Three People Said How Strong I’d Been. I Cried the Following March.

Mind · The Reading Room, Vol. 113 · 8 min read · what the research on keeping your feelings off your face found, for you and for the people you are protecting

“Tired of being the strong one” is what a woman types after she has held it together through her father’s illness, a restructure, a child’s crisis and her own quiet health scare, and been told, at every stage, how well she is coping. The strength is real. So is the cost. Research on hiding what you feel has measured that cost, and some of it lands on the people you were trying to protect.

The short answer: being tired of being the strong one usually means you have spent a long time holding back what you feel so that other people can lean on you. Research on this kind of expressive suppression links it to more negative emotion, less positive emotion, worse well-being and weaker relationships.¹ A separate experiment found that when people hid their feelings in conversation, the blood pressure of the person they were talking to rose, and rapport fell.²

My mother’s funeral was on a Thursday. I did the flowers, the order of service, the sandwiches, and a reading I had rewritten four times so that I could get through it without my voice going. It didn’t go. Afterwards, three people told me how strong I had been. I said thank you. On the Friday I went back to work, because there was a board paper due, and I finished it. I did not cry until the following March, in a supermarket car park, over nothing, for forty minutes.

I tell that story because being the strong one has a very particular shape. It is not that you feel nothing. It is that you have become extremely skilled at keeping what you feel from showing, because somebody has to stay upright, and everybody has always assumed it would be you.

Jump to: What “the strong one” is doing · What suppression costs you · What it costs them · What works better · One true sentence · Questions women actually ask

What does it mean to be the strong one?

It means being the person others lean on in a crisis, and being the one who does not visibly need leaning on in return. You keep your face composed at the hospital. You say “I’m fine” in a voice that ends the conversation. You manage everyone else’s distress while filing your own for later, and later rarely arrives.

From the outside it looks like resilience, and in part it is. From the inside there is usually a specific skill at work, and it has a name in the research.

Why am I so tired of being the strong one?

Partly because suppression is effortful, and partly because of what it does over time. In 2003 James Gross of Stanford and Oliver John of the University of California, Berkeley published five studies comparing people who habitually used expressive suppression with people who habitually used a different strategy, reappraisal, which means changing how you interpret a situation.¹

Their findings were consistent. People who relied on suppression experienced more negative emotion and expressed less positive emotion. They had worse social relationships and lower well-being. People who relied on reappraisal showed the opposite pattern across the board.¹

The key detail is in the definition. Suppression hides the feeling. It does not remove it. So the grief, the fear or the fury you kept off your face at the hospital is still there, running underneath, and you are spending energy every day keeping it from showing. That is a plausible reason why “the strong one” so often describes herself as tired rather than sad. The effort is the tiredness.

If you have been holding up so many people that you have lost track of what you yourself are carrying, the Quiet Audit lays it out in ten minutes, on one page. Start here.

Does being the strong one actually help the people around me?

This is the part most women find hardest to hear, because the whole point of being strong was to protect other people. In 2003 Emily Butler, working with Gross and colleagues, ran conversation experiments with pairs of people who did not know each other. One member of each pair was asked to hide her emotions during a conversation about an upsetting topic.²

When people suppressed, their partners’ blood pressure rose. Suppression reduced rapport and got in the way of the pair forming a relationship.² The people doing the suppressing also came off worse.²

These were strangers in a laboratory, not a daughter and her dying father, so the finding should be held lightly. But the mechanism is worth understanding. People read faces constantly. A face that shows nothing while something is clearly happening is harder to read, not easier, and it can leave the other person more on edge, and further away. The strength that was meant to reassure may, some of the time, leave the people you love feeling shut out.

What should I do instead of being strong all the time?

Not the opposite. Nobody is suggesting you fall apart in the board meeting or at the bedside. Suppression has its place in a genuine emergency, for a short time, and you are good at it for a reason.

The research points to two shifts. The first is to use suppression as a tool you pick up in a crisis and put down afterwards, rather than as the default setting for your whole life. The second is to let at least one person see what is actually going on. Not everyone. One. The goal is not to stop being dependable. It is to stop being the only person in your life who is never allowed to be depended on less.

If this has gone on for years and the tiredness now reaches into everything, it is worth checking whether it has become something with a clearer name, such as burnout or low mood. Our burnout guide, everyone keeps telling you how well you’re handling this, is a good place to start.

How do I stop being the strong one for everyone?

The practice is one true sentence, once a week, to one person you trust. The next time someone you are close to asks how you are, and you feel “fine” forming in your mouth, replace it with a single honest sentence instead. “Honestly, I’m exhausted.” “It’s been a hard month with Dad.” “I’m managing, just about.”

Pick the one that is true. If none of them is, write your own on the back of an envelope before the next family phone call, so it is ready when the question comes.

That is all. You do not have to explain. You do not have to cry. You are simply letting the outward sign match, for one sentence, what is going on inside. Watch what happens to the conversation, and to the other person’s face. More often than not, it opens.

For a lot of women this is harder than it sounds, because the automatic “fine” has been in use for thirty years. That is why it is one sentence, once a week, and not a new personality.

Questions women actually ask about this

Why am I always the strong one?

Often because you were good at it early and kept being needed. Composure in a crisis is a real skill and people rely on it. Over time, holding back your own feelings can become automatic, so you are cast as the strong one even when you are struggling, because nobody can see it.

Is it bad to always hide your emotions?

As a habit, research suggests it has costs. People who routinely suppress the expression of emotion report more negative emotion, less positive emotion, weaker relationships and lower well-being than people who reframe situations instead.¹ Occasional suppression in a crisis is different from suppression as a way of life.

What happens when the strong one breaks down?

Often it arrives late and out of proportion to the moment, such as tears over something small months after the real event. That delay is common after a long period of holding things in. If you are struggling to function, or the low mood persists, it is worth speaking to a doctor or therapist.

How do I tell people I’m not okay?

Start with one person and one sentence. Replace “fine” with a single honest line such as “I’m really tired, it’s been a hard month.” You do not need to explain everything at once. The first sentence is the hardest; the conversation usually follows.

Does hiding my feelings protect my family?

Not always. In experiments, when one person hid their emotions, their conversation partner’s blood pressure rose and rapport fell.² Keeping composed in a real emergency can help. As a permanent state, it may leave the people close to you feeling further away.

If the part that stings is that everyone sees you as fine when you are not, that particular gap has its own piece: nine people said you seem great, and you drove home and cried.

On the research. The emotion regulation studies are largely correlational and were conducted mostly with students; they cannot prove that suppression causes the outcomes. The conversation experiments used unacquainted pairs in a laboratory. Applying both to long-term family roles is an interpretation, stated as one.

References
1. Gross JJ, John OP. Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2003;85(2):348-362.
2. Butler EA, Egloff B, Wilhelm FH, Smith NC, Erickson EA, Gross JJ. The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion. 2003;3(1):48-67.

Written by Tomasz Nowak for Blue Leaf Journal.