Common Survival Strategies of Adult Children of Immigrants
As adults, children of immigrants may need to learn how to set new boundaries.
It is an especially stressful time to be an immigrant right now and I just wanted to share some survival strategies that might be showing up more frequently these days.
Being an immigrant means it’s often “sink or swim.”
I feel like I’ve been swimming since the moment I hit American ground. Since childhood, I have been busy surviving—translating for my parents, figuring things out for us, and trying to make sense of this foreign world. Even now, I feel like I slip into survival mode, often in flight—running from place to place, job to job, and home to home. It feels so second nature to me that I often forget that I’m going through that trauma response again. My body still senses danger or urgency and it takes off in flight.
I quickly become the problem solver, ready to take action and fix any problem that comes my way because that feels much safer than dealing with the dread or anxiety of not solving it. Or I accommodate and people please. That’s way better than disappointing anyone and feeling guilty. I stay hyper vigilant—scanning my environment and looking for signs of danger. I become a mindreader because if I don’t anticipate everyone’s needs and moods, then something could go horribly wrong.
These are my survival strategies that helped me get through my childhood and the trauma of suddenly moving to a whole new world with unfamiliar faces, languages, and cultures, with parents who knew just as little as I did about this foreign place.
Except, sometimes my body forgets that it’s over and that I’ve made it. I’m American now. I’m a grown up. I survived. And so I have to remind myself that I’m not back there, back then anymore, which is a new skill I’m practicing.
Here are some common survival strategies of adult children of immigrants on my Psychology Today blog.
What are some of your survival strategies that you’d like to re-examine?