There is a sentence that lives quietly in the minds of so many women who come to see me. They don’t always say it out loud — but I hear it underneath everything else they bring into the room. I should be able to handle this myself.
Maybe you’ve thought it too. You’ve built a life. You left your country, learned a new language, rebuilt yourself from scratch in a city that didn’t know you yet. You’ve held your family together across time zones and hemispheres. You work, you mother, you love, you manage. And still — something isn’t right. Something inside you is tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix, sad in a way that has no single cause, anxious in a way that follows you from room to room. And yet you hesitate. Because asking for help feels like admitting that all of it — the strength, the competence, the resilience you’ve been told you have — was somehow a performance. That behind it, you’re not actually okay.
That thought: “I should be able to handle this” is not a personal failing. It is a cultural wound. And it deserves to be looked at honestly.
Where Does This Voice Come From?
The shame around seeking psychological help is not random. It is taught. Research consistently shows that stigma, both social and internalised, is one of the primary barriers stopping women from accessing mental health care, particularly among immigrant and Latina women (Ojeda & Bergstresser, 2008). For Latin American women specifically, cultural frameworks like marianismo — the deeply embedded expectation that women should be self-sacrificing, enduring, and humble — shape how emotional distress is understood and expressed. Cultural concepts like aguantarse (the ability to withstand) and controlarse (the containment of difficult feelings) are presented not as coping strategies, but as virtues (Añez et al., 2005, cited in Heredia et al., 2023).
The message is ancient and it runs deep: a good woman endures. Seeking help is not enduring. It is, in this logic, a kind of failure.
A systematic review examining barriers to mental health care for female migrants in Europe found that stigma, cultural beliefs, and the absence of gender-sensitive services were the most consistently reported obstacles — and that these barriers are not merely individual, but are rooted in “intersecting systems of oppression” that immigrant women navigate simultaneously (Guerrero et al., 2023). In other words: the shame you feel about needing support is not yours alone. It was built by systems larger than you, and placed in you long before you knew it was there.
The Paradox of the Strong Woman
Here is something that might feel uncomfortable: the very qualities that helped you survive — your self-sufficiency, your ability to keep going, your refusal to fall apart — can also keep you from getting what you actually need. Studies on help-seeking among immigrant women show that a strong sense of resilience and self-reliance is frequently cited as a barrier to accessing mental health care, not just a strength (Martinez et al., 2020). Women who have learned to rely on themselves because there was no one else — or because asking felt dangerous, or shameful, or weak — often continue that pattern long after the circumstances that created it have changed.
The strength was real. The cost of it is also real. And here is what psychology understands about that cost: unprocessed emotional experience doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere. Research on the relationship between women, shame, and psychological distress consistently shows that when difficult feelings are habitually suppressed — controlarse, aguantarse — they tend to manifest in the body, in relationships, in a pervasive exhaustion that resists explanation (Brown, 2006; Acar et al., 2025). You may not be able to name what is wrong. But your body has been keeping track.
What Therapy Actually Is (and Isn’t)
One reason the shame around seeking help persists is that many people have a distorted image of what therapy is. They imagine lying on a couch confessing their worst thoughts to a stranger who will judge them, or being told they are broken, or — perhaps most feared — being told that what they are feeling is their own fault.
None of that is what good therapy is.
In the relational psychoanalytic tradition, the therapeutic relationship itself is understood as the primary vehicle of healing. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described the therapist’s role as that of a container: a presence that can receive the raw, difficult, often unthinkable feelings that a person cannot hold alone, and return them transformed — as something comprehensible, bearable, workable (Bion, 1962). Winnicott called this the holding environment: a reliable, safe psychological space in which a person can finally stop performing and simply be (Winnicott, 1960). Neither of these frameworks asks you to be broken. They ask only that you be human.
Seeking therapy is not evidence that you have failed to cope. It is evidence that you are ready to stop coping alone – which, if you think about it, is one of the bravest things a person can do.
An Intersectional Reality
If you are a Brazilian or Latina immigrant woman living in Australia, there is something else worth naming here, directly. The barriers you face in seeking mental health support are not only internal. They are structural and cultural. Research on Latinx communities and mental health shows that women from these backgrounds are significantly more likely than their white, locally-born counterparts to report stigma-related concerns as barriers to care — and that these concerns are meaningfully shaped by the cultural frameworks around gender, family loyalty, and emotional containment that they have grown up with (Ojeda & Bergstresser, 2008). Added to this is the very specific experience of immigration: the grief of leaving, the exhaustion of adapting, the loneliness of being between two worlds, and the near-impossible task of explaining all of this to someone who has never lived it. Research on barriers to mental health care for migrant women in Europe found that the absence of culturally attuned, language-matched services was a primary structural obstacle — not a preference, but a clinical need (Guerrero et al., 2023).
