For those who enjoy longer-form content to pair with my newsletters and blog posts, I launched a YouTube channel where I'll be talking through topics I'm exploring and sharing in a different format.

An Ethnography of Familial Love

Written by Linda Lin RCC, RCAT

This blog post reflects on the complexities of familial love. What it takes to address and heal intergenerational wounds. What if intergenerational work isn't learning to demand more, but learning to be with each other in ways that don't always come from a place of fear or suffering?

Figure 1. Black Dragon Pool / 黑龙潭, Lijiang, Yunnan 1960s

Back in March this year, I revisited Lijiang in Yunnan province, China. It's on the edge of the country that not many folks are aware of, next to the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. I've been holding this trip close, wondering how to share intergenerational insights I gathered from my lineage who happens to be part of a well-known indigenous clan (aka. an ethnic minority).

I come from a family where the torch passed down through the past 4-5 generations has been one of peace-keeping, by not speaking up, or taking up too much space. They specialize in secret-keeping, zipping their lips on opinions, feelings and views. Which I always found difficult to understand.

It was my second time visiting. The first time, I promised my extended family I would do my best to bring my mom and sister back with me.

My mother left Lijiang before she turned 1, fleeing with her family from danger. She never returned until this year, nearly 65 years later. My sister, too, hadn't stepped foot in China for almost 20 years. So there was an unspoken pressure and hope among the relatives who had stayed that this homecoming would be a meaningful one.

They welcomed us with open arms, with more generosity and warmth we imagined. They made me feel like I belonged to this family and this lineage, even as so much of its history, language, and traditions remained unfamiliar to me…having born and grown up overseas. I couldn't help but feel like both an insider and an outsider despite their efforts.

I arrived with fresh eyes, like an ethnographer, eager to learn about the Naxi people (纳西族), my mom's ethnic minority/indigenous clan, and the stories and conditions that shaped our family.

What I found out about my family and their responses surprised me… in ways that were more complicated than I expected.

Figure 2. Me (Linda) in a modernized traditional Naxi outfit

Intergenerational grief and history

My uncle from Lijiang brought my sister and I to a courtyard of Lai family mansion which now belongs to the government. I noticed a weighted tension with each step. He shared that my great-grandfather once worked and lived with the family, as a doctor treating villagers, prominent and affluent, before everything changed in the late 50s. 

My family was exiled to a horse shed overnight. My great-great-grandmother was severely punished to death, after being turned in by a family member whose name we don't speak. They sold furniture and rugs for pennies. My grandmother sold tea eggs on the streets and was forcefully separated from my grandfather before fleeing with her children (one of them being my mom), teaching them to hold their tongues, because speaking up could mean fatal consequences.

It's been difficult to feel the full weight and messages of intergenerational grief: layers of confusion, lost dreams, autonomy, erasure, anger, sadness only show up in hues. To be frank, I can't predict when or if this kind of grief will ever be completely processed in the bloodline.

Figure 3. 4 generations of Lijiang family welcoming us

I was stunned to see 80+ close and distant relatives show up to welcome my sister, my mom, and I. They showered us with warmth, their time, the best food, stories of each home and sites tied to our lineage. Although all of them holds different politics, different worldviews, different ways of healing, they centered in on familial love. There was something beautiful in that: being in the diversity together rather than needing everyone to agree to a degree first. 

Money anxiety

I noticed a pattern that most of the family members have 'superstitions' or anxiety around money, either rarely bringing it up at all, or sharing the sentiment that they shouldn't ask for more to be able to live well. That whatever they get is what probably what's best for them. 

This showed up when they asked me what the current climate living outside of China is like – asking with fascination and curiosity. I could send that they wanted to share they'd like to also go on fun trips outside of their province or country and explore but would shut the fantasy/dream down before it could be a topic of interest.

There's this confusing, guilt-like feeling showing up: wondering if their efforts toward community-building, instead of voicing/chasing their raw hopes, were what allowed me to come back to Lijiang, to go on these trips, from a foreign place of privilege, distance, culture.

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Figure 4. A foreigner's insights on Lijiang, with mention of my family clan (this book was banned for 50 years)

It's both of this and the other

I was told there were 3,000+ descendants of my family lineage still living across Yunnan province. This is proof that despite everything that hurt them, they survived the best way they knew how. Hardship and commitment was the social glue holding thousands of people together across a province. 

