14- When Rest Was Never an Option in Your Family Line

You can look put together and still be running on fumes. This conversation speaks to the people no one worries about—the ones who hold the calendar, the feelings, the loose ends, and the backup plans—while everyone else sees a smooth surface. We name the mental load for what it is: not a list of chores, but the constant responsibility of noticing, anticipating, deciding, and protecting outcomes that others take for granted.

I share how an immigrant survival mindset formed my reflex to overfunction, why rest was never modeled or protected, and how competence made my labor invisible at home and at work. We unpack the difference between swapping tasks and truly sharing responsibility, and why productivity tweaks fail when structure stays the same. Along the way, I open up about ADHD wiring, queerness in nonaffirming spaces, and the way identity and systems—patriarchy, racism, religious norms—shape nervous systems into vigilance.

The turning point wasn’t trying harder; it was seeing the pattern. Awareness came first, then redesign: explicit domains of ownership, clear standards, and routines that make rest a neutral practice rather than a prize. If rest has felt unsafe or undeserved, you’re not broken—you’re trained. Together we explore questions to map your conditioning, surface hidden rules, and start redistributing the load so care becomes sustainable for everyone involved.

If this resonates, share it with the person who carries the unspoken plan in your life. Subscribe for more honest tools on mental load, relationships, and structure that supports real rest, and leave a review to help others find the show.

Come follow me on instagram @MentalLoadCoach and subscribe to my newsletter here. Looking forward to adventuring with you!

Chapters

• 0:00 Not Burnout, Something Deeper
• 1:55 Naming The Invisible Mental Load
• 3:22 Immigrant Survival And Hustle
• 7:38 Being The Unworryable Child
• 12:50 Competence Makes Labor Invisible
• 18:16 Partnership And The Hidden Map

