Immigrant Daughter Q&A Part 1

Part 1:

Immigrant Daughter Q&A: Why Does Choosing Myself Feel Like Betrayal?

Have you ever felt guilty for setting a boundary?

For moving away?

For choosing a life your parents didn’t envision for you?

For wanting peace?

In Part 1 of this special Immigrant Daughter Q&A, Dr. Phebe Brako responds to anonymous questions, confessions, and experiences submitted by immigrant daughters from around the world.

We unpack:

✨ The guilt of choosing yourself

✨ Why boundaries feel so difficult

✨ The pressure to be the “good daughter”

✨ The struggle between obligation and authenticity

✨ How to build confidence in your decisions without waiting for permission

If you’ve ever felt torn between honoring your family and honoring yourself, you’re not alone.

This episode is a reminder that becoming your own person isn’t betrayal. It’s growth.

Listen now and share with an immigrant daughter who needs to hear this.

Send your questions and topic ideas to consult@phebebrakolmft.com or slide in my DM's on Instagram @drphebebrako

Remember we can only grow our audience with your support. Please share with your community!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Right. One listener wrote, Every day since I moved away, I feel guilty, but I also found peace. Now, that might be the most immigrant daughter sentence ever written. Okay. Because let's talk about the guilt and the peace and the fact that they're sitting side by side at this dining table. They might not be eating the food together, but they're sitting there side by side. And many of us were raised believing that choosing ourselves meant that we were abandoning our families. Now, this episode is a little different. A few weeks ago, I asked immigrant daughters to anonymously submit questions, confessions, frustrations, and things that they have never felt safe saying out loud. And whew, y'all did not disappoint. Now, full disclosure, I am an immigrant daughter, if you haven't realized. Younger, younger, apart. Whatever the case is. Anyway. But like I'm saying, y'all did not disappoint with these responses. I I laughed, I nodded, and I really wanted to hug some of you because who? The things that I was reading, the things that I was hearing, and for at least three responses, I had to put my my phone down and stare in the diff in the distance because like the different responses were all relatable. And also it seems like we're all living the same life. So today's episode is dedicated to every immigrant daughter who has ever felt stuck between being a good daughter and being yourself. Let's get into it. So the first segment here about you know wishing that your parents understood. One listener wrote, I wish my parents understood that I am no longer a child and I'm a full-grown adult capable of making my own decisions.

