.entry-content .aw-definition-box .aw-term,
.entry-content .aw-definition-box p,
.entry-content .aw-definition-box .aw-kitchen-table {
font-style: normal !important;
font-family: inherit !important;
}
.entry-content .aw-definition-box .aw-term {
font-style: normal !important;
font-weight: 700 !important;
}

A Pep Talk For Those Times When You’re Struggling

THERAPY TOPICS • March 30, 2026

SUMMARY

This isn’t a pep talk about positive thinking. It’s the conversation I wish someone had offered during the seasons when everything felt like it was crumbling. If you’re in a hard chapter — if therapy is stirring things up, your relationship is shifting, or the ground won’t stop moving — this is written for you. You’re not falling apart. You’re reorganizing. And that’s different.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. You’re Struggling. I Know.
2. What Struggling Actually Means (And Doesn’t Mean)
3. The Science Behind Why It Feels This Hard
4. When the Ground Keeps Shifting
5. The Words That Have Held Women Through Hard Times
6. Both/And: You’re Struggling AND You’re Doing Better Than You Think
7. The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Struggle Harder and Hide It Better
8. Grounded Encouragement: What I Actually Want You to Know
9. A Note Before You Go
10. Frequently Asked Questions

You’re Struggling. I Know.

You’re struggling. I know.

Maybe it’s the kind of struggling that shows up in your body first — that tightness across your chest when you wake up at 3 AM, the way your jaw is clenched before you’ve even checked your phone. Maybe it’s the kind that lives behind your eyes, the low hum of it running underneath everything — the meetings, the dinners, the conversations where you say “I’m fine” and mean none of it.

Maybe something happened — a loss, a rupture, a season that just refuses to turn. Or maybe there’s no single thing you can point to, and that almost makes it harder, because how do you explain to anyone that you’re exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t fix?

Whatever it is, you’re here. And I’m glad you are.

This post isn’t going to tell you that everything happens for a reason, or that you just need to shift your mindset, or that gratitude will fix it. I’m a trauma therapist, and I’ve sat with too many women in their hardest moments to offer you that kind of hollow comfort. What I can offer is something more honest: a real pep talk, the kind I’d give you if you were sitting across from me in my office, the afternoon light coming through the window, a box of tissues on the table between us.

It starts here: with what’s actually true. And what’s actually true is that you’re struggling — and that’s okay. That doesn’t make you weak, broken, or behind. It makes you human. And it means this is exactly the right time to read what comes next.

What Struggling Actually Means (And Doesn’t Mean)

Here’s what I need you to hear, clearly: struggling is not the same as failing. It’s not a sign that you’re falling apart, that you can’t handle your life, or that something is fundamentally wrong with you. Struggling is what happens when life is genuinely difficult — when the weight of what you’re carrying is real, and your system is responding honestly to it.

DEFINITION

SELF-COMPASSION

Self-compassion is the practice of extending the same kindness, understanding, and patience to oneself that one would naturally offer a suffering friend. Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the world’s foremost self-compassion researchers, identified three core components: self-kindness versus self-judgment, common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification with pain.

In plain terms: The voice in your head that says “just push through” or “you should be handling this better” — that’s not strength. Self-compassion means treating yourself the way you’d treat someone you love who’s struggling. Research shows it builds more resilience than self-criticism ever could.

DEFINITION

STRUGGLE

In clinical terms, struggle is the natural response of a nervous system and psyche to demands that exceed current capacity. It is not dysfunction — it’s signal. Struggle tells us something important about what we need, what we’re missing, and where the system requires support. The therapeutic goal is not to eliminate struggle but to move through it without abandoning yourself in the process.

In plain terms: When you’re struggling, your system is not broken. It’s communicating. The work is learning to listen rather than override — and to respond to yourself with the care you’d extend to anyone else in the same pain.

For many driven women, the moment things get hard, the inner critic steps in immediately with a verdict: You should be handling this better. Other people manage. What’s wrong with you? That voice isn’t wisdom. It’s a wound. And it tends to show up loudest when you’re already down.

I want to be honest with you about something else, too: I can’t promise you that this hard time is happening for a reason, or that it’ll all make sense later, or that the universe has a plan. I don’t know that. What I do know is that hard times are part of the full architecture of a life — not a detour from it. And I know that how you treat yourself in the middle of them matters enormously.

