My daughter was nearly 4 years old then. We streamed the movie one evening, and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so seen as when Louisa sang, “I’m the strong one, I’m not nervous. I’m as tough as the crust of the earth is.” She lamented her immense capabilities and how she’d rather not be flexing those capacities all the damn time.
I was so shook that I immediately texted one of my best girlfriends in California.
An exceptional corporate attorney and mom of two. “Have you seen Encanto? Did you listen to this song?” She wrote back in all caps with exclamation points about how this song felt like a love letter written just for us.
She, like me, was the primary breadwinner in her family—working 80-hour weeks. The question that haunted me most from the lyrics: “But wait, if I could shake the crushing weight of expectations, would that free up some room for joy or relaxation or simple pleasure?”
That line about pressure being “drip, drip, drip, ever increasing”—I’ve never related to something so much. The movie came out during a watershed moment for me, when I had decided to sell my therapy center and leave the Bay Area for a quieter life on the New England coast.
I knew the pressure was accumulating too much, and like Louisa, the psychological structure holding up my life was showing signs of strain. What started as economic necessity during the pandemic had evolved into something else entirely—a way for my unresolved childhood trauma to latch onto one last coping pattern.
This is the story of the day my body finally said “no more” to being everyone’s rock, and how I began putting down what was never mine to carry…
I don’t think I was born to be “the strong one.” This identity was carefully constructed over years, brick by brick, expectation by expectation.
Looking back, I can see the early blueprints forming in my childhood. When you grow up in an environment where emotional needs often go unmet, you learn quickly to be self-sufficient. You learn that vulnerability is a luxury you can’t afford. If grownups don’t have their hands on the wheel, you learn that someone needs to hold things together, and if not you, then who?
The full manifestation of this identity took shape during the pandemic. Suddenly, I wasn’t just the emotionally strong one—I became the sole financial provider for my family, which now included a 16-month-old. The economic necessity created the perfect conditions for my unresolved childhood trauma to evolve into a full-blown coping pattern.
