
It’s Not Too Late to Break Generational Cycles with Sahaj Kaur Kohli
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Sahaj Kaur Kohli is going on her fourth father-daughter trip soon – something that she could never have imagined 10 years ago. And it’s something that Reshma definitely can’t imagine with her own father. Both daughters to immigrant parents, Reshma and Sahaj talk about how their unique upbringing has informed their senses of self. But Sahaj’s work as a therapist, journalist, and founder of Brown Girl Therapy isn’t limited to adult children of immigrants. She gives Reshma tools for setting boundaries, breaking generational cycles, and rebuilding adult relationships with our parents – things we can all use in our midlife.
Follow Sahaj at @BrownGirlTherapy. Check out her book, But What Will People Say? here.
You can follow our host Reshma Saujani @reshmasaujani on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/reshmasaujani/?hl=en
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Transcript
SPEAKERS
Reshma Saujani, Sahaj Kaur Kohli
Reshma Saujani 00:11
Welcome to My So Called Midlife, a podcast where we figure out how to stop just getting through it and start actually living it. I’m Reshma Saujani. So much of my personal experience comes from growing up as the daughter of immigrants in episode after episode in this show, I talk to these amazing guests who just feel a sense of freedom that just happens in midlife. But if I’m honest, I’m still struggling to find that freedom, that sense that I could live my life for me, and I think so much of why I’m struggling is because of my experience growing up with immigrant parents who had so many expectations for me, like I had to live out and achieve things that they couldn’t because they came to this country as refugees, and they didn’t know the language, and they didn’t have enough money or resources or support, and so that meant that I had to live the perfect life that they couldn’t, and if I was honest about that, it’s created a lot of anger and tension with My family. So today’s guest really helped me unpack this adult identity that is still resentful and angry and confused. Sahaj Kaur Kohli is a therapist, a Washington Post columnist and founder of Brown Girl therapy, the first and largest mental health community for children of immigrants. She’s also the author of but what will people say? It’s about navigating mental health, identity and the love between cultures. In this episode, sahej gave me tools on how to build that stronger sense of self and how to create an entirely new relationship with my parents while still Validating my own experiences. It was an incredibly healing conversation. And no matter who your parents are, whether they were immigrants or not, I know that you’re going to find this conversation helpful, so let’s get into it.
03:34
Well, thank you, Sahaj, we’re so excited to talk to you. I feel like I dug into your book, and I have so many thoughts, questions. In fact, I had a bunch of friends over for dinner on Saturday, and I was like, got the book out, and I was like, oh, and listen to this. And then we’re like, yes, that’s totally true. I don’t remember anything from my childhood. I love that. I’m really excited. So, Sahaj, this shows up midlife. You’re not in midlife, but I have to ask, Have you experienced a quarter life crisis?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 04:04
I don’t know what to call what I’m going through, because I don’t think I’m in midlife, but I’m definitely way beyond the age of quarter life.
Reshma Saujani 04:10
How wait. How old are you?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 04:12
35
Reshma Saujani 04:13
Sorry, girl, you’re in midlife. Welcome.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 04:17
No, I’m sticking to 40, 40 is midlife. I still have five years. I’m on my way to entering midlife, and I feel like I’m in a little bit of a transitional phase in my life. Anyways, I’m currently family planning with my partner, and exciting, trying to figure out what that means as a South Asian woman. So lots, lots there that’s being unpacked, and I don’t know I feel more confident in my career and just my choices and my lifestyle has changed a lot, which I think happens naturally as we get older. So there’s lots of things that I feel like I’m experiencing, but I don’t know the word for it.
Reshma Saujani 04:52
Yeah, but you’re excited like you feel, yeah, more like you have an excited vibe than a I’m scared. Oh, fuck vibe.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 04:59
No, I’m super excited. Honestly, turning 30 was the first step for me of being like, okay, the hard years are over. I can just, like, figure out who I am and what I want and focus on that. And it’s only been that for the last almost six years for me, and it’s only getting better. And I have lots of friends in their 40s. My sister is one of my best friends. She’s in her 40s, and it’s just really exciting to see women, especially just kind of owning their midlife and how different it feels from what I was modeled and taught by my mom. So I feel super excited.