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

I just wanted to start by saying that this episode is not about burnout. It's not about productivity. It's not about how to get more productive or be more productive. It's not about self-care. It's for the people who are highly functioning. If you are labeled as a person who's highly capable, if you had to hold things together so well that nobody worries about you, this is for you. These are this episode is for the person who nobody worries about. And if you've ever felt deeply tired when life looks completely fine, if you ever notice a slowing down becomes so uncomfortable instead of relaxing, if rest feels like something you need to earn after you've done something really difficult, this episode is for you. I am pivoting into a new chapter in my journey of coaching and therapy. And I am working on addressing the version of me that lived for so long, who carried everything in my family, who had carried everything in my life, who was the primary person that carried the mental load. And I am dedicating this series of episodes indefinitely in the shift to you. And I wanted to ask you a question that nobody really asks. Why are you so tired? We often ask ourselves, why can't I do more? Why can't I be more productive? Why can't I handle more? And we assume that the exhaustion and the tiredness is deeply personal. It's a mindset, it requires a mindset shift, or it maybe requires you to build more capacity. But what if that tiredness and the exhaustion is not about how much you're doing, but it's about how long you've been carrying responsibility without rest being a real option, not just in your life, but in your ancestral family line. This is so what led me here in building my practice is that I didn't set out to build a practice or a coaching program around mental load or family systems. I didn't even know there were words for this for a long time. And I got here the same way a lot of people do. It's by being highly capable and by being highly responsible and by being the person that everyone relies on. And that was shaped by my family system where I was taught and conditioned by the immigrant survival mindset. And the immigrant survival mindset is something that happens when you have, like for me, my family was came from war trauma in Vietnam, where Vietnamese-Chinese and we were refugees. My dad was a boat person. They were all sponsored by the Catholic Church, and it took my extended family over 20 years to slowly come to America to reunite eventually in New York City. But my parents grew up in a very tenuous time in Vietnam where the war was taking, it started to take place, and then they left in their adulthood, young adulthood to America and had to start their lives over from scratch. And so a lot of their work in their lives, we didn't have any wealth by any means. We started out with zero. And my parents just hustled. My parents just did what they needed to do to put food on the table, to make sure the bills were paid. And we just grew. And rest wasn't exactly forbidden, but it was never centered. It was never taught to me. It wasn't protected. And it wasn't something I planned for either. It was something that wasn't valued and prioritized. But what was valued was being very dependable, being helpful, being the one that other people didn't have to worry about. And to this day, nobody calls me up and asks me how I'm doing or if they're concerned about me, because I'm literally known as someone who's so responsible and so on top of things. And so early on, I learned how to read the rooms. I learned how to get on top of things and anticipate needs and how to carry things really quietly, shrinking myself and being smaller so that I didn't take up a lot of space with my needs. And at that time, I really thought that was maturity. And I thought, in fact, I thought that was a way to service my parents and love my parents. And actually, I was being socially rewarded for because people told me that I was such an old soul, that I was so mature, that I was such a good kid, actually a dream child to have. And I thought that is what good kids just do. They just do as they were told and they just don't question people. And that pattern, unfortunately, followed me to an adulthood, into my career, into my marriage, into parenthood. And I became a therapist. And actually, a lot of therapists have this upbringing of being like this amazing golden child. Eventually, I got married in 2008. I had kids. And also I joined the evangelical church in when I was in high school. And I'll probably make future podcast episodes about that and how there's like a strict family upbringing pipeline to the evangelical church. And the evangelical church has a pipeline to those who hold a mental load up primarily in their families. So it's a very like common pipeline that people engage in, but we never really talk about. So on the outside, my life looked completely solid. And it still does. I look really put together on the outside. I'm frumpy. You'll see me on these podcasts, on right podcasts, like wearing my sweats for my exercising time just an hour ago. But internally, on the outside, my looks, my life looks really solid. On the inside, what you don't see or what you didn't see is that I was holding so much. I was always tracking, always on edge, always looking out and anticipating the next thing, always scanning, always hypervision, always holding the full picture of everything. And yet I didn't know how to question that. I just thought this is adulthood. This is just what people do. And here's the thing that nobody tells you about being the capable one, about being the one that nobody worries them. Your competence makes your labor invisible. The smoother the things run, the less visible the effort behind them comes. So if you notice, like sometimes when you go earn, when you observe how teams function, or if you go on a set for a show, I've got the privilege to be raised in New York City, and we used to go to Broadway shows, or I used to go to Conan O'Brien showings. I actually never get to go to SNL showings, but that's still on my list. But what happens is you just notice everything flowing so effortlessly, and you're like, wow, everyone makes this look so easy, but it's not actually really easy. It's there's a lot of effort in the behind-the-scenes casting and staffing and trainings to make every little thing run so well. And in my relationship, that's how things showed up, too. Everything was running really well. And I don't think there was neglect or like withholding care on my partner's part. My partner is very caring, he's extremely present, and he's actually really extremely responsible. He's the eldest born son, and he is very used to carrying the load of responsibility for his immigrant family, too. He's Chinese American as well, and he grew up with like similar to me with an impoverished background with immigrant parents who were just hustling. So he was also indoctrinated to be very responsible. But I was still the one holding the mental map. I knew what needed to happen next. I knew what hadn't been done yet. I knew the timelines, I knew the emotional needs, I knew all were the loose ends were. And when I tried to explain what felt heavy, I struggled because how do I describe something that just lives in my head, right? I could point to tasks, but tasks were the issue. And the issue was really that I felt responsible to be the one who notices everything that needs to be done. And I tried communicating better, which ended up like complaining. I tried to ask more clearly, which really just sounded like requests to help with the tasks. I tried doing more, hoping it would somehow create