conversation. But for South Asian communities and immigrant families, the awareness that is most needed is not just awareness of symptoms. It is awareness of origin.
When a second-generation South Asian woman comes to therapy with anxiety she cannot explain, the clinical question is not only what is she anxious about. It is: whose anxiety is she carrying? When did the pattern start? What was never allowed to heal in the generation before her?
Mental Health Awareness Month, in Brown communities, has to include this. It has to include the permission to say: what my family called normal was also painful. What my family called strength also cost something. And I am allowed to want something different, not because my family was wrong, but because healing is now available to me in a way it may not have been available to them.
That is what awareness actually looks like. Not just naming the condition. Understanding where it lives.
What Intergenerational Trauma Actually Does to the Mind and Body
Research in epigenetics and interpersonal neurobiology has shown what therapists have witnessed clinically for decades: trauma is not just psychological. It lives in the body. It shapes the nervous system. And when a parent's nervous system was never given the chance to regulate, the children's nervous systems learn to mirror that dysregulation.
This is not metaphor. Children of parents who lived through sustained stress, grief, or danger often show measurable differences in stress hormone regulation, threat response, and capacity for emotional self-regulation. Not because they experienced the same events, but because they were raised by bodies that did.
What it does to the mind
The mind absorbs the emotional rules of the household. When feelings were dangerous to express, the mind learns to suppress them before they even reach the surface. When conflict was unpredictable, the mind develops hypervigilance as a permanent default setting. When love was conditional on performance, the mind ties self-worth to achievement and can never rest in simply being enough.
Over time this shows up as:
• A inner critic that sounds like a parent's voice
• Difficulty trusting your own perceptions and feelings
• Anxiety about conflict even in safe relationships
• A persistent sense of waiting for something to go wrong
• Patterns of people-pleasing that feel automatic, not chosen
What it does to the body
The body keeps a record that the mind often cannot access. When a child's nervous system grows up in a state of chronic low-grade stress, the body does not simply reset when the environment becomes safer. It continues operating from the same threat-detection system it learned in childhood. The posture stays braced. The gut stays reactive. The muscles stay tight.
In the body this shows up as:
• Chronic tension in the jaw, shoulders, or chest
• Digestive issues that have no clear medical cause
• Fatigue that sleep does not fully resolve
• Startling easily or feeling jumpy in quiet moments
• A deep discomfort with stillness, as if rest itself feels unsafe
• Physical symptoms that worsen during family gatherings or stressful anniversaries
This is why healing intergenerational trauma cannot happen through insight alone. Understanding the pattern in the mind is necessary. But the body also needs to learn, slowly and with support, that the threat has passed. That it is allowed to settle. That safety is real and not temporary.
None of this is your fault. But all of it is yours to work with, if you choose to.
The Inheritance You Get to Change
Here is what is true about intergenerational patterns: they move in one direction until someone decides to move them in another.
That person does not have to be you. But if you are reading this, you might already be the one in your family who is asking these questions. Who is feeling the weight of something you cannot quite name but cannot keep carrying the way it was handed to you.
That instinct is not disloyalty. It is courage. And it is the first move toward something genuinely different.
Name what you inherited without shame
Not to assign blame, but to create clarity. You cannot change what you cannot see. Saying my family had a pattern of emotional suppression is not an indictment. It is a map.
Grieve before you fix
There is grief in recognizing this. For the childhood you deserved. For the comfort that was not available. For the version of your parent who was also carrying something they were never helped to put down. That grief is real and it deserves space before any strategy.
Understand that your body is part of this
Intergenerational trauma is not only a story you tell yourself. It lives in your nervous system. Healing it requires more than insight. It requires somatic work, relational safety, and often, a therapeutic relationship that can offer the kind of regulated, consistent presence your nervous system has been waiting for.
Therapy as the first break in the chain
For many South Asian clients, entering therapy is the first time in their family's history that someone decided their inner life was worth tending to. That is not a small thing. That is generational. And what you heal in yourself does not stay with you. It changes what you pass down.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, that is the invitation. Not just to learn what a panic attack is. But to ask the deeper question: where did this come from? And what do I want to do with it?
"You are not weak for asking these questions. You are the first one brave enough to ask them."
What your grandparents called strength, and what your parents modeled as resilience, was real. And it was also a set of adaptations that kept them alive under conditions you may never fully know.
You get to honor all of that and still choose something different.
The chain does not have to keep moving in the same direction. It can stop here. With you.
And if you are ready to do that work, I am here.
About the Author
Ashma Hakani, LCSW-S is a licensed clinical social worker and the founder of Renewed Hope Therapy, PLLC. She specializes in grief, trauma, anxiety, and relationship issues, providing compassionate, culturally competent, and trauma-informed care. With over 18 years of experience, she utilizes evidence-based approaches to support her clients in building resilience and coping skills.
Ashma also offers clinical supervision and mental health education to individuals and communities. Her work is rooted in the belief that healing is a journey, and she is dedicated to walking alongside her clients every step of the way.
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