Multiracial Mental Health (Part II): Healing in the Mixed Community

Multiracial people face higher rates of mental health challenges than monoracial peers, and fewer coping resources designed for them. Healing in the Mixed community tends to involve finding genuine affirmation, building identity from the inside out, and being truly witnessed by someone who doesn’t need everything explained. This is Part II of a two-part series. Part I covers the Mixed experience and its history.

In my last installment on multiracial mental health, I described some of the most common experiences of multiracial, Mixed, biracial, bicultural, or multiple heritage people: the context around multiracial lived experience and what being multiracial means for well-being. Here, I go deeper into the inner life and what healing actually looks like.

What does multiracial mental health look like?

Compared to monoracial peers, multiracial or Mixed youth face poorer mental health outcomes and reduced coping resources, like not having peers who look like you or who understand your experience without explanation. Multiracial people are likely to have grown up without many people who share the same mix, and even shared heritage doesn’t determine how you look or how you identify.

National studies of biracial Asian and biracial Latine people show that multiracial individuals are twice as likely to struggle with mental health and generally experience greater distress. Mixed folks face greater risk factors without necessarily having the most useful coping strategies, and we end up with struggles we weren’t given the tools to face.

Racial, cultural, gender, and sexual minority groups are all disadvantaged when it comes to mental health care: a profession that has not always been kind to those it was chartered to help; cultural stigmas around seeking help; the accumulated weight of lifelong discrimination; limited access to relevant information; and too few therapists who have done their own work well enough to actually help. Multiracial identity adds its own specific pressures on top of all of that.

What is the inner life of a biracial person like?

Multiracial folks often face conflicts growing up around embracing identity versus fitting in. For some, not fully identifying with one racial or cultural group leaves us wondering where we belong, if not inside one of those monoracial communities. Realizing that your life experiences are different from your friends’ or schoolmates’ is isolating, and as human beings, we rely on connection and belonging to survive.

Multiracial youth often face discrimination and microaggressions even within the family: being “too much” of one thing or “not enough.” Recall the family gathering at which you weren’t treated the same as your monoracial siblings or cousins? Multiracial people can also find themselves subjected to slurs or inappropriate jokes when presumed to be one race. This hurts you, a lot. So does not being able to properly self-identify in the race box on a demographic form.

What are the unique pressures for some multiracial people?

For multiracial folks who are lighter-skinned than their family members, or White-assumed in some settings, the experience is often erasure and invisibility. It can be hard to be seen and acknowledged for a lifetime of experience and culture you carry. There is also the responsibility of privilege to reckon with and channel.

Some multiracial folks also grow up with an immigrant parent. Immigration is its own complicated weight, layered with social inequality and cultural differences, and those hardships ripple across generations. A family history like this can leave a child carrying high expectations and an ambient sense of responsibility, only developing awareness of the anxiety underneath it much later.

For other children of immigrants, a parent still learning English can put a child in the role of interpreter, including for complex adult situations. That’s a weight no child should hold, even as being bilingual carries real cognitive and personal benefits.

How does the Mixed experience affect adults long-term?

Whatever your generational immigration status, for most children and adolescents, being the only, being “unique,” or being “interesting” is isolating, even within your own family, where you can still look and feel different from everyone else. But the alternative, fitting in, means erasing, suppressing, or shrinking parts of yourself. Later in life, we might find ourselves still distanced from our “true self,” a self that was never fully seen.

It’s when we can be seen and validated for all of who we are, in affirming therapy, a community group, or even a meme, that we can start to embrace ourselves and let go of the parts we built just to try to fit in.

Research shows that incorporating and accepting aspects of two distinct racial or cultural backgrounds into your individual identity produces real growth. And that integration actually leads to improved mental health compared to monocultural or monoracial peers. Integrating what’s positive from your various cultural backgrounds builds a more grounded, whole sense of self. At Panorama Therapy, that’s the work I’m here to do with more of us.

What does it mean to be multiracial and mentally well?

Carrying these challenges from birth means that as multiracial people, we tend to be adaptable, sharp, creative, and often attuned to others. We are resilient and flexible, and we don’t feel so defined or enclosed by a single box. We’re more likely to understand intuitively that race is a social construct and not a biological fact, which helps us understand ourselves better outside the limitations of a monoracial world.

And yet only 60% of multiracial adults say they’re proud of their background. Given what we face, that’s not surprising. No matter what we’ve been through, healing is possible, through finding genuine affirmation that comes from within and seeing it mirrored in real connection with others.

What can you do to affirm yourself?

We can grow into ourselves when we are validated and affirmed by ourselves first and others second, finding our authentic selves without becoming isolated in the process. Here are a few small, specific ways to start:

• Call an elder relative.
• Read a Wikipedia article about a traditional holiday you’ve heard of.
• Visit the local Mexican carnicería, stop by an Asian market for mooncakes, or cook an old family favorite.
• Create artwork in the style of your past generations.
• Download Duolingo for your grandparents’ language just for fun.
• Listen to or record yourself singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black National Anthem.
• Join an identity-based Facebook group and let yourself resonate with a meme.
• Visit a history museum honoring legacies from your cultures of origin.
• Look at old pictures or learn more about your family line.
• Write some affirmations styled after Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “I Am — Somebody.”
• Read about the history of interracial romance for your particular lineage.
• Watch media from your homelands or cultures of origin.
• Read an audiobook about the Mixed-race experience.

Finding even one person with whom you can express yourself and be witnessed matters. Expanding into a community that embraces shared values and lets you be yourself will broaden your capacity for connection and support. Once we’ve resolved the pressure to fit in, we can fully engage with being seen.

Seeking out relationships with diverse friends, loved ones, and a broader community are all ways to find that. How much support we get organically from family or local community varies a lot. Online communities can be a valuable way to connect with others who understand, like a Facebook group for folks of your heritage or my 10-week multiracial and anti-racist discussion group.

What if I need help building self-compassion around my identity?

In my work with multiracial clients, self-compassion is often where we start. Multiracial, biracial, and Mixed folks can move toward healing when they can offer themselves the grounded container of self-acceptance to feel affirmed, validated, and seen from within. Therapy can build that, especially when you need support developing those skills or space to really dialogue about identity.

When looking for mental health treatment, you’ll want someone who understands your specific experiences without needing them explained. Finding a therapist who also identifies as multiracial can make a real difference. Not having to justify or defend your realities frees you up to be seen more fully, and that witnessing is where the real work begins.

There are more of us making our way as multiracial people than ever: 33.8 million in the last U.S. census, and likely undercounted. At Panorama Therapy, I work with multiracial and Mixed-race adults virtually across the USAlberta. If you’re looking for support around your Mixed-race identity, reach out to continue the conversation.