How Obedience Has Shaped My Life

A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto the Instagram account Asians for Mental Health by Jenny Wang, PhD; a psychologist.

As a Hmong-American woman, I’ve come to realize that my life comes with more baggage than I originally thought. (You can read a little about that experience here, but I hope to write about more baggage in the future.) And while I scrolled through her feed, I found myself deeply resonating with much of what she was writing about. However, one post in particular really stood out to me.

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“Why can’t you just listen to my words?” Spoken in Chinese this message conveys a sense of “why don’t you just obey/comply.” This was the parenting model that some of our parents may have learned from their childhoods or thought was the only effective way to motivate behavior. Some of us were quick to obey our parents while others may have bucked the system, but neither option provided the safe environment necessary to learn how to set boundaries. . . In therapy work, boundaries are a recurring theme that arises. Compliance is highly valued as a symbol of Asian parenting success. But compliance renders love to be transactional and conditional upon approved behaviors and emotions. So if you are raised in these environments, you may have never learned that you were allowed to say no or have boundaries in the first place. Because your protests may have fallen on deaf ears, your opinions were disregarded, and your feelings overlooked. Unfortunately, our first experiences with boundary setting begin in our childhood homes. If you had a right to speak up about how you felt hurt or harmed by others, you learned that your boundaries would be validated and respected. But if there was no room for you to speak up about how you’ve been injured, you learned that you were not allowed to have or set boundaries. . . The problem is that when the environment is SAFE, boundaries can be more permeable and malleable because you can trust the people you are with. However as we grow up, safety in life is no longer guaranteed. Your ability to say no (to friends, partners, coworkers, strangers) and maintain boundaries becomes crucial to protecting your wellbeing, body, and life. But if you were raised to only OBEY, you often never learned how to identify what and where your boundaries are and how to communicate when a boundary is crossed to ensure it doesn’t happen again. So we must unlearn the guilt that boundary setting can induce, unlearn the desire to people please through obedience, and unlearn the idea that we are not allowed to say no. For many this will be uncomfortable, but boundaries provide safety in relationships that obedience can never achieve.

A post shared by Jenny Wang, PhD (She/Her) (@asiansformentalhealth) on Jul 10, 2020 at 5:16am PDT

When I read this bit of text, my body had a visceral reaction. I felt it in my gut. This text about obedience seeped into my bones because the phrase “be good” has always been a part of my life.

Interestingly–as well as kind of funny–enough, I actually wrote a paper in high school about this. In my AP English and Composition class junior year, we had to write a number of different essays for our end-of-the-year portfolio. One of the essays had to be a definition essay. The goal was to describe a term in our own way and meaning. I chose the word good.

I titled my essay “To Be Good or Not to Be,” which is an obvious play on Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy from Hamlet. In the essay, I wrote about how “good” is a positive term, but the connotations were negative in my mind. Like clockwork, the adults in my life forced me into this box of obedience and suffocation. All I ever heard was “be good,” as if I truly did not know better.

It also didn’t help that I grew up the oldest, and only, daughter in a Hmong Pastor’s family. Talk about unlucky cards. I had to be extra obedient at church because all eyes were on me, and I couldn’t possibly embarrass my family. Yes, my family–not myself. Even if someone else did the same supposedly “bad” thing I did, they wouldn’t be viewed the same way I would. Completely unfair.

Because of this, I felt like I had no voice growing up; no choice in my own life. There were so many things I wanted to do and experience, but I couldn’t due to how my family was. So, in turn, for much of my adolescent and adult life, I felt considerable bitterness and resentment over it. The adults in my life cared so much about molding me into the perfect daughter that they failed to see I was dying inside. All of my pent up anger towards obedience lead to me want to be anything but good.

As I’ve gotten older and have come to understand my parents and other elders more, I see that their choice in instilling obedience had positive intentions. However, even though I’m not that bitter anymore, there’s still this lingering bit of frustration left.

Like Wang’s post suggests, when you’ve never really had the choice to make your own opinions about anything, you don’t even know where to begin trying to help yourself overcome these feelings. You find yourself in this weird limbo of do I do what my parents want or do I finally grow a pair and live my own life?

However, it’s hard to answer that question as someone who–at the end of the day–still wants to please others. Being an adult doesn’t really change that. For instance, I forget that I’m allowed to say “no” to anyone. I can have boundaries when it comes to my life. I am free to communicate what I want. My emotions and feelings are valid. I’m allowed to be selfish and care about myself.

Although I didn’t grow up with a proper understanding of mental health, and how it shapes us, I’m trying to understand more each and every day. Just because my family doesn’t want to talk about their feelings, doesn’t mean that I have to do the same. Therefore, know that it is never too late to be aware of our experiences.

Such experiences don’t define us, but they’ve made us who we are today. Learning and growing from them will allow everything to come to fruition.