The Strong One (and What She Never Got to Grieve)
A midweek thought to carry gently…
You’re the first call.
When something breaks — a marriage, a diagnosis, a Tuesday — your phone is the one that rings. You’re the one who knows what to do, who stays level, who handles it. Every family has one. Every team has one. And if you can’t immediately think of who it is in yours, I have gentle news for you about who it is.
So here’s the thing we’ve agreed not to say:
“The strong one” is not a personality.
It’s a job — assigned before you were old enough to read the contract.
Nobody applies for it. It gets handed out early, usually to the child who noticed the most, in the house that needed the most noticing. And it comes with one clause written in invisible ink: your own losses will be handled at a later date. The later date never comes. Strong ones don’t skip grief because they don’t feel it. They skip it because grief requires something they’ve never had — someone standing by to catch them.
We called her strong, when really she had no one to fall apart on.
We called her dependable, when really she was unattended.
We said “she can handle it,” when really no one ever offered to help her carry it.
(If you started this reflection thinking of someone else who needs it — beloved, I mean you.)
And the strength itself deserves honor before anything else. It was real. It got children raised and bills paid and funerals organized. Becoming capable was not a mask — it was a masterpiece of adaptation, built by someone very young who understood the assignment perfectly: if I am strong enough, we survive this. You were. You did. The problem was never the strength. The problem is that no one ever relieved you, and somewhere along the way your turn to be held got postponed so many times it fell off the calendar entirely.
The strong one grieves too.
She just never got her turn.
And she has things to grieve — real ones. The childhood spent on duty. The help that never came. The people who loved what she did for them and called it loving her. The version of herself she might have been if someone else had taken a shift. These are losses. They count. Ungrieved doesn’t mean unfelt — it means the funeral is still pending, and your body has been quietly paying the storage fees. (You learned about those receipts two weeks ago.)
The shortest verse in my faith’s whole book is two words: “Jesus wept.” He stood at the tomb of a friend he was minutes from raising — he knew the ending, he knew it was a good one — and he stopped and cried in front of everyone anyway. The strongest one in the story took his turn. Publicly. Un-rushed. Which means tears were never the opposite of strength or the failure of faith. They were what strength looks like when it finally trusts the room.
Now the cost, told straight: taking your turn will cost you the job title. People who have only ever seen you competent will not know what to do with your tears at first — some will be uncomfortable, a few will be strangely disappointed, and one or two will finally, actually see you. Grief that has waited decades doesn’t come in one clean cry; it comes in layers, on its own schedule, usually at inconvenient times. And the hardest cost: you will have to let someone catch you badly before they learn to catch you well. Being held is a skill on both sides, and you’re both beginners.
Take the turn anyway. It has waited long enough. So have you.
A 60-second practice: the turn
One hand over your heart. Let it be heavy — the hand, not the moment. Feel the warmth of it through your shirt.
Now name, silently, one loss you never grieved because you were busy being strong. Then say to it, in your own inside voice:
“That mattered. That was a loss. It counts.”
Then let your eyes do whatever they want for sixty seconds. Watering is permitted. So is nothing. Grief postponed this long doesn’t perform on command — the practice is only to tell it the calendar finally has an opening.
A landing-point prayer (if this is part of your path)
God, You wept, and nobody in the story called You weak.
I have losses filed under “later.”
It’s later.
I don’t know how to be caught — I’ve only ever done the catching.
So go slowly with me.
And don’t let go first.
Amen.
You’re not falling apart. You’re finally taking your turn.
One Wednesday at a time.
With you, in strength and softness,
Kristi
Kristi M. Estrada, LPC-S, NCC, SEP writes about trauma from both sides of the couch. She aged out of foster care with a suitcase and a survival plan, and spent years being called strong when what she was, was alone. She became a somatic trauma therapist, clinical supervisor, and the creator of Trauma Restorative Care™ — not because healing came easy to her, but because it didn’t. Her faith has been broken, misused, and rebuilt by hand, which is why she doesn’t write tidy ones. She is the Clinical Director of Healing Servant Therapy in Phoenix, where she sees clients, trains therapists, and writes weekly at healingservant.com.