Examining Our Stories (with therapist Sahaj Kaur Kohli)

0:03Don't hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it, want it, let it come from the intention of real truth for you and then let it go. For me, our soul is like it's unbound. It's limitless. But we will use words to limit ourselves. When people stop believing that somebody's got your back or Superman's coming, we turn to ourselves. And that's where you become empowered. Courageous participation attracts positive things. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow, and this is the Goop Podcast, where we bring together visionaries, scientists, healers, artists, and seekers. I'm so grateful that I get to interview these extraordinary thought leaders and share their wisdom with you.

0:51And I love listening to the conversations that are led by my co-host and dear friend, Cleo Wade. Cleo is a beautiful poet and author. I deeply admire her and the way she keeps her heart open to the world. Together, we believe that engaging in open-minded, honest, and sometimes difficult conversations has the power to change our lives. All right, over to Cleo. My guest today is Sahaj Kohli. Sahaj is the founder of Brown Girl Therapy, the first and largest mental health and wellness space for children of immigrants. Her new book is called But What Will People Say, which is about belonging, family, and identity.

1:33Even if you aren't a child of immigrants yourself, it's really a book about stepping into your life by examining the narrative and stories that are holding you back. Today, Sahaj and I talk about the idea of bicultural identity straggling, or the pressure to present different versions of yourself across multiple cultures, like with family versus friends. Sahaj explains how emotional immaturity, the need for external permission, and the expectation to be exceptional is what she calls the three E's, and how they contributed to her struggles growing up as a child of South Asian immigrants. We also talk about all of the ways guilt shows up in complex family dynamics and why a pause or space can be a boundary too.

2:19Okay, let's get to my chat with Sahej Kohli. I want to thank you for writing this book. You're so naturally gifted as a teacher, and it's very hard to find books that are an invitation into an experience while also teaching the listener, even if it's not their experience in a way that is so shame-free and almost as if it's an invitation to your own kind of really loving kitchen table conversation. And so I really enjoyed going through your book and kind of being, it feels like you're living in your book, not really reading it. And so I want to thank you for the style in which it's written in that invitation into this experience, because it was really so beautifully done and in such an informative and educational way.

3:09Thank you for saying that. It was very hard to balance all of the pieces I wanted to do in my book, the personal with the research, with the community stories, with the client stories, and it took many versions. So I appreciate that it delivered in the intent that was there. So all of your writing is very relatable, even if you're not a child of immigrants. Although it reminds me of like people, you know, in black community, if you like write a soul song or like a gospel song for black church, but everybody feels it. And it's really, your writing is very much, you know, it feels so deeply intended for children of immigrants as this really healing, connective, communal tool, while really gifting so many people from a different background, a way to kind of understand trauma and their own childhood and their own family dynamics.

4:01And especially the disappointment of the parents and And I guess I want, maybe I'll start with this term you use called bicultural identity straddling. Because something I noticed in your book is that, you know, I think of code switching more of like how someone is from like work to personal. And something that you really made me reflect on was this idea of how this personality or kind of sense of some type of self you go into to be with your family. And then it's a completely different person with your friends and your kind of chosen family. so can you talk to me about that yes I mean that is the bicultural identity straddling is something that I think a lot of people deal with right when we think of culture we think of culture as if I'm Indian and American but we also all live within multiple cultural systems every single day just like you said it's there's a workplace system culture there's a family system culture there's a family of origin system culture, if you have your own family, there's a friendship system culture, like every space that you kind of exist in has a set of cultural norms, values, and expectations.

5:09So I think everyone to some degree kind of straddles these multiple cultures all the time. But specifically for children of immigrants and anyone who straddles more than one culture, so if you're biracial, multiracial, multicultural, those values, norms, and expectations are so diametrically opposed to one another that the tension is constant. And it doesn't matter, right? I'm a therapist now. I have done so much healing. I have done so much work, but I will still always feel like I am a different person to some degree in a different environment, depending on where I am. And I think what happens for so many of us, if we're not conscious about it, is that there's a performative sense of identity that we develop.

5:51So we develop performative behaviors, values, words, actions, choices that we make, all in the name of belonging and acceptance and validation. And if we're not conscious about it, that will just continue to go on for our whole life. And we will not ever know what we really want, what we really need, what is meaningful to us, what we require from our relationships, because we are so concerned about what, you know, pun intended here, other people might think or say about us, that we don't actually learn those things about ourselves. So I'm really hoping that this book can be a resource for people to question and interrogate some of those stories they're taught from a cultural standpoint.

