By Justine Trinh
I had a horrible experience my first time seeking out mental health resources. At the time, I was going through a huge change in my life in which a former friend deemed it necessary that I utilize the emergency counseling service at my undergraduate university. If I am being honest, I did not really want to go, but my former friend would not take “no” as an answer. To keep the peace, I opted to go even though the whole thing felt coerced. As I sat down across the counsellor, an older white lady, I began telling her of the violence and verbal abuse I experienced in my home life. When I was done, I looked over to the counsellor for her response and what she said shocked me to my core. She stated, “It sounds like you have Asian parents, who tend to be very strict and overbearing.”
I was in tears sobbing as this is not what I expected to hear. The prognosis of my parents’ and my Asian-ness was not the epiphany this counsellor made it out to be. To her, my problems could be attributed to race, but I felt exoticized and reduced to just being Asian. I knew therapy was not going to be like in the movies, but this felt humiliating. As I walked out of the session, I met up with my former friend in the waiting room as emotional support. Without asking me anything, they took in my tear-stained face and straight up said, “Therapy is supposed to make you feel shitty. It’s good that you are feeling shitty.”
What Sahaj Kaur Kohli, founder of Brown Girl Therapy, makes clear in her book, But What Will People Say: Navigating Mental Health, Identity, Love, and Family Between Cultures, is that therapy and mental health resources are not “supposed to make you feel shitty.” While therapy and counseling are not quick fixes as it takes time to reflect upon and work out issues, the process does not need to hurt or blame someone’s cultural identity as the root of the problem as there are other factors that contribute to the construction of one’s identity.
Using a combination of personal narratives, anecdotal analysis, and research, But What Will People Say challenges the way we think about mental health and self-help while providing tips to navigate a range of topics such as intergenerational trauma, boundaries, and guilt. In recent years, even as conversations about mental health have become more honest and open, the current model of care continues to be Eurocentric as “83 percent of the U.S. psychology workforce is white.” As a result, the form of care provided is informed by white epistemology that often prioritizes the individual as a productive body and pathologizes collectivism without considering cultural norms. Kohli offers an alternative model that centers storytelling to connect and build community; this act decolonizes care to show that personal healing is connected to collective healing. We cannot heal as individuals if the collective is unwell. Kohli advocates for a culturally sensitive approach as “cultural sensitivity is not always about sharing an identity or a language…It’s about creating a space that gives clients permission to speak their truth” as “therapy should be a refuge where we can remove our armor, explore being who we’ve never dared to be, and sort through our issues—not have them exacerbated.”
Within professional spaces, the personal is overlooked and dismissed as not as credible or as important, but Kohli shows how storytelling can be informative as she discusses her own experiences with mental health in her book. These moments she chooses to share inform how she approaches her care work and practice. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, posits that we, as people, experience the world through our bodies, and through our bodies, we understand the world. Our experiences are considered to be the mundane and the norm, but they are also a site of theory. By sharing stories of her everyday experiences and how they make her feel, Kohli analyzes these anecdotes to identify the problems while coming to an understanding of the systems of power put in place. The purpose of her approach is not to put herself as the center of attention, but rather to share her relatable stories to highlight her process and better understand her community, one that is deserving of tailored care that does not ostracize them.
What I appreciated about this book is that it made me feel seen without feeling judged (i.e. it didn’t make me feel shitty). I could see similarities between my experiences and Kohli’s, and it made me feel less alone in some of the frustration and emotions I have been feeling. This is not to conflate our experiences as the exact same, but rather to say that her storytelling created a bridge of understanding that did not reduce me to just being Asian while perpetuating an all-or-nothing mentality between culture and mental health. I also appreciated how the end of each chapter included tips and questions to help me reflect on and navigate my own healing journey. One of the topics she addresses that I struggle with is perfectionism and procrastination. For me, it is debilitating to start a long project due to the fears of failure. Her words are empathetic as she states, “perfectionism can be a time suck” before posing the questions, “What part of [the thing you are working on] actually needs to be perfect? Can [you] settle for ‘good enough’ in other parts of this?” Having that question posed to me helped rethink the projects (like my dissertation) that I need to work on.
Learning, unlearning, and processing take time, sometimes it is two steps forward, one step back, but But What Will People Say is a book that encourages revisiting, digestion, and introspection. Even though I finished this book, I still return to it for certain passages to help me navigate through the hard topics like intergenerational trauma, guilt for not being enough, perfectionism, and expectations.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.