It's moving and sometimes hard to believe that most of the lineage stayed loyal through peacekeeping, not to share too much: of the very good and the very bad. This familial bond, by circumstances none of them could control, if I'm honest in dissecting it, is both a blessing and a curse for their relationships.

The things that help with survival can later on come at a cost. My mother have always been a private person. She learned early that endurance, ducking her head down, focusing on education/work would get her the peace and security she needed to survive. I watched her grow into her adulthood rarely advocates for herself, asks for more, or deviating from that lane.  

I asked my mom more questions than she probably expected, really challenging her…

Questions like,

“What's your view on money?”
What do you think about your family here?"

Reconnecting after being nearly 65 years apart, her responses came short, like interviewing a stranger. At first that really frustrated me. I wanted to pry like Oprah in the 90s asking questions with a sense of expectation of a certain kind of charged response or gossip.

Figure 5. A Naxi prayer burial with Dongba script, the only hieroglyphic pictograph that is still in use in the world today. (Note from Linda: this is Indigenous resistance!)

Attachment of outcome = suffering

I realized that not getting the responses I expected and wanted is a form of suffering on my end. It illuminated just how much it can take to address hard things. I see things a bit differently now. Those short answers were her genuine reflections. It made more sense once I learned that before her identity as Naxi was treated as something to hide rather than celebrate and that her childhood was a difficult period to recall and process. I can understand why she never returned to Lijiang, and it's fortunate that she eventually did this time. 

I realized being an ethnographer means to go in with reflexivity, humility (which is straightforward to practice in my role as a therapist but extremely hard when it comes to my family), experiencing the subjective nature of learning one's cultural and generational experience, making room for both their childhood view of the world and the adult one, then translating these moments into insights. This practice and its embodied values are humbling to how I'm learning about my lineage and intergenerational healing.

What if intergenerational work isn't learning to demand more, but learning to be with each other in ways that don't always come from a place of fear or suffering? 

Transparency and sharing dreams still aren't natural to me…yet. I have been conditioned growing up to hold my tongue instead of speaking of my dreams and hopes, my inner most truest thoughts, of joy and of suffering, especially if it has to do with family. What's allowed have been topics that are socially acceptable, in the family and in the dominant culture, and only after I've already processed them privately. It's a niche, calculated kind of showing up.

What if we let familial love be honest in its unpredictability, confusing, messiness, instead of needing it to be certain? 

What if we trusted in ourselves that we could create boundaries and ways of relating that support us, without leaning on the family bond to hold everything, and trusted that doing so would be okay, not unsafe?

Art as therapy prompt: The altar of curiosity vs. the altar of suffering

[ I will be creating a video on making this art prompt very soon! Stay tuned! ]

(Important note: This would make an excellent creative prompt that don’t necessarily require you to draw/paint it. Feel free to visualize this through a meditation, build a metaphor or a sculpture, make a song or poem or dance…any creative way to bring this practice into your weeks ahead!)

A client of mine shared something that's stayed with me this month: that we may be visiting the altar of suffering more often than we visit the altar of joy and curiosity, when really, we get to choose which altar to walk toward. 

Choosing is available to us, again and again. Curiosity can be the new tool that carries the torch of healing generational trauma from a place of love, joy and wisdom.

I'd like to think that bringing my family together, listening to their stories they so humbly shared with me, and writing out what I am learning is how I'm beginning to break the cycle of suffering and into familial love and joy.

Let me know your thoughts if you’ve been dealing with the complexities of intergenerational family dynamics.

Until next time,

Linda

written and filmed by Linda Lin, RCC RCAT

For those who enjoy longer-form content to pair with my newsletters and blog posts, I launched a YouTube channel where I'll be talking through topics I'm exploring and sharing in a different format.

Since when did the word "consistency" start to feel like a threat? Somewhere between entering school age and trying to be a responsible adult, consistency started feeling like an obligation I'd already fallen behind on. It turned into a chore that feels meaningless, too difficult to even attempt. Like our dreams just stopped getting along with our capacity. There's this lingering disappointment of not living up to the version of ourselves we thought we were rooting for.

When we let ourselves down.

I am noticing a lot of us are struggling with consistency and the energetic toll it takes to adapt to life. Building a pace that fits you, specifically is getting harder and more ambiguous to find in a world with rapid changes, artificial intelligence, and end-of-stage capitalism. 

This topic is feeling tender and I often find myself and people I come across committing to too many things, and not able to commit to the course of action we need to actually do to take care of us.