Reshma Saujani 05:31
I don’t even feel like my mother brought it up, right? Like, I don’t remember her being like, Oh, I’m aging or I, you know, it’s interesting. I think she’s my mother’s still telling me how fabulous she is, but that’s my mom.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 05:44
Yeah, my mom loves that too yeah.
Reshma Saujani 05:47
We’ll get to that too. So my parents came to this country in 1973 in the 1970s and they were refugees. They were, you know, forced out of Uganda, basically, Idi Amin came to power, and he kicked all the Indians out. And so much of your book, but what will people say? Like, really resonated with me. I mean, I’m just like underlining, underlining, underlining, and I want to start off by reading a stat that just blew me away. In your book, you said that children of immigrants are two times more likely to experience psychological distress like my parents were fucking refugees, and I have more psychological stress compared to them. So what kind of distress are we talking about?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 06:33
Yeah, so I think that stat comes from the experience of being in the Western world, in the new country, in the host country. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that you experience more stress than what your parents have as refugees, but I think in the US, you’ve probably experienced more stress, and that’s because of bicultural straddling, because you are being socialized at a time in your life, adolescence, you know, when you’re trying to find a sense of belonging when your ego is being formed, when you’re trying to be accepted, you’re making all these decisions, and you are constantly feeling this tension between the norms and expectations and values of the household you’re raised in versus the external, socialized culture that is teaching you and telling you to be someone totally different. And so I think that bicultural straddling is what leads to more stress, but our parents can go through that too. It just looks really different, right? It’s not as it’s not as debilitating, I think, as it is on their children who are growing up in the new country, because there’s lots of research that says, you know, that’s where academic problems can come from. That’s where substance use can come from. That’s where depression can come from. Anxiety. Is this idea that we were navigating these different tensions in our identity.
Reshma Saujani 07:44
Shat’s so powerful. As you’re talking I’m thinking like my father changed his name from Mukund to Mike. He still signs my birthday cards. Love Mike. He went to toastmasters every week to get rid of his accent. But I felt like, in many ways, right, their generation was about assimilation, like this was the tax that you had to pay to be in this country. But for us, it was different. It was more complicated. Like I remember being mad that my mom named me Reshma instead of Rachel, and that nobody could pronounce my name. And I don’t even think, honestly, it was until, like five years ago or six years ago that I stopped using Rachel at Starbucks instead of my name, because I always felt like I was putting somebody out right by having to pronounce my name. I still remember we were talking about this at the dinner I had mentioned that, you know, just the pain of never having a boy Look at me or be attracted to me in high school going to the dance, like all, all of that. So it was, it is really our pain or our trauma was different than theirs?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 08:50
Yeah, and it looks it feels different, right? Because our parents are so concerned with what I call the three S’s, the safety, security, stability. For them, it’s about keeping their head down, surviving. They grew up in a different generation. In the US, where even being othered looked different for them, there was much more threat to their safety than maybe, say there is for us, where it’s more about emotional belonging, social acceptance and wanting to feel. You know, we’re not worried as much about safety as we are about kind of this belongingness that we crave.
Reshma Saujani 09:20
But what’s worse? Our parents were stressed about their safety. We’re stressed about our emotional security. Which stress is worse?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 09:28
I don’t know. It just looks different, right? We are honestly, even though we are focused as the children on our emotional security, we still have that intergenerational trauma in us. We’re still dealing with the repercussions of what our elders have been through, and I think we’re the first generation to kind of decide to interrogate it, and I think that leads to even more tension and more mental health struggles and more conflict internally, and more feelings of shame and disillusionment about what it means to feel a sense of belonging.
