Therapy for East Asian Communities

Are You Struggling With Intense Pressure To Succeed?

• Do you feel unfulfilled despite achieving impressive grades or a prestigious job?

• Does it seem like you’re emotionally disconnected from yourself, your family, and your culture?

• Have you been trying to find a way to make sense of your inner world while still honoring where you came from?

Maybe you’re torn between cultural expectations and your personal desires. You strive to live up to high expectations, yet you end up feeling like you’re losing touch with who you really are.

Perhaps you’ve checked off all the boxes for external markers of success, yet your stellar academic performance and professional accomplishments haven’t brought you a sense of true fulfillment. Sometimes, you might find yourself lying awake at night, wondering if all of the effort is worth the stress, anxiety, and loneliness. 

East Asians In The US Often Face Bicultural Stress

Compared to other racial and ethnic groups, Asian-Americans are the least likely to reach out for mental health support. In a given year, only 8.6% of Asian-Americans sought mental health services, and only 23% of adults in this group with a mental health condition received treatment.

Why do so many Asian-Americans hesitate to seek therapy? Stigma, cultural taboos, and a lack of culturally competent therapists are among the most prominent reasons that Asian-Americans often suffer in silence.

Cultural values like collectivism, filial piety, and “saving face” can make emotional vulnerability feel like a form of betrayal. On top of it all, you might be carrying unspoken generational trauma and lack the precise language to convey your experiences, whether in English or your family’s native language.

Even if you’re ready for support, you might worry that you’ll feel unseen or invalidated by therapists who don’t understand the nuances of your background. Our team is ready to guide you through a wide range of challenges, including:

• Giving yourself the grace to heal, and letting go of the shame around seeking help and expressing your emotional pain

• Healing from burnout and shifting your energy towards pursuits that make you come alive

• Recovering from trauma that has been passed down through your family and rewriting generational patterns

• Honoring the spirit of your cultural values without becoming emotionally burdened by traditions or beliefs that you don’t align with

You deserve the opportunity to pursue healing with someone who understands your struggles and takes you seriously.

At Repose, Our East Asian Therapists Combine Lived Experience With Clinical Expertise

Many of our clients come in feeling torn between two worlds. Our approach is not about embracing one while rejecting another—it’s about integration. 

When you’re working with one of our East Asian therapists, you’ll be able to move at your own pace, without minimizing the complexity of your unique challenges. You won’t need to painstakingly explain your cultural values—we already understand how loyalty, duty, and family responsibilities can weigh on your decisions.

Each and every one of our therapists has completed extensive training in cultural somatics, allowing our team to deliver care tailored to your specific needs and background. Before you begin therapy with Repose, we can match you with an East Asian, Asian-American, or Pacific Islander (AAPI) therapist from your culture, or a practitioner who specializes in addressing particular mental health concerns, depending on your preference.

In therapy, we’ll delve into your cultural identity and sense of belonging. We’ll also examine generational patterns that have persisted within your family and might be influencing your choices today. 

Together, we can explore how unspoken obligations, perfectionism, or the tendency to silence your own needs in order to keep the peace within your family. We’ll practice setting healthy boundaries so that you can begin living life on your terms, without letting go of family relationships.

You might be grappling with guilt, external pressure, or internalized shame, especially when you consider setting boundaries or pursuing paths that your family may not support. You’ll learn to recognize where this shame might be cropping up and holding you back, reframe your limiting beliefs, and change the way you process your emotions and relate to others. 

We integrate a range of approaches, always adapting them to your cultural context and personal needs:

• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy for resolving the tension linked to past trauma, perfectionism, and inherited patterns

• Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a pathway to exploring the parts of you defined by guilt, fear, and shame, opening up opportunities to tap into your authenticity

• Somatic therapy to tune into body, identify where you’re carrying cultural pressure and stress, and release this pain rather than holding on to it in silence

• Mindfulness practices for centering yourself in the present and calming racing thoughts so that you can navigate stressful situations with a clear head

• Narrative therapy to shift your self-perceptions and rewrite the stories you’ve told yourself about your place in the world

At Repose, we believe that you don’t have to choose between honoring your family and being yourself. Healing isn’t about becoming someone else. Instead, it means coming home to who you already are, with gentleness and strength. Over time, you can feel whole, grounded, and free, with a stronger sense of integrity and self-trust.

Common Concerns About Therapy For East Asians

Meet Our Team

Our multilingual East Asian team includes licensed therapists, trauma specialists, and somatic practitioners.