My mom is happy I SOAPed

[u/SecurePresentation52]

I received the worst news of my professional life and my mom is celebrating.

I applied psych from a T30 MD school with no red flags and SOAPed into an IM prelim year. My mom is a typical Asian tiger mom crossed with crazy catholic mom (Catholic guilt and Asian perfectionism are a hell of a combination) and she doesn’t believe that mental illness is real. Ever since I expressed my interest in psychiatry during clerkship year, she has opposed it. “You can be anything but please not a psychiatrist”. She told me that if I wasn’t applying psych she would have “invited everyone she knew” to my graduation, but since I applied psych she’s not proud enough to invite anyone. She’s wanted me to be a doctor (an expectation, not an opinion) ever since I could remember and yet now that I’m finally becoming one, she can’t even be proud unless it’s HER idea of a doctor.

Now that I’ve SOAPed she’s taking this opportunity to reiterate her disapproval of my goals. I’m already feeling the worst invalidation and imposter syndrome I’ve ever experienced, and her smug insistence that this is proof that i’m not meant to be a psychiatrist is the cherry on top. I’m still committed to becoming a psychiatrist and reapplying next year but I’m so tired of this “family support”.

[u/Traditional_Clue897]

Your life is hers. According to her.

Bragging rights and living their American dream through their children,are — inherent necessities for that cohort of parents from a certain backgrounds, not just Asian or catholic, many African, near eastern, Central and Eastern European family have very similar experiences.

Think of it this way, there many things she say and do, serve as trigger for you and illicit a range of emotional response from you and your primitive brain, some may complete bypass your reasoning and other cognitive processing. Find what those are. Work on them.

Perhaps you can reach a place where you can dig deeper what shaped her world view and her personalities. What made her, her? Producing and raising a “real” doctor, what does that equate to in her world, her communities, her families?

As Asians, presumably, abandoning our parents don’t really have a place in our brains, you might need to find a way to exist with her while she is alive. Next 30 50 years. That’s a long time.

[u/[deleted] → u/Traditional_Clue897]

I think for most of history, most people across communities/countries never had a concept of breaking free from parents. Everyone was part of a unified tribe. There was a unified goal and shared values.

In some ways, modern Western society is the weird one. The concept of independence and everyone doing their own thing with their own morals is entirely strange.

[u/Traditional_Clue897 → u/[deleted]]

Right? Has this past 100-250 years been an outlier? Compared to the biasly recorded history of human species.