6:29So if you're straddling more than one culture, I want people to question and interrogate whose values am I living by right now? Why am I acting this way? Why do I feel the need to do this or say this? And that will really be so painful and difficult because it might clarify relationships or expectations that aren't true to who we are. But in the name of all of that, we are going forward to a more authentic version of ourselves. You know, I, I often think about I, in, in my last book, I wrote about one day, my mom had recently given me this letter that I had written to her in second grade that it must've been Valentine's and we're making like a Valentine for your parents.

7:10And it was, you know, three ways you show love for your parents. It's just like kind of crazy handwriting. It's like, I show love for my mom by not talking when she's on the phone, by doing the dishes, by da-da-da-da. And in my book, I reflected on when does accommodation become the thing that makes us invisible because the love is given to us through praise, right? So when we say chasing belonging or validation, the deepest kind of underlying foundation of that is love, right? It's like, oh, I get to be loved if I'm quiet, if I'm small, if I'm making life easier. And then as you take on this idea that love comes when I do these things, you think that you have to be doing to have love rather than being to receive love.

8:05And there's so much of that I felt in your book, because there is this space of I get love with my grades being this or my connection to, you know, my, if I'm anxiously attached to my parents or, you know, all of these things. And I'd love to kind of understand or you to share with our readers, when did the you that is with your friends and whoever that person is, this kind of liberated you, you know, what's a conversation that you're in the house in your parents, family structure, you trying to get their love and the person who's appreciated for who they are in the real world. What's the conversation they had to become one?

8:47Oh my gosh, that's such a good question. It took so much work. I don't know that it was one conversation. It was, it was many different conversations between those parts of myself. And it took a lot. If I'm, if I'm being honest here, it took me leaving and getting physical and emotional distance from my parents and my family and the community I grew up in, in order to figure out who I wanted to be versus who I was told to be. And I think that was the beginning of that conversation between those two parts of me, where I started to realize there were pieces of myself when I was out in the world, having that physical and emotional distance that weren't loved, that were deeply neglected because of the version of me who showed up at home or in my community or as a child.

9:29And it was through the work I was doing out in the world on my own with that physical and emotional distance in therapy, building new friendships, having my own career, being financially independent, all of these things where I started to tend to those neglected parts of myself. And I started to realize I needed to give love to those parts of myself in order to be able to go back to where I came from, to my family, to my cultural roots, to my community, and interact in a way that felt good to me and meaningful because maintaining those roots were really important to me. Some people have that tension between those parts of themselves and say, you know what, screw it.

10:06I don't actually want to go back to that. I don't want to go back to that version of me when I'm at home or the parts of me that were neglected, but I didn't want that. I wanted to find a way to merge them. And so some of the conversation that I had to have between those parts of myself were really, what are my values? What is important to me? What is it that I want? Because I needed to get clarity for myself. That's the only way for me to show up in spaces and say, I'm okay, I'm comfortable with this. If I can't get love in this relational context, I can give it to myself and or I have other places I can receive that.

10:37And I think that is the hardest thing for so many of us to reconcile with is that we aren't always going to be to get the love that we want in the ways that we want from the people that we want. And that's just the nature of having many relationships, being in relationships with people with different value systems, different expectations, different cultural contexts. And that's where self-love is so important and so key and yet so misunderstood because often it is just focused on us as individuals rather than us as individuals in the roles that we play, which is the piece that I think I was missing.

11:12I love playing the roles I play. I love being daughter, aunt, wife, sister, all of these things, but I can't really show up in those roles and be in those contexts if I'm not also taking care of myself. And so when you ask about those conversations, I really think I just needed to make room for myself to be with myself and to love myself before I could even go back and reintegrate these roles and these other contexts of my life that I felt either neglected in or felt misunderstood in quite honestly. My girlfriends and I often talk about this kind of power of the pause that, you know, when you suffer with like kind of the guilt of creating that space with you and your family, when you create long periods of, of space or, you know, my, my, my, one of my best friends, Stevie always says like, Oh no, I like had to put her on pause because the thing also is that when you have narcissists in your family, you know, how narcissism and not in that kind of like buzz wordy way of like how everyone's like gaslighting our narcissist now.