In this newsletter we get into:

.✦ ݁˖ the relationship between consistency and cultivating trust within ourselves
.✦ ݁˖ unpacking / pacing consistency
.✦ ݁˖ “taking the path least taken” as a way to challenge and build consistency
.✦ ݁˖ art as therapy prompts to help build trust and confidence for consistency

Consistency is how we gradually create the conditions where trust becomes possible.

On another note, self-trust can be built from consistency. Trust in ourselves, like listening and understanding our capacity what we actually have time for, what will actually move the needle and support us.

There's something in psychotherapy I have been working with my clients on. I always remind folks that we learn from each other, that our brain has an innate feature of neuroplasticity: where we can update our beliefs, expand our worldviews, adapt and navigate the world more freely when we feel safe enough to do so, throughout our lifetime. 

When the conditions are trustworthy, new habits and ways of being actually stick and make sense in the body, not just the mind. Leading us to embodiment. Consistency is how we slowly create the conditions where trust becomes possible.

adrienne maree brown writes about something that rhymes with this in Emergent Strategy: "small is good, small is all". What we practice at a small scale sets the pattern for the whole. Every tiny, mundane showing-up counts and accumulates into something important. Safety and repetition build trust and consistency, together, they are building blocks of forming neural pathways that heal and support us.

Additionally, how we treat our own consistency (self-perception) is how movements treat their members. How we let ourselves rest is how communities learn that rest is allowed. The personal and the political are running on the same pattern!

Practicing an honest relationship with our own capacity isn't a detour from the work. It might actually be where the work begins…

Consistency, when paced well, builds trust.

To be transparent with you, trust tends to build brutally and slowly. The way we hyper-monitor inconsistencies like our job depends on it, distrust in incongruence doesn't back down easily, and anxiety shows up because it feels threatened. It's hard to know when to forgive our own inconsistency, like when the goals we set the night before didn't pan out the day after. :(

To start building a less familiar neural pathway, we could begin by allowing ourselves to dream about what we actually want to experience.

ideal land 🏰 

High energy plans could look closer to what we desire in ideal land. If I were to wave a magic wand, what would your most desirable, idealized outcome actually look like? Ideal land lets us imagine: if anything were possible, what would that be like for you?

Daydreaming, or intentionally practicing imagination to sort out what we want, is not supposed to hurt us. I say that because I'm aware of how many of us are afraid to even imagine what we want. It comes up a lot in the therapy room.

nice to have 🫧 

When we have a bit more in the tank, we can start to think about what would feel supportive as we move through something hard. Not what we should do, but what would actually be nice to have there. If we could name even one small comfort to bring into a difficult task, what would it be? How do we want to feel in the process?

necessities 🪞 

Permission to be consistent is where self-trust begins. Giving ourselves that permission means letting go of the need to do it perfectly.

When we're low on energy, in survival mode, just coping, sometimes the most grounding thing we can do is show up in small, consistent ways.

Part of that is learning to ask: what is actually necessary right now? What is the bare minimum that helps us move through this state rather than fight it? (Some things clients have found helpful are below.) We're not asking for much here!

There is no permanence in these states, like we don’t always find ourselves in ideal land. 

What this practice is for: 

If your usual neural pathway is to doubt in your ability to be consistent with anxiety hijacking your perspective, this practice is literally the opposite of that. We are noticing what your actual energy is capable of, and tapping into what it would be like if you could attempt at a difficult task to support you. 

“The best plan is one you will actually do”

As someone who wears a lot of hats day-to-day: therapist, group practice founder, clinical supervisor (training to be approved), participant of peer groups sharing ideas, hiring and outreach, eldest daughter, long-term partner, parent to my twin dogs... somewhere in there is also a person who needs to lots of rest.

When I'm burning out, I find myself revenge bedtime procrastinating, in attempt to reclaim back the time I didn't get to support myself during the day. Then waking up the next morning realizing I won't be able to complete the goals I thought I could the night before.

What I am learning (slowly, imperfectly) is that consistency has to be embodied before it can be planned.

We have to start with honesty about our actual energy capacity, not our aspirational capacity.

This is something I wish all of us can start to believe: the best plan is one we'll actually do.

Tips from YOU!

This past month I asked people what they do to rebuild consistency after something unexpected: a mental health episode, illness, a life transition, grief. Some common threads came up: when things get hard and the unknowns pile up, people return to spaces that feel like a routine anchor, somewhere familiar to land. They go back to debriefing with someone safe. And name what is energetically taxing, which is its own form of honesty. People return to the fundamentals: being gentle with themselves, easing up on the pace, going slower than they'd like to go.

