Trying To Be Strong

Many people with health struggles try and be strong for their kids, for their spouses, or for whoever they perceive needs them. But what if the very act of trying to be strong actually weakens you? Strength isn't something that you can try to have. You can have a willingness to keep going, you can have perseverance, but strength is something that comes from within you. You can't create it or superimpose strength based on an idea of how you believe you ought to be.

I see women who have ideas of how they ought to function and then they pressure themselves to try and fit into the mold that they create of how a good mother, spouse, or employee should function. When they can't function at their own ideal, they get anxious about not measuring up and about people seeing their pain. Life shows them that people can’t handle their pain and so they try and be strong but what actually happens is that trying to be strong causes a lot of anxiety. Chronic anxiety creates internal pressure and contraction which aggravates their underlying condition.

People in chronic pain go to great lengths to try and shield other people from the discomfort of seeing their pain. But people, particularly children, feel it anyway. Even if you're trying to hide your pain, I can assure you that your children still feel it. Even if your children don’t know intellectually that you're in pain, they'll feel an aloofness, a disconnectedness that they won't be able to understand.

In my experience, it's far better to just be honest and show up as you are, even if it's not how you wish that you were. When you're trying to do something with a child and you don't have the energy or you're in too much pain, you just look in that child's eyes and tell them the truth. “I really wish I could do this right now but it's beyond my body is out of power”. You apologize if you're irritable. “Oh, I'm sorry I'm showing up with this much irritability. My head is really sore. I'm not meaning to take this out on you.” Otherwise, on a subtle level, you're actually teaching your children that how they are in any given moment isn't okay. By hiding yourself, you're inadvertently teaching them to hide themselves, and I know that’s not what you want for them.

Nobody wants to be limited. Nobody wants to be in pain. And it's true that other people don't necessarily want to hear you story and it does make some people uncomfortable, but people are actually more uncomfortable with people who are trying to be something that they're not. If you're pretending to be at ease, it will make you awkward which people find even more uncomfortable to be around.

I’m not recommending that you tell everybody your woes. I'm suggesting that with discretion and as much grace as possible, you show up in your relationships with as much authenticity as possible. To the extent that you can, release your ‘shoulds’ and your ideas of how you ought to be. When you show up as you are, you create more space for healing.