12:16And you're just kind of like, okay. But when, when you really have a narcissist in your family, something that they do is have a ton of presence in order to constantly control your narrative. And so sometimes the only way that you can take back your narrative or have real space to reflect and be like, wait, hold on, what just happened, what happened not only in our conflict, what has gone on to create our dynamic. If I'm kind of in community or in conversation or conflict with the narcissist in my family, like they'll try to call you five times, be like, talk to you, let's talk about this or send you a million messages being like, why are you da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

12:53But really it's because there are, you know, narcissism is on shaky ground if they are not controlling the story. and that is what feeds them. And so I found that in your giving that space was actually the only way. And then I'm not saying that your family members are narcissists or anything, but sometimes when you have that boundary, you know, the space, like space is a real boundary. And I think sometimes people want boundaries to always just be like, it's a conversation, but we stay in this exact dynamic, but at times not having, if you don't have time away for reflection, contemplation and intentional kind of strategy for dynamic, you know, that is like sometimes the most critical boundary, but I think it carries the most guilt.

13:38Do you think? I totally, I totally agree. Guilt is the number one topic I see in my clinical practice, in the Brown Girl Therapy community, the stories I hear. It's all guilt because so many people feel like they've been told to be one way. Like you're saying that narrative they've been fed and the story that they now tell themselves because of what they've been told about who they're supposed to be. And the minute they try to divert, diverge and go off onto a different path, they feel so guilty. They it's, and it automatically becomes a black and white mindset. I'm betraying my family. I'm not a good enough kid because I'm doing this or I don't deserve it.

14:14I don't deserve this thing I'm chasing because I'm not doing the thing that my parents wanted me to do. It always becomes these absolute catastrophes that the guilt will start to feed. And I totally agree that the pause is so important. I mean, we talk about boundaries in a Western world and it's like, be direct, be explicit, be communicative, but that's not how boundaries work in systems, family systems that are hierarchical or patriarchal or have cultural contexts where direct communication isn't even used on a good day, right? There's cross-cultural communication matters. And so that space is a boundary, like you said, behavior is a boundary, right?

14:51Not choosing not to pick up the phone. I was able to practice those types of boundaries when I got that physical distance. I was able to say, you know what, I'm actually not going to pick up the phone right now. And I'm going to call my mom back later or tomorrow when I feel like I'm in a better headspace or I can manage a conversation. And it's needing, having that space is so important, but there's so much guilt. There's so much guilt because distance for a lot of us equates, I don't love you, or I don't want a relationship with you. and that that automatically goes inward to say I'm not good enough I am doing something bad I am bad because now I am taking the space yeah so unlearning that guilt is so important guilt is just it's it's a yellow it's like a yellow light it's a sign that says slow down think about why you're feeling this guilt but it is not a neon sign that says turn around you you need to turn around and backtrack and change your behavior sometimes yes sometimes it indicates that we are doing something against our moral compass.

15:51But what I've seen in the research too, is that whose moral compass and cultural context, whose social and cultural norms are you crossing? Is it your parents? Is it yours? Are you actually doing something harmful? Are you actually doing something wrong? Or do you just feel bad because it's new and unfamiliar? And often with the guilt with my clients and in the community that I serve, that is the key is people feel like because it feels uncomfortable, it's bad when in reality it's uncomfortable because it's new and it's learning to differentiate that for yourself. Well, and it's like, you know, sometimes I think when it comes to boundary setting, when we view it as something that only kind of belongs in conversation, and then you have this expectation that then they will just do all the change so that you can just be you that ends up becoming a letdown because I think two things happen.

16:39Like one, you, you over control and over strategize how people receive the information, right? So you're, whenever you're overthinking, like, can they handle it? Can they not, what will they do with it? Then they're just going to do this. Or whenever you're kind of like kind of spiraling on reception of your truth, to me, that's always this like moment to be like, okay, hold on. Should my boundary just be an act? Like, do I feel that in conversation I can be met with real like reception and understanding, or does my boundary merely need to be an action and not a conversation because people are who they are.

17:15And, you know, you can't, people can change when they want to change, but you cannot change people. And so, you know, I, I feel like sometimes when I'm having those kind of reflective moments with my girlfriends, I'm being like, Oh, I just can't decide. Like, I just feel like it's not that I feel that someone won't understand the boundary I'm trying to put down. It's that it actually is in the same vein of what you're saying like, it's going to be covered in like complete and utter misunderstanding that is like just too frustrating that instead you're like, Oh no, I just won't go there for that day.

