Everyone calls you strong. They have been calling you strong since you were a child. You handled the divorce at nine without falling apart. You managed the family crisis at fourteen without breaking down. You buried your grief at twenty, your rage at thirty, your exhaustion at forty, and you are still standing. And I mean that.Still functioning. Still showing up. Still being the person that everyone leans on, everyone turns to, everyone describes with that particular tone of admiration that you have come to recognize as the sound of being permanently, irrevocably drafted into the role of the unbreakable.
The mythology goes like this: some people are just built stronger than others. They can handle more. They can carry more. They can absorb more. They are naturally resilient, naturally tough, naturally capable of enduring what would destroy lesser people. The mythology is a lie. Not a malicious lie - a convenient one. Convenient for the people around you who benefit from your carrying capacity. Convenient for the culture that values production over personhood. And convenient for you, because the mythology gives you an identity that is socially rewarded, interpersonally useful, and psychologically safe. The strong person never has to be vulnerable. The strong person never has to ask for help. The strong person never has to feel the terror of being fully human - fully breakable, fully needy, fully dependent on other people's care. The armor protects. And the protection costs everything.
Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart is the book I give to anyone going through a dark night. *(paid link)*
I know this mythology from the inside. I lived it for decades. Five Emmys and a body of work that most people would consider amazing - and behind all of it, a person who had not cried in years because crying was weakness and weakness was death. Not metaphorical death. The kind of death that a child's nervous system registers when the adults in the room cannot hold what the child is feeling, and the child learns: if I fall apart, no one will catch me. So I must never fall apart. And I did not. For decades. Until the not-falling-apart became the thing that was killing me - not through dramatic collapse but through the slow, invisible erosion of everything that makes a person human: the ability to feel, to connect, to rest, to be held, to be soft, to be anything other than the unbreakable surface that the world required and the child learned to provide.
I recommend keeping black tourmaline near your workspace, it absorbs negative energy like a sponge. *(paid link)* Look, I know how this sounds. Crystal healing whatever. But here's the thing ~ when you're constantly performing strength, constantly being the rock everyone leans on, you need something that just... takes the hit. Black tourmaline doesn't judge you. It doesn't need you to be anything. It just sits there and soaks up the psychic crud that builds up when you're always saying "I'm fine" while everything inside is screaming. Think of it as energetic armor for people who are tired of wearing the other kind.
The Cost of the Armor
The armor costs you I remember sitting in Amma’s darshan, surrounded by thousands, feeling the weight of years carrying grief and anger like armor. A moment came when her hand reached my head, and something inside me cracked open—not with a burst, but with a slow, shaking release deep in my chest and belly. That trembling wasn’t weakness. It was a long-stifled “no more” slipping out through the body’s language before my mind caught up. Years ago, during a workshop on emotional release, a man came forward, rigid like he’d been holding a mountain inside him for decades. As we worked with his breath and nervous system, I saw the armor begin to soften, muscles unclench, tears come unbidden. It reminded me... strength isn’t the absence of breaking, but the courage to let the cracks show and finally heal. your body. Strength, as the culture defines it, is the chronic suppression of vulnerability. And vulnerability - the emotional kind - is processed by the same nervous system that processes physical sensation. When you suppress the emotional, you suppress the physical. The strong person loses access to their body's signals: the pain that would have told them to stop, the fatigue that would have told them to rest, the illness that would have told them something is wrong. They override these signals with the same willpower that overrides their tears. And the body, overridden long enough, stops sending signals and starts sending symptoms. Autoimmune conditions. Chronic pain. Mysterious fatigue. Heart disease. Cancer. The body is not failing the strong person. The body is dying of unexpressed truth. Explore more in our healing hub guide.
The armor costs you your relationships. You can be admired or you can be known. You cannot be both. The strong person is admired for their armor. They are not known because the armor prevents access. Their partner loves a performance. Their friends trust a function. Their children inherit a model of emotional unavailability that will shape their own relationship to vulnerability for the rest of their lives. The strong person is alone inside the armor. And the aloneness is the cruelest cost of all - because the armor was built to prevent the abandonment the child feared, and the armor produces the isolation the adult experiences. You built the wall to keep out rejection. The wall kept out connection. And now you are safe and alone and the safety feels exactly like the abandonment you were trying to prevent. Paul explores this deeply in Forensic Forgiveness.
Taking Off the Armor
You do not take off the armor all at once. The armor has been load-bearing for decades. Removing it without support would collapse the structure it has been holding up. You take it off one piece at a time, in the presence of someone who can hold what the armor was protecting. Think about that - the armor isn't just protection, it's become your damn skeleton. Pull it off too fast and you're left with nothing but soft tissue and terror. I've watched people try this rapid-fire approach, thinking courage means ripping everything away in one dramatic gesture. Bullshit. That's not courage, that's panic. Real courage is the slow, methodical work of finding someone trustworthy enough to witness your actual bones, your actual heart, the stuff you've kept hidden so long you forgot it was there. The armor comes off when you finally believe someone else can handle the weight of who you really are underneath all that steel.
Start with one person. One person you trust enough to show one crack in the surface. One moment of honesty. One admission of tiredness. One sentence that sounds nothing like the strong person and everything like the human being behind them: I am not okay. I need help. I do not know what to do. Each of these sentences, spoken out loud to another human being, is a piece of armor being set down. And the setting down will activate every alarm in your system. The child who learned that vulnerability equals abandonment will scream: pick it back up. Know what I mean?They will leave. They will lose respect. They will see the weakness and they will go. You might also find insight in The Healing Crisis: When Getting Better Feels Worse.
A weighted blanket can feel like a hug from the universe, especially on nights when the mind will not stop. *(paid link)* There's something about that gentle pressure that cuts through the bullshit our brains throw at us when we're trying to rest. You know those nights. When every worry decides to throw a fucking party in your head right when you hit the pillow. The weight doesn't judge you for falling apart. It just holds you while you do. It's weird how we've forgotten what it feels like to be held without having to perform strength in return. No explaining. No fixing. No pretending the cracks aren't showing. Just this steady pressure that says "I've got you" while your nervous system finally downshifts from survival mode. Think about that. When was the last time you let something support you without immediately thinking about how to give back? The blanket doesn't need your gratitude or your resilience. It just needs you to lie still and let it do its one simple job.
Watch what actually happens. In most cases - not all, but most - the person does not leave. They lean in. They soften. They meet your vulnerability with their own. And in that meeting - that mutual softening, that moment where two people are both human at the same time - something shifts that the armor could never shift. The nervous system receives the experience it has been starving for since childhood: I was vulnerable and I was not abandoned. I showed my weakness and I was held. The experience does not erase the armor overnight. But it provides counter-evidence. And counter-evidence, accumulated over months and years of small, brave acts of vulnerability, eventually outweighs the childhood evidence that made the armor necessary. You might also find insight in Sacred Solitude vs Toxic Isolation - And How to Tell Whic....
Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now remains one of the most important spiritual books of our time. *(paid link)*
The strong person does not become weak by taking off the armor. They become whole. Strength that includes vulnerability is not less strong. It is more durable, more flexible, more capable of absorbing shock without shattering. A rigid structure breaks under pressure. A flexible structure bends. The armor made you rigid. The removal of the armor makes you human. And human - in all its messy, vulnerable, terrifyingly unprotected beauty - is the strongest thing you can be. Not because it cannot break. Because when it breaks, it can repair. And repairability, not invulnerability, is the only real strength there is. If this strikes a chord, consider an deep healing session.