Mariela used to be the family peacekeeper, but as she learns to acknowledge negative emotions and embrace healthy conflict, she's facing resistance from her Mexican mom. And therapist Nicole Linardi helps us understand the impact sibling order has on relationships, and offers tips for negotiating family expectations.
Featured Expert:
Dr. Nicole Linardi is a Bilingual (English/Spanish) Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a Masters in Science degree from Nova Southeastern University. She graduated with her Doctorate in Marriage and Family Therapy from Nova Southeastern University and is dually trained as a Person-Centered and Systemic thinker, utilizing both frameworks in supporting those who are marginalized, face oppression, and other daily challenges. Dr. Linardi enjoys working with teens, couples, individuals, and families. She specialize in working with survivors of trauma, serious mental illness, the elderly, parent-child interaction, and marital conflictnd healing. Learn more about her work and private practice here.
If you liked this show listen to She's Opening Up to Mamí For the First Time and Oldest Daughter Is Tired of Being Everyone's Go-to.
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Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi, everybody. Mariela is with us today. She's a self-described lifelong people pleaser, who is just now changing her ways, but doing so is also creating friction with her family members, especially with her Mexican mom. Let's get into it.
Mariela: My name is Mariela. I grew up in Salinas, California and I'm currently based in San Francisco. I consider myself Mexican American and first generation. I refer to my parents as mamí and papí.
I am the youngest of three children, and I feel like that says a lot. Being the youngest, you see the way that your siblings show up in your family. I became an observer at a very young age. And so, yeah, I grew up being the people pleaser in my family. I remember whenever something odd would happen or somebody in my family would start getting upset, I would just go to them, kind of rush over and just try and soothe them or just talk to them and be like, "Oh, it's okay."
I also had this saying with my mom where whenever I noticed that she would start to get upset, I would go and rush over to her and tell her like, "Let's go with the flow. Let's just calm down." It was something that I thought was super special about me. It helped me have a really close relationship with my mom and she was able to confide in me. I felt validated when I provided support to her and others in my family, and just in my personal life.
Later in my adulthood, I realized how constantly being the people pleaser meant that I never got to feel my feelings. If something negative arises in me or if any negative emotion comes up, I would feel guilty for feeling angry. Last year, I ended up actually having to take a break from having any communication with my sister, or I found myself feeling hurt and then trying to rationalize it. And then having another small thing happen with my sister and then trying to rationalize it.
I would talk myself out of being mad. And the way that it would happen is I would feel the anger. I had a whole process. I would feel the anger and then I'd be diminishing anything that I felt. I just finally was at a point where I couldn't handle it. Mentally and physically, I became numb. I remember telling my sister, like, "I need some time away from talking to you." I had never done anything that extreme in my family. If anything, it would turn into like I would cry, then I would get sad, and then I would go and approach my family members again, because I would feel guilty for allowing myself to feel angry.
Mariela: My mom waited a few days, but then she approached me and she was like, "Mariela, what are you doing? Why are you acting this way? This is a bit extreme. como vamos a ser familia.” All of these statements that make it feel heavier to let yourself feel your feelings. When my mom said that to me, I felt the hurt, and then I felt the guilt for the hurt. It was kind of validating that cycle of knowing that whenever I felt any negative emotion, there would be some sort of backlash from people, which is the reason why I never allowed myself to feel that. The guilt just plays into that. It takes over.
The conversations with my mom, honestly, felt like we would constantly hit a wall. She would talk to me, try to console me and then turn it into a conversation about how she could have done better to make sure that my sister and I were close. And then that would set me off and make me feel really angry and try to convey like, "This isn't about your parenting. This is about my relationship with my sister and the hurt that has built up on my end that needs to be healed." My mom had a hard time accepting that I was just not going to talk to her about that. And she said, "Aren't we close? Isn't this what it means?" And that hit deep because I was like, "Oh, so this means I can't be close to my mom." I started telling myself the same story.
To be honest, I would love to be able to talk about this with my mom, but I also have been trying to accept and respect the fact that I can't force my mom to change the way she's going to interpret the situations that happen between my siblings and I. I think I really want my mom to understand that I'm having to do these things and make these changes for me. My boundary of not having certain conversations with her is not a reflection of having a less close relationship. I still love her and that there are some conversations right now, I'm just not going to have with her.
Lantigua: So, now that she's no longer going to put aside her feelings for the sake of pleasing others, it's as if Maria has to retrain her family on what to expect from her. Yeah, pretty much. I've been there and it takes a while. How can we as first gens, speak with our parents openly about what we need from our relationships with them and how can we do it in a way that doesn't come across as selfish or gives them the impression that we don't want to be close to them? To help us figure it out, I called in an expert.
