How Anxiety Passes Down to the Next Generation in Asian Families

The Inheritance No One Talks About

Anxiety doesn’t always look like panic attacks or sleepless nights. Sometimes it looks like the child who scans their parent’s face before speaking. Or the straight-A student who can’t enjoy their success. Or the adult who is constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop — even when everything seems fine.

Anxiety often begins before we even know the word for it. And sometimes, before we are even born.

In my work with clients, I often hear them say, “My parents never talked about emotions,” or “They never talked about negative feelings or conflicts. After conflicts, we all would go back to business as usual the next day.” Many clients come in seeking help for their own anxiety, but soon discover that the roots go much deeper than their own experiences. Beneath the perfectionism, people-pleasing, and chronic overthinking, there’s a long history of survival — passed down quietly through their family trees.

Let’s explore how anxiety is transmitted across generations — and how we begin the brave work of breaking the cycle.

The Invisible Inheritance

When we talk about inherited traits, we usually think of eye color or height. We don’t often think about psychological patterns being inherited. Not just through genes, but through the way we are parented, the way emotions are handled (or avoided), and the way fear is transmitted without ever being named.

In the field of epigenetics, researchers have found that trauma and chronic stress can alter how genes are expressed (Barlett et al., 2017) — essentially "switching on" anxiety-related responses in children whose parents experienced trauma. This means that a parent’s anxiety doesn’t just shape the home environment; it can also shape how a child’s nervous system develops. However, biology is only part of the story. The other part is relational, cultural, and often hidden.

The Nervous System Learns What Love Feels Like

Children don’t learn emotional regulation from words — they learn it from the nervous systems of their caregivers.

If your parents were constantly anxious, overwhelmed, or emotionally unavailable, you likely learned to be on high alert. Even without any explicit lessons, you absorbed a powerful message: love must be earned through obedience, performance, or emotional caretaking.

Many Asian American clients I work with describe childhoods where success was equated with safety. If you got good grades, didn’t speak up, and kept the family name clean, you were accepted. But if you had big emotions, failed to meet expectations, or expressed a need, love felt distant — or disappeared entirely.

This kind of conditional love wires children to become perfectionists, over-functioners, or emotional shapeshifters. And while these strategies may have helped you survive, they often become the very things that make you anxious in adulthood.

Anxiety as a Family Language

In some Asian families (and others), anxiety is inherited not as a disorder but as a way of being. It's in the way people speak — rapid, urgent, focused on worst-case scenarios. It’s in the way families push for perfection, not because they don’t love their children, but because they believe that achievement is the only protection in a world that will not love them unconditionally.

I remember when I cried in front of my mother expecting emotional support — my mother told me, “How are you going to survive in this world with this weak mind?” It hurt deeply, but in the deep down, I knew that my mother was projecting her anxiety about the world’s lack of unconditional love and was passing it down onto me.

For many Asian families, especially those shaped by immigration, colonization, war, or systemic racism, anxiety is survival. Being constantly prepared, never satisfied, and hyperaware of others’ opinions wasn’t irrational — it was adaptive.

And so, we learn to worry — not because we have a “chemical imbalance,” but because we were raised in a world where vigilance was necessary.

This kind of anxiety isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s the quiet tension in the body, the shame that flares up when you rest, the guilt that comes from saying “no.” It’s a fear that feels like second nature — because it was modeled for you over and over again.

When Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Forgot

One of the most powerful moments in therapy is when my clients realizes, “This isn’t just mine.” That their anxiety is not a personal failure, but a relational inheritance. That their body has been carrying stories their family never had the language to speak aloud.

This is especially true for those raised in silence. If your family avoided conflict, downplayed emotions, or equated vulnerability with weakness, you likely internalized the belief that anxiety must be hidden, controlled, or managed in isolation.

But the body always remembers. It remembers the pressure of unspoken expectations. The tension of being “the good child.” The fear of being a burden. And unless we find safe places to process these legacies, we carry them forward — often into our own parenting, partnerships, or sense of self.

Breaking the Cycle

Healing generational anxiety doesn’t mean blaming your parents (though at times it involves distancing yourself from your family of origin while healing). It means recognizing the systems and stories they were shaped by — and deciding that your story gets to be different.

It starts with naming what was never named. Giving language to what you felt as a child, even if no one ever acknowledged it. This alone can be profoundly liberating. It helps us see that our anxiety isn’t random — it’s relational. It had a purpose. But it no longer has to define us.

Next, we learn to befriend our nervous system. We learn what safety feels like from the inside out. This is often unfamiliar, especially for clients who have lived their entire lives in a state of quiet panic. But over time, with the right support, your body begins to trust something new: that you don’t have to be in crisis to be worthy of care.

We also learn to set boundaries, not as rebellion, but as a form of repair. To say “no” without shame. To rest without guilt. To make choices that honor your needs, even if they go against family expectations. These moments — small but sacred — are how we create new blueprints for love and space to exhale a sigh of relief.

You Are the Cycle Breaker

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are the one in your family who feels everything. Who questions everything. Who refuses to settle for survival when you know you were meant to thrive.

You are the interruption. The one who is brave enough to turn toward what others turned away from.

At the Center for Asian American Trauma, we hold space for this kind of healing. For the cycle-breakers, the deep feelers, the ones who carry more than they ever should have — and are still here, still soft, still choosing to heal.

Your anxiety is not your fault. But your healing? That is your right.

Author: Wonbin Jung, PhD, LMFT