Reshma Saujani 09:56
Is that because, like intergenerational trauma, is somehow. So biologically passed on thinking about my mother, right, being pregnant with my sister coming here as a refugee, not having anything, you know, literally being expelled, and then, right? Like, how that translated to us physically?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 10:14
Yeah, I mean, there is research that suggests that our DNA is actually encoded with some of that trauma, so it shows up on a molecular biological level. But what’s happening is it’s more of the like stressors, the reactions, the ways that you show up as a person that’s being passed down. So for example, if your mom is in survival mode and she’s got her head down and she’s focusing on just like building a life for your family, you might then internalize that as, oh, I need to be perfect. I need to not rock the boat. I need to not make her any more stressed because she’s dealing with this. But you’ve internalized that trauma. That trauma is being passed down to you as something that you learn how to show up in that relationship, and then you become an adult who’s a people pleaser, who thinks that your worthiness is tied to how well you can be useful to other people. And so the trauma is not necessarily. It’s not replicated in the same way. The patterns might look different, but you are learning to internalize their experience as your own, and then because of the way they treat you, you’re showing up differently because of it.
Reshma Saujani 13:33
You asked something very profound in your book. You said, when does culture end and trauma begin? When does culture become a scapegoat for toxic behavior? Can you talk to me about what you meant by that?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 14:19
Yeah, so many times in my work as a therapist, and even with the brown girl therapy community, and just talking to immigrants and children of immigrants, the number one thing when we talk about functioning in our family, how our family functions, oftentimes, we will unpack and start to uncover that there’s a level of dysfunction that maybe it’s patriarchal beliefs, It’s a hierarchical, you know, established norms that make us feel like we’re small as women, or we’re not allowed to speak up, or depending on your birth order, age, gender, there’s ways that communication are normalized or not normalized in our family, discipline, right? If there was corporal punishment in our household, and that was just a normal part of our upbringing, and so many times these. Conversations, then go to, well, it’s cultural. Everyone in our culture is dealing with this. Everyone in our culture did this, our parents. Parents did this. And when I’ve tried to talk to my family about it, my mom will often throw American at me, like it’s a bad word. You’re just so American. You just don’t understand the cultural differences. It’s this is just how it’s always been done. You turned out fine. I turned out fine. Everything’s fine. And so it’s almost like culture becomes this scapegoat of just for people not to take accountability of how their behavior is actually harming other people. And that’s actually really harmful for so many of us, because then that makes those of us who want to break generational cycles, who want to try to have healthier dynamics, who want to learn how to do things differently, feel like we’re doing something wrong, and then it makes other people feel bad, our parents, for instance, because then they feel like we’re blaming them. They feel like we are making them look bad. We’re talking poorly about them. And it’s just the cycle because some people are stuck in the way things have always been done, which is, quote, unquote, cultural and some people want to change that, and that can lead to these kind of disruptive and dysfunctional and unhealthy dynamics that are so common in so many families.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 16:05
Yeah, I think one of the things that’s really disruptive or unhealthy is, how do we validate our own experiences like I think especially as I became a mom, I had more empathy for my parents, especially my mother’s challenges. Because I understood when, you know, when she was mom, they had far less, far less support, far less resources, so much. And they had, you know, my mother was at range marriage. They come to this country, right? They don’t know anybody. They don’t have any family and and in many ways, I realized that then I then begin to question my own feelings about whether they’re actually valid or not, yeah, and I no longer really have trust about my own emotions.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 16:55
Oh, it’s so common. It’s so common, and it’s really interesting that you’re talking about empathy, because a lot of my work is around and even my book is around. How do we have empathy and compassion for what our elders went through? How do we how do we hold the truth that maybe they did their best with the truth that they still caused harm in some way? How do we honor what they’ve been how do we do that?
Reshma Saujani 17:17
How do we do that?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 17:17
I don’t know. I think it’s really reminding ourselves that multiple things can be true at the same time. A lot of my work with clients is about navigating that guilt that comes from feeling like, oh, I should have more compassion. I should rationalize my parents experiences because they did their best, but at what cost and to what end is always my question. How do we love other people while loving ourselves? And if you haven’t been taught to love yourself. How do you make room for that? So it doesn’t replace the relationships that are important to you, but it it just adds to, like, the diversity of your experience of recognizing that more than one person’s reality is true. Yeah. Does that make sense? absolutely.