unknown 2:22

Whew.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Can we can we take a moment for the immigrant daughters in the room? Because some of us have mortgages, okay? Mortgages. We have children, we have businesses, we have graduate degrees, PhD represent, okay? And also shout out to everybody who's graduating this season. I know it's a graduation season, and so shout out to you all because y'all are doing the damn thing, right? Between the bachelor's, the associates, the high school diplomas, I am so proud of us. So anyway, back to the topic, right? Somehow, even though we have all of these things, we are still being treated like we are 12 years old, right? You can run an entire company by yourself, but one visit home, and all of a sudden, it's like, why are you wearing that? Where are you going? Who is calling you? Who's going with you? Ma'am, I pay taxes, okay? I pay taxes. I'm a full-grown adult. And I think for me, it's also this piece of recognizing that there is some protectiveness around this. And sometimes I really, I really struggle with that because for sandwiched immigrants like myself, you know, you came, your parents came later, or you know, like you find yourself in that middle ground between being a parent but also being a daughter. I've had to navigate a lot of these things on my own, right? I was living this life before y'all showed up here in America. What do you think I was doing all these years? Right. But at the same time, as a parent, I'm also relating, and uh it's it's so complicated. It's not something that is so straightforward because why are you asking me where I'm going? I understand that you care about me and everything, but there is this way in which our parents still treat us like we're children. And I mean, at the end of the day, I know that we're always going to be your babies, we're always going to be your children. But when I was reading these responses, I was like, oh my goodness. I'm not, I'm not alone on this, right? There's so many of us who are dealing with this. And another thing that also came up here is about boundaries. Another listener wrote, I'm not difficult just because I set boundaries. I set them because I want to be happy and healthy. And let's let's talk about that a little bit. Because many of us immigrant daughters, we were taught that good daughters sacrifice, that, you know, and and I use good quote unquote, that we we accommodate, that good daughters don't make things difficult. But at the end of the day, like, think about healthy daughters, right? Healthy daughters learn limits. And sometimes the healthiest thing that you can say is no without writing a whole dissertation to explain it. And when we think about boundaries, I know that sometimes it sounds really foreign for us as immigrant daughters because it's not something that we were raised with. We weren't raised to express our needs, express ourselves. We weren't raised to put ourselves first. It was everybody before us. I can't tell you the number of times that I have made decisions based on the needs of my family. There were decisions that I made in life that looking back, I probably would not have made, but I was thinking about my brothers. I was thinking about my parents. I was thinking about everybody that's going to come after me. And even imagining saying no, right? Your parent asked you for something or asked you to do something, and saying no, just even saying the word no just sends shivers down my spine. Because how dare you? You know, I brought you into this world and you're going to look at me and say no. It it just feels so it feels so foreign and it feels so scary. And, you know, maybe on another episode we'll talk about this a little bit more, about how to say no without actually using the word no, because there's a lot of cultural nuance to that word no. And sometimes, you know, the boundary conversations lack that. The boundary conversations do not recognize that we are from different cultures and words have meaning, and words look look and sound different, also. And then there was another part of the responses that I got about choosing yourself, right? One listener wrote, Every day since I moved away, I feel guilty, but I also found peace. Now, that might be the most immigrant daughter sentence ever written, okay? Because let's talk about the guilt and the peace and the fact that they're sitting side by side at this dining table. They might not be eating the food together, but they're sitting there side by side. And many of us were raised believing that choosing ourselves meant that we were abandoning our families. And I've learned so many things over the years as somebody who is a huge family person. Like anyone who knows me personally knows how much I love and adore and support my family. But here's one of the things that I've learned that you can love people deeply and you can also still need some distance, right? You can love them so much, but also feel like, hey, I need some space, right? And and sometimes it looks like people literally moving away or just going out and not coming back home like they usually do. You know what I'm saying? Because you can still care, you can care about people, you can care about your family, and you can still say no, right? You can leave and you can still belong, right? And and even as I I talk about this, I'm thinking about all of the immigrant daughters who are still living at home and dream about wanting to leave, not because they abhor or they hate their families, but sometimes you just want to breathe without somebody just being on your behind all the time. You want to be able to pick up your keys, pick up your handbag, get your low Stanley cup, and just walk out without somebody asking, hey, when are you coming back? When are you coming back? Or where are you going? Right. And another part of the the data I would say that I I collected for this particular episode is, you know, what one person who listens to this show, you know, they asked, How can I feel more confident in my choices? Now, here's my answer to that. Confidence is a muscle. I think that people don't realize that confidence is one of those things that is it's not a destination that you just reach, where one day you're just like, oh, I'm I'm confident, right? Confidence is not necessarily the absence of doubt. It's it's learning to trust yourself even while the doubt is present. So it's it's like going to the gym, picking up your five-pound weight, you know, doing your little, what do you call those things? You know, your thing, right? And you're you're you're working on your muscle group, right? Your biceps and your triceps and all those things. Look at me talking as though I don't work out. I promise