Hey, I'm Elise Hugh. This is TED Talks Daily. Whether it's guilt or grief or anxiety, all of us have felt such a range of difficult emotions over this past year and at various points throughout our lives. In today's conversation from Ted's new series called How to Deal with Difficult Feelings, Mental Health Advocate Sahaj Kohl-Cohle sits down with TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks to bring some real wisdom and science on understanding guilt.

It's a talk that will resonate with children of immigrants, as it did for me.

But it speaks to all of us on themes of belonging, questioning,

and how to handle our emotions. Hello, Sahad. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me.

I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited to be speaking with you. So you are a mental health

therapist in training and the founder of Brown Girl Therapy,

a community you started to allow the children of immigrants to speak openly about mental health issues.

And one theme I've noticed in the content you share is the guilt frequently experienced by people with immigrant parents.

Can you talk more about that guilt?

There's definitely a relationship between being a child of immigrant parents living Can you talk more about that guilt? There's definitely a relationship

between being a child of immigrant parents living in the West and experiencing guilt. Children of

immigrants are often straddling to cultures known as bicultural straddling, and there's often

this expectation to make our immigrant parents sacrifices and choices for coming to this country worth it.

Many children of immigrants, you know, feel chronic sense of guilt for letting their parents down,

for not being enough, for being too American, for seeming ungrateful.

There's also this sense of a thriver's guilt or this guilt of growing, healing, accessing

resources and opportunities that maybe our parents

didn't have or our family and other parts of the world don't have access to.

So many children of immigrants may have grown up being responsible for their parents as well.

You know, if we think about an immigrant's journey to the West, they may not speak English well.

So a lot of children of immigrants may act as a translator,

may help pay the bills, may help take care of younger siblings, so caretaking.

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