So before we go any further: you don’t have to be okay right now. You don’t have to perform recovery or wellness or resilience. You can just be in it — and still be deserving of care, support, and gentleness. Including from yourself.

The Science Behind Why It Feels This Hard

There’s a reason why, when you’re struggling, everything feels harder. It’s not a character flaw. It’s neurobiology.

Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, has studied what happens in the brain when we’re suffering — and particularly what happens when we turn self-criticism on top of that suffering. Her research shows that self-criticism activates the body’s threat response, triggering the same stress hormones as external danger. When you’re already struggling and your inner critic piles on, you’re essentially adding fuel to a fire that’s already burning. You’re not toughening yourself up. You’re making the experience neurologically worse.

DEFINITION

PSYCHOLOGICAL RESILIENCE

Psychological resilience is the capacity to adapt and recover in the face of adversity, trauma, or significant stress. George Bonanno, PhD, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Teachers College and author of The End of Trauma, demonstrated through decades of longitudinal research that resilience is not a rare trait but the most common human response to loss and hardship — and that it coexists with genuine pain, not in spite of it.

In plain terms: Being resilient doesn’t mean you don’t hurt. It means you can hurt and still find your way back. If you’re reading this during a hard season, the fact that you’re still here, still searching for something that helps — that’s resilience in action, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Dr. Neff’s research also shows that self-compassion — treating yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a friend who was struggling — actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and restore” branch. It reduces cortisol. It increases oxytocin. It doesn’t make you soft or complacent; it makes you more regulated, more capable, more resilient. Self-compassion isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a physiological tool.

Russ Harris, PhD, psychologist, ACT therapist, and author of The Happiness Trap, adds another dimension to this. His work centers on what he calls psychological flexibility: the ability to make contact with the present moment — including painful feelings — without being hijacked by them. In his framework, the goal isn’t to feel better in order to act well. It’s to act in alignment with your values even while feeling the full weight of something hard. This is not about pushing through, minimizing, or bypassing. It’s about the radical idea that you can struggle and still move, still choose, still be present for your own life.

What both of these researchers understand — and what I’ve witnessed across thousands of clinical hours — is that the antidote to struggle is not strength. It’s contact. Contact with yourself. Contact with reality. Contact with what you actually need. The suffering intensifies when we fight the struggling itself. When we demand that it not be happening. When we layer shame on top of pain.

Thank you — check your inbox.

Your guide is on its way.

So here’s what the science is actually asking of you: not to be stronger, not to think more positively, not to get it together. It’s asking you to be a little kinder to yourself, right now, exactly as you are. That’s a harder ask than it sounds. For many driven women, self-compassion is the most uncomfortable thing I can suggest. But it’s the one that actually works.

When the Ground Keeps Shifting

Camille is the person everyone else leans on. She’s the one who shows up when things get hard — for her mother, her team at work, her friends when their relationships fall apart. She’s good at it. She’s been practicing her whole life.

So when her own season of difficulty arrived — a health scare, a relationship that quietly dissolved, a career pivot that didn’t land the way she’d expected — she had no template for how to receive support. She knew how to give it. She had no idea how to be in it herself without immediately trying to fix it or minimize it or make it make sense.

She told me she kept waiting to feel better. Like it was something to get through as efficiently as possible. She scheduled things. She made plans. She researched her way through grief — which is a particular driven-woman coping mechanism I recognize immediately, because I’ve seen it in so many women’s lives: the idea that if you understand the thing well enough, you won’t have to feel it so much.

What shifted for Camille wasn’t a breakthrough. It was a moment, sitting on her kitchen floor at 11 PM, still in her work clothes, eating cereal out of the box, that she thought: I’m not okay, and maybe I don’t have to be right now. Not as resignation. As permission. As the first real breath she’d taken in months.

That moment didn’t fix anything. The health scare was still there. The relationship was still over. The career path was still uncertain. But something in Camille landed — and from that landing, she could begin to actually work with what was real rather than fight it. She started therapy the following week. Not because she’d finally fallen apart — but because she’d finally stopped pretending she hadn’t.

