The Day My Foundation Cracked Under the Weight of Being Everyone’s Rock

The Day My Foundation Cracked Under the Weight of Being Everyone’s Rock

Driven Women & Perfectionism • May 18, 2025

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Relational trauma is the emotional injury caused by repeated experiences of feeling unseen, unsafe, or unvalued in the significant relationships that were supposed to nurture and protect you—especially early ones. It’s not a single traumatic event like an accident or disaster, and it’s not about blaming anyone; it’s about the slow, accumulating impact of emotional neglect, inconsistency, or control that shapes how you relate to yourself and others. This matters to you because those early wounds quietly set the stage for why you might have taken on the role of ‘the strong one’—it felt like the safest way to survive. Understanding relational trauma helps you see that your struggle with being reliable isn’t just about willpower or character, but about a deep, unmet need for safety and recognition that you deserve to reclaim.

• You carry the heavy, often invisible burden of being ‘the strong one,’ a role quietly built from years of external expectations rather than your own self-exploration, and this weight can silently erode your sense of self until something finally cracks.
• Identity foreclosure explains how committing to the role of reliable caretaker early—especially when shaped by relational trauma—locks you into a fixed identity that feels safe but ultimately limits your ability to discover who you truly are beyond that role.
• When your foundation fractures under the pressure of these unmet internal needs, that breakdown becomes a crucial turning point where you can begin reclaiming your authentic self and open space for genuine joy, connection, and rest.

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.

1. I was so shook that I immediately texted one of my best girlfriends in California.
2. 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.
3. The Weight Becomes Unbearable
4. The Day It All Became Too Much
5. Continue Your Healing as a Driven Woman

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.

Over-functioning and severe workaholism became my default setting. I was running a therapy center that was growing rapidly, seeing a beyond-full clinical caseload, running an online course, publishing regularly, and trying to be present for my family. The lines blurred completely between Annie the person and Annie the provider, Annie the CEO, Annie the therapist, Annie the problem-solver.

The world reinforces this identity at every turn. When you’re good at carrying weight, people hand you more to carry. When you’re known for solving problems, everyone brings you their problems. When you never say no, no one expects you to start.

My professional success became both validation and prison. Each achievement, each media quote, each new client became evidence that this identity was working. Look at what you’ve built! Look at how many people you’re helping! Look at how necessary you are!

What I couldn’t see was how this identity was slowly hollowing me out from the inside. I was so busy being strong for everyone else that I had no idea how to be gentle with myself.

The Weight Becomes Unbearable

Your body always keeps the score, whether you’re listening or not. Mine kept score in increasingly visible ways.

I put on 50 pounds in the five years of growing and running the therapy center. Then came the thyroid cancer—the first in my family with no history of it. The chronic insomnia was laced through all of it, with 2 AM wake-ups being the norm, filled with anxiety about all the things I needed to do, all the people counting on me.

My beloved therapist had been warning me for a long time: “If you don’t slow down, you might end up with a chronic illness or an autoimmune disorder because of how hard you push yourself.” I nodded along during our sessions, acknowledging her wisdom intellectually while believing somehow that I was the exception. That won’t happen to me.

Meanwhile, my marriage was super strained. I was physically present but mentally always at work. I felt like I never had enough time for my daughter, and the guilt was constant, crushing. And time for friends? Forget about it.

The irony wasn’t lost on me: I was a therapist helping others set boundaries and practice self-care while I was running myself into the ground.

On paper, everything looked impressive. I was being quoted in major publications. The therapy center was thriving financially. From the outside looking in, I was a success story.

On paper, everything looked impressive… But inside? I was totally fucking miserable.

I felt like a car driving down the highway at 100 miles an hour with no gas in the tank, running on fumes and sheer determination, knowing that a breakdown was inevitable.

The Day It All Became Too Much

May 2023. I remember it with perfect clarity—the day I couldn’t ignore what my body had been trying to tell me.

It wasn’t one dramatic moment. There was no cinematic breakdown. Instead, it was after yet another night of waking up at 2 AM, heart racing, mind spinning with all the responsibilities waiting for me. It was the fifth night in a row I’d gotten only 4.5 hours of sleep.

That morning, I found myself paralyzed with exhaustion. I couldn’t move. I had no idea how I’d get through the day. My body had simply reached its limit and was refusing to cooperate with my mind’s demands.

