Immigrant Guilt: Learning Self-Compassion to Honor Heritage and Healing

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By Concentric Counselor Jane Chang, M.A., LPC*, NCC

When Survival Is All You’ve Known

How do you practice self-compassion when your entire life has been about survival? Being an immigrant in the United States is marked by a history of exclusion and contempt, and yet, immigrants are the very heartbeat of this nation. Part of America’s story has always been written by those who left everything behind to begin again.

As a child of immigrant parents, you witness their everyday struggles, learning to speak a language that’s not their own, working labor-intensive jobs, sacrificing rest for the promise of stability. You inherit not just your immigrant parents' dreams, but also their guilt, fear, and resilience. You grow up believing that love is measured by endurance.

Immigrant guilt is the emotional toll of obligation that tells you to make your parents’ sacrifices “worth it”. It can show up as a ruminating thought, “Am I doing enough?” even when you’re doing all that you can. Accomplishments aren’t ones to be celebrated, but the inevitable, since the only option is to succeed.

With the world changing faster than ever, many of us are trying to navigate our mental health while honoring the sacrifices that brought us here. Understanding how immigrant guilt permeates in our lives can be the first step in growing our practice of self-compassion.

Understanding Immigrant Guilt

Immigrant guilt captures the emotional tension that comes from wanting to repay our parents for their sacrifices through achievement and success, often mixed with a sense of survivor’s guilt. The term shares similarities with Thriver’s Guilt, coined by Sahaj Kaur Kohli, MAED, LGPC, which describes the discomfort of flourishing with resources or opportunities that were never available to those who came before us.

Common examples of immigrant guilt include:

●       Feeling guilty for resting or enjoying your accomplishments
●       Experiencing remorse while on vacation, thinking of the experiences your parents never had
●       Believing you must constantly achieve to “repay” their sacrifices
●       Feeling shame for forgetting or drifting from cultural customs as you assimilate

But immigrant guilt isn’t just about repayment, it also reflects the tension of belonging to two “worlds”. As children of immigrants, we naturally strive to adapt to the culture around us, often leading to a quiet conflict between the values and beliefs of two vastly different identities. This experience, known as bicultural straddling, can create an ongoing sense of not fully belonging to either culture.

Yet, in navigating that space, you’re building something entirely new, a blended identity that honors both where you come from and where you are. The guilt you feel isn’t entirely bad. It’s a sign of awareness, a reflection of the love and cultural complexity that live within you. Recognizing that duality is the first step toward turning guilt into self-compassion.

Guilt as a Spectrum

Psychotherapist Sahaj Kaur Kohli’s work invites us to rethink how we define guilt. In Western culture, guilt is often understood as a personal response to having done something wrong, a feeling tied to individual responsibility. But in many collectivistic cultures, guilt carries a broader meaning. It reflects our sense of duty, our obligations to others, and the expectations of our community.

When viewed through this lens, “fixing” our guilt can deny the cultural nuance that is our experience. Immigrant guilt is not simply a flaw to overcome, it’s also a thread that ties us to where we come from.

Unhealthy guilt, however, convinces us that we are never doing enough. It tells us that we owe our parents everything, even at the cost of our rest, joy, or peace. It can keep us emotionally enmeshed, leaving little space to define who we are outside of our family’s sacrifices.

Healthy guilt, on the other hand, reminds us of what we value and appreciate. It connects us to our roots and to others who share our bicultural experience. When we approach guilt with awareness, it can transform into appreciation, a deeper understanding of the love, effort, and history that shaped us, and a guide toward the person we are becoming.

Guilt Into Gratitude

Although “immigrant guilt” is a unique experience, the process of learning self-compassion in the face of inadequacy resonates across cultures. For many, immigrant guilt is a natural outpouring of love, a response to the sacrifices our parents made so that we could have more. For others, it is reinforced through blatant words: “We did all of this for you.”  “You didn’t raise yourself on your own.” “You’re so ungrateful.”. These messages, spoken or implied, teach us that love must be earned, and that rest, joy, or self-expression come at the cost of our parents’ suffering.

The truth is that we are both the product and the proof of our parents’ sacrifices. We are navigating survival in a country that has often stripped away the rights and dignity of those who look like us. Self-compassion doesn’t erase those realities; it acknowledges them while reminding us that we are not the perpetrators of their pain. It is the antidote to generations of survival mode.

Practicing self-compassion means reframing guilt into gratitude: “My parents worked so I could rest, not so I could burn out.” It’s choosing to celebrate cultural evolution rather than mourning what has changed. It’s allowing yourself to belong to both cultures, even imperfectly.

In practice, this can look like:

●       Speaking to yourself with the same empathy you’d extend to a loved one.
●       Taking rest without guilt, as an act of honoring your family’s labor.
●       Reconnecting with your heritage through music, food, or language, rather than pressure.

Self-compassion is an act of gentleness to not only ourselves, it’s also an act of gratitude toward those who’ve come before us. In moments when the guilt becomes to immense, we can implement therapeutic practices, such as Dropping the Anchor, a technique from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), to ground us and engage in what matters.

Learning the Language of Self-Compassion

It’s often easy to offer compassion to others, to comfort a friend in pain, to forgive a stranger’s mistake, or even to understand someone who has hurt us. Yet when it comes to ourselves, that same kindness can feel foreign. Self-compassion asks us to extend the same patience and care inward. It invites us to meet our guilt, shame, and inadequacy without judgment, and to replace perfectionism with presence. But for many of us, this practice might not come naturally. How do we speak gently to ourselves when we’ve only ever been taught to push harder?

We begin by noticing the harsh voice within us, the one that critiques, doubts, and demands, and softly rewrite its script to that of a close friend:

  1. Negative Belief: “They’ll never accept me as I am.” Reframe to Self-Compassion: “They may not understand my choices right now, but I can hold both love for them and truth for myself. I’m more than their approval.”

  2. Negative Belief: “How could I have been so stupid?” Reframe to Self-Compassion: “I tried my best, and now I know more than before.”

  3. Negative Belief: “I’ll never be good enough.” Reframe to Self-Compassion: “I am enough, and I’m going to continue to grow and learn.”

Self-compassion doesn’t deny our pain or our mistakes; it reframes them as part of being human in a world of vast experiences. It reminds us that our struggles aren’t our identity but the colors that add depth and texture to who we are becoming. In practice, self-compassion can show up as:

●       Taking a breath before reacting to self-criticism and creating space for gentleness

●       Acknowledging your strengths and efforts

●       Expressing gratitude to yourself

Compassion is connective. It draws us closer to our shared humanity, with the understanding that everyone, no matter their story, is navigating something unseen. Self-compassion draws us out of our over-identifications with our “failings” and reminds us that we, too, are human. We are stumbling, learning, and doing our best to grow. Self-compassion is not complacency, and it doesn’t shield us from accountability. It grounds us in the reality that we can hold both our imperfections and progress at the same time. Through practice, we learn to embody what we wish had been shown to us from the start: patience, gentleness, and the belief that we are still worthy, even as we continue to grow.

A New Cultural Reality

Practicing self-compassion doesn’t dishonor your parents’ sacrifices, but instead it fulfills a hope for a better life. It helps us transcend from survival into growth. You can build a life that both honors your heritage and your healing.

If you’re struggling with immigrant guilt or want to build self-compassion in therapy, our counselors can help you begin your healing journey. Contact a counselor today to schedule an appointment.

Reference: Kohli, S. K. (2024, January 22). What the West gets wrong about guilt. Culturally Enough. https://culturallyenough.substack.com/p/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-guilt

For Consideration: Sahaj Kaur Kohli TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UeaxsubJ70

*Has completed all the requirements for LPC licensure; waiting for official issuance