The Words That Have Held Women Through Hard Times

There’s a reason certain words survive generations. They get passed from woman to woman not because they solve anything, but because they hold something. They remind us that we’re not the first person to feel this way — and that people who felt this way went on, nonetheless, to live full and meaningful lives.

What I love about Angelou’s words — beyond their beauty — is that they don’t deny the wound. They don’t say “none of this matters” or “you’ll be fine.” They say: all of this is happening, and still. Still. That single word holds everything. The acknowledgment of what’s real and the insistence that it won’t be the last word.

I think about this often when I’m working with driven women who are in the middle of something hard. The goal isn’t to transcend the difficulty. The goal is to remember — in the middle of it — that you have risen before. Maybe not from this exact thing. But from hard things. You have a history of surviving things that felt unsurvivable. That history belongs to you, even when the current moment makes it hard to feel.

Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work returns again and again to the question of how to live fully in a complicated world, asked it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” I bring her into this not as a prod to be more productive — I’m not asking you to make the most of your hard season. I’m asking you to remember that this moment belongs to that life. It counts. You’re in it. And the fact that you’re still asking questions, still looking for something true — that matters.

Both/And: You’re Struggling AND You’re Doing Better Than You Think

One of the hardest things to hold when you’re in a hard season is that two things can be true at once. Your brain, under duress, wants to collapse things into either/or. Either I’m handling this or I’m not. Either I’m okay or I’m falling apart. Either I’m strong or I’m weak. The binary feels certain — and certainty feels safer than complexity when everything is already uncertain.

But the Both/And is the more accurate picture. And it’s the one that actually allows you to move.

You’re struggling and you’re showing up. You’re exhausted and you’re still here. You’re not okay and you haven’t given up. You feel alone in this and you’re reading something right now, which means part of you is still reaching for connection, still looking for a handhold. You want to feel better and you haven’t betrayed yourself by being in pain.

In my clinical work, I often introduce this framework to women who come in deeply ashamed of their own struggle — because they’ve spent so long measuring themselves against an impossible standard of unfailing capability. When everything is hard, they don’t conclude that the standard is too high. They conclude that they’ve failed it. And that conclusion makes everything harder.

The Both/And reframe isn’t about making yourself feel better artificially. It’s about getting the picture right. If the picture you’re working from is “I’m struggling, therefore I’m failing,” you’ll keep trying to solve for the struggle by pushing harder, performing more, or shrinking into shame. None of those responses actually help. But if the picture is “I’m struggling AND I’m still doing things right” — that creates a different set of options. It creates room for compassion, for rest, for asking for what you actually need.

Elena came to me convinced that her difficulty was evidence of a personal failure. She was a physician in her late thirties, running a practice, raising two children, and managing a marriage that had quietly become a co-parenting arrangement more than a partnership. She told me, very precisely, that she didn’t have time to struggle. That other people would fall apart if she did. That she wasn’t allowed.

What we worked on together — slowly, over months of individual therapy — was helping her see that her struggle wasn’t competing with her capability. It was happening alongside it. She was maintaining her practice. She was there for her kids. She was doing an extraordinary number of things that required skill and care and attention. And she was also suffering. Both things were true. And her suffering didn’t undo everything else. It was just the part she’d never let herself acknowledge.

That acknowledgment — that simple, radical act of letting her own pain be real — is where the healing began. Not the performance of healing. The actual thing.

The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Struggle Harder and Hide It Better

I need to say something that doesn’t get said enough: the particular difficulty that driven, ambitious women have with struggle isn’t personal. It’s structural.

We live in a culture that rewards capability, productivity, and the appearance of effortless competence — especially in women. Ambition is expected to look clean. Burnout is something you power through. Emotional need is something you manage privately, preferably in a therapy office on your lunch break, with your out-of-office reply already set for 1:00 PM. The message is consistent: you can struggle, but you cannot let it show. And you certainly can’t let it affect your output.

For women in leadership — physicians, executives, founders, attorneys — this pressure is intensified by environments that were not built with their full humanity in mind. The professional cultures many driven women have succeeded in were designed by and for people who weren’t expected to also carry the emotional weight of families, aging parents, and interpersonal relationships that require ongoing tending. When you try to bring all of yourself to a system that wasn’t designed for all of you, something has to give. Usually it’s the internal world. The private one. The one where the struggling lives.

Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, research professor at the University of Houston and author of Daring Greatly, has written extensively about the cost of the armor we wear to protect against vulnerability in professional settings. Her research shows that the greatest barrier to connection — and to being seen and supported when we need it — is the story we tell ourselves that vulnerability is weakness. It isn’t. It’s the most accurate possible reading of the human condition. We all have limits. We all hurt. We all need other people. The woman who appears never to struggle isn’t stronger — she’s just better at hiding it. And that hiding comes with a cost.

So if you’re struggling right now, and struggling with the fact that you’re struggling — can I offer you a reframe? This difficulty isn’t evidence of weakness. It’s evidence that you’re a full human being operating inside systems that don’t always honor that. The problem was never you. It’s the gap between what the world asks of driven women and what the world offers us in return.

Asking for support — whether that’s executive coaching, therapy, or simply letting someone know you’re not fine — is not a concession to the system. It’s a refusal to let the system’s demands be the only thing that matters. It’s a form of self-reclamation.

Grounded Encouragement: What I Actually Want You to Know

Here’s what I want to say to you directly, without hedging:

You are not too much. You’re not too sensitive, too demanding, too emotional, or too needy for being in pain. You’re a person with a nervous system and a history and a life that has asked a great deal of you. The fact that you’re struggling is not evidence that you can’t handle it. It’s evidence that you’re honest enough — at least with yourself — to know that it’s hard.

The hard season will not last forever. I know it doesn’t feel that way from inside it. Hard seasons have a particular quality of permanence — like they’re the truth of your life rather than a chapter of it. But I’ve watched hundreds of women move through seasons that felt just like this one. Not painlessly. Not on a timeline anyone would choose. But through. And on the other side, they didn’t just survive — they found things they couldn’t have found any other way: clarity, deeper relationships, parts of themselves they didn’t know were there.

You don’t have to do this alone. I mean this practically. Isolation is one of the most reliable ways to make a hard time harder. It cuts you off from the perspective, comfort, and regulation that other people provide. If you’re not already in therapy — and this is a harder moment than you can navigate alone — I’d encourage you to reach out. If therapy isn’t available right now, lean toward any form of honest connection: a friend who doesn’t need you to be okay, a group, a community, a letter you write and don’t send but at least let yourself speak the truth in.

What you’re doing in this hard time matters. How you treat yourself in the middle of struggle — whether you abandon yourself with harsh criticism, numb out entirely, or find small ways to stay in contact with your own experience — will shape who you are on the other side of it. I’m not asking you to perform some theatrical version of self-care. I’m asking you to not be cruel to yourself. To eat something. To sleep when you can. To say no to one unnecessary thing. To let someone see you, even a little. These small things accumulate into something.

You have survived every hard thing that has ever happened to you. Your survival rate is 100%. I know that sounds like a bumper sticker, but I mean it as something more precise: you have a documented record of getting through things that felt unsurvivable. That record exists. It belongs to you. It’s not nothing. It’s actually a great deal of evidence.

If you’re in a season where relational trauma is part of what’s making things hard — if the struggling is connected to a relationship that hurt you, a childhood that left marks, or patterns that keep repeating — I want you to know that there is specific, effective help for that. This isn’t just generic struggle. It has roots. And those roots can be understood and, eventually, metabolized. The work of healing the foundations is real and it’s available to you.

A Note Before You Go

Before you close this page and go back to whatever you were doing — whether that’s the next task, the next obligation, the next version of keeping everything together — I want to leave you with something simple.

You found this. You were looking for something — maybe you didn’t even know exactly what — and you found this. That reaching matters. It’s not nothing. In fact, it’s the whole thing.

Struggling is part of what it means to care deeply about your life. People who are checked out don’t struggle. They’re numb. You’re struggling because something matters to you — your relationships, your work, your sense of self, the future you’re trying to build. The struggle is, in a strange way, a sign of how much you’re still in this.

So here’s the pep talk in its most essential form: You’re in a hard season. You’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re not alone — even when it feels that way. And you have options: for support, for help, for healing that goes deeper than coping. If any of what I’ve written here landed, I’d encourage you to take the next small step — whatever that looks like for you. Reaching out to a therapist. Taking a quiz to understand yourself a little better. Reading something that helps you feel less alone. Letting yourself rest.

