When You’re Afraid of Being a Burden But Are in Deep Pain and Sadness

One of my biggest fears is being a burden on other people. Like many other adult children of immigrants being raised by parents who were hustling, working long hours, and suffered in silence without much complaining, I grew up learning to never utter a peep if I was sad, mad, or anxious. I often found myself saying “you don’t have it that bad” or “others have it much worse” or “don’t tell your parents, they have a lot on their plate.”

Even to this day, I tend not to tell my mother anything about my kids getting sick, financial stressors or parental woes (for different reasons) but part of me worries that it would be burdensome for my mother to know such details without a lot of means to help. Even if they could help, I don’t want them to even worry about me.

where does that belief come from? Why do I feel the need to hide my pain from my parents?

Here are a few reasons:

1) filial piety-ish: I grew with the notion that I didn’t need to pay back my parents for their sacrifices, but I wasn’t supposed to make a big fuss about anything. I didn’t need to get good grades or do anything nice for my parents, but I was expected to not bother my parents and to take care of myself. This is still a form of payback. It’s self sacrificing payback by being less “needy” and at the same time, it produced a lot of guilt in me for times when I took care of myself.

2) toxic collectivism culture: it’s all about the family. Everything is wrapped around caretaking for others. Making sure everyone else is ok without taking into account that individual needs are important too.

3) the culture of stoicism: the culture of silence, avoidance and suppression of feelings is centered. Most immigrant parents avoid talking about feelings and the implication is that feelings aren’t important and addressing feelings is burdensome and inconvenient.

4) parentification aka being a parent to your parent- if your job was to take care of your parents feelings or help your parents by being a “good” kid, then it creates a belief that your role in all relationships is to take care of others, not to be taken care of.

As a result of some of these reasons, we learned to push away our “needy” or “vulnerable” feelings/tendencies that learned early on that it was “too much” to express our needs and be in a place of dependency.

Vulnerable parts that we learned to push away

We might also hear messages from our parents saying “don’t cry, we have other things to deal with” and it might bring a sense of unworthiness. Shame might arise if we are directly or indirectly told that expressing our needs is selfish. Guilt might arise if we feel bad for asking for help. We might feel fear of rejection if our parents were too overwhelmed to comfort us.

Things that we do to avoid feeling vulnerable

Different parts of us help us to prevent our vulnerable feelings of unworthiness, shame, guilt and fear of rejection from being felt. Here are the common behaviors:

Emotional suppression/numbing- keep emotions private

Perfectionism- excelling in the school or workplace prevents us from feeling guilt and shame

People pleasing- putting others first and taking care of other people’s feelings while sacrificing your own

Over responsibility- saying “yes” to helping others to avoid ever asking for help

Being hyper independent, avoiding hard conversations, being super hard on yourself, scrolling, work addictions, etc

What can you do to heal from this experience of consistently fearing that you are a burden to others

• Take a moment to pause and take a look inside. Notice the feelings, sensations and thoughts that maybe popping up

• Listen to your protective feelings and thoughts. Ask your protective behaviors: “how do you help me? What are you afraid of would happen if you didn’t work so hard for me?”

• Gently connect with your vulnerable feelings underneath the protective behavior.

• Work with a professional to help you unburden these vulnerable parts of you. These vulnerable parts might want to release their burden of feeling like a burden through different means: fire, water, earth, air, etc.

• building a trusting system- encourage your protective parts to partner with your higher self. Everyone has a higher self that knows that their needs are not a burden and knows how to relate to others needs while balancing it with their own.