Your Life Has a Context: Why It Matters in Therapy

photo credit: Mari yamaguchi

One of the easiest mistakes to make in therapy is to assume that there is one correct way to be healthy.

There isn't.

What independence looks like in one family may look selfish in another. What one person experiences as closeness may feel intrusive to someone else. Direct communication may be valued in one culture and experienced as disrespectful in another. Expectations around family, caregiving, gender, privacy, achievement, emotion, sexuality, money, religion, and responsibility can vary enormously.

And none of us enters a therapy room without a perspective—including the therapist.

Behavior makes more sense in context

My undergraduate degree is in Cultural Anthropology, and one of the most useful things I took from that education was an awareness of how easily we mistake our own norms for universal ones.

That has stayed with me as a therapist.

When someone tells me about a relationship, family conflict, decision, or behavior, I don't want to immediately measure it against my own idea of what a person should do. I want to understand the world in which it makes sense.

That context includes culture, but it isn't limited to ethnicity or nationality. Families have cultures. Communities have cultures. Religions, professions, generations, socioeconomic environments, regions, and social groups all carry expectations about what is normal, admirable, shameful, dangerous, or simply the way things are done.

Sometimes those expectations fit us beautifully.

Sometimes they don't.

And sometimes we're caught between several of them.

More than one thing can be true

This is particularly important when people have complicated relationships with their families or communities.

You can understand why your parents behaved as they did and still be hurt by it. You can value your culture and struggle with some of its expectations. You can be grateful for what your family gave you and angry about what they couldn't. You can want greater independence without wanting to reject the people you came from.

Therapy doesn't require choosing one version of the story.

Part of the work can be making enough room to hold the complexity: This mattered to me. This hurt me. This protected me. This limited me. I understand where it came from. I still want something different.

Those statements can coexist.

Trauma has a context too

This matters enormously in trauma therapy.

People sometimes dismiss their own experiences because they were normal in their family or community. Everyone was disciplined that way. Nobody talked about feelings. My parents had it much worse. That's just how relationships were.

Context can help us understand why something happened. It doesn't necessarily tell us what effect it had.

The opposite mistake is possible too. A therapist can look at a family or cultural practice through their own lens and label something unhealthy without adequately understanding its meaning to the person sitting in front of them.

Neither is particularly useful.

In trauma work, I'm interested in what happened, what it meant to you, what you learned from it, and what effect it continues to have now.

Sometimes the conflict is inside us

Growing up between different cultures, families, identities, or sets of expectations can also leave people carrying contradictions they don't immediately recognize.

Take care of everyone else—but become your own person.

Be successful—but don't think you're better than us.

Be strong—but don't make other people uncomfortable.

Family comes first—but somehow build a life of your own.

Sometimes what looks like indecision, guilt, anxiety, or difficulty setting boundaries makes considerably more sense once we understand the different loyalties and expectations involved.

The goal isn't necessarily to decide which side is right. It may be to figure out which values are actually yours and how you want to live with the parts that conflict.

Curiosity matters more than assumptions

Being culturally responsive doesn't mean that a therapist can become an expert in every culture or fully understand an experience they haven't lived.

I certainly can't.

My background—growing up in a multiracial and multicultural family, spending formative years around people from many parts of the world, and later studying Cultural Anthropology—gave me an early appreciation for different perspectives. It did not give me expertise in someone else's life.

What it gave me, more importantly, was respect for the limits of my own perspective.

That means I may ask questions. I may get something wrong and need you to correct me. There may be aspects of your experience that I understand intellectually but can never know in the same way you do.

I don't think good therapy requires pretending otherwise.

It requires enough curiosity and humility to keep learning who you are rather than fitting you into who I expect you to be.

The same principle shapes how I approach change

This is also one reason I'm cautious about deciding too quickly that a coping strategy, belief, or reaction simply needs to disappear.

Before trying to change something, it's useful to understand why it developed.

Hypervigilance may once have kept you safer. Taking care of everyone else may have protected important relationships. Staying quiet may have prevented conflict. Perfectionism may have helped you earn approval or create predictability. Even patterns that are causing problems now may have made enormous sense somewhere else in your life.

Approaches I use, including EMDR and Havening Techniques®, can help us work with distressing experiences and reactions when they're continuing to interfere with your life. But the goal isn't to erase parts of you that don't conform to somebody else's definition of healthy.

It's to give you more freedom to decide what still belongs.

Good therapy should help you understand yourself in context—not take you out of your context and tell you who you ought to be.