I work out. I go to the gym, but for some reason right now, I just can't bicep curls, yes, right? You're doing your bicep curls, and you know, one week you're doing five, and then you're like, oh, okay, you know, this five feels good. But then you realize that one day when you pick up the tens, you can actually do this because you've been practicing, you've been working on it. And even though the doubt might be in your head and you're like, oh, maybe the five, the, the five is what I need to stick to, you pick up the ten and it just might surprise you, be like, oh, okay, you know, this feels good. I can I can continue to do this. So when it comes to confidence being like a muscle, it's also about like continuing to trust yourself, continuing to believe in yourself that the decision that you're making, the words that you're saying, everything that you're doing is going to work out fine. It's going to be okay, right? As immigrant daughters, we we're always waiting for permission. Let's be honest. We're always waiting for somebody to give us the green light, for somebody to tell us that it's okay. We're waiting for the green light from our parents, from our culture, from community, from God, right? From everybody except ourselves. So what if your next decision did not require unanimous approval, right? What if your life belongs to you? Did I say that out loud? Your life belongs to you. As I'm saying this out loud, I'm also like saying this to myself because some of us have been sitting around and waiting for different things and waiting for things to line up and waiting for things to look a particular way before we actually make decisions. And meanwhile, the decision is rights and runs with you, right? For those of us who are believers or or people of faith, we're we're waiting for God to show us a sign and all these things. And I'm sure, you know, I call him my homeboy upstairs. My our homeboy upstairs is probably like, ah, but if you don't take the step, how am I going to to do something in your life? If if you don't make a move, how am I going to bless the things that you're asking for? Or how am I going to do the very thing that you keep putting away? It's just, it don't make sense. The math is not mathing. So I'm going to pause on this and move into our bridge the gap tip because you know I always have to bridge the gap here for us, and we have to leave with a tip here. So if you're an immigrant daughter, I want you to notice how often guilt appears when you choose yourself. I'm going to say it again. I want you to notice how often guilt appears when you choose yourself. And then I want you to ask yourself, did I actually do something wrong? Or am I simply disappointing an expectation? Right? These are not the same thing. And as somebody who has struggled with this guilt, this is a question that I ask myself quite a bit. Because at the end of the day, we lose sight of the fact that this life that we're living, one, is short, but it's also for ourselves. It's for us. Like it's this is this is our life. And we are also living our lives in ways that we're so focused on disappointing others. And there's so much freedom in understanding that we are here to disappoint people. That that's just it. We are here to disappoint people. One, because we're not perfect, and two, because we're not going to be in agreement with every single person in our lives as immigrant daughters. There is no way that we are going to be able to make every single person happy. Right? And so if we are going to focus so much on living our lives to make sure that we're not disappointing people, we're doing ourselves a disservice. We really, really are. And I know that the guilt is part of the system and the way that the system is designed. We are, as daughters, designed to serve, take care of everybody else. And so the guilt comes from that and trying to meet that expectation. And I wish I could tell you all how much freedom or express how much freedom you start to experience when you make peace with the fact that you're going to disappoint people. And if it's disappointing people over disappointing yourself, I mean, the choice is obvious, right? Because when you go home and you put your head on your pillow, who do you get to deal with? Because everybody is over there living their lives, everybody's in their bedroom, everybody's in their bed. And then you have to face yourself. When you look in the mirror, it's you you're going to look, it's you that you're going to look at. And if you're going to make any decisions that are going to bring you some semblance of joy, bring you some semblance of peace, why not choose to do that? Your parents are going to be disappointed. And you know what? At some point, sadly, they're going to have to get over it. And if they don't get over it, that is also not for us to try to navigate. Right? There's there's going to be things that we're not going to be able to do for them. You know what I'm saying? And I think about the ways in which, like, I in the past, I feel like I disappointed my parents. But I also look on the other side and think about how some of those things brought me peace. One of the things that I really struggled with was, for example, like deciding to leave my marriage. One of the things that I really struggled with over the years was I'm going to be disappointing my parents because I'm not supposed to be the divorced daughter, right? I'm supposed to be the married daughter. And I had to make a decision for myself, right? I had to make a decision that made sense for myself because we have a saying in a con that loosely translates as you are the one who's sitting by a fire and you know how hot it is. You know how much it's burning you. And if I was sitting by this fire of marriage and I was burning up, I was getting charred up, my family, my parents, they were not going to be experiencing that. I was the one that was experiencing it. Right. And this is not even an easy thing to talk about. This is not an easy thing to say out loud. But I felt like I was a disappointment. This is actually the first time I've talked about this, that I had tried something that was supposed to be for a lifetime, and here I was ending it 13 years in. So so if you you are listening and this is one of those decisions that you you're considering taking, I really want you to think about what is also on the other side, the peace that is on the other side, the love that's on the other side, the freedom that's also on the other side of the decisions that you're afraid of making, right? I I knew that I was disappointing my parents by not going to medical school, right? By some of the career choices that I was making, by by deciding to be a psychology psychology