Therapy in your mother tongue, with someone who understands your cultural framework from the inside, is not a luxury. It is a fundamental part of what makes therapy actually work.
What If You Reframed the Question?
You have been asking: Should I be able to handle this myself?
What if the better question is: What would it mean to finally stop having to?
What would it feel like to have a space — genuinely held, genuinely safe — where you are not managing, not performing, not being strong for anyone? Where you are not the one holding everyone else together, but instead, for one hour a week, you are the one being held? The shame that keeps women from seeking help is not a moral truth. It is a learned response — shaped by culture, by gender, by the specific experience of migration and displacement. It can be examined. It can be understood. It can change.
You have already survived things that would have broken many people. That is not in question. The question is whether survival is all you want — or whether you are ready to live more fully than that.
You Don’t Have to Have Everything Fall Apart First
One of the most persistent myths about therapy is that you need to be in crisis to deserve it. That things have to become truly dire before it’s acceptable to ask for support. This, too, is a cultural construction — and a harmful one. Research on treatment-seeking among women shows that many wait until their difficulties become severe before accessing care, precisely because they have internalised the message that help is only warranted at the extreme end of suffering (Solbakken et al., 2026). By that point, the work is harder and recovery takes longer.
You do not have to hit a wall to be allowed to seek support. Feeling persistently tired, disconnected, anxious, or like you have lost the thread of yourself is enough. Feeling like you are going through the motions of your own life is enough. Feeling like you cannot quite explain what is wrong, but knowing something is — that is enough.
Wanting more for yourself: more clarity, more ease, more presence in your own life… that is enough.
A Closing Thought
The woman who finally makes an appointment is not the woman who gave up. She is the woman who decided that her inner life matters. That what happens inside her: the grief, the exhaustion, the unnamed sadness, the anger she has been swallowing for years and is worth attending to. That is not weakness. That is one of the most significant acts of self-respect available to you.
If any part of this landed — if you recognised yourself in the sentence: “I should be able to handle this myself”— I would like you to consider that perhaps you have been handling it long enough. And that there is another way.
If you have been carrying everything on your own, it may be time to explore what support could offer you. I invite you to book a session with a psychologist who will understand the challenges of being an immigrant woman. Talking Works can provide the support you need – face to face in Melbourne or online. Get in touch so we can begin.
References
Acar, et al. (2025). The intersection of shame, gender, and resilience. Psychology of Woman Journal, 6(4), 1–9. https://journals.kmanpub.com/index.php/psywoman
Añez, L. M., et al. (2005). Conducting culturally sensitive psychiatric evaluations with Latinos. Psychiatric Services, 56(6), 684–686. [Cited in Heredia et al., 2023]
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Heinemann.
Brown, B. (2006). Shame resilience theory: A grounded theory study on women and shame. Families in Society, 87(1), 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1606/1044-3894.3483
Guerrero, N., et al. (2023). Barriers and facilitators to seeking and accessing mental health support in primary care and the community among female migrants in Europe: A “feminisms” systematic review. BMC Women’s Health. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10523615/
Heredia, D., et al. (2023). VALOR: Cultural considerations when assessing Central American immigrant women in behavioral health settings. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10373987/
Martinez, A. B., et al. (2020). Filipino help-seeking for mental health problems and associated barriers and facilitators: A systematic review. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 14, 64. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7578164/
Ojeda, V. D., & Bergstresser, S. M. (2008). Gender, race-ethnicity, and psychosocial barriers to mental health care: An examination of perceptions and attitudes among adults reporting unmet need. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 49(3), 317–334.
Ojeda, V. D., & McGuire, T. G. (2006). Gender and racial/ethnic differences in use of outpatient mental health and substance use services by depressed adults. Psychiatric Quarterly, 77(3), 211–222.
Solbakken, et al. (2026). Ranking determinants of therapy dropout among women. Psychology of Woman Journal, 7(1), 1–11. https://journals.kmanpub.com/index.php/psywoman
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 585–595.
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