Nicole Linardi: My name is Nicole. I am a first gen Latina, born in New York. Moved here to Florida when I was pretty young, but I am a licensed mental health counselor in the state of Florida and I also have my doctorate degree in marriage and family therapy. Here, I actually have my private practice as well. I've had it for about a year. And then this is actually my first week back to work. I was on maternity leave.
Lantigua: Wait, my jaw just dropped, because she had a baby and she opened a business in the same year?
Linardi: In the same year.
Lantigua: Yeah. Now, you're just showing off. Right, well, I asked the same question when we started these, which is, what did you hear in Mariela's story as you listened?
Linardi: Well, a few things that stood out to me, the first one was that she has this cutoff with her sister. She constantly grew up, as the youngest, and so sibling position comes up to me when I think of family systems and how, being the youngest child, she wanted to be a people pleaser growing up. And now that she's an adult, she finds there's a lot of conflict, so to speak, with her sister. And she sometimes has like a cutoff. And that really stood out to me because in Latino culture, if we have cutoffs, it's either two extremes. We have to forgive because family comes first, or if there's a cutoff it's because something serious happened.
Lantigua: I love that you brought up sibling order because I'm a big believer in the influence of that. So give us a quick sense of how sibling order and where you fall in the sibling order impacts how you develop in your household.
Linardi: Sure, of course. So as a systemic thinker, using a theory that a psychiatrist, Dr. Murray Bowen, he actually incorporates research from a psychologist called Walter Toman and he founded this concept of sibling position and how in sibling position, it not only affects, but it influences our behavior and our role within our family systems. And then in other systems that we're a part of. So like our work system, our school system, church system, different family groups that we start to incorporate ourselves in. And in terms of thinking culturally as Hispanics or thinking culturally as a collectivistic culture and the way that this theory talks about is the eldest gets a lot of responsibilities. So the role in the family is like, "Take a look after your sister or make sure you have the rice cooking already by the time I get home," or something like that.
Lantigua: That was me.
Linardi: Yes, me too. And then the youngest, they typically are seen as the baby and they're treated with more of like a casual, "Oh, let them rest or they're okay." But the oldest have to take care of them.
Lantigua: Yep.
Linardi: And then when we see something like that come up in our relationships, in every aspect of our lives, it comes up, our role comes up. So it can come up as like a leadership role. We're more of leaders when it comes to teamwork or we're more of like followers, if we're the youngest, something like that.
Lantigua: Okay. So I want to ask you a deceptively simple question, which is, does being a first gen complicate how you develop in your role as a sibling in that order?
Linardi: I don't know if it's so much complicates it, but I think it has a huge impact and influence on the expected role that you have to fill. Being the eldest, you are expected to go to school, get an education and be a professional and all these things. And so there's a lot of pressure on rank and success and accomplishments in that aspect. And then at home, there's a lot of expectations that we have to fulfill, again, and these can be subconsciously thrown to us by our parents or our caregivers or consciously, verbally spoken.
Lantigua: So Mariela describes herself as a people pleaser and she seems to be very aware that she took on that role. It seems to have had some consequences for her. Do you see this in your work where someone takes on that role of the peacemaker, the people pleaser, the mediator in families?
Linardi: Yes. So very often in my private practice and then in a few other settings that I've worked at, I tend to see individuals either come in, maybe not as aware as Mariela, that she is a people pleaser. But for the most part, people pleasers, when I see them in my practice, they find themselves constantly figuring out that what they do isn't enough, maybe for their parents or for their significant other. It's never enough. It's never enough. And oftentimes just going forward on an empty gas tank.
Lantigua: So how does one recognize that one is a people pleaser? And then how does one begin to correct that?
Linardi: It's going to come more to first gens, I believe, that have both and. Both and meaning they're immersed in our culture, but then also more into the Americanized Western thinking. Where they can see, "Oh, so I can think of myself and I can have some boundaries." Because in our culture, it's not so much embraced, but sometimes we are deemed as selfish. And so I think awareness is definitely the key for that and having some form of ability to compartmentalize when time is invested for oneself and then for others.
Lantigua: But there's so much guilt that comes with that.
Linardi: Yes.
Lantigua: What do we do with all this guilt?
Linardi: Tons of guilt. I know, I've been there, done that. Believe me, and it's a work in progress. We have to constantly think, "Well, whose guilt is it? Is that guilt that I'm feeling for me? Or is it because someone is placing that guilt onto me and then I'm just making it my own?" And we have to think about, "Well, what am I already doing that's coming from a place of caring and love for the individuals that are in our families or that are in our lives? And how much can we actually do?"
Lantigua: So I have to admit, I've been waiting for you to say the B word, boundaries.
Linardi: Yeah.
Lantigua: Because it comes up almost 90% of the time and I always basically say to our experts, "Okay. But that just sounds so easy," but it's not. Although in Mariela's case, she was able to set a very clear boundary with her mother in terms of not talking about whatever issues she had with her sister.
