Healing the Need to Prove Yourself Through Ancestral Connection

Where ancestral memory meets the longing to feel at home in our own lives.

Many Asian and Asian diaspora professionals feel trapped in a constant need to prove themselves at work and in life. This article explores how reconnecting with ancestry can help clarify where that pressure comes from and how therapy can support a more grounded, self honoring way of living. This reflection may be helpful for those who feel burned out, over responsible, or disconnected from themselves and are curious about how ancestral work and therapy can support healing.

It was just last month that I returned from Mexico, where I spent Día de los Muertos. I didn’t go there looking for answers. I simply allowed myself to arrive, to let the days unfold without forcing meaning. An altar was waiting in my aunt and uncle’s home, covered in marigolds, mezcal, bread, and the names of the grandparents I never truly knew. My grandfather migrated from Guangdong, China to Mexico, carrying more silence than story with him. I sat quietly and invited them to come home to us. Just a thought, a whisper, a soft opening.

Days later, I found myself reading a migration story out loud. It wasn’t written about my family, but it could have been. The leaving. The ocean. The country that did not know them yet. The beginning again. When I reached the part about my grandfather leaving his homeland, not knowing if he would ever return, I began to cry. And then I sobbed, the kind of sobbing that comes from a place older than language.

Maybe I was crying the tears he never allowed himself to shed. Maybe I was grieving the loneliness of building a life in a place where no one spoke his name. Maybe I was recognizing the ache in myself, the one that has always been searching for belonging. There was something familiar in his story. The survival. The quiet strength. The longing to find purpose in a world that asks us to prove our worth.

This is the part many of us, especially in AAPI communities, inherit without being told: we work hard not because we love achievement, but because our bodies remember that survival once depended on it. We become high achieving. We become accommodating. We become responsible. We become reliable. And somewhere inside, we feel tired. Lonely. Disconnected from ourselves.

What softened in me during this trip was the understanding that my patterns are not personal flaws. They are lineage. They are memory. They are stories carried through blood and breath. And if that is true, then healing is also lineage. It can return to us. It can be remembered.

This is the work I do with clients: not fixing, not performing, not forcing change, but listening. Slowing. Making space for what has been held for too long. Healing does not erase history. It allows history to breathe.