Sahaj Kaur Kohli

I'm so excited to be here.

There's definitely a relationship between being a child of immigrant parents living in the West and experiencing guilt.

Children of immigrants are often straddling two cultures known as bicultural straddling, and there's often this expectation to make our immigrant parents' sacrifices and choices for coming to this country worth it.

Many children of immigrants feel chronic sense of guilt for letting their parents down, for not being enough, for being too American, for seeming ungrateful.

There's also the sense of a thriver's guilt or this guilt of growing, healing, accessing resources and opportunities that maybe our parents didn't have or our family and other parts of the world don't have access to.

So many children of immigrants may have grown up being responsible for their parents as well.

You know, if we think about an immigrant's journey to the West, they may not speak English well.

So a lot of children of immigrants may act as a translator, may help pay the bills, may help take care of younger siblings.

So caretaking.

And we know that immigrating and immigration can lead to a lot of family and generational conflict as everyone in the family is growing.

navigating their own acculturation journey, creating a sense of belonging in the host country.

So a lot of children of immigrants are often mediators for cultural conflict within their family.

This responsibility for the well-being of our parents, whether it's explicitly or implicitly stated,

can be reinforced over the years as a sense of obligation.

And it's exhausting.

It's, you know, children of immigrants are often internalizing these beliefs that they have to be a certain way, that they have to act a certain way.

And then they're out in the world feeling like they're also not enough in the Western sense of the word.

And so it's really important, you know, I think in a lot of immigrant communities and for a lot of children of immigrants, we don't talk enough about questioning that guilt, questioning where it comes from and questioning why it's there.

Yeah, so the thing we know about guilt is that there is healthy guilt, right?

Healthy guilt alerts us to our morality, to the pain and hurt that we might be causing to other people, to the social and cultural standards that we may have crossed.