You don’t have to figure all of this out today. You just have to take the next small step. And you’ve already taken one by being here.

I’m rooting for you.

Related Reading

• Neff, Kristin. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. New York: William Morrow, 2011.
• Bonanno, George A. The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD. New York: Basic Books, 2021.
• Harris, Russ. The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living. Boston: Trumpeter Books, 2008.
• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Gotham Books, 2012.
• van der Kolk, Bessel, MD. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.

{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “FAQPage”,
“mainEntity”: [
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “Is it normal to feel like I can’t stop struggling even when my life looks fine from the outside?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “Yes — and this is one of the most common things I hear from driven, ambitious women. The gap between an external life that looks impressive and an internal life that feels heavy is real and it’s painful. It’s also one of the things that makes it harder to ask for help, because the evidence people see doesn’t match what you’re experiencing. The fact that you have built something external doesn’t mean your internal world is okay. Both things can be true, and the internal world matters just as much.”
}
},
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “How do I know if what I’m feeling is normal struggle or something I need professional help for?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “A useful distinction: struggling that you can move through over time, that doesn’t significantly impair your functioning, and that ebbs and flows — that’s the normal human experience of hard times. But if you notice the struggle is lasting longer than a few weeks without lifting at all, if it’s affecting your ability to work or care for yourself or others, if it includes persistent hopelessness or thoughts of harming yourself — that’s a signal to get professional support. Therapy isn’t just for crisis. It’s also for the sustained, grinding difficulty that doesn’t cross any obvious clinical line but is making your life significantly smaller. If you’re wondering whether to seek help, that wondering itself is often a sign that it would be worth it.”
}
},
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “Why does self-compassion feel so uncomfortable or even wrong when I’m struggling?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “For most driven women, self-compassion feels like giving up — because somewhere along the way, you learned that pushing through and being hard on yourself was what worked. It produced results. It kept things moving. Self-compassion feels like the opposite of that, and it feels unfamiliar, soft, even dangerous. But what research consistently shows is that self-compassion doesn’t reduce motivation or performance. It actually supports both by reducing the threat response in the nervous system. The internal critic you’ve been relying on is making it harder, not easier. That’s not intuitive, but it’s true.”
}
},
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “I feel guilty for struggling when other people have it worse. How do I deal with that?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “Pain isn’t comparative. The fact that someone else’s situation is objectively harder doesn’t mean yours isn’t genuinely difficult — and it doesn’t mean your experience doesn’t warrant care and attention. Comparison is one of the most effective ways to invalidate your own experience and make it harder to get the help you need. Your struggle is real. It doesn’t need to be the worst possible struggle to deserve your attention, your compassion, and other people’s support.”
}
},
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “What’s the difference between going through a hard time and being in a trauma response?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “Hard times are situational — they’re usually connected to something identifiable: a loss, a transition, a disappointment. They tend to respond to time, support, and active coping. A trauma response has a slightly different quality: it can feel disproportionate to the current moment, it often involves a nervous system that’s stuck in fight, flight, or freeze, and it can be triggered by things that seem unrelated to the original event. Importantly, trauma responses often have their roots in earlier experiences — childhood relational wounding is one of the most common underlying factors. If you find that your current struggle feels bigger than the circumstances warrant, or that certain situations seem to disproportionately derail you, it may be worth exploring whether earlier experiences are part of what’s activated. That’s work best done in therapy.”
}
},
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “How do I support myself during a hard time without completely falling apart or completely shutting down?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “What helps most is what I’d call “titrated contact” with your own experience — not drowning in the feelings, and not walling them off entirely, but making small, regular contact with what’s actually happening inside you. Practically, this looks like: keeping some structure to your days, because structure is regulating; moving your body, even just walking; staying in some form of honest connection with at least one person; naming what you’re feeling, even if only in a journal; and limiting choices and decisions where possible, since our executive function degrades under sustained stress. You don’t need a perfect self-care protocol. You need a few anchors. And you need to be willing to reach for support before you’re in full crisis.”
}
}
]
}

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women -- including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs -- in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

Work With Annie

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer