How Immigration Trauma Shows Up in the Second Generation

As part of SAMHIN’s mission to encourage open conversations about mental health in the South Asian community, we invited Sarah Usman, to share her experience about how intergenerational trauma shapes adaptation in South Asians.

My friend and I grew up in a central New Jersey suburb known for its competitive public schools, where, every March, a dozen or so students were accepted to Ivy League schools. In her home, report cards and rankings were regular topics of conversation, while feelings were not. Her parents had immigrated from India in the decades following Partition, carrying family histories shaped by displacement, colonial rule, and the urgency to build stability in a new country. That meant, in her household, academic stress could be discussed openly; emotional overwhelm could not. Anxiety was reframed as motivation, exhaustion as discipline. When she struggled, the response was not unkind, but it was practical: work harder, focus on school, don’t dwell.

For years, she struggled to understand why her parents never acknowledged her feelings, or why they never spoke about their own. It all began to make more sense when she learned more about her family’s history. Partition was not something her parents talked about directly, but it lived in fragments—stories about relatives who never made it across borders, land that was lost, names that disappeared from the family tree. Not only that, but, British colonial rule had reshaped economic opportunity, education, and movement long before migration to the United States was even possible. Emotional expression was not rewarded; endurance was.

By the time her parents immigrated, that logic was firmly embedded. In the U.S., where immigrants were expected to prove their worth repeatedly, achievement became both shield and currency. Success promised safety in a way vulnerability never could. In that context, emotional neglect was not intentional. It became structural: passed down through history, reinforced by migration, and normalized within the household.

What she learned, really, was this: immigration does not sever families from historical trauma; it relocates it, embedding it into household norms, and the boundaries around what is considered appropriate to express.

Research on intergenerational trauma demonstrates that large-scale historical events such as displacement, political violence, and colonial disruption continue to shape emotional regulation, parenting practices, and relational norms across generations, even when the original trauma is no longer explicitly discussed [1].

As a second-generation Indian American, she began to recognize how these inherited survival strategies shaped her own emotional life. She was highly attuned to expectations and deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty. She learned how to perform competence while disconnecting from her own needs. When she felt overwhelmed, guilt followed quickly—guilt for feeling ungrateful, for wanting more than what her parents had worked so hard to provide.

Therapy gave my friend language for what had once felt difficult to name. Naming emotional neglect did not mean rejecting her parents or her culture; it meant contextualizing them. South Asian mental health practitioners note that many immigrant families operate within trauma-informed survival frameworks, where emotional suppression is not a cultural flaw but an adaptive response to historical instability and migration stress [2].

Breaking generational patterns required learning skills that had never been modelled: sitting with discomfort, expressing needs without justification, and recognizing that emotional care is not a threat to cultural identity. As South Asian therapists emphasize, healing does not require abandoning cultural values but expanding them to include emotional attunement and self-compassion [2].

My friend’s story is not unique. It reflects the experience of many second-generation South Asians who are now questioning the costs of silence and the limits of endurance. In naming what was once unspoken, she is not undoing her “culture” or “familial values”: she is reshaping it, making room for a future where ambition and emotional care can coexist.

Citations:

Qureshi, F., Misra, S., & Poshni, A. (2023). The partition of India through the lens of historical trauma: Intergenerational effects on immigrant health in the South Asian diaspora. Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health, 3, 100246.
South Asian Therapists. (n.d.). How therapy can help break generational trauma.

By Sarah Usman
Sarah Usman is majoring in Biological Sciences and minoring in African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, Class of 2027. She has experience in research and EMS and is deeply committed to advancing mental health awareness. She is also a dedicated SAMHIN volunteer.