relief to get on top of things to be more type A. Instead, I felt resentful and then ashamed for feeling resentful because nothing looked wrong. My husband is not an addict, he's not addicted to work, he doesn't have many vices. There was like no crisis that I could point to, no obvious injustice. I'm not like a golfer's wife, a golfer's widow. I'm not a football widow. I'm just, I'm actually like, he has a great balance in his life. So this is me just quietly depleting. And at that time, he's working full-time for a nonprofit, and I was working very part-time as a therapist, mental health therapist. I still am a mental health therapist, but when our first child was born, first child has had a lot of extreme eczema issues where her skin was like basically raw and exposed like a burn victim. And this actually happened to my second child, too. And so I was tasked with managing her health care, basically. And my husband, who was working at that time full-time at this nonprofit, was not earning a lot of money at all, but was earning enough for us to pay the bills and for us more importantly to have child health care, health insurance. So at that time, it really felt like things couldn't be changed. I told myself, like, I could totally handle this, that other people should do more, like my husband, and or maybe I was just too sensitive and too needy. But the truth was the system required someone to stay alert at all times. That's like what households with kids require. And I had it in mind, this is all subconscious, that this was up to me. What made this especially difficult was realizing that rest didn't feel neutral to me, but it felt actually unstable. So if I slowed down, something might fall apart, someone might be disappointed, I might lose my usefulness, or in that case, with my daughter having eczema, I might, if I wasn't on top of things, if I wasn't, if I was resting, my rest would cause her to itch and scratch at her face, which causes her to bleed, which causes more infections. So I felt really urgent at that time that I couldn't rest. And this wasn't just something that was logical, it was living in my body. Later on in my 30s, that was in my early 30s and my late 30s, I learned that I have ADHD, and that helped me understand why my system was always on. There's like a brain-wiring difference as to why ADHD brains are always on versus non-ADHD brains, and that helped me to understand that. And then also in my late 30s during COVID, I saw how my queerness revealed that I had to learn, I had to mute myself or to shrink myself or to make myself really quiet in order to belong to the evangelical church. We're no longer a part of the evangelical church, but that was a really big reminder that and most just as if if you have any background with evangelical churches are not queer affirming, 99.9% of them. There's another like set of denominations of churches that are queer affirming are in the realm of Christianity, but I did not belong to them. I found out that I was queer and ADHD, and I was surprised with our third child, which was not planned. And my husband was going through major health complications because of the stress levels in his job, and I was going through a lot of stress complications with just being a full-time stay-at-home parent at that point while managing my therapy practice part-time, which I really loved and loved at that time. So work, caregiving, schooling, we decided to homeschool at that time, which now I look back, I'm like, wow, all of that, of course, resulted in a lot of extreme exhaustion and overwhelm. But even as the circumstances changed, my husband was quitting his full-time job, and I was stepping into more of a full-time, full-time role in my job, the patterns stayed the same in that I was still holding the mental load, still delegate tasks, but I noticed that the responsibility was still on me. And I realized that even before my third kid, I just didn't have words for it. And I didn't realize that was something that was going on under me. That's when it became clear to me. Now I could say this, but in retrospect, it wasn't clear. Um, this wasn't about effort because we're both trying really hard. We're both working really hard, my husband and I. It was about structure. And it was about the programming that both of us were deeply conditioned to doing without even knowing the programming to overfunction. And I had inherited a system where rest was optional only after everything was taken care of. So that's part of my deep conditioning as an immigrant child, a child of immigrants. And the shift didn't come from trying harder, it came from fully seeing the pattern as a pattern. And that in my coaching program, we do work on really seeing how the systems that we are a part of that sets us up for the framework of our society, like patriarchy, racism, sexism, misogyny, systemic oppression overall is not part of how we are conditioned. And so for me, really seeing my conditioning as a result of a pattern and not as a result of personal failure changed everything. And in addition to that, I learned that when I encounter frameworks that name responsibility and not just tasks, it feels like someone turned on the light for me. Not because I fixed everything, but because I finally had language for what I've been carrying in combination with my personal work, with internal family systems, bringing to light my conditioning, intersecting with the lack of structure that we have in our everyday lives to split the domains of responsibility. I realized that this personal failure that I thought was a personal failure of carrying a mental mood and being responsible for everything and not resting well wasn't me being bad at rest or being bad at finding a hobby or being bad at having no friends and being bad at friendships. But I was being trained and deeply conditioned for vigilance. And once I could see that, I could stop blaming myself. And this is what this journey has taught me is that my exhaustion is not a personal failure. It's the result of my conditioning. And rest doesn't feel hard because I'm broken. Rest feels hard because I was never modeled rest, nor was my rest ever protected or encouraged. And third is that awareness has to come before redistribution. Awareness of your programming, awareness of how the systems that have been around you, around us, like social systems, have conditioned us to be the way they are. And that contributes to the dysfunction. And finally, the last thing is you don't need to stop caring to reclaim yourself. Like I felt like I had to choose between caring for others and caring for myself. And really, at the end of the day, through my unlearning process and deprogramming, I realized that I could care for others and care for myself. I feel more confident to find systems or build systems that don't depend on my constant invisibility. Who did you notice rested in your family? And who didn't?

unknown: 19:59

What did

SPEAKER_00: 20:00

Responsibility protect you from? What feels dangerous about slowing down? You don't need answers today. You don't need to change anything yet. But sometimes that recognition alone is enough to create a little space. And if rest wasn't an option for your family line, like it was for me, like I never saw my parents rest. My immigrant parents did not model that for me. My dad, more so because he is conditioned as a male-body person to claim rest. But my mom never sat down, never saw my mom like truly rest. If it was like for her, it was being on or being off and sleeping. There was no in between. If rest was never an option for you, like it wasn't for me, it makes sense that you're deeply tired. And it makes sense that you've carried as much as you