Everything Will Be Okay
Coming Soon…
“We have got to find a way from surviving to thriving again.” With these words, Jue Jue— a Burmese-American social worker and founder of Jue Jue’s Safe Space— summarizes both the emotional core and forward-looking vision of her mental health advocacy work. Speaking from Honolulu, Hawai’i, where she is based as a clinician and lecturer, she reflects on the long road that led her to this point: from growing up in a politically active Burmese family to becoming a driving force in a growing movement for culturally competent mental health care for Myanmar communities around the world.
Raised by her grandmother because the political activism of her father—a former political prisoner and 88 Generation democracy activist—had caused her parents to flee to Thailand when she was young, Jue Jue eventually reunited with them in Thailand after a dangerous trip across the country. At that point a young adult, she resonated with the story of her father, and her mother’s work in anti-trafficking efforts along the Thai-Burma border. That exposure to proactive responses to injustice, and the value of resilience, sparked her own commitment to social justice, and a career focused on healing her community’s trauma.
Her understanding of inequality deepened after immigrating to the United States, where she experienced discrimination firsthand, her strong Burmese accent often costing her leadership opportunities despite her qualifications. Ideas she voiced in meetings were overlooked or appropriated by others. These experiences helped her better understand social, cultural and institutional influences on mental health.
This shift in her positionality—from majority to minority—also evoked a newfound empathy for ethnic minorities in Myanmar, and spurred her to examine the privileges she once took for granted as a Bamar in her country, where “the system is set up for Burmese to thrive.” She recalls being conditioned to view Indian-Burmese and Rohingya as second-class citizens. “They were carrying our… lunch basket and that kind of service they provided,” she says, with visible discomfort.
This understanding led in part to the creation of Jue Jue’s Safe Space, which offers equal opportunity for ethnic minority Burmese and makes a deliberate effort to uplift and learn from people across linguistic and ethnic lines.
Jue Jue sees this embrace of inclusivity is emblematic of a cultural shift in the new generation of Burmese, who seek genuine greater solidarity with ethnic communities, what she sees as a departure from past conditioning. She supports initiatives that honor ethnic food traditions, multilingual education, and storytelling from marginalized voices. “We need to first acknowledge the different ethnic background,” she says. “Not just the facts, but also the mindset, the respect that we have to pay each other.”
Jue Jue turns her attention to a critique of the patriarchy’s harmful entrenchment in Myanmar, where she notes that it has been romanticized as a kind of cultural ideal. However, she describes how it has then been used as a justification for hate crimes and other unhealthy social behaviors. Male dominance, she warns, is also a tool wielded for political manipulation; she sees this not just as an issue in Myanmar, but in the U.S. as well, where traditional gender roles are being emphasized to push exclusionary agendas. She urges people to be vigilant about how language and ideology can be weaponized in these ways.
Jue Jue discusses Buddhism, too, as a complex force in Burmese society. She distinguishes between the organized religious structure—which has sometimes aided exclusion—and the compassionate values and balance at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. Jue Jue urges Burmese Buddhists to recognize the suffering experienced by Myanmar’s minority Muslims during the recent earthquake—particularly those killed while praying in mosques.
All of her insights and values come together in Jue Jue’s Safe Space, which began as a self-funded passion project in 2019. At first just a Facebook page, it has since grown into a virtual and in-person platform offering therapy, community programs, webinars, and trainings in Burmese. The impetus for the project was deeply personal: “I didn’t have any safe people or safe space to share my struggles with as a young person,” she explains. Her father’s trauma as a former political prisoner affected the family’s emotional life, and wider Burmese society, she observed, lacked emotional literacy. “Burmese people are easily escalated, and it seems like they don’t have a lot of coping strategies.”
Recognizing all this, she wanted Jue Jue’s Safe Space to function as a forum to share personal stories and normalize mental health conversations in Burmese—a rare offering at the time. The page grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the 2021 coup, as psychological needs intensified. “We started to see these trends of suicide cases that just kept increasing,” she recalls. This demand motivated her to offer professional counseling services rooted in U.S.-based clinical standards while maintaining cultural sensitivity. “People in Burma deserve to receive the best service,” she says. “Sometimes… people just give this watered-down quality, and I think Myanmar and Burmese people deserve better.”
Returning to the topic of the roots of mental illness, she frames it not as a personal failing, but as a response to systemic injustice and intergenerational trauma. “This is not just happening during the pandemic or because of the coup,” she asserts. Burmese society, she argues, often shamed or dismissed mental illness. Through her work, Jue Jue endeavors to recast mental health as both a collective and systemic issue, where trauma can be acknowledged and healing made possible, blending social and spiritual frameworks. She says, “When we put pain and acceptance, it’s just pain. But if we put pain and rejection together, it becomes suffering.” That teaching, drawn from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and Buddhist philosophy, informs her approach to helping people accept and process their pain rather than repress it.
But at the present moment, Myanmar’s pain is uniquely acute. In the past five years alone, the population has endured a pandemic, a military coup, devastating violence, economic collapse, and a catastrophic earthquake. “We don’t get a break at all!” she exclaims. “One crisis after another… [it has] become chronic.” With mental health services lacking, many self-medicate through drugs or alcohol. She has seen children as young as 10 years old now sniffing glue to try and numb their pain.
To prevent further trauma, she emphasizes the need for proactive healing. “If we don’t allow this pain… to come out… it becomes trauma,” she warns. Her team has led workshops such as “Preventing Secondary Trauma for Humanitarian Workers” to teach coping strategies and resilience. “The only way we get to pass through the pain is to accept and… process it.”
That cultural shift is already underway. She recalls how, in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 coup, many Burmese voiced a sentiment previously unheard of in her country: “I’m not okay.” For her, this was a watershed moment. “Previously, we were not given permission to check in with ourselves,” she says. But now, younger generations are learning it’s okay to admit distress and seek help. Jue Jue’s Safe Space is helping guide that transition “from surviving to thriving.”
Still, challenges remain. Funding is limited. “I would pay my staff members out of my salary,” she says. “I don’t really have any grants or any secure funding.” Despite this, she’s received support from private donors and hopes more will see the value of building national peace through emotional well-being.
Regarding the sensitive question of how to view aggressors, she is conflicted. While acknowledging the Buddhist principle that oppressors often act out of their own untreated suffering, and in this way deserve equal compassion, she admits that as a clinician and a human being, “I’m not there yet.” She does draw a distinction between military elites and lower-ranking soldiers, some of whom—like CDM (Civil Disobedience Movement) participants—she has been supporting. “The imbalance is such a huge gap,” she says. Though if there is ever some acknowledgement of the suffering caused, or an apology that is issued, she believes that there may be some way to find common ground.
Looking forward, she hopes that Jue Jue’s Safe Space will continue to blossom into a full-fledged movement embedded in national policy. Whether operating from exile or returning to a post-authoritarian Myanmar, she envisions building outpatient clinics, addiction treatment centers, and media programming that integrate mental health into daily life. “We need to build strong foundations,” she says. “When the time is right, it’s just going to blossom right away.”
Jue Jue closes on a note of vision and encouragement: “We’re going to shine again. We’re going to lead the nation toward the international community… It’s just the hope that we cannot give up.”