I was supposed to be getting ready for work, but instead, I sat at my desk (housed in our 75 sq foot garage along with our washer/dryer, pantry, husband’s tool racks and home gym). I started sobbing. 3 AM and I was sobbing in my garage home office, husband and daughter asleep, super clear I couldn’t continue like this.

In that moment of complete physical shutdown, I heard my therapist’s voice in my head, warning me about the autoimmune disorders that often follow chronic stress. I thought about my daughter, who deserved a mother who was present. I thought about my marriage, strained to the breaking point. I thought about the 50 extra pounds, the thyroid cancer, the insomnia—all the ways my body had been screaming at me to stop.

And for the first time, I listened in a way that took traction. I HAD to make changes.

The fear was overwhelming. What would happen if I stepped back? Would everything I’d built collapse? Would we be okay financially? Would I still be valuable if I wasn’t constantly producing, achieving, solving? Who was I if not the strong one?

But in that moment, an even greater fear emerged—the fear of continuing on this path. I suddenly saw with crystal clarity where it led: to illness, to broken relationships, to a life that looked successful on paper but felt empty in reality.

That day, I knew I needed to change course. Like Louisa in Encanto, the pressure had become too much.

Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t pushing through. Sometimes your growth edge isn’t about continuing and working it through. Sometimes it’s admitting that what you’ve been carrying is crushing you. Sometimes your growth edge is fucking stopping.

I called in sick that day and canceled clients—something I almost never did, maybe the 3rd time in 13 years of clinical work—booked an emergency session with my therapist and had the conversation with my family that would change everything. It was time to make some radical changes, both internal and external.

If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with driven, ambitious women through relational trauma recovery therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching. And if this essay resonated, there’s more where it came from — my Substack newsletter goes deeper every week on relational trauma, nervous system healing, and the inner lives of ambitious women. Subscribe for free — I can’t wait to be of support to you.

The Clinical Reality of Being “The Strong One”: What Happens Inside the Rock

The identity of “the strong one” is one of the most clinically significant roles I encounter in my work with driven women. It often has roots deep in the family of origin — the child who learned, usually before she had language for it, that her job was to be unshakable. That other people’s distress was her responsibility. That her own needs were either secondary or invisible.

Amy is a 45-year-old hospital administrator who came to me after what she described as “a small breakdown” — a term she used apologetically, as if the breakdown needed to be minimized to be acceptable. She had been managing her department through a systems overhaul, supporting her aging parents, raising two teenagers, and holding her marriage together with what she called “the force of my will.” When the will finally gave out — when she found herself sitting in a hospital stairwell, unable to stop crying, unable to move — her first thought wasn’t “I need help.” It was: “What if someone sees me?”

What Amy encountered in that stairwell was the weight of a lifetime of carrying. The role of “the strong one” is not just a behavior pattern — it’s a neurological organizing principle. The nervous system has learned to stay in a state of chronic sympathetic activation — hypervigilance, readiness, always-on — because that’s what holding everything together requires. When the demand finally exceeds the capacity, the system doesn’t gracefully downregulate. It collapses. And the collapse is experienced as a failure, not as a body finally doing what bodies do when they’ve been pushed past their limits.

The clinical work for women who have built their identity around strength involves something counterintuitive: learning to let the self be seen in weakness, to receive care without immediately deflecting it, to have needs without making them invisible. This is harder than it sounds. The “strong one” role isn’t just a behavior. It’s an identity, and losing it — even partially — can feel like losing the self.

If you recognize yourself here — if the idea of not being the rock feels more threatening than any concrete consequence — that recognition is itself the beginning of something important. Trauma-informed therapy is one of the few spaces where the cost of that role can be honestly assessed, and where a different relationship with strength — one that includes the capacity to receive as well as to give — can be built. You don’t have to keep holding everything. Not alone.

Both/And: High Performance and Honest Feeling Can Coexist

The driven women I work with often arrive in therapy with an unspoken fear: if they stop pushing, everything falls apart. If they let themselves feel what they’ve been outrunning, they’ll never get back up. So they frame the choice in binary terms — keep performing or collapse. In my clinical experience, neither option is necessary.

Amy is an executive at a major tech company who hadn’t taken a sick day in three years. When she finally came to therapy, it wasn’t because she decided to — it was because her body decided for her. Migraines, insomnia, a jaw so clenched her dentist flagged it. She told me, “I can’t afford to fall apart,” and I told her the truth: she was already falling apart. She just hadn’t given herself permission to notice. What Amy needed wasn’t to dismantle her drive. It was to stop treating her own pain as an inconvenience to her productivity.

