Even when she was a young girl, Amara was acutely aware of the ways she seemed different from her classmates. As the child of an Indian immigrant family in a school with mostly white students, she figured out that conforming and excelling were ways of warding off shame and feeling valued by others. She tried to distance herself from her parents and their customs: when her mom came to her school wearing a sari, she was horrified.
Looking back on this time with me in therapy, Amara, now an adult, realises that her shame about feeling different led her to compensate academically – she worked hard and became an honours student. After years of feeling inadequate and excluded, excelling in this way suddenly earned her recognition and praise. But her compensatory striving seems to have brought other challenges. As Amara tells me about her early experience, she tears up and says that she is still constantly comparing herself with others, feeling like she is never ‘enough’.
Another client, Zarak, a software engineer from Afghanistan, had to adjust to a new home twice. When he was young, his family moved to Turkey, where he was teased for being different. Then, as a young adult, he came to the United States. While it was difficult to be uprooted from his surroundings and lose all his friends, Zarak learned that achieving, pleasing others, and managing people’s perceptions of him were his ticket to feeling included.
But Zarak now tells me how sick he is of worrying about what everyone thinks of him. Whenever he is around other people, he feels anxious. He explains how he carefully interprets what others want in order to mould himself to their expectations. His long-running efforts to fit in are wearing him down. As we explore further, he shares what it was like to be suddenly surrounded by peers who looked, spoke and acted differently from him. His parents were too overwhelmed with their own adjustment to be supportive.
In my decades as a psychotherapist, I have seen many clients like Amara and Zarak (whose names have been changed here): people who immigrated to the West with their family when they were young, or were born in the West to immigrant parents. They often come to therapy because of a personal crisis, such as a break-up in their relationship, or stress at work. These clients have given me insight into the shame and feelings of inferiority that often characterise the experience of being a cultural outsider, as one tries hard to figure out the rules and avoid seeming foolish to others. My clients have also shown me how young people attempt to deal with those feelings.
One of the common strategies for managing feelings of shame and inadequacy is to develop a sense of self that is centred on competence, performance and being liked. Cultural outsiders experience being an outsider as synonymous with being deficient. Eager to ‘fit in’, and to avoid feeling inferior, they seek validation from outside to feel good about themselves, focus on achievement, and rigidly conform to societal expectations. People with experiences like Amara’s and Zarak’s are often model children who become successful adults, and who go through life needing to be seen as exceptional. Their strong need to be seen as competent conceals a sad truth: although they look well-adjusted on the outside, inside they suffer silently.
All too often, the very qualities that have become key to their success – such as being super-responsible, striving to be the best, or behaving in overly accommodating ways – create problems in relating to others, and lead them to feel even more stressed or anxious. Even when they achieve conventional markers of success, they are often plagued with anxiety, comparing themselves with others and with an ideal standard. The pain that comes with feeling different growing up often leads to overlooking what is best for them in order to be liked and accepted.
The pressure to be better and do more, and the need for external approval, causes emotional turmoil.
We’ll see how someone who’s had this sort of experience – as well as their family, peers and others – can better understand the pain, and what’s needed for healing.
For children of immigrant families, the challenges can be numerous and overwhelming: adjusting to a new language, facing discrimination, having a heightened awareness of difference. Some of these children have the extra challenge of navigating for parents who are also adjusting. They play a typically adult role, helping to ensure parents understand the norms of a new culture and serving as an interpreter when a parent doesn’t comprehend the new language. As a result, their identity may get organised around self-sufficiency and usefulness to others.
Culturally specific stereotypes can also increase the burden. In the US and among my clients, high-achieving Asian-American youth are often cast in the stereotype of the ‘model minority’. Teachers, parents and other adults might assume that Asian-American children are just naturally hardworking, not under pressure, and fail to see maladaptive coping.
Failure to recognise a child’s ‘inner person’ leads to the child feeling unseen for who they are
Like Amara and Zarak, cultural outsiders may become highly focused on achievement and conformity in order to increase the chances of ‘fitting in’ and being valued by peers. But there are other potential reasons for this form of coping. Many immigrant parents make their way to new countries in part to pursue a better education and future for their children. High expectations for a child’s academic success can have unintended negative consequences, particularly when parents put a lot of pressure on a child to achieve.
What I have noticed in my practice, and in the culture at large, is that some parents will say they consider their child’s intrinsic qualities to be important, but when I dig deeper, these qualities seem to matter to them only when they are tied to an outcome – they are not considered the primary markers of a child’s worth. Failure to recognise and acknowledge a child’s ‘inner person’ as being important in itself leads to the child feeling unseen or not valued for who they are.
Of course, for any young person, including those who feel like outsiders, trying to better oneself and achieve goals are positive things. What causes problems is when achievement comes to be seen as the source of self-worth – that is, when worth is defined not by who they are but by what they do.
How can someone break free of this trap? One important step is to revisit one’s definition of success. Success, as it relates to assimilation, is often defined in terms of conforming to a society’s ideas about what it means to be a success. This can lead to a preoccupation with how one is perceived by others, which in turn becomes the way of measuring how they view themselves. When Amara and Zarak were encouraged to examine how they defined success in life, they realised the degree to which their criteria were tied to how others perceived them, and to their performance. This recognition led to an increased sense of self-compassion.
In the process of changing how one thinks about one’s worth, self-compassion is essential. When self-worth is tied too closely to performance, one tends to be hard on oneself, having little tolerance for perceived imperfections or shortcomings. Failing and falling short of some ideal or standard becomes synonymous with being a failure as a person. Self-compassion involves cultivating a kind attitude toward oneself, and challenging the voices inside that are harsh and unforgiving. Both Amara and Zarak adopted a gentler approach toward their shortcomings and, in doing so, they relieved the pressure they felt to live up to unrelenting standards.
It is also helpful to learn to separate the past from the present. People who grow up feeling valued primarily for their usefulness and accomplishments learn that displaying these qualities leads to positive attention, and lessens the likelihood of negative responses such as the pain of feeling inadequate or like an ‘other’. The strategies that they employed when they were young to ward off painful feelings or consequences were intelligent ways of coping. But as adults, they need to remind themselves that those survival strategies, and the conclusions they drew about dreaded consequences, belong to an earlier time. In adulthood, there are opportunities to recognise how one is being responded to in ways that are different from when one was young, and to develop new sources of support in the form of adult friendships and communities.
A passion to learn, a big heart or resourcefulness came to seem secondary to their accomplishments
A pivotal moment in therapy was when Amara discovered her own belief that not being the ‘star performer’, not being needed, would lead her to reexperience the pain of being alone, powerless and unworthy. Her recognition that these fears belonged to an earlier time enabled Amara to reveal more vulnerable, less competent aspects of her personality that she would have kept carefully hidden in the past. This resulted in her feeling more confident and less anxious about how others viewed her.
Another critical perspective shift is learning to prioritise intrinsic qualities. For some, inner qualities such as sincerity, humour, a passion to learn, a big heart or resourcefulness came to seem secondary to their accomplishments. So it helps to reflect on what makes one a worthwhile human being in ways that have nothing to do with achievements or the perceptions of others. Often a person must also remind themselves regularly where their true worth comes from, and actively challenge the internal voices that suggest their worth is not based on their intrinsic qualities.
Once Zarak thought more about his self-worth in terms of his inner qualities, he became less dependent on external approval. For most of his life, he wouldn’t even consider prioritising his own needs, and expressing them meant, to him, risking a break in the connection with others – which only intensified his isolation. Gradually, this began to shift as he realised that disharmony no longer carried the same threat that was poignant in his youth.
The inner struggle and pain that often come with feeling like an outsider are not restricted to individuals who are adjusting to a new culture. People who feel separate or ‘different’ from their peers adopt various sorts of strategies that enable them to cope. But in my experience, at least for cultural outsiders, conflating excelling with self-worth and ‘fitting in’ with success is a dominant coping pattern. All too often, friends, family and others knowingly or unknowingly strengthen the perception that worth is tied to performance. When those who’ve felt like outsiders can instead recognise and affirm their intrinsic worth, they become better equipped to navigate life with greater freedom and peace.
