Culture and Our Mental Health

What we’re taught to feel, and what we learn to hide.

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I once sat with a client who kept saying sorry for crying. Whenever she let herself be vulnerable, she would apologise for wasting my time

She wasn’t wasting my time at all. She spoke softly and chose her words carefully. At one point, she told me, in her family, they don’t really do feelings. They just get on with it.

When I hear someone say ‘get on with it,’ I feel the same way. I still feel guilty, almost like there’s a voice telling me I’m lazy if I’m not being productive. But, come to think of it, is this just my personality or it’s something I’ve learned from my culture?

What did you hear about emotions when you were growing up? Were there things your family always said, or things that were never talked about? These patterns can reveal the hidden rules we carry with us about what is acceptable to feel.

This client didn’t grow up in a family that talked about feelings at the dinner table. In her world, she was expected to endure, work hard, stay silent, and keep her struggles private. Being strong meant staying calm, and showing love meant taking care of others and neglecting yourself. Stress meant you’re a bit tired, so go take a short nap, you’ll feel better afterwards. Being emotional meant boredom or a lack of creativity.

When she first felt anxious, she described it as weakness or boredom. She didn’t come up with those words on her own; she learned them over time, and they were shaped by small moments that influenced how she saw herself. In some places, people don’t even call these feelings anxiety, they see them as tiredness or a lack of discipline. It makes me wonder how much our view of a problem depends on how we choose to see it. This brings to mind something Simone de Beauvoir once wrote in her book The Second Sex:

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Simone de Beauvoir is arguing that being a woman is not simply handed over by biology at birth, but a social role that is made, shaped, and taught by a society. It’s built through expectations, rules, rewards, shame, culture, and power. In many ways, the same can be said here about how we come to understand our emotions. Many of us understand it through what we’re taught to feel, what we’re allowed to express, and what we learn to hide.

In therapy, when someone says “sorry” for being emotional, it does feels like it’s not just them speaking. It almost feels like a whole culture talking through them. And sometimes, my work is not to correct that but to understand where it came from. Every culture has its own unspoken rules about suffering or pain. These rules become normal early in life. Children notice what gets attention, what brings approval, and what makes adults uncomfortable. With time, the nervous system adapts.

If a child’s feelings are criticised or dismissed, the brain learns that hiding emotions is safer. What we later call emotional repression may once have been an intelligent way to belong. In some cultures, hyper-independence is rewarded. It’s seen as a sign of competence, strength, and reliability. But I’m sure many of us know by now that those strategies don’t always age well.

I often hear people say, “In my culture, we don’t really talk about mental health.”

That one sentence says a lot. Mental distress seldom goes away completely. It shows up in different ways. Instead of anxiety or depression, it might turn into headaches, stomach pain, digestive trouble, brain fog, or just a sense that something feels off.

I must confess too; in my culture, mental health was never really something we talked about openly. In fact, when I was growing up, it wasn’t a thing, therapy was seen as something that belongs in the western culture. Things may have changed a little now, but it still tends to stay unspoken. Just like my client, we’re more likely to hear “get on with it”, or “get over it”. And oh, in some families, therapy might just be a waste of time and good money. You’re encouraged to go talk to a religious leader or an elder in the community instead of a therapist.

When culture doesn’t have words for emotions, the body finds its own way to express them. This is somatisation; when emotional distress appears physically. But somehow, it’s what happens when a person learns to adapt to the emotional setting they grew up in. Not every culture gives the same language for inner experiences. Some have many words for one emotion. Others have very few. And when the language is not there, the experience feels harder to locate. Something feels wrong, you feel it in your soul, but it’s difficult to name. Culture doesn’t just shape what we feel. It shapes what we’re able to recognise and express.

Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory describes something called neuroception, this is the nervous system’s constant scanning for safety or danger. This process happens below conscious awareness. If someone grows up in a culture or society where emotional expression leads to irritation, silence, or dismissal, the nervous system learns from these experiences. It learns that being visible can threaten one’s sense of belonging. So it protects the person by keeping things contained.

Culture is the context that defines what mental health even means.

Now imagine growing up in a family where perseverance and loyalty are the most important values. Then later in life, you find yourself in a different culture that emphasises emotional expression and personal boundaries. You end up with two competing internal experiences; one is shaped by conditions of worth (I must make the family proud by keeping the tradition going). And the other comes from your organismic valuing process (I need to take care of myself). Living between those expectations can create an internal conflict. Sometimes it feels like anxiety, guilt, or just a vague sense that you’re doing something wrong. But a lot of the time, nothing is wrong at all. It may simply mean you belong to more than one emotional world.

In some cultures, people see their identity as closely connected to their family, and decisions are made together as a community. Other cultures focus more on the individual, linking identity to personal values and encouraging independence and clear boundaries. When someone from one background lives in a different system, they might feel selfish or guilty for setting boundaries, or feel trapped by others’ expectations. This kind of inner conflict can lead to anxiety or confusion. It’s really a clash of different values inside one person, and it can feel overwhelming. Our cultures also shape how we cope with what we feel. In some spaces, we talk things through. In others, we carry on quietly. Some turn to community, others to independence. Some to prayer, others to therapy. None of these are inherently right or wrong. But they can make it confusing to know what healing is supposed to look like, especially when we’re moving between different worlds. Culture decides what counts as a problem in the first place. There are people walking around thinking they’re failing, when in another context, they would be seen as struggling.

None of this is about blaming culture, don’t get me wrong. Culture gives us a sense of belonging, identity, and rituals. It can hold communities together in powerful ways. But culture also shapes which emotions are respected and which are discouraged. It can determine whether sadness is boredom, whether tiredness is laziness, whether anger is acceptable, a tantrum or too sensitive, and whether seeking help is admirable, embarrassing or a betrayal. So even if someone is suffering, the idea of getting help can feel like breaking an unwritten rule.

Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” maybe we can start asking a more interesting question: 

“Whose emotional rulebook am I following. And where did I learn it?”

Is it really yours? Or is it a set of rules you learned so early that now it just feels like part of you?

Healing has nothing to do with blaming your past, your culture, or rejecting where you come from. It’s noticing the script you inherited so you can decide what still belongs in your story. Because survival strategies are brilliant, I know, but, they’re also allowed to change.