❤️🔥 In Relationship With x 💙 Asian Mental Health Project | Examining Why We Deflect Love
Note on the session: This live session will be recorded and accessible to the facilitators, Kevin and Stephanie. They will use it to write a follow-up summary and post the recorded part of only their story on YouTube, to be accessible to folks who cannot attend the session live. Due to the privacy and protection of folks who attend the session, the rest of the recording will not be published or accessible at all.
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Receiving love can feel foreign, even difficult, in Asian culture.
Allowing ourselves to be poured into can transform us, yet many of us have been conditioned to feel undeserving.
Growing up in an Asian household, resistance to receiving love could have looked like witnessing our caregivers:
❌ Deny compliments
❌ Track gifts or favors in order to reciprocate back in the future
❌ Refuse to celebrate milestones and view them as status quo
These experiences in childhood could translate into hardwired beliefs in adulthood around receiving love, such as:
☹️ Love is conditional; it must be earned
☹️ Love makes you weak; it makes you less sharp in pursuit of your goals
☹️ Love is cheesy; it’s assumed and better not to verbalize it at all
When we examine how we receive love, we can start to increase our capacity to show love towards the people we care about most. Relational dynamics facilitators, Kevin and Stephanie will unpack these themes in this Brave Conversations session. We’ll specifically explore:
❤️🔥 How upbringing impacts receptivity: the way we were raised and how that showed up in our relationship
❤️🔥 Stories of resistance: transforming thoughts of resistance to acceptance
❤️🔥 Tools for relating: Congruence over Composure principle by Relating Between the Lines
It’s safe to say that Kevin and Stephanie’s Asian experience has lots of complexity, and while their experience isn’t representative of all Asian cultures, their intention is to create a space to normalize having conversations about these themes.