"My Problems Aren't That Bad" The Thought That Keeps So Many Asian Women From Getting Help

Illustration of a calming therapy office with an armchair and plants, representing therapy for Asian American women in Los Angeles. Miwa Emi, LCSW 26659

Something I hear a lot in my work is this."I know I shouldn't complain. Others have it so much worse." It's said quietly, almost apologetically, by women who are exhausted and struggling, yet somehow still convinced that what they're feeling doesn't quite count. I have heard some version of this from the same client, session after session, for months.

If you have ever said something like this to yourself, this post is for you.

Where This Thought Comes From

For many Asian women, minimizing your own struggles isn't just a passing thought. It's something that was modeled for you, probably for as long as you can remember. There are many reasons why Asian women wait to seek help, and this is one of the deepest ones. If you want to learn more about why Asian women wait to start therapy, you can read here [Why So Many Asian American Women Wait to Try Therapy].

Maybe you watched your parents work exhausting hours without complaining. Maybe the message in your household was that hardship is just part of life, and you push through it. Maybe gratitude was how your family survived difficulty, by always pointing to someone who had less, as a way of keeping perspective and keeping going.

There is genuine strength in that. But there is a difference between gratitude that sustains you and comparison that silences you. One helps you keep going. The other teaches you that your inner life doesn't quite deserve attention, that your feelings need to clear a certain bar before they're allowed to exist.

Most of my clients learned that lesson so early they don't even notice they're still following it.

The Problem With Using Someone Else's Suffering as Your Measuring Stick

Here is what I want you to really sit with: when you measure your pain against the worst thing you can find, you will almost always lose. Not because your pain isn't real, but because that's simply not how pain works.

Think about the comparisons my clients make. A family who lost their home in a fire. A friend who is a single mother and just lost her job. Someone diagnosed with terminal cancer who has young children at home. These are devastating situations. Genuinely devastating.

And yes, compared to that, a good job and a nice house and a stable marriage can feel like more than enough. It can feel almost ungrateful to be struggling.

But I want to offer you a different way of thinking about this.

Pain Doesn't Work on a Sliding Scale

Your nervous system doesn't know about someone else's tragedy. It doesn't weigh your cortisol levels against someone else's circumstances and decide how much distress you're allowed to feel. It just responds to what you are carrying, the pressure, the exhaustion, the quiet loneliness of holding everything together, the anxiety that shows up at 2 am when the house is finally quiet.

Suffering is not a competition with one winner and everyone else disqualified. When you use someone else's tragedy as the reason your pain doesn't count, you aren't actually helping them. You're just making sure no one helps you.

Comparison Keeps You Stuck, Not Humble

I want to name something gently here, because I think it matters. The impulse behind this kind of comparison usually comes from a good place. It comes from empathy. From not wanting to be self-centered. From genuinely caring about people who are going through something hard.

But you getting support doesn't take anything away from someone who is struggling.

What I have seen, over and over, is that the clients who use this thought to talk themselves out of help don't actually end up feeling more grateful. They feel worse. The anxiety doesn't shrink because you've decided it's not serious enough. It just continues, quietly, without any support.

What This Habit of Minimizing Is Actually Costing You

By the time most of my clients come in, they have been managing their anxiety on their own for a long time. And they are tired in a way that is hard to describe. Not just physically tired, but tired of being the one who keeps it all running. Tired of saying "I'm okay" when you're not sure that's true anymore. Tired of waking up at 3 am with a full mind and nowhere to put it.

When I ask them what they wish they had done differently, the answer is almost always some version of: I wish I had come in sooner.

Not because therapy is magic. But because carrying something alone for years takes a toll that doesn't just disappear when you finally decide to ask for help. The longer anxiety goes unaddressed, the more it shapes how you move through your days, what you avoid, how you sleep, how present you can actually be with the people you love. There's a reason that trying harder doesn't make anxiety go away, and I wrote about that in more depth here [Why Effort Doesn't Fix Anxiety].

Waiting until things are bad enough is itself a cost. It just gets paid slowly, in small daily installments, until one day you realize how long you've been running on empty.

So When Is Anxiety Serious Enough to See a Therapist?

This is the question underneath all of it, and I want to answer it as plainly as I can.

The answer is not about finding a threshold of suffering that earns you access to support. It's not about whether someone else has it worse. The right question is much simpler than that.

Is your anxiety affecting how you live?

Is it changing how you sleep? Is it making it harder to be present with your kids, your partner, your work? Are you more irritable than you want to be, more withdrawn, more exhausted than your schedule seems to explain? Do you spend a lot of mental energy managing worry, pushing it down, talking yourself through it, staying busy so you don't have to sit with it?

If the answer to any of those is yes, that is enough. That is more than enough.

You don't need a crisis. You don't need to be falling apart. You don't need your problems to be worse than someone else's. You just need to be a person who is struggling and who deserves support, and that is already true.

You Don't Have to Earn the Right to Get Help

A lot of my clients arrive at their first session still half-convinced that what they're dealing with isn't serious enough to deserve help. As if there are people who truly qualify for support, and they aren't quite one of them.

There is no threshold. There is no level of suffering you need to reach first.

What I know is this. The women who sit across from me and say "I have a good job, a nice husband, I shouldn't complain" are not ungrateful. They are not dramatic. They are not making things up. They are people who have spent a long time taking care of everything and everyone around them, who never quite learned that they were also allowed to be taken care of.

You are allowed to struggle even when your life looks good on paper. You are allowed to ask for help even when someone else has it worse. Those two things can both be true at the same time.

You Don't Have to Wait Until Everything Falls Apart

If something in this post felt familiar, if you recognized yourself in that sentence about not wanting to complain, I want you to know that what you're feeling is real, and it matters, regardless of what anyone else is going through.

Therapy isn't reserved for the worst-case scenario. It's for anyone who is tired of carrying something alone.

If you're in the Los Angeles area or anywhere in California and you're wondering whether what you're feeling is serious enough, I'd gently say that the fact you're asking that question is already worth a conversation. I work with Asian women who have spent a long time convincing themselves that what they're feeling isn't serious enough.

You're welcome to reach out. It can start with just a conversation.

I'm Miwa Emi, an [anxiety therapist in Los Angeles, California]. I work with Asian women who've been managing this alone for a long time, usually by doing more instead of less. Sessions are available in English and Japanese via telehealth throughout California, and you're welcome to switch between the two languages in the same conversation.

Miwa Emi, LCSW is a bilingual (English/Japanese) anxiety therapist in Los Angeles, CA, who uses a somatic approach. She offers online therapy to women throughout California, with a focus on Asian women navigating anxiety, stress, overwhelm, and life transitions. Her work helps women reconnect with their bodies when pressure, responsibilities, and guilt begin to manifest as exhaustion, tension, and an inability to stop.

Learn more about Miwa’s background, approach, and services here.