Here's your Art As Therapy Prompt:

I think art as therapy can help us find our way back to what we truly want, and what kind of consistency we can actually sustain. Below is an art as therapy prompt from your friendly neighbour art therapist.

Feel free to draw, journal or meditate on this directive.
 

Ideal / Nice / Necessary (pairs with the three states of energy capacity)

Create three distinct spaces on a single page. Label them however feels true to you: ideal, nice, necessary; or high, medium, low; or dream, okay, enough. Then fill each space with imagery, colour, words, texture, or feeling. 

What does each state look like in your body?

What are you asking of yourself in each one? If it starts to feel overwhelming, try to make a frame or border to contain the expressions.

We aren’t here to resolve them but to allow them exist.

Thanks for creating with me .✦ ݁˖

Linda

written and filmed by Linda Lin, RCC RCAT

For those who enjoy longer-form content to pair with my newsletters and blog posts, I've just launched a YouTube channel where I'll be talking through topics I'm exploring and sharing in a different format.

Since 2019, something feels like it has shifted societally and relationally. Not to dampen the mood, but it feels important to name. In the therapy room, we’ve been witnessing deep feelings of nihilism, resentment, and disconnection. There’s been so much ghosting instead of closure or generative feedback, and more counter-relational ways of coping that seem rooted in fear.

We seem to be moving toward a culture where loneliness is managed through posting rather than personally reaching out. There’s such a fear of being alone, or of worst-case-scenario loneliness, yet many people still feel profoundly lonely within their relationships and communities.

Relationships, limerence, and the search for belonging and community already feel difficult to navigate. And now there are new Instagram features (like previewing stories without ‘seeing it'; create multiple story audiences, story rewatch insights…) rolling out that honestly scare the shit out of us. What do you mean there’s a paid version of IG where you can make a story appear like it’s for all your followers, while actually singling it out for the one person you’ve lost sleep over?

With so much of our lives happening digitally, passively, there’s a growing disorientation, grief, and a kind of anguish around how we relate to each other, and whether the versions of ourselves that knew how to belong still exist.

In this post and video, we're sitting with a question: how do we return to being genuinely relational? Things like tolerating feedback, knowing when to set boundaries, and being willing to move through the messiness and discomfort that real relationships ask of us.

This past month, I held many conversations with peers, friends, colleagues exploring relational patterns we're seeing in the therapy room and beyond, bringing in discourse on artificial intelligence and relationships. These talks sparked both grief and a sense of relief in me. Grief and relief in finally having a container to hold and express these reactions, a similar feeling to a canvas sturdy enough to carry all the layers we want to express.

“Avoidance is a way to stay close to the fantasy while staying far from the truth. You want a peak, the how-to, but you don’t want to be the one who does it (first).” – Care from Erotics of Liberation

What is the thing that never gets said?

Something interesting about this era we're in, whether we like it or not, is how both artificial intelligence and digital proximity can offer a kind of artificial sense of security. Artificial intelligence is a prediction model, generating responses based on patterns of what is likely. With AI, there's comfort in the idea that there is always an answer. But when we use it as a mediator in relational conflict, or as a response to feel like we are desired and right about something… the response it generates is shaped by the context we give it, drawn from patterns in its training and what's publicly available, rather than from immediacy. 

Immediacy is when we practice naming what the air feels like between us, right now. When we speak to the pattern of how we're relating: what's alive in the room, what's being carried but not said. It's making space to address the space between: the tension, the coldness, the defensiveness, the avoidance.

What opens from immediacy is a spectrum of feelings, warmth, closeness, connection, care. The willingness to name what's hard is what makes room for what's tender.

That awareness, reciprocity and attunement, and courage to take something so subtle seriously, is what builds trust between people.

In the relational realm, when things feel uncertain and we don't have the spoons to meet that uncertainty, a deep fear can surface. A fear of rejection, of not being wanted, of being truly seen in a vulnerable way. We start to experience emotional mind games, where it becomes unclear who holds the ball and whose court we're in.

This spills into how we sense belonging too, and how we numb out or sidestep responsibility when relationships get strained. In an era of artificial proximity, how do we resist that pull toward desensitization? How do we stay genuinely open to each other when so much of our connection is simulated? Can we choose to stay more intentionally, more carefully, and keep building something real even when it gets hard?

As our team member Natasha puts it, it takes less than two minutes to reply to a friend, and we can do it from anywhere: in bed, on a walk, or on the toilet. It just takes some getting used to.