17:48And that is just the boundary. And it's like, must be pretty clear that that's just not what I'm doing because it's not what I'm doing. And I think that that can, that boundary can be easier felt than heard. Absolutely. And that actually, I think is more of an invitation for the other person to reflect on what is actually happening and their role in it, if they so choose, right? If you choose not to go home or go to that event for that day, that is more of an invitation for that person to say, huh, I wonder why they didn't come to this. I'm wondering if it's something I did. I mean, and not everyone's going to have the emotional maturity to have that.

18:26So it still allows you to protect yourself. But I agree. A lot of times, a lot of times, if we're only viewing boundary in one way that it needs to be set in communication, we are taking away our own agency to be able to do other things to set boundaries that we need. At Goop, we believe the spaces we spend time in shape how we feel and how we connect. That's why we're drawn to Convene, a global hospitality brand reimagining work in meeting spaces centered around design and care. Convene's sophisticated purpose-built locations are designed to inspire connection, whether it's a board meeting for 10, a team off-site, or a workplace membership that gives you and your team a home base.

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19:54just because I feel that, you know, when we go into like this idea of this misunderstanding, you say, as I look back on this time in my life, I can pinpoint that my struggles were due to a combination of what I call the three E's, the need for external permission, emotional immaturity, and expectation of exceptionalism. Can you kind of take us through how these manifested for you? And then kind of what you also, how you, I think arrived at such a kind of, you know, not it's a complicated idea, put very simply and how you've woven healing into these by being able to label them. It's also a great question that I haven't fully explored, but I'm going to try to do that here.

20:40I will say to preface this, writing this book was so healing in so many ways. I think you can feel that as the reader. Yeah, even if no one reads it, which obviously I want people to read it, but even if no one did, I gained so much personally from just excavating so many of these like old wounds and old experiences and revisiting them and interrogating them and rewriting them for myself. And I think that is what happened in that specific chapter you're talking about, where I do revisit my academic failures and my struggles and my mental health. And I was able to say, huh, I play a role in my experiences.

21:18I'm not to blame for struggling, right? Struggling is not a moral failure. I'm not to blame for needing more support or needing more time to figure things out. But I also play a role in how I handle things or how I wasn't ready to handle things. And I think in writing the book, that's something I really came to was just owning a sense of, I think a part of owning our sense of agency is also owning our responsibility and accountability in the experiences we have. and so when I say the need for external permission up until maybe my mid-20s if I'm being honest my whole life was what is it that my parents want from me what is it that other people want from me as a woman as an Indian woman as an Indian daughter as a daughter of immigrants like all of these intersection of identities I had been conditioned to believe that other people knew best maybe because my parents were scared for me worried wanted my safety and security and all of these things, or maybe because I just wasn't trusted to be able to make decisions, whatever it was.

22:17And I just realized that I never really had my own compass and guidance, self-inflicted guidance to make decisions and decide for myself, which is why when you read the book, there are so many years of just pain and struggle because I didn't know how to get out of it. And I think a part of that healing from the need for external permission was just, again, making space for myself and saying it's okay if I make mistakes it's okay if I make a choice and then I change my mind later or I don't really like that I made that choice and I get to own it and have accountability for it almost turning to other people to help make choices for me was a way for me to escape accountability for making choices for myself and I think that's something I've really started to acknowledge is you can't just have agency with making decisions and saying this is what I want.

23:05You have to have agency when it comes to accountability for whatever the repercussions are for those choices and decisions you make. You don't get it one way. And when I think about emotional maturity and my lack of emotional maturity for, again, many decades of my life, I think a part of that comes from not being taught to be critical or analyze things or make choices for myself. I think they go hand in hand where a lot of it is I knew the role I had to play. I knew the lines I had to say. I knew what I needed to do. And that was it. There was no sense of, it's okay if I make mistakes. It's okay if I make the wrong choice.

23:43It's okay if I don't know. And I think emotional maturity is about being able to handle those difficult emotions when things don't go according to plan. And I didn't know how to do that. And so I think that was something that I really learned only later in life. And then when I think about exceptionalism, I, you know, I think there are many groups in especially this country that are expected to be exceptional. There's the model minority myth for Asian Americans. There's all of the post-Civil War immigration laws that changed that allowed a wave of Indian immigrants, South Asian immigrants to come to this country.

24:16and a lot of that was where my history in this country is rooted in is this idea that you know my dad was allowed to come to this country was welcomed in because he's a doctor and could be of service to this country and then he had a son who decided to be a lawyer and then they had a daughter who decided to pursue fashion and excel in it then they had another daughter who struggled and that was like mind-blowing for them they were like we've done everything right to set you up here and you're struggling and we don't understand that. We just don't understand. We can't conceptualize that. And I think the need for exceptionalism can be really suffocating and really isolating for many people who grow up in situations where they're not allowed to struggle and they're not allowed to experience something differently than the people around them.

25:08You know, I often think about as a recovering perfectionist myself, you know, if I think about if I had to talk to another person who's struggling with that, I would tell them that, you know, motivate out of perfectionism by knowing that it removes you from your humanity. it removes you from the human experience of being flesh and bones and and then even we like to be like oh embrace our flaws but we don't even know if they are flaws it's just human it's just so you know we don't think that a flower is flawed because it grows you know to the left and one grows straight up and one grows to the right you just think it is what it is and I think whenever we you know being a perfectionist is an out-of-body experience and so you know I think that and obviously it's a response to, you know, trauma and it's a response to so many different things and, or a survival response to our world or, you know, American capitalism and all these things.

26:08But most of all, what it does is says, leave your body, turn it into a machine, go for this thing. And then at some point, spirit, soul, your, you know, mind and heart connection is like knocking and knocking and knocking and knocking and then pounding. And I think that that is what creates such, whether it's breakdowns or breakthroughs for people. I totally agree. And I think, you know, if your whole identity is a pie and that whole pie is only one thing that you think you need to do or be, of course, it's going to be like an unstable ground that you're walking on and living on. And that's why all of those pieces in the pie need to be different things, play, mistakes, fun, you know, experience, learning skills, all of these things that just relationships, all of these things that just need to fill our, to stay on analogy, to be the pie, the whole pie.

27:08It's so important because like you're saying, I think, I mean, I struggle with perfectionism still to this day. I'm still unlearning it. Even with this book, this process, it's an ongoing journey where it's taking me, as you said, out of my body. And I'm not able to stay present and enjoy what's actually happening in the moment. So I'm too worried about either what I did or what I'm going to do. Yeah, that is such a reminder that there's kind of no there with any of these things. So, you know, whether it's the kind of, you know, bicultural identity straddling that creates self-betrayal, you know, you can find a flow where you're like the boundaries working, the boundaries working, the boundaries working.

27:46And then like one big thing happens, whether it's a funeral or this or that. And then, you know, it really kind of makes your current boundaries that are protecting your integrity irrelevant. And then I'm in different terrain all of a sudden, and it's not really working and you have to kind of go back. And, you know, something you, it's funny because you said this in your previous response, but I wrote it down and I was looking through your book, interrogating our narratives. Do you think that even now, if you fall into a space where you're tight roping between your kind of family dynamic or, you know, your current chosen family dynamic where things are more high integrity or in flow, whatever they are, when you're trying to get back to self or, you know, you kind of fall off your course, do you find that you begin by interrogating your narrative again?

28:37And how would you kind of tell someone how they can begin the process of interrogating their narratives? It's super heavy work and it's hard and it's not a one-time thing that you do. I think you're spot on that for me, it's constant. Interrogating our stories and our narrative, it's constant because we're being fed different stories every day in all of our experiences. And so it's not meant to be this, you always have to be on interrogating, but I think that we owe it to ourselves in any which way that is meaningful to us to make space for ourselves, to be able to interrogate our narrative. And for some people that can be running, for some people that can be journaling, for some people that can be whatever it looks like where you feel like you're able to get out of your head and into your body and really sit with whatever's coming up for you.

29:29Some people that's coming to therapy. I think a part of interrogating our narratives is we know our bodies know our bodies know when we're when we're in misalignment they just know right I don't think that there's like a thought you have or a feeling you have where you're like oh all of a sudden I need to start like interrogating my narrative I think that's too that's too simplified I think your body just knows you either you know I think your body either starts to shut down a little bit or you're getting burned out or you're feeling really resentful or you're feeling like rageful and you don't know why or you're starting to feel these emotions that maybe you don't have words for, but whatever happens, your body knows your body, you know, you feel it in your stomach, you feel it in your chest, you feel it in your head, you feel it in your back, your body knows when you're misaligned with whatever is happening around you or the relationships you're engaging in or the conversations you're happening.