Off Map Living

Trigger Warning: This blog discusses eating disorders, hospital admissions, CAMHS/medical appointments, emotional neglect, family conflict, body-related comments, shaming behaviours, verbal abuse, distressing interactions involving food and control. Please read with care & step away if you need to. – AK

I have always wanted to shed light on this particular topic. This was actually the first topic someone requested I write about. I spent a long time thinking & procrastinating because this isn’t just a subject to me. It’s my life. Writing this means revisiting some of the darkest periods I’ve been through.

Mental health stigmas in cultural families doesn’t get spoken about enough. If sharing my experiences gives even one person language for what they went through, or help someone feel less alone, then maybe I didn’t go through all this for nothing.

Growing Up Without Emotions

Emotions were never a thing in my household. Not in the way they are supposed to be. I learned at a very young age that feelings were something you managed quietly & internally, preferably alone. Crying wasn’t met with comfort. Vulnerability wasn’t met with reassurance or curiosity. It was treated as something disruptive, something that created problems rather than signalled need. So I adapted. I learned how to swallow things, how to keep my face natural, how to disappear emotionally while still being physically present.

I remember when my grandma passed away. I didn’t cry openly. I cried alone, behind closed doors, where no one could see or hear me, even grief, something as severe, unavoidable and human as death felt like too much to express. In my home, emotions weren’t seen as normal responses to life. They were seen as an inconvenience, weakness as something that needed to be controlled. That silence didn’t come from nowhere, it was learned, it was cultural, it was passed down through generations that prioritised survival over softness. When children grow up without emotional safety, they don’t stop feeling they just stop trusting their feelings.

When Care Feels Like Control

My mum would constantly tell me to eat her homemade food, not gently, not supportively, but insistently. Repeatedly, as if eating what she made would fix everything that was wrong.

Food wasnt just food in my house, it carried meaning, it was obedience, it was compliance, it was proof that I was behaving correctly, that I was being “NORMAL” again.

Meal times became battlegrounds. There was screaming, constant, relentless screaming. I would be made to sit at the table for hours on end, staring at food I physically and mentally could not eat. One time, I was sat there from 5pm-7pm while my mum would just constantly scream at me, wishing death upon me because I wouldn’t eat what she had put in front of me. That moment stays with me. Not because of the words, but because of what they communicated: that my illness was less important than obedience and that my distress was an inconvenience.

Every time I came out of hospital, the focus was never on how traumatising those admissions were. It was on my appearance, whether I looked better, whether I looked healthier, whether I looked acceptable. No one asked how I genuinely felt.

My body felt like it became public property, something to be monitored, commented on, evaluated. I wasn’t allowed to wear what I wanted, there was control over how I looked, how I ate, how I existed, this control extended far beyond my anorexia. In my house, that level of control was normalised, questioning it wasn’t allowed.

When Mental Illness Is Misunderstood

When my eating disorder began, my parents didn’t recognise it as mental illness, because mental illness itself wasn’t something they believed in. In my home, feelings were never treated as real indicators of distress. Thoughts weren’t explored, emotions were something you spoke about, sat with or tried to understand. Therapy was viewed with suspicion, as something uneccasary or exaggerated, something influenced by Western culture rather than “real life”.

Mental health was seen as weakness, so when I became unwell, there had ro be another explanation. I remember countless CAMHS meetings where I sat dissociated, barely present while my mum argued that there must be something physically wrong with me. Blood tests, scans appointments anything that could provide a tangible answer, anything that didn’t require acknowledging thoughts, feelings or vulnerability because acknowledging mental illness would have ment acknowledging that emotional pain exists. That trauma matters. That strength doesn’t cone from silence alone.

In many cultural house holds, those ideas are deeply uncomfortable. My parents were raised in environments where survival came first. Where emotions were luxuries. Where you endured, stayed quiet and kept going. Mental heal wasnt discussed because there was no space for it and admitting it now felt like opening something that had been kept shut for generations.

There was also fear, fear of shame, fear of judgement, fear of what wider family would think if they knew. Protecting the family’s image mattered more than naming what was actually happening to me, when anorexia was finally acknowledged it still wasnt met with compassion or concern it was met with blame.

• I was told I was attention seeking
• I was told I needed to get over myself
• I was told I was causing problems for the family

What I was experiencing was never allowed to exist as illness. It was questioned, dismissed and reframed not because it wasn’t real, but because accepting it would have disrupted everything they believed about strength, resilience and control.

This is what stigma looks like in real life, it doesn’t always sound cruel, sometimes it’s practical, logical, protective but its impact is the same. Mental illness is denied, emotions are dismissed, appearances are prioritised and the person who is struggling is left to carry their pain alone, silently and for far longer than they should have to.

Shame, Surveillance And Cruelty Disguised As Concern

At school, I was made to keep a food diary, this continued when I was home as well so my ED team could monitor my intake. Every missed meal or snack became evidence, not evidence of how much I was struggling but evidence of how difficult I was being. I wasn’t trusted. I was watched.

Majority of the time this didn’t come from my parents, it came from my older sister stepping into a parental role she never should have had. One time, she took a picture of me eating my evening meal and put a pig emoji over it on her private story on snapchat.

That image wasn’t about helping me eat. it was humiliation, about reducing my illness to something ugly and shameful. Another time, was when I was in hospital, she went through my iPad and found my excerise logs in my notes app. That discovery wasn’t met with concern or fear for my safety it was instead met with anger and screaming.

