What My Mother Taught Me About Alignment, Suffering, and the Quiet Strength We Rarely Name
By Dr. Ivan Zy Lim, PsyD MSocSc
There is a story I have carried for a long time.
I have not told it often, because some stories feel too close to offer casually. But Mother's Day is around the corner, and I find myself thinking about her again. Not in a heavy way. In the way a person thinks of someone who shaped the floor beneath their feet without ever drawing attention to themselves.
So let me tell it now.
The Back Stairs
When I was young, in the kampong days of old Singapore, my grandmother sometimes chased my mother with a walking stick.
My grandmother was a bound-foot lady of another era. She moved slowly, the way bound-foot women moved, with a careful, deliberate gait shaped by a practice that had compressed her feet since childhood. But anger, as I would come to understand, does not need speed.
The neighbours knew. When things began to escalate, one of them would quietly signal my mother. Go. The back stairs. The circular ones, the kind old kampong houses had, narrow and wooden, leading down from the back of the house. She would slip away before things got worse.
I want you to sit with that image for a moment.
A woman being chased out of her own home. A neighbour's quiet signal. The back stairs.
The escape.
And then what came after.
The Return
Every morning, my mother went out to work. Not for herself. For the family. For food on the table.
And every evening, she rushed home. Not to rest. To cook. For the household. Including for the woman who had just driven her out.
No explanation. No speech about forgiveness or duty or sacrifice. No declaration of anything.
她只是做了该做的事。
She simply did what needed to be done.
I used to wonder about this when I was young. I understood it differently as I grew older. And now, after more than fifteen years of clinical practice sitting with human suffering in its many forms, I think I am only beginning to understand it fully.
What Psychology Usually Says
When we hear a story like this, the clinical instinct is often to reach for familiar frameworks. Was this trauma bonding? Was it learned helplessness? Was it a woman who had simply been conditioned to accept mistreatment as normal?
These are not unreasonable questions. And in some situations, they would be the right ones.
But they did not fit my mother.
She was not broken by what she endured. She was not confused about her worth. She did not seem to be waiting for someone's approval before she could act. She was simply... clear. About who she was. About what mattered. About what she was going to do regardless of the conditions around her.
That kind of clarity is rarer than we think. And it is far more sophisticated than the word resilience usually captures.
Resilience, as it is commonly used, suggests bouncing back. Recovering. Returning to a previous state after disruption. But what my mother demonstrated was something quieter and more durable than that. It was not a return. It was a constancy. She never left herself in the first place.
What PATH Sees
I developed PATH, Psychology of Alignment Toward Harmony, as a clinical framework that integrates Eastern philosophical traditions with Western psychological science. It was built to understand something I kept encountering in my work, particularly with clients from Asian backgrounds: that the frameworks we had were often insufficient to explain the full complexity of how people suffer, endure, and ultimately find their way toward wholeness.
At the centre of PATH is the concept of the SELF.
Not the self in the Western individualist sense, the bounded, autonomous, self-actualising self. But the SELF as a dynamic core of identity that exists in relationship, in history, in culture, in meaning. The SELF that is always situated within what I call the Meaning Ecology: the family, the beliefs, the cultural inheritance, the history that surrounds and shapes a person's inner life.
In PATH, suffering is understood as self rigidity. The moment we become locked into a fixed way of seeing, a fixed way of responding, a fixed construct of who we are and what we deserve, we begin to contract. We lose the capacity to move with what is real.
My mother was the opposite of rigid.
She had absorbed a great deal of pain. That is undeniable. But the pain had not calcified inside her. It had not turned into bitterness, or withdrawal, or a hardened version of herself that protected against further hurt by refusing to give.
She kept giving. She kept moving. She kept cooking the meal.
In PATH terms, her SELF remained oriented. Her alignment held, not because the conditions around her were good, but because something inside her was more stable than the conditions.
That is not common. And it is not simple.
What the Ancient Teachers Understood
Confucius spoke of 仁, ren. It is often translated as benevolence, or humaneness, or loving kindness toward others. But the ancient teachers were careful to distinguish ren from sentiment. Ren is not a feeling. It is a practice. A daily, embodied choosing to act from one's deepest humanity regardless of how one is treated in return.
有仁者，必有勇。
One who is truly humane must also have courage.
My mother had both. She did not endure passively. She made active, costly choices every single day. Going to work. Earning the wages. Rushing home. Cooking the meal. These were not the actions of a woman who had given up on herself. They were the actions of a woman who had decided, somewhere deep and quiet and unspoken, who she was going to be.
Daoism adds another layer. The Daoist tradition speaks of 水, water, as the highest symbol of virtue. Water does not fight what is hard. It finds its way around, under, through. It yields without disappearing. And it continues to nourish, even the ground that does not seem to deserve it.
My mother moved like water. Not passively. Not without her own current. But without forcing, without hardening, without becoming what she was exposed to.
And from my Christian faith, I think of what the scriptures say about love. That it is patient. That it bears all things. That it does not seek its own. I used to read those words as ideals, beautiful but remote. My mother made them concrete. She gave them a face and a pair of hands and a pot of rice.
The Question I Sit With
I have spent my career working with people who are suffering. People who have been hurt by those they trusted. People who carry wounds that were given to them by family, by circumstance, by histories they did not choose.
And I have learned that healing is rarely about becoming someone different. It is almost always about returning to something essential in oneself that the wound obscured.
PATH talks about Harmony not as a destination, not as a state where everything finally becomes easy, but as a returning. A coming back to who you are beneath the roles, the wounds, the constructs that have accumulated around you.
My mother, I think, never fully left herself. That was her gift. And her mystery.
I do not offer her story as a model for what people should do in difficult relationships. Context matters. Safety matters. Every situation requires careful discernment. What I offer it as is a window into what is possible in the human person when the SELF holds. When alignment does not depend on the conditions being right first.
There are people in your life who are doing this quietly, right now. Holding things together without asking for recognition. Moving through difficulty without making it visible. Returning, again and again, to what matters.
有些人，用沉默撑起了整个世界。
Some people hold up the whole world in silence.
A Closing Word
She has been gone a few years now.
I still hear her in the way I sit with clients who are exhausted but still showing up. I see her in every person who keeps going, not because anyone claps, but because something inside them knows what is right.
I did not fully understand her when she was alive. That is one of the quiet griefs of growing older: the understanding arrives after the person.
But the values she lived by did not leave when she did. They are in the work I do. In the framework I built. In the way I try to hold space for people who have absorbed more than anyone around them knows.
Her life was the lesson.
妈妈，您的一生，就是最深的教导。
Mum, your whole life was the deepest teaching.
This Mother's Day, I am thinking of every quiet, faithful, steady mother. Seen or unseen. Here or already home in God's care.
Your love is not small. It is the ground beneath everything.
Dr. Ivan Zy Lim is a Clinical Psychologist and the founder of the PATH framework, Psychology of Alignment Toward Harmony. He practises at Inner Quest Centre in Johor Bahru and Singapore, working with individuals, families, and organisations across the APAC region. For enquiries, visit innerquestcentre.com or email ivan@innerquestcentre.com.
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