The challenge is how we stay in the here-and-now and trust our own knowing. I want to offer a gentle nudge: we carry so much more context than we give ourselves credit for, and the brain builds neuroplasticity when we challenge it to hold nuance, as we do when we navigate relational concerns.

Thanks for tuning in, friend ✮⋆˙

written and filmed by Linda Lin, RCC RCAT

For those who enjoy longer-form content to pair with my newsletters and blog posts, I've just launched a YouTube channel where I'll be talking through topics I'm exploring and sharing in a different format.

I hope this newsletter finds you in moments where time feels like a meadow, or where you’re nestled somewhere you really like.

This time last year, my friend Leah challenged me to take a full month off work while we were creating our healing money anxiety art therapy course. The relevance of this exposure alone shook me. We travelled to China together, but I couldn’t honour the non-working part.

Then, an intrusive thought that was supposed to pop in and out, came true: Decipher was in crisis. Our studio was reported to be flooded by rainwater 3 days after I left for my break. I put on that leadership hat as the practice founder and parentified eldest daughter, replying to bureaucratic calls, took on some clients on the whim, 4am in China Standard Time. The anxiety voice insisted that I had to fulfill these roles and expectations to get through this. My mind locked in by crisis managing even though I was trying really hard to take a break.

In major contrast, one of the essence goals that made it onto my 2026 bingo card was to go analog. On my bingo card, I had written that I wanted to take two months off work (!!), wean off screens, and spend more time with analog media like filming for fun, and returning to things I really love → liberating imagination and creativity, unlocking maps of the world, and taking in philosophical pauses.

"Nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished" - Lao Tzu

Fig.1 among a field of canola flowers in Jingdezhen

So what happens on a full month on analog?

There was more of whatever this feeling is: "the next step appears because we moved, not because we tried to make sense of it first” and building on roles outside of being a therapist.

Procedural learning. I didn’t consciously notice it during my break, but after last year’s office flood incident and after co-creating a course on healing money wounds, going analog naturally helped me step out of crisis responding rooted in fear. I fully stepped out of my usual role of monitoring emails and everything happening back at home. This allowed my body to implicitly learn that not everyone and everything is dependent on me, and leadership doesn’t look like constant vigilance.

I’ve always loved philosophy of culture and in ethnography. Arriving in Lijiang, Yunnan, for the 2nd time (my 1st was last year), I interviewed my mom, who had finally returned to her birthplace for the first time in over 60 years (after years of me urging her to reconnect with her roots). I dug up books and history around my family's lineage (a NaXi clan from Lijiang) who lost their wealth during the cultural revolution and ethnic minority cleansing. Hence complex money wounds and inherited anxiety. More of this in the upcoming newsletter!

Going rogue/off screens helped me see the world in another way. Like adopting rituals that support me to experience the flow and pace I’ve been craving. From fight and flight → rest and digest, without binary lines.

Fig.2 West Lake, Hangzhou — golden hour on the water

The month was full of creative, liberating moments like doing things just for fun! I noticed my creative voice sparking with more confidence (stepping out no matter how dressed up I am, dancing midway when a song gets stuck in my head, cracking jokes without filtering). There was less pressure to take things seriously or shape myself around a specific image or identity (like a “therapist” or “the older sister”), or to meet the demands of the algorithm. In these moments, my attention feels like it is sacred and actually belongs to me again.

Going analog helped me create glitches in the system. Capitalism handed all of us a bag of rocks and told us “this is the kit we need to survive”. Grasping onto internalized strategies like ableism, production and optimization over welfare, fatphobia, or taking time here on Earth too seriously… aren’t things I actually value. They’re inherited. Forcefully fed. Learned and rehearsed from a place of fear. Even though internalized thoughts will still appear through the course, I can discern what's mine more clearly and that makes the time I spend with myself so much easier.

I felt the depth of this: diligence without context isn't discipline, it's constant numbing and busywork. The goal was never to optimize myself into exhaustion. It's always been ease, alignment and a slightly unhinged feeling of being genuinely, embarrassingly alive.
 

This month felt like a different pace: a kind of attention and a life that doesn’t need to be constantly monitored to be lived. I honoured this principle, "说到做到" translation “following through with my promises” throughout the walk.

I don’t think going fully analog is the point. 

I’m more curious about what parts of this I’ll carry forward.

And for now, that’s enough. 😌

Putting these feelings into words for you, in case you haven’t already named them for yourself.

Thanks for tuning in, friend ✮⋆˙