There was no space for honesty. No room for admitting struggle. Only punishment. I also remember being in hospital while my mum went through my wardrobe at home and found food I had hidden she was screaming, she rang me screaming on the phone. To this day, I remember the intensity of that rage, I didn’t even recognise her. I still question it why was she that angry? That level of anger wasn’t care. It wasnt concern. It was something else entirely. This is what stigma looks like in real life. Surveillance instead of support. Shame instead of safety.

Emotional Neglect, Control, Trauma And Stigma

I want to be clear about something.

The environment I grew up in was already shaped by control, emotional neglect and abuse long before my anorexia ever existed. My anorexia didn’t create those dynamics, it developed within them.

From a young age, emotional safety wasn’t part of my reality, control was normalised, obedience mattered more than understanding, feelings were dismissed, minimised or treated as inconveniences. Mental health wasn’t acknowledged, discussed or taken seriously.

Due to that stigma, trauma was never recognised as trauma. In my home, there was no framework for understanding how long-term emotional harm affects a child. There was no language for coping mechanisms, survival responses or the need for control in unsafe environments. Struggling was not seen as a response to circumstances, it was seen as misbehaviour. Seen through a lenses, my anorexia didnt come out of nowhere.

Anorexia became a way to survive in a word where I had very little control over my emotions, body, my voice. It offered structure where there was chaos, control where I felt powerless and predictability in an environment that felt unsafe, but stigma made that impossible to see.

My mum never viewed my behaviour through a trauma informed lenses, because trauma itself wasn’t recognised. Mental health stigma meant there was no curiosity about why I was struggling only frustration that I was.

My dad on the other hand was calmer around my struggles, he wasn’t abusive in the same way, not all parents contribute in the same ways, but growing up in a home defined by control, emotional neglect and mental health stigma leaves lasting damage. When trauma is denied and emotions are invalidated, children don’t stop being affected, they just learn to suffer quietly. My eating disorder wasn’t a mystery it was a response.

Cultural Stigma And Silence

Mental health stigma in cultural families isn’t always loud. Most of the time it’s quiet, dismissive and deeply ingrained. In many communities mental illness is seen as a western concept, something exaggerated, something invented, something people talk about when they don’t have “real problems”.

• Depression becomes laziness.
• Anxiety becomes overthinking.
• Eating disorders become attention seeking.

Theres also belief that suffering is normal. That life is meant to be hard. That if previous generations survived worse, than you should too, without complaint. Mental health struggles are often framed as personal weakness rather than health conditions, because of that they are met with shame instead of support. What makes this even heavier is the communal aspect of culture, struggle ins’t personal its REFLECTIVE. People worry a lot about reputation & about what relative’s will say about how it will look if the word gets out.

So, mental illness becomes something to hide, your told to keep things within the family, to not embarrass anyone, to be grateful, to be quiet.

When a child does speak up, they’re often met with defensiveness instead of concern, because acknowledging mental illness would mean acknowledging that something isn’t perfect, and perfection is often treated as survival. This kind of stigma doesn’t just silence people, it teaches them that their pain is inconvenient. That their suffering needs to be smaller so others can stay comfortable.

Thats why so many people from cultural backgrounds group feeling conflicted- tone between loyalty to family and the need to survive emotionally.

How stigma follows you into adulthood. The stigma didnt end when I got older, it followed me into adult hood as

• Guilt for resting
• Shame for needing support
• Fear of being seen as too over the top
• Hyper independent

Naming Harm To Break Generational Stigma

Whats important to acknowledge is that this isn’t a story with a neat resolution. Even now, many years later, my parents views around mental health haven’t shifted. I haven’t lived with them for 6 years now but the pattern remains the same. There has been no reflection, no accountability, no real attempt to understand the importance of what happened.

Instead, blame is still redirected back onto me, as if my suffering was a choice, a flaw or a failure of character rather than a response to the environment I grew up in. Theres been no willingness to sit with the discomfort, to question long held beliefs or to put their own views aside long enough to truly listen… and that too is stigma, because stigma isn’t just a loud denial, its the quiet refusal to reflect. It’s prioritising being right over being compassionate. It’s choosing familiarity over growth.

Ive had to accept that understanding may never come from them, breaking generational stigma for me has meant stepping away, choosing boundaries and even when the people who caused harm refuse to change.

Closing

For a long time, I believed my pain had to be understood or approved of by my family before it could be real, that if they didnt acknowledge it, maybe it didn’t count.

It doesn’t.

My experiences don’t need to make sense to anyone else to be valid. They only need to be true to me. Mental health stigma, especially within cultural families thrive on silence, it teaches us that emotions are weaknesses, that endurance is strength and that protecting the famous image matters more than protecting the individual. Over time, suffering becomes normalised and those who speak up are labelled as difficult, dramatic or ungrateful.

That stigma doesn’t just dismiss mental illness, it re shapes it. It turns trauma into misbehaviour, coping mechanisms into flaws and pain into something shameful. When that happens, the harm isn’t just personal it’s generational.

By naming this, im not assigning blame, I’m refusing to carry silence any longer, im choosing to interrupt a cycle that tells people like me to suffer quietly and call it strengths.

If this resonates with you, if you grew up in a home where mental health was ignored, misunderstood or denied, your pain doesn’t need permission to exist, breaking stigma doesn’t always look like confrontation, sometimes it looks like honesty, sometimes it looks like boundaries, sometimes it looks like choosing yourself.

if you’re reading this and recognise parts of your own story in mine, I hope you know this: you are not weak for being affected. You are not dramatic for needing support. And you are not broken for struggling in an environment that never made room for your emotions.

AK