Both/And means this: you can be the person who delivers exceptional results at work and the person who cries in the car afterward. You can be fiercely competent and quietly terrified. You can want more and still appreciate what you have. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the full truth of what it means to be a driven woman navigating a world that rewards your output but not your wholeness.

The Systemic Lens: The Cultural Forces Behind Your Exhaustion

When a driven woman is struggling — with her mental health, her relationships, her sense of self — the cultural prescription is almost always individual: meditate, journal, set boundaries, practice self-care. These interventions aren’t wrong, but they’re radically incomplete. They place the burden of repair on the woman who was harmed, without ever naming the systems that created the conditions for harm.

The expectation that women — particularly ambitious, driven women — should manage careers, households, relationships, caregiving, and their own mental health without structural support isn’t a personal failure. It’s a systemic design flaw. When corporations demand 60-hour weeks and then offer “wellness programs” instead of workload reduction, when healthcare is tied to employment, when childcare costs more than college tuition in many states — the “wellness gap” driven women experience isn’t a gap in their self-care routines. It’s a gap in the social contract.

In my work with clients, I find it essential to name these forces explicitly. Your exhaustion is not a character deficit. Your difficulty “balancing” work and life isn’t a skills gap. You are attempting to meet inhuman expectations with human resources, and the system that set those expectations has no interest in adjusting them. Understanding this doesn’t solve the problem — but it stops you from internalizing it.

How to Heal: When the Rock Finally Gets to Rest

In my work with clients, the women who have spent years being everyone’s rock share a particular kind of exhaustion — not just the physical kind, but the bone-deep fatigue of never having had your own weight held by someone else. If your foundation has cracked, or is cracking, I want to reframe what that means: it’s not a failure. It’s your system telling the truth about what it’s been asked to carry, often for far too long. That crack is an invitation, even when it feels like a catastrophe.

The path forward for women in this pattern starts with a hard and important question: Whose needs have been centered your entire life, and when did yours stop mattering? Often the answer traces back well before the current relationships and responsibilities — back to childhood, where you learned that your role was to hold things together, stay steady, anticipate others’ feelings, and not add to anyone’s burden. That early learning is what we address in therapy. Until we do, the pattern tends to reconstitute itself no matter how many times you try to set limits on the outside.

Attachment-focused therapy is one of the primary approaches I use with clients navigating this pattern. When your earliest relational experiences taught you that love is conditional on your usefulness, or that needing things made you a problem, your nervous system internalized those lessons as survival rules. Attachment-focused work helps you revise those rules — not through insight alone, but through the corrective experience of a therapeutic relationship in which you can need things and still be held. That experience is more powerful than anything I can say in a blog post.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is another modality that’s particularly effective here. Parts work lets us get to know the part of you that became the rock — understand what it’s afraid would happen if you put down the weight, what it’s been protecting you from. That part isn’t the problem; it’s a part that took on an enormous job very early and has never been relieved of it. In my experience, when clients really connect with that part with compassion rather than frustration, something begins to shift at a level that pure willpower never reaches.

Practically, I often encourage clients to begin practicing what I call “receiving” in small, low-stakes ways — letting someone else pick the restaurant, accepting help with a task you’d normally handle solo, letting a friend sit with you in distress rather than immediately problem-solving your way out of it. It feels trivial. It’s not. You’re training your nervous system that receiving care won’t destroy you or the relationship, and that’s foundational work. Our Fixing the Foundations program is specifically designed to support this kind of deep relational rewiring.

I’d also invite you to consider what it would mean to let your relationships become more mutual — not perfectly equal, but genuinely reciprocal. That’s not a demand you make of others. It starts with you getting clear on what you need and learning to ask for it, which is often the most terrifying step of all. But it’s also the most important one.

You’ve held so much for so long. You deserve to be held too. Working with a therapist who understands how deeply this pattern runs — and who can be genuinely present with you in the process of releasing it — is one of the most meaningful investments you can make. Not just for yourself, but for everyone who loves you and wants to know the real you, not just the version that holds everything together.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
3. Bowlby J. Attachment and loss: retrospect and prospect. Am J Orthopsychiatry. 1982;52(4):664-678. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1982.tb01456.x. PMID: 7148988.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. Penguin Audio, 2012.
• Brown, Sandra L.. Women Who Love Psychopaths. Mask Publishing, 2018.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer