I can speak to two of those three identities (EA and Asian). I think one possibility that took me an unusually long time to consider was that maybe my identities didn’t matter and I’d still feel the same problems if I was the “default person” in society. And I was working through a lot of identities.
It’s a weird way of framing things since we can’t have our identities counterfactually removed. Even if we did, we wouldn’t be the same person. But I think it’s a framework that usually doesn’t get mentioned much in mental health circles , especially on the internet. Partly because it feels invalidating, partly because most people really want contextual advice, and partly because it feels “emotionally dumb and ignorant” to downplay sociological factors.
To do some fake math on this, if we could decompose mental health problems into the triple Venn diagram of Asian-women-EA (which is 6 different things if you count up the intersectionalities!) and include stuff outside that, it’s possible for the Asian-women-EA sources of stress to be maybe only 10-25%.
Basically, part of the challenge of identity is not just figuring out if it matters but also how much. And maybe that amount is ultimately a small thing. Or maybe it’s not as tractable as working on the identity-less portions
As someone who fits into the trifecta I think it’s less about identities and more about upbringing / messaging associated with identities. I grew up in a family context with strong filial piety, respect for authority, lots of comparisons with other people which leads to feeling not good enough, EA is dismissed as something that’s stupid to do by “authority figures”.
I do think that I need to unlearn a lot from my family’s messaging. For me personally, I’d say it’s much more than 10-25% as a source of stress given how much I need to re-program my brain from all the messaging I received. I’d maybe say like 80%?
Agree it’s more about upbringing and messaging. And also relate a lot to this.
But also I think it’s really hard to tell the “cause” of any given problem at an individual level. As recently as a few years ago, I would have put 80% weight on upbringing / messaging (which I agree aren’t the identities themselves but something associated with them). Nowadays I’m more agnostic about it.
I think it’s fine to seek out affinity groups and culturally-relevant advice to some degree. But also, there’s a tradeoff between exploring identities versus applying generic mental health advice. Especially when you get to intersectionality-type stuff like trifectas where the number of things to explore is gets incredibly vast very quickly.
I can speak to two of those three identities (EA and Asian). I think one possibility that took me an unusually long time to consider was that maybe my identities didn’t matter and I’d still feel the same problems if I was the “default person” in society. And I was working through a lot of identities.
It’s a weird way of framing things since we can’t have our identities counterfactually removed. Even if we did, we wouldn’t be the same person. But I think it’s a framework that usually doesn’t get mentioned much in mental health circles , especially on the internet. Partly because it feels invalidating, partly because most people really want contextual advice, and partly because it feels “emotionally dumb and ignorant” to downplay sociological factors.
To do some fake math on this, if we could decompose mental health problems into the triple Venn diagram of Asian-women-EA (which is 6 different things if you count up the intersectionalities!) and include stuff outside that, it’s possible for the Asian-women-EA sources of stress to be maybe only 10-25%.
Basically, part of the challenge of identity is not just figuring out if it matters but also how much. And maybe that amount is ultimately a small thing. Or maybe it’s not as tractable as working on the identity-less portions
As someone who fits into the trifecta I think it’s less about identities and more about upbringing / messaging associated with identities. I grew up in a family context with strong filial piety, respect for authority, lots of comparisons with other people which leads to feeling not good enough, EA is dismissed as something that’s stupid to do by “authority figures”.
I do think that I need to unlearn a lot from my family’s messaging. For me personally, I’d say it’s much more than 10-25% as a source of stress given how much I need to re-program my brain from all the messaging I received. I’d maybe say like 80%?
Agree it’s more about upbringing and messaging. And also relate a lot to this.
But also I think it’s really hard to tell the “cause” of any given problem at an individual level. As recently as a few years ago, I would have put 80% weight on upbringing / messaging (which I agree aren’t the identities themselves but something associated with them). Nowadays I’m more agnostic about it.
I think it’s fine to seek out affinity groups and culturally-relevant advice to some degree. But also, there’s a tradeoff between exploring identities versus applying generic mental health advice. Especially when you get to intersectionality-type stuff like trifectas where the number of things to explore is gets incredibly vast very quickly.
thank you both for sharing your perspectives! :)