Redefining Strength: When “Being Strong” Becomes a Prison
When you go through cancer, people call you strong.
They mean it as a compliment — a way to lift you, to hold you steady in the storm. They tell you how inspiring you are. How brave. How remarkable it is that you’re still smiling through it all.
But what they don’t realize is that sometimes, being called strong can feel like another burden to carry.
Because once you’ve been labelled “the strong one,” you feel like you have to live up to it — even when you’re breaking inside.
During my own journey, I heard those words a lot.
“You’re so strong.”
“You’ve got this.”
“You’re a fighter.”
And for a while, I clung to them like a life raft. I needed to believe that narrative — that I was unbreakable — because if I allowed myself to feel just how terrified I was, I didn’t know if I’d get back up again.
But the truth is, I wasn’t strong.
I was scared.
I was angry.
I was exhausted.
There were nights I lay awake replaying every mistake I thought I’d made that might have contributed to my illness. Days I put on a brave face for my kids while inside I was falling apart. I was strong only because I had no other choice — because collapsing wasn’t an option when you’re the parent, the provider, the patient, and the person everyone else is watching for cues.
And so, I wore strength like armour. It protected me, but it also imprisoned me.
That’s what no one tells you about strength — when misunderstood, it becomes a mask that hides your humanity. It stops you from crying when you need to. It silences the truth of your pain. It keeps you performing a version of yourself that looks resilient but feels hollow.
After treatment, when the scans finally came back clear, everyone around me seemed to exhale. “You did it,” they said. “You beat it. You’re so strong.”
But I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t relieved. I was numb. The adrenaline that had carried me through years of fighting had nowhere to go. And beneath the armour, everything hurt.
That’s when I realised that the kind of strength that gets you through cancer is not the kind that heals you after it.
Read that again… the kind of strength that gets you through cancer is not the kind that heals you after it.
The strength that helps you survive is all about endurance — holding on, pushing through, refusing to give in. But the strength that helps you heal is something entirely different. It’s about softness. Vulnerability. The courage to let go.
And for many of us, that kind of strength feels foreign. Especially for men — we’ve been taught to equate strength with control. To hold it together. To never show weakness. But what I’ve learned — through cancer, through heartbreak, through rebuilding my life from scratch — is that true strength begins where control ends.
Healing asked me to do the very thing I had avoided most: to stop being strong.
To stop pretending I was fine.
To stop hiding behind resilience.
It asked me to cry in front of my children. To admit that I was lost. To feel the anger and grief I had buried for years. It asked me to let go of who I thought I was supposed to be, so that I could start becoming who I actually was.
And in that surrender, something unexpected happened — I began to feel free.
I began to realise that vulnerability isn’t the opposite of strength; it’s the evolution of it. That there is immense power in honesty, in saying, “I’m not okay right now,” and letting someone else see you in your truth.
The armour I once believed was saving me had actually been keeping me from healing. It had protected me from pain, yes — but it had also kept love, comfort, and connection at a distance.
I see the same thing now in so many of the patients I work with — men and women who fought their way through unimaginable adversity, but who, once the battle was over, couldn’t stop fighting. Their bodies healed, but their nervous systems didn’t get the memo. They stayed locked in survival mode — always vigilant, always braced for the next hit.
Because when you’ve lived in crisis for long enough, peace can feel unsafe.
That’s why true healing after cancer — or after any life-altering event — isn’t just about physical recovery. It’s about teaching the body and the mind that it’s finally safe to rest. Safe to soften. Safe to live again.
And that process begins by redefining what strength means.
Strength isn’t about enduring endlessly. It’s about knowing when to stop. It’s the ability to ask for help. It’s the humility to say, “I can’t do this alone.” It’s the wisdom to let yourself be held.
The hardest thing I’ve ever done wasn’t chemotherapy. It wasn’t facing relapse after relapse. It wasn’t rebuilding a life as a single father after my marriage fell apart.
The hardest thing I ever did was let myself be human again.
Because healing isn’t found in the pretending. It’s found in the permission.
If you’re in that place now — the place where you’re still wearing the armour because it feels safer than falling apart — I want you to know this: there’s a space where you can finally set it down.
As both a survivor and a psychotherapist, I’ve sat in that same silence — and I now hold space for others to step into it safely. Sometimes we don’t need to “fix” ourselves; we just need a space where we can stop performing strength and be witnessed as we are.
If you feel ready to begin that process — to be seen, to soften, to rebuild in a way that feels whole and honest — I invite you to connect with me.
Sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn’t to hold it together — it’s to finally let yourself fall apart, in the right hands, and discover that you’re not broken… just becoming.