Each year, National Hispanic Heritage Month invites us to honor the histories, languages, and cultures of Hispanic and Latino communities, and the countries of origin through which many people name themselves: Mexican, Salvadoran, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Guatemalan, Dominican, and many more. Many of the adults we work with at Belonging Partnership carry inheritances with pride as well as complexity. Some of what is inherited may be a set of rules, learned early and often without words, about what it takes to be safe in a country that has not always welcomed their families.
Moreover, living between two cultures can mean feeling like an outsider in each, a persistent isolation that is hard to name because it has no single place to point to. Moving through the world in this way may mean living with a feeling of being othered that follows you into every room, where belonging always seems to require leaving part of yourself at the door.
The Immigrant Bargain
Sociologists have a name for the unspoken agreement at the heart of many immigrant families: the immigrant bargain (Smith, 2006; Louie, 2012). Parents sacrifice. They leave home, learn a new language, work jobs beneath their training, and absorb indignities so their children will have more. Children, in turn, repay that sacrifice through achievement.
The hope behind this bargain is love. Parents who have seen how quickly a family can be dismissed, detained, underpaid, or disbelieved want to armor their children against that world. Their messages are protective: work twice as hard, do not give anyone a reason to hold anything against you. In a hostile environment, a child can hear all of it as one instruction: to have a place at the table, you must be impeccable.
How a Survival Strategy Becomes a Self
Messages absorbed under threat do something to the developing mind. They crystallize. What began as a strategy for a specific danger hardens into a rule about who you are allowed to be. Over time, the rule calcifies from advice into fact.
In adulthood, the crystallized rule can show up as relentless self criticism, an inability to rest without guilt, or success that brings no relief because the next test is already coming. It can look like being the “successful one,” the translator, the problem solver, the person who holds everyone together. It can also look like painful guilt when you set a boundary, turn down a family obligation, or make a choice about career, partnership, faith, or where you live that your parents did not imagine for you.
If these rules cause so much suffering, why are they so hard to loosen? Two forces keep them in place. The first is the original threat. The rule was built to keep you safe, and your nervous system remembers the stakes. Relaxing your standards can register in the body as exposure. The second is loyalty. Questioning the strategy can feel like questioning your parents’ sacrifice. Many adults describe a taboo against even thinking it: How can I complain, when they gave up everything? That taboo protects the family’s love, and it also keeps suffering unspoken.
The dangers are also not only in the past. For many families, discrimination and the threat of immigration enforcement remain part of daily life. Often this is where therapy can be supportive. Therapy helps you tell apart the vigilance your present life requires from the vigilance your past installed, so you can decide where each belongs.
When the Body Speaks What the Family Cannot
When distress cannot be put into words, it often finds another language. Medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry have long documented how cultures shape the ways suffering is expressed. For decades, psychiatry grouped these expressions under the label “culture bound syndromes.” The current diagnostic manual uses the term “cultural concepts of distress” instead, recognizing that every culture, including the dominant culture of the United States, shapes how distress is experienced and communicated. Many Hispanic and Latino families will recognize nervios, a general state of vulnerability to life’s pressures, or ataque de nervios, an episode of trembling, crying, heat rising through the body, and feeling out of control, often in response to loss or conflict.
In my 2020 article, “Metaphors of Agony: Culture-bound Syndromes of Hyper-Independence,” I argued that symptoms function as metaphors for suffering a culture does not permit us to speak directly, and that the dominant U.S. ideal of self sufficiency produces its own culture bound forms of agony. Adult children of immigrants often live at the intersection of two sets of expectations. At home, they may be asked to put the family first. In school and work, they are rewarded for needing no one. The result can be a double bind: deeply responsible for everyone else, and unable to ask anyone for help. When that tension has no words, it often shows up in the body as headaches, stomach problems, exhaustion, insomnia, or a constant dread.
Research on familismo, the value placed on family closeness, loyalty, and mutual support, suggests that these values can be deeply protective and supportive of wellbeing. At the same time, the benefits of family connection can come with significant costs when expectations of loyalty, responsibility, or sacrifice become too demanding. In these circumstances, what is valuable can begin to exact a greater toll than it provides in return (Calzada et al., 2013). The question, then, is when does family closeness sustain us, and when does the cost of what is asked become too great?
Many adults in therapy find they want to keep a great deal: the warmth of a crowded kitchen, the expectation that you show up for each other, respect for elders, humor in hard times, and a resilience built across generations. The work is learning to hold these values by choice, which lets you keep them without sacrificing yourself to them. Some questions worth sitting with:
Which family values feel like mine, and which feel like debts?
Where does my care for others turn into erasing myself?
Can I love my family and still survive disappointing them?
What would it mean to belong without being perfect?
How Therapy Can Help
Thawing crystallized rules takes time, and it happens best in relationship. In therapy, the relationship itself becomes the place where you can be imperfect, uncertain, or angry and find that the connection survives. Over time, that experience makes it possible to honor your parents’ sacrifice without repeating its costs, to grieve what the bargain asked of everyone, and to build an identity that draws from both worlds instead of being torn between them.
At Belonging Partnership, our mission is to serve communities experiencing mental health inequity, and we train clinicians who share lived experiences with the people they serve. We offer individual therapy in person in Berkeley and Menlo Park, and via telehealth throughout California and New York. We accept several insurance plans and offer sliding scale fees.
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belongingpartnership.com | 510.319.0365 | Toll Free: 800.383.1790
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Publishing.
Alegría, M., Canino, G., Shrout, P. E., Woo, M., Duan, N., Vila, D., Torres, M., Chen, C., & Meng, X. (2008). Prevalence of mental illness in immigrant and non-immigrant U.S. Latino groups. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(3), 359 to 369.
Calzada, E. J., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Yoshikawa, H. (2013). Familismo in Mexican and Dominican families from low-income, urban communities. Journal of Family Issues, 34(12), 1696 to 1724.
Isaacson, T. G. (2020). Metaphors of agony: Culture-bound syndromes of hyper-independence. Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 15(4), 375 to 383.
Louie, V. (2012). Keeping the immigrant bargain: The costs and rewards of success in America. Russell Sage Foundation.
Smith, R. C. (2006). Mexican New York: Transnational lives of new immigrants. University of California Press.
“National Hispanic Heritage Month” in your web editor: https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/hispanic-heritage-month