We often believe being strong means pushing through — pushing past the pain, pressure, and grief, and meeting the expectation to hold it all together. And I was good at it.

I am a psychiatric nurse practitioner, a business owner, a wife, and a mother of seven. I seamlessly held space for others while quietly processing my own pain, until the day my third child died.

What followed wasn’t emotional resilience, the way we are taught to perform it. Instead, it was raw, slow, real, and non-linear. It was the beginning of a journey that would challenge everything I thought I knew about mental health and mental and emotional strength.

This isn’t a story of breakdown. It is a story of revelation, and of discovering that true strength isn’t about pushing harder, but about pausing long enough to see yourself clearly and choosing to live on in purpose.

My journey through grief was unthinkable. I lost three of my seven children and my husband. That sentence alone seems impossible to hold, but I have lived it. What made it more complicated is that I am also a mental health professional. I have the degrees, the training, and the clinical tools. And yet, none of it prepared me for the level of soul pain I was carrying.

In the beginning, I relied on what I knew — routines, responsibilities, and pushing forward with grit and determination. I kept showing up for others, but I was struggling; strong on the outside and........

© Psychology Today