Linardi: Correct. I remember thinking about that and how, in our culture, there's a lot of enmeshment. There's not much of a differentiation between privacy and secrecy. And even when I would bring up boundaries with my own parents, they're like, "That's an Americanized thing. That doesn't exist in our family."
Lantigua: Get privacy, any privacy.
Linardi: Yes. But with Mariela and her even determining how it was important for her to tell her mom, "Listen, my issue with my sister's mine and our relationship is separate." That's another thing that Bowen talks about, Dr. Murray Bowen, the psychiatrist that I brought up earlier, he talks about triangles. And he says that when there is high anxiety or high tension and a diet, so a relationship between two people, we tend to involve a third in order to kind of digress that tension. That doesn't allow sometimes for the proper communication or even the proper healing to exist or to occur in a relationship. And so the simple fact that she realized, "What's going on with my sister, needs to remain here and then what's going on with my mom, can occur on its own."
Lantigua: In a lot of the conversations that we've had on the show, we hear things like, "Somebody else's feelings are not your responsibility. If you don't feel emotionally safe with someone, then set real physical distance between you and that person." There are a lot of, and I'm going to use loose quotes here, American notions of how we can alter the dynamics within our family ecosystems that sometimes are just plain unrealistic. So as a Latina, as someone who helps other people sort this out, what are some realistic ways that we can begin to address some of the issues that Mariela brings up that are true for so many of us?
Linardi: These things are essentially perpetual. They're not quick fixes. There are ideas and notions and traditions and values and culture that have been passed on generationally. And so the first thing that I always like to have my clients think about is, what's working? What about these traditions and these values are working and how can we tweak them a bit to really work for you and your family?
Linardi: So for example, we go through some values and traditions that have been implemented in their families can be respect, honesty, could be religion even. And how that comes up, for example, for Mariela. Maybe honesty is really important for their families. So mom wants to know exactly what's going on with her sister, and I would suggest being open and remaining curious of, "Mom, you've always taught us to be honest. And so within that idea and that notion, I want to be honest, and I want to tell you X, Y, and Z. I want to keep things between my sister and I so that I can think further on what I want to do moving forward." Clarifying. Typically, the person that is experiencing the boundary that you're implementing, they get a sense of their feathers are ruffled because they're the ones that are benefiting from you not having a boundary.
And so mom, for Mariela, may feel like, "Whoa, what is this? This is new to me." And so it becomes more of then of a habit of continuing to implement these boundaries and letting our parents know like, "Hey, you taught me more than enough. And you've put a well and capable adult into the world and trust that I'm there to be the mini you, but even better version of you. And this is just another way that I'm doing it."
Lantigua: Yeah. That's really tough. Part of how I have addressed that is to quite literally say to my mother, "Remember, I'm your daughter." And it seemed really simple the first time that I uttered it because I was doing it defensively to say, "I can handle myself. I am your daughter. You are the one who equipped me." And it ended our argument. Because at the same time that I was setting my boundary, I was also acknowledging all of the work that she poured into me and all of the values and all of the strength that she poured into me. And so she was kind of like, "Well, I can't argue with that." We, like you said, you have to remind them that they did what they were supposed to do, which is why you now are demanding your boundaries. You are now creating a safe space around yourself, even if it means being safe from them sometimes.
Linardi: Correct. And you made an excellent point. A lot of the times we know that we learn not to implement these boundaries because maybe our parents didn't model that for us either. It sounds easy, but it's tough because how can you not see, how can you not see your life's hard work embedded in us, but that's where communication really plays a huge part, clear and concise communication with respect and love.
Lantigua: Yeah. Don't forget the love, guys. Don't forget the love.
Linardi: Yeah.
Lantigua: Nicole, you are such a gift. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Linardi: Thank you, Juleyka, for having me.
Lantigua: Okay. Here's what we learned from Nicole.
Factor in sibling order. The expectations placed on us are often decided by how we were socialized based on the sibling order. So whether you're first born, whether you are the baby, whether you are the middle child. These things matter. And knowing how it is impacting you in your role is really useful in helping your family adjust their expectations of you.
Triangulate with caution, bringing in a third person into a strained situation with a family member might initially diffuse some of the tension, but ultimately, it can make communication and through conflict resolution, much harder. Avoid this at all cost, basically.
And remember, lean on what's working. Identify the values and family practices that are having a positive impact on your relationships and use those as tools for addressing what's not working.
Thank you for listening and for sharing us. How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show producer, Kojin Tashiro is our mixer, Manuela Bedoya is our marketing lead. I'm the creator, Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram we’re @TalkToMamiPapi. Bye, everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Confessions of a Recovering People-Pleaser.” How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything, LWC Studios., July 11, 2022. TalkToMamiPapi.com.
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