17:55
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that really resonated your book too, is this idea of emotional neglect, right? Because our parents, I mean, I could think about again, my parents, they’re young, they’re arranged marriage, they have these kids, and they just don’t have the space to actually. I mean, I when I see my kids, I take them over, I kiss I know exactly what their the names of their kid. You know, friends are like what they did, yeah, my parents none of this, right? And I think older as the implications that it’s had on me, you know, in my ability to be emotional or emotive, I then rationalize the fact that they didn’t, weren’t able to give that to me, because how could they right? And I think this whole point of being able to say that’s really sad as a child that I didn’t receive that kind of emotional affection and love and at the same time to be like but I and I understand why they weren’t able to give that.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 18:51
Yeah, definitely. And it is, it is about kind of tending to your inner child. What is it that your inner child didn’t get right? How can you give that to yourself? How do you find that in other relationships and as a parent, how do you give that to your kids? When I worked with immigrant families, the number one thing that would come up in my work with those families was parents being faced with the fact that they had to do a lot of healing work from their own childhood stuff in order to give their kids what they might need in these moments, if you weren’t taught that you could express your emotions if you your emotions were intended to it’s going to be that much harder for you as a parent to do that if you’re not constantly trying to heal that part of you for your kids and for yourself, right? We don’t know how to do things we’ve never been taught to do. So first of all, have self compassion. You’re learning something that’s totally new, probably for the first generation in your entire family how to do these things. And second, remember that empathy is a tool for us to be able to have compassion for our loved ones, but also we want to like the caveat here is that too much empathy is also not a good thing when we are rationalizing other people’s choices, when we are having empathy to the point where it’s like, well, they can do. Anything, and I will always forgive them, and I will always understand it. We are then foregoing our own sense of self and our own needs and our own voices and our own experiences. And I think that’s something that I had to confront in my book. I mean, the whole first chapter was, I don’t remember anything, and if my parents say it happened this way, if my siblings say it happened this way, I should just defer to them. I’ve been taught to always defer to someone else, and the first chapter of my book actually became integrated into the book like three drafts in. Because finally I got to a point where I was like, hey, editors, I think I need to talk about this. I think that I’m not the only person who is struggling to give space to my own voice. And I want people to know that this is a very common experience, but also it’s a practice. How often are you spending time with yourself, like just asking yourself, Hey sahej, what do you need right now? Hey sahej, what are you feeling right now? Hey, sahej, I care about you. Like, instead of just doing and constantly being for everyone else, never, the answer for a lot of peoples is never, yeah, I’m not doing it.
Reshma Saujani 20:59
You touched on something that this thing blew me away. You did an informal poll in your book, and you found out of the 1500 people that you surveyed, 65% of them said they struggled to remember significant parts of their childhood. Can you explain why I relate to this? There is so much of my childhood that I’ve blocked out some of that as parents, some of that is growing up as the only brown kid in a white neighborhood where I was harassed and bullied and made to be ashamed of the color of my skin and my religion, and that is like so I don’t, you know. I really don’t remember huge parts of my and I didn’t realize that until I read your book.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 21:44
Totally I mean, so there are different types of traumas that we experience, right? We experience big T traumas, the really big, socially understood, like very acknowledged, Trump traumatic experiences. And then we have small t traumas, which are things like micro invalidations, to some extent, emotional neglect can be both of those things, but when we have all of our needs met except our emotional ones, it’s hard to feel like you’re allowed to complain about that, right? So that’s like an example of a small trauma where we might also be our self, our sense of self is being chipped away, but we don’t really acknowledge it, because it doesn’t feel that bad. Doesn’t feel as bad as what other people are going through, or as bad as something else that you could be experiencing. And we know that trauma changes the way that our memories are encoded, if they’re encoded at all, because our brains are in survival mode, because they’re in fight or flight, they are taking they are actively just trying to survive, regulate themselves, and that is something that is going to impact the ways that these memories are then processed and stored in our brains. Also something in immigrant families that’s more common for children and immigrant families than it is in non immigrant families is parentification. So parentification is common and can be in any family, but research suggests that it’s more common in collectivist families and immigrant households, and this is the idea that a child is taking on an adult like role or a task that is beyond their developmental age. And so this happens in immigrant families, because children maybe speak English and their parents don’t, so they start to become translators. They start to be the ones doing the bills. They go to the medical appointments. But other times it’s emotional parentification, where because maybe extended family is left behind, because we know immigration can lead to marital conflict. One of the children might take on, like a spousal role for a parent. So you might start to become a confidant. You might start to be an emotional caregiver to your parent at a young age. These are things that take away from your ability to be a kid and to have like a very traditional, like stereotypical childhood, because you are so concerned about these roles that have been given to you, to that are beyond your developmental age. That’s why so many children of immigrants have been called mature for their age and old soul wise, because these are skills that we’ve learned to survive in a household where maybe we needed to help our family survive, and there’s a lot of instrumental parentification, where we need to do things in order to help our family survive in a new country. But then there’s the emotional one, where all of a sudden we feel like we are of use when we are there for other people, and that can have long, lasting effects. Yeah also, there’s some research that says that parentification is a form of emotional neglect. So that goes right back to the fact that our needs are being neglected, and it’s not a conscious thing, right? Our parents don’t mean to parentify us. They don’t mean to put us in these positions. But if they don’t know better, then we don’t know better. And if we aren’t having our needs, you know, tended to or made space for, then we don’t know how to do that. So then it goes right back to where we started in this conversation, where you become an adult who’s like, how do I actually take care of myself while honoring what my parents have been through.
Reshma Saujani 24:43
Right, no, it’s so interesting. So question for you can is it possible to unlearn what we’re taught growing up so we can show up differently for our kids? Like, is it possible? Like, I’ll give you an example. I never saw any affection. You I mean, no hugs, no kisses, of my parents growing up. And so now. I’m not a hugger. I do this, like, weird, like, side hug thing. I just saw my son do it, and I’m like, yeah, yeah. What do I do now?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 25:09
Well, first of all, if you’re, if you’re if it worries, you can talk to your son about it. You can say, Oh, I realize that I don’t like hugging because X, Y and Z, or I wasn’t really hugged that much growing up, or whatever the belief is for you around hugging and you can open a conversation with him. Is that how you feel? I noticed you do this. How come? What do you think? Why do you think you do that? Just open up a conversation that everything you’re saying is literally what it means to be a generational cycle breaker. It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about having all the answers. It’s about being present. It’s about tending to our loved ones, needs, our kids’ needs, and being curious about their experiences. Those simple acts of curiosity are the very difference between how you might have been raised versus how you want to do things differently. And I think that you absolutely can unlearn some of these things, but it’s not easy, and you are not a project that constantly needs to be worked on. So again, I can’t stress this and repeat this enough. It’s not about being perfect. You will never be a perfect parent. But how can you be present in the moment with your kids and have a level of self awareness and reflection to understand how your own behaviors, your own fears, your own learned skills are impacting your relationship and or your kids in some way?
26:19
What do you think is the number one thing that children of immigrants have to unlearn, that you’ve seen?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 26:26
What it means to be a good child. I think that that’s the biggest thing that we are always interrogating, is that the definitions for good are very different, based on culture, based on generation, based on parent beliefs, based on family dynamics, all of these things, right? Because, for instance, gender plays a really big role, especially in South Asian families and collectivist families. What does it mean to be a good son versus a good daughter? And I think a lot of times, we are constantly interrogating our goodness, and a lot of that comes from if we make a mistake, we take it as a moral failure. If we disappoint someone else, we take it as a moral failure. We are constantly tying the way that we make other people feel, or our lack of perfection to how good we are, and I think that that’s something I’m constantly seeing people having to question and unlearn, like, what does it actually mean to be a good person, a good child?
29:26
Want to talk your background a bit like so you were the first in your family to be born in the West. Go to therapy, marry outside your culture, tell me about how all of that affected your relationship with your parents.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 31:05
Oh, how much time do we have? So my my relationship with my parents was always really fraught, especially with my dad. I just learned to fear him. Growing up, I always often felt like I was too sensitive. My mom would tell me I was a really good actress, because I would cry a lot. I was, you know, too outspoken. I was kind of a rebel in a lot of ways. I was too American. I was too all of these things, and I don’t have, I didn’t have the language I have now, which is a, I was bicultural straddling, and B, that I just my whole identity, cultural identity, was built on this idea that I had to perform and take on certain behaviors in order to feel accepted at home and also in the American society I grew up in, because I also grew up in a predominantly white area, and so I just most of my life was just about me figuring out who I needed to be to get a sense of acceptance and validation. Then I enter my 20s, and I go through something really traumatic, and I was living at home at that time, and my parents really didn’t understand why I possibly needed professional help. I think for them, again, I didn’t have this language then, but for them, they felt like they failed me in some way. Why are you struggling? We’ve done everything for you. You have everything you need. Why is it that you might need to air your dirty laundry? Talk to someone outside of the family? We can help you. Turn to God, right? Let’s just pray more like pray, you know, if you just put your head down, you’re going to be fine. And I actually needed professional care because I had went through a traumatic event. I was dealing with really severe depression, and I just didn’t get the support I needed. And so being someone in my family for the first time who was saying, hey, I need to talk about mental health. Hey, I’m going through something that’s like, we can’t fix just ourselves. I need outside help. Really impacted my relationship with my parents, because I was continuously bringing in these new Western things into our family that they just didn’t understand. And it took me actually, physically and emotionally leaving my parents house moving to New York from Virginia, like getting some time alone and away from them, to become financially independent, to kind of live on my own, and then get that support myself, for me to come back into the relationship with my parents and integrate the things I was learning in therapy. And that’s often what I have to tell people, is like doing this work can be really hard when no one else in your family wants to do this work. But if you do this work, and you like, pursue healing, confront some of those intergenerational stories and trauma, and do this work, find that community, you can actually leave breadcrumbs for your loved ones, and you can, like, bring that work back into your relationship, to better the relationship, because I totally believe that healing has ripple effects.
33:40
Yeah. So tell me how, like, the first walk with your dad happened. Because I was like, blown away by that. Like, it’s, I was, like, super impressed. Like, it’s, like.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 33:50
The trip I took with him?
Reshma Saujani 33:51
Yeah, I mean, you know how it is, right? We don’t have a lot of intimacy with our parents, and, like, even, and I’ll confess, like, I my, you know, my you know, my father had a heart attack at 56 and I always want, I feel like there’s so many things I never asked him, so many questions I had that I was just too embarrassed, shy. I don’t know what it is, you know, I mean to ask. And I actually hired somebody to come interview my dad, and so I would have all of that information. And I and he did it, and he probably told him all his business and all his secrets, right? And I still haven’t had the courage to listen to him. My dad’s still alive, but, like, but my point is, is, like, I would rather go through all of that than to be like, Dad, who I, my father and I are very close, than to be like, Let’s go on a walk. I want to ask you a couple of things.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 34:40
Yeah, so you know, when I took that first father daughter trip, how my my book opens with that trip from 2015 it was interesting how it came about, because it wasn’t necessarily at that point in my life. I had already sought healing for a few years. I’d already kind of like been on the other side of that traumatic incident, and I was. Living away from my family, and I remember my mom telling me, Oh, your dad doesn’t seem like himself. And again, I’m the one in my family that kind of gets given the emotional, you know, baggage, and then I have to, I have to decide what to do with it. And so I was like, oh, you know, I wonder what it would be like to take a trip with him, just the two of us. And immediately I was terrified. I’ve never spent more than a dinner alone with my dad […] Yeah, and immigrant, immigrant dads are notorious for being, like, more stoic, less open, right? All of these things that we kind of know. And I was just like, You know what? Let’s just do it. And my dad was so excited. He was, like, bragging about it with his friends. I’m going to Maine with my daughter, and we’re going to go on a father daughter trip, and I think in some way, he never really my parents have never had that relationship with their parents. They’ve always lived far away, physically and emotionally and technologically, because technology wasn’t a thing when they moved to the US. Like they’ve never had access to their parents in that same way. And our trip was, it was scary. I mean, it was, there was, I’ll be honest, like, there were lots of awkward silences. There were times where I was like, why am I here? Why are we doing this? Like, are we ever going to feel closer? There was one point where I forced him, I have a voice recording on my phone, where I forced him to say five things he loved about me, and he was like, stuttering, trying to figure out what to say. But I took it as a I took it as a sign for me to just start to starting to get to know Him. And instead of diving into, like, some of those really deep, hard conversations, I asked the easy ones, what was your life like when you were a kid? What was India like when you were growing up? You know? What was your, what did you and mom like to do before us kids were born like things that just felt really low stakes, but I could learn a lot about him and over a beer, and when there’s no one else there, and you’ve had enough downtime, my dad will open up. Like, that’s the only time he’ll open up. If I called him right now, we are very close today, he still won’t open up. I need to get in front of him, sit him down, get some like, downtime with him, and he’ll start to talk to me. And I’ve done three trips now with my dad, and I have a fourth one next this weekend, actually.
37:00
Yeah, that’s like, goals. I feel like people listening to this are like, yeah, because, you know, the scariest thing, I think so hedge is like, when they do pass, to feel like you had so much you wanted to ask and you didn’t have the courage, I know, to do it.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 37:16
Our whole lives are about having courage. Especially as children of immigrants, we have to have the courage to carry on the momentum of our parents moving to a new country and us having access to more resources and opportunities. We have the courage of accessing some of those resources and opportunities and help in order to interrogate some of our like collective family trauma and, you know, unhealthy dynamics. And then we have to have the courage to bring that back into our family and try to better our relationships. It doesn’t always go the way we want them to go. It took me years to get to a point where my dad has the relationship my dad and I have the relationship we have today. But I think for me and myself and my own, like rule of thumb was to just keep trying. I want to try in different ways. I want to try to have same conversations in different approaches. I want to I want to maintain connection with them and the same as you right, anticipatory grief is such a common experience we don’t talk about.
Reshma Saujani 38:11
So, what was your reason for why you wanted to keep trying?
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 38:15
I think it was twofold. If I’m being completely honest here, I think in the beginning it was I want my dad to love me and know me like, does he still like? Am I still getting that validation from my parent that he like cares, even though I am making all these choices that are like so against what he thought I would do? So I think there was, like, a need for that validation initially, and then I think as we continue to make this time for each other, and I realized that he was, unlike a lot of parents, really receptive. I mean, if I asked him now to go to therapy, he would probably say yes. And so I think now it’s, it’s this relationship is really important to me, and I want to, I want to learn him. I think one of the biggest things as children of immigrants and children of refugees and grandchildren of immigrants and refugees, is that so much of our history is taken from us. And these stories, these intergenerational narratives, is what they’re called, these times where we can, like, get to know our family, our family members, our family secrets, stories, life lessons, like how people learned crafts and skills and how those were passed down. Those are like, the precious heirlooms that we get to hold on to, and we get to pass on to our kids. But so many of us are scared to have those conversations, because A they don’t know if their parents will be receptive, and B, they don’t know how. And I know it can be really scary, but for me, that just means a lot that I record these conversations with my dad and for me to have these if and when I decide to have kids, or even for my nephews and niece, it’s just so special to be able to pass that on.
39:44
I think it’s also because we have become these functioning people with these tools and tactics, you know, of like we got these relationships our parents, but we don’t know too much. We don’t ask too much, and so to invite almost all of this information and data, it’s risky, right? It’s risky to, like, the fortress that you’ve built around yourself.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 40:12
Yeah, it can be so destabilizing, especially when you learn things that maybe you weren’t prepared for, or stories that you held about people actually turned out not to be true, right? Like, I always thought my dad was like, oh, let’s like they were living in London with my two older siblings, and they had the opportunity to his, like, contract was up or something, and he was going to move back to India or move to America. And I always just assumed my whole life, my dad moved to America to give me a better life. He, like my mom was pregnant, he wanted to give his kids a better life. And then I learned from interviewing him with my book that actually, he didn’t want to go back to India and disappoint his dad. He didn’t want to, like, have to go back instead. So he kept running away to the west. And I was like, oh my God, that’s what I did when I left home and moved to New York. And we have, like, this pattern has lived in our family, and we didn’t even connect over it. And so even that, it can be destabilizing, but it can also be just amazing to be like you’re a person who’s just trying to figure things out in the same way I’m just trying to figure things out. The things we’re figuring out are different, but we’re both doing it.
41:12
Clearly, there is a different experience that children of immigrants have, and so much of that has to do with this kind of generational trauma. And then I think so much of it has to do with the fact that we don’t really have this open communication where we can actually share how we’re feeling. And so the trauma just kind of, you know, I mean, piles on top. So is your advice going through this to just actually have the intervention or to let things go.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 41:44
I love that question, and that the therapist version of me is like that answer is so individualized. I think that every person should interrogate what they’re willing to tolerate, and I think that tolerance looks different for people. For example, I am much more tolerable of my mom’s antics and kind of guilt than say my brother is for different reasons, and I think we should learn behavioral boundaries. Sometimes it’s not even about what you say, but it’s about what you do. You know, maybe pick up the phone less. Maybe have a routine for calling once a week rather than every day. Have have kind of behavioral boundaries around how often you go home, how long you stay how you take care of yourself when you’re at home, what you’re willing to tolerate when you’re home, what you engage in when you’re at home. Those are behavioral boundaries for you to set in place that can also help you protect yourself in some way.
Reshma Saujani 42:31
Boundaries, the word that doesn’t exist in the immigrant vocabulary.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 42:36
I know we’ll need another podcast just on boundaries.
Reshma Saujani 42:39
Boundaries, thank you so much. This was such an incredible conversation, and I think, enormously helpful for our listeners. So thank you so much for your time.
Sahaj Kaur Kohli 42:47
Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
Reshma Saujani 42:49
So Sahaj Kaur Kohli is a therapist, columnist and author of the book, but what will people say? She’s the founder of brown world therapy, the largest mental health and wellness resource for children of immigrants. I am so grateful for everything Sahaj shared during our conversation. Thanks so much for listening to My So Called Midlife if you haven’t yet, now is a great time to subscribe to Lemonada Premium. You’ll get bonus content from episodes like the one where Sahaj and I talk about how siblings of immigrant parents have these completely different relationships with their parents. It was super helpful for me as I thought about my relationship and my sister’s relationship with our parents. Check it out on Apple podcast. Okay, that’s it. See you next week.
Reshma Saujani 43:47
Our senior supervising producer is Kristen Lepore, and our senior producer is Kryssy Pease. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neel. Special thanks to our development team, Hoja Lopez, Jamela Zarha Williams and Alex McOwen. Executive Producers include me, Reshma Saujani, Stephanie Wittels Wachs, and Jessica Cordova Kramer series consulting and production support from Katie Cordova. Help others find our show by leaving a rating and writing a review and let us know how you’re doing in midlife. You can submit your story to be included in this show at speakpipe.com/midlife. Follow My So Called Midlife, wherever you get your podcast or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week, bye.
CREDITS 43:47
There’s more of My So Called Midlife with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content, like midlife advice that didn’t make it into the show. Subscribe now in Apple podcast, I’m your host, Reshma Saujani, our producer is Claire Jones. This series is sound designed by Ivan Kuraev. Our theme was composed by Ivan Kuraev, and performed by Ryan Jewell, Ivan Kuraev and Karen […]. Our senior supervising producer is Kristen Lepore. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neel. Executive Producers include me, Reshma Saujani, Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Series consulting and production support from Katie Cordova. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review and let us know how you’re doing in midlife. You can submit your story to be included in the show at speakpipe.com/midlife, follow My So Called Midlife, wherever you get your podcast, or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership, thanks for listening. See you next week, bye.