How Asian Family Patterns Affect Your Worth and Financial Abundance
I’ve been deeply trying to understand how abundance and financial attraction works for quite some time. I grew up in quite a paradox, you see. I am third generation Taiwanese wealth, meaning that my grandparents created massive amounts of wealth that supported and cushioned my parents’ generation and my own generation. While logically speaking, my family ought not to ever be poor again, I also grew up to the background music of my father’s financial anxiety that even got me worrying about lack and scarcity at a young age.
Financial scarcity patterns can look like double-checking and triple-checking your actions for wasteful mistakes. It looks like actively scanning for ‘personality flaws’ of laziness or simple-mindedness where one does not perceive or pursue opportunities for financial hustle. Notice that I used the words “financial scarcity patterns”, and not financial scarcity. Because from my unique upbringing, I have learned that you don’t actually need to be poor to think like you’re poor.
So why does the financial scarcity mindset not disappear just because one’s parents or grandparents become rich? One logical reason points to epigenetics. Up until three generations ago, most of my ancestors were likely farmers- people who got to survive because they labored, scrambling to live in governmental circumstances that never favored them. Our genetic and spiritual coding likely promoted stress signals in the body when things didn’t go away, like a bad harvest or a bad fight with another person. Relationship damage is often critical in collectivist Asian societies. If you were a woman, you likely weren’t going to eat unless you strove to positively align yourself with the man most likely to financially provide for you. All of that coding doesn’t just go away because one generation touches money. Everything Many things in my ancestors’ life likely signaled in their nervous system that bad things would frequently happen ( I don’t know, maybe like Japanese colonization or civil turmoil with the Kuomintang governmental takeover… perhaps these events may have been stressful).
As a trauma-informed, culture-curious therapist, I knew all of this already. But knowing this is only part of the puzzle and it wasn’t what unlocked new levels of abundance for me.
When you think of abundance, you can’t just think of it as finances, money, and dollar signs. You have to think broadly about what the full spectrum of abundance is. The facet I am highlighting in this article is the abundance of Love. This is one main area that I know Asian culture has Lack in. Even if one Asian generation is passing on wealth to the next generation, the abundance transference will be distorted if they are, at the same time, passing on messages and lessons of unworthiness, prostituting one’s sovereignty to others, and the camouflaging of vigilance as virtue.
I’ll explain these three distortion codes through my personal experience.
“Unworthiness”:
Even if I am third generation wealth, I was still taught to ‘know my place’ and not think I was too great or amazing. This was not personal. It feels like every Asian person I knew growing up was being taught some version of this message in their respective households. And this is the tricky bit. When the messaging is not personal, you unconsciously accept the distortion code as truth because if everyone else is receiving the same code, you think it must be a universal truth. You cannot really hold wealth if you don’t believe you’re great enough to deserve it.
To layer onto this base-layer distortion code, I am a woman. As an Asian American woman, the general teachings taught to my group are that I am unworthy of making my own decisions if they happen not to align with the desires of men or elders. The price of an Asian woman making her own decisions can historically be dangerous. If she speaks her truth or sets boundaries, she can literally be cast out on the streets, beaten, or raped. Thus, the “you’re not worthy” distortion code becomes heavily encoded into the lineage of Asian woman and it becomes a commonplace cultural discipline.
As an Asian person growing up in America, Asian immigrant elders will sprinkle an additional layer of unworthiness. They will send messages that Asian Americans do not truly know themselves because they have grown up away from the “authentic culture”. They will foment ideas such as Asian Americans not having a strong moral value system because they have absorbed bad American ways. This is another manifestation of suggesting one does not have the capacity to know oneself, and thus does not have the capacity to make sound decisions for themselves. It is incredibly difficult to hold wealth when you do not truly believe you are qualified to make good decisions for yourself.
“Prostituting one’s sovereignty to others”
Building on the Unworthiness distortion code, if you’re not qualified to make decisions for yourself or your money, who do you turn to that will help you make these decisions? This distortion code is where the power of your sovereignty gets shifted to flow into the hands of others who are ready to oppress you. Common examples of this are when Asian elders tell their children to” trust in the parents” and “always listen to the parents”. Never mind the fact that most of us Asian Americans have higher degrees of education than our immigrant parents, we’re taught that we should still be giving away our power to the elders. Even when Asian Americans have worked hard to establish themselves in their life, I see so many of them choosing to make painful decisions because they were commanded to by their parents or elders. The conditioning is so real. The gender distortion component to this one is also devastating. For many Asian cultures, it has been so commonplace to hope for a wife to bear sons. In Chinese ‘spirituality’, they believe that only sons can pray for his parents in the afterlife, while daughters cannot.
So many societal distortions have been layered on. In some societies, women are not allowed to seek employment and cannot bring money in. In others, women cannot own property or have their own businesses. And for most cultures in the world, that was the reality for so long. So essentially every person has encoding that guides them to look upon women as not able or not capable of making their own decisions.
There are cases when an Asian American woman might break free out of distortion code #1 (I’m unworthy) but be hampered by distortion code #2 (someone else other than me should be making the call). I’ve been there, and I’m sure I’ll find out ways in the future that I’m still holding vestiges of it. This can look like a person feeling confident that they can hold wealth and are worthy of wealth, but every societal and cultural example they’ve seen is telling them to look towards others to lead them to their wealth, rather than putting themselves in the command zone of making wealth decisions.
There have been countless times that I expected my parents to teach me how to save, how to invest, how to get an apartment, buy a car, and buy a house. They never did any of that, truly. My mother told me to go Google “how to buy a house”, despite her being a homeowner, a landlord, and a former real estate agent. My parents don’t even know how to do their own taxes. Why did I spend so much time and agony waiting for them to guide me? It’s because I was conditioned that I should follow the guidance of experts, people who have done these things before. Presumably, your parents would be the ones most willing to support you in the success of these financial endeavors. After 30 years of processing my unique experience with my parents, I have come to the understanding that no one will want your financial success more than you. No one else will care for your unique needs as tenderly as yourself, and thus no one else is more qualified than you to make financial decisions for yourself.
“The Camouflaging of Vigilance as Virtue”
This distortion code is such a huge problem from a nervous system standpoint. The more vigilance you hold in your body, the more you will constantly feel that it is unsafe to hold wealth, and the Quantum Field will recognize that. There is a lot of inherited vigilance that Asian Americans have from their experiences growing up as first Generation Americans, especially those with a background of hardship or poverty. However, I want to look at the other kind of inherited vigilance.
At least in the Taiwanese culture, it appears that we make a game or competition out of who can be the most frugal, or who can be the one most alert to eradicate possible sources of wastefulness. If I were to distill the lessons I’ve learned from my Taiwanese family, one of them would be the phrase “You should have known”. “You should have known” is the idea that you will only be safe if you have anticipated the actions of others beforehand. This is typically so that you can jump to appease someone more powerful than you (going back to #2 distortion code – someone else is in charge of your abundance) or so you can avoid the inevitable harm that would’ve come to you if you weren’t vigilant. This vigilance has become a virtue in the culture. People proudly share the ways they are vigilant, in order to show that they are trying to be a good person. This distortion is so wild, because it means that people will actively strive to create a nervous system environment counter to what is required for abundance.
One of the biggest things I am working on is not preemptively scanning for what could go wrong next. It’s not necessarily because I’m addicted to that belief. It’s because I’ve been conditioned that if I look relaxed or unbothered, some elder will come yell at me for obviously being entitled (apparently bad) and inconsiderate (for failing to vigilantly scan for others’ needs). To add a circular bind onto all of this, in Taiwanese culture, a woman who is not actively demonstrating her contributions to the family at every single waking moment, can be thrown out of the family. Several of my great-aunts were ‘given’ to other families when they were children. Presumably, my great-grandparents had too many children to feed and that’s why they gave their daughters away to other families to be treated as second-class. But the boys were never given away. Their mouths were not too much of a burden to feed.
So in essence, if a family is passing on wealth codes to their descendants, but fail to pass on love codes, the wealth container will be unstable. I spent a lot of time here decoding what the abundance distortion codes are in Asian families, and I will spend just a little time discussing what the actual love codes are.
Love Codes:
1. You are wonderful. Period.
2. You have every ability to enjoy the things you have and the things you want. Period.
3. You are a person that others enjoy being around. If there is someone around you that makes you feel bad, you shouldn’t be around them. Period.
4. Even if you make a mistake, the first three codes are still valid. Nothing changes your worth.
The Love Codes are very simple in sentence, but gets blocked up by all the unconscious Asian cultural distortion codes. Many Asian Americans have literally been taught to follow these distortion codes in order to be a good person or to be even worthy of living. The truth is that you will still have a life following these distortion codes, but it won’t be one that feels fully Abundant in all the ways.
Some of us, like myself, are going to have to break off unhealthy relationships with family members because they are literally promoting unworthiness, prostitution of sovereignty, and vigilance as virtue. Those family lines have forgotten how to embody and share Love. The next best thing is to get yourself to a safe space where you can begin to cultivate the Love Codes to bestow true abundance on yourself and activate it throughout your lineage.