major. My dad, I remember saying to me, like, are you sure about this? Are you going to have a job? Are you going to find a job after? And I mean, yeah, like here I am, years later. And yeah. So if if today's episode, you know, felt a little too familiar, that is because you're not alone. Many of us have been suffering in silence. I'm going to say that again. Many of us have been suffering in silence. We are dealing with a lot of pressures that we we don't know how to navigate on our own. We don't know how to figure out on our own. And for some reason, because we have been raised to believe that we we don't deserve help, we have to navigate things by ourselves. We have to figure it out by ourselves because we are strong women, especially for us as black women, you're strong black women. Which, by the way, I push against that narrative all the time because I'm not a strong black woman. I'm trying to be soft, okay? I'm trying to be malleable. Many of us have been have found ourselves in the position where we had to navigate things on our own. And one day you talk to a fellow sister and you realize, oh, you've been struggling with this too, you've been going through this, because shame and guilt also thrive in isolation. It really does. And I remember having conversations with some women in my life over the years and realizing we were both suffering. We were both struggling with the same kinds of things. But for some reason, we weren't saying anything to each other. And I know that some of us, that part of that guilt is, oh, I don't want to burden anybody. I don't want to, you know, take my problems to anybody. What if people gossip? People are going to gossip, okay? People are going to gossip. That's just who we are because we're human beings. And so you give them one, give them something to gossip about, but also like give them what you want to give them. Whatever it is that you're sharing with them, that you're okay with the fact that somebody might hear. Yeah. Or you go find a trusted therapist and you let them know what's going on because your therapist is not going to be the one to gossip. There's no gossip that is going to be more valuable than somebody's license. Okay. So you better clock that. But there's a lot of us who are are struggling, and we we wear our struggle as a badge of honor because that's what it's that's what we were raised to believe, but it's not. I'm sorry, it's just not. It's not a badge of honor to struggle or to suffer. Because there's so many resources out here, there's so many people that we can connect to. And in in Qi, we say, which translates as if you don't talk about or if you don't sell your disease, you're not going to find the cure. You're not going to get the medicine, right? And I remember a few years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who's, you know, older than than I am. And I was I was telling her about some struggles that I was having. And she was like, oh yeah, that's something that I've dealt with, and this is how I dealt with it. And I was thinking to myself later on, if I hadn't said anything, one, I wouldn't have realized that I actually had this point of connection with this fellow immigrant daughter, but also I wouldn't have found this solution. I wouldn't have been able to see that, oh, there's there's a light at the end of the tunnel. So if you're out here and you're trying to figure things out on your own, please know that it's just not sustainable. It's not. There's so much power and healing in community. So, immigrant daughters, please, I'm begging you, let us get together, let us connect, let us talk about things. There's so many Instagram pages out there that talk about the immigrant daughter experience or the first daughter experience. And there's so much overlap, right? There's a lot of sacrifice that we're making, there's a lot of ways in which we take care of others, and we also deserve to take care of ourselves as well. So, this is my challenge to you. Reach out to one of your fellow immigrant daughters that you know, you know, is is going to be able to hear you, to be able to support you. And also know that if you go and you try it out, you dip your toes in the water and you realize that this person is not for me. There's always going to be somebody else for you. Because at the end of the day, there's always a lid to every pot. Well, unless somebody decides to throw the lid in the pot and the lid of the pot into the trash or something like that. So I'm going to stop here because there was a lot of content. There were a lot of comments, there were a lot of like stories that were shared and a lot of different questions that were shared when I when I reached out asking, like, hey, immigrant daughters, let's talk about this. So on the next episode, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the the invisible labor that immigrant daughters carry, you know, the stuff that nobody is talking about, the caretaking, the pressure, the emotional load, the sleepless nights. And I mean, trust me, it is going to hit. So if you enjoyed this conversation, if you enjoy this episode, make sure that you share it with somebody. Okay. If there's an immigrant daughter in your life that you're like, sis, I need you to understand that Phoebe is talking about this too. So we're not alone. Because we're not alone. We're not crazy. We're not. All the things that we're experiencing are extremely valid. And so if you if this conversation was helpful, make sure that you share this with somebody. And also make sure that you hit that subscribe button so that when the other part of this conversation comes up, you're going to be notified. You are going to see it. You will not miss it because part two is going to hit. Okay. And make sure that you leave me a comment too. And if you're also interested in sharing maybe some of your experiences as an immigrant daughter, I would love to hear from you. Send me an email at consult at phoebraco lmft.com or send me a DM on Instagram, dr phoebe braccill, or even on TikTok. Yeah, I'm on the on the clock app too. So you can find me under the same name, Dr. Phoebe Brackel. Remember to leave the O outside. Okay. Put it at the door. Leave it over there with all the problems of this world. And I will catch you on the next episode. So guess what? We are opening up some slides for a sponsorship. If you've been watching or listening to this podcast and you've been enjoying it as much as we have been enjoying recording it, I would love to invite you to consider sponsoring us. You can reach out to me at consult.com. We have a wide range when it comes to our audience, and we would love for our audience to hear about you and your service or your product. Thank you so much.