Body-First Healing Podcast

The Cost of Being the Strong One: How Hyper-Independence Keeps You Depleted

• Britt Piper • Episode 48

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If you are the person everyone calls when something falls apart, this episode will help you understand why it is so hard to let anyone help you, and what that is costing your body. Britt explores how the strong one gets made, why hyper-independence is usually an attachment strategy rather than a personality trait, and how you can be highly functional and deeply dysregulated at the same time. You will learn why endurance without recovery breaks the system down, why recovery is relational rather than something you do alone, and how to begin communicating a need before your body reaches collapse. Britt also shares insight from her own life that you may recognize in your own. Being needed is not the same thing as being known. You are allowed to be held without first earning it.


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Welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast. I'm Britt Piper, Survivor Turn Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Aut. If you feel stuck in old patterns, overwhelmed by your emotions, or disconnected from yourself, you're in the right place. Each week I'll share practical somatic tools, personal stories, and conversations to support you in building a more regulated and embodied life. Because you can't talk your way through healing, you have to feel your way through. Together, we'll explore what it means to come back to yourself and create a life that feels safe enough to fully live in. I am so glad that you're here. Hello, my friend, and welcome back to the Body First Healing Podcast. I am your host, Britt Piper, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, author, trainer, and survivor. Oh man, oh man. I am looking forward to our conversation today, you guys, because most of these conversations feel personal because these are things that I have been through. They're things that I know that so many of you are going through. Today, I want to talk about the cost of being the strong one. So we all know that there is a particular kind of person that everyone kind of calls when something falls apart, right? You know this person, maybe even you were this person or are this person, but this person knows how to take the next step before anyone else has even stopped panicking, right? Like they can solve the problem, they can hold the grief, they can keep the business moving or remember what everyone needs. And somehow they make the unbearable tasks appear very manageable. They're often described as resilient, as independent, maybe capable or unbothered. And people will often admire how this person can carry it all, right? And they might even tell them, I don't know how you do it. And because those words sound like praise, it can take a long time to recognize the grief that they're actually holding inside of them. Because sometimes what people are really saying is, I've become accustomed to watching you survive without help. And what the strong one hears is your value lives in how little you require from anyone else. Now, I know this woman. I know this person because I've been that woman for most of my life. I come from a line of women. If you've read my book, you know, I talk about this, who knew how to endure. Women who did what needed to be done, often without being asked what it was costing them. Women who could hold families together, who learned to adapt to disappointment and learn to kind of make competence look really effortless. And I of course just want to state this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I inherited so much resilience from these women that I am deeply proud of. Their courage lives in me, their ingenuity lives in me, their willingness to create something from almost nothing, that lives in me. But my seasons of healing have required me to ask a much harder question. And that is what parts of that strength were freely chosen, and which parts were developed because there was no safe alternative. Because there is a strength that comes from knowing you're supported, and then another kind that develops because you've learned that support may never arrive. One is going to sound like I can do this, and then the other one is going to sound like I have to do this because I can't trust anyone else to. And those two forms of strength can look identical from