‘Mindset work’ helped, until it didn’t.
On why "do the work yourself" doesn't always land and what gets left out when it doesn't.
And how it intersects with “the middle”
“Go together, with others. If you do, 100 miles will feel like ten.”
- ‘When Life Gives You Tangerines’ 🍊
Over the long weekend, I sat down to watch When Life Gives You Tangerines, a slow, tender Korean drama (K-drama) that follows the quiet emotional lives of two young people on Jeju Island. It’s a story about grief, friendship, unspoken family dynamics, and the way love often shows up in small, ordinary acts rather than grand gestures. If you’re not familiar with K-dramas, this one isn’t the fast-paced or romanticised kind. It lingers and it sits with discomfort rather than rushing to resolve it. And in doing so it invites many intricate and questionable reflections.
There’s a moment in the show where a quote stands still for a while:
“Go together, with others. If you do, 100 miles will feel like ten.”
Days later, I was still turning that line over because of what it made me notice was missing everywhere else.
Therapy and coaching spaces love the word you.
You're the only one in your own way. It's your mindset that's blocking you. At the end of the day, it's on you.
I've said versions of these things. I believe in them, to a point. There's something real in the idea that no one can do your inner work for you. CBT can genuinely shift how someone understands their own thinking. Schema therapy can reach into early patterns and name what was never named. I use these frameworks and they matter.
But they were designed for a particular kind of self. Autonomous. Boundaried. Self-contained. A self that exists, mostly, alone. And a lot of us don't live there.
If you grew up in a household where sacrifice was how love was expressed then being told you have to put yourself first doesn't feel like permission. It feels like an accusation. If your family's wellbeing was something you carried, not as burden but as meaning, then "healthy detachment" can sound less like growth and more like abandonment.
And yes, I say this as someone who deeply values Schema Therapy and uses it in practice. But as I’ve learned, it’s possible to hold dialectical truths: to appreciate what works and still question what’s missing. These approaches are grounded in particular worldviews often ones that centre the individual. They embed cultural values like autonomy, self-sufficiency, and rational control. When they’re practiced without cultural awareness or rigidly from a therapy manual - they can unintentionally overlook how many of us have learned to survive, car and connect.
When Culture and Context Are Left Out, and “Growth” is centred on the individual
If you’ve grown up in a collectivist culture or been shaped by one:
where needs are negotiated within family,
where sacrifice is a kind of love,
where silence is a form of respect
then mindset work alone might feel… disconnected.
This is especially true for many Asian Australians and others raised in-between navigating life in a Western system,
but still carrying unspoken family codes, inherited roles, and intergenerational expectations. When you're told: “You have to do the work yourself” or “You can’t rely on anyone else” or even “You’re just blocking your own growth” it doesn’t always feel empowering. Sometimes, it can feel like something important is being missed. When growth is framed as something only achievable through internal work, we also risk overlooking:
The relational labour many people carry including caregiving, emotional holding, translating between cultural and generational worlds
The cultural obligations that shape how we express (or suppress) our needs
The intergenerational roles that influence how we show up in relationships, workplaces, and systems
For some, separating from family or community isn’t “growth.” It’s grief and autonomy isn’t always safe or even desirable.
Not Everything Needs to Be Unlearned
Western psychology carries assumptions about what a healthy self looks like: individual, autonomous, emotionally articulate on demand. When a framework built around that self meets someone whose sense of self is relational and by unspoken family codes that go back generations it often doesn't know what to do with them. Many decolonial scholars have spoken to this about Western mental health concepts and frameworks might label as:
What we call enmeshment might be care.
What we call self-sabotage might be cultural loyalty.
What we call avoidance might be the silence that kept someone safe.
Perhaps we don’t need to discard these frameworks. But we do need to contextualise them. To ask:
Who were they designed for? What are we calling dysfunction, and who’s deciding?
What happens when we stop asking care to sound like a thought, and let it sound like a story?
What if care was shaped not just by what we think, but by where we come from?
Can growth still include connection not just separation?
Why I Keep Thinking About Tangerines
That’s why that line from When Life Gives You Tangerines keeps echoing for me:
“Go together, with others. If you do, 100 miles will feel like ten.”
I keep thinking: what would it look like if wellness spaces actually believed this? As the framework itself that for some of us, the self was never the unit of healing to begin with.
If the message you have to do this alone has ever felt like it skimmed past something deeper, this is for you. It can make a lot of sense that it didn't land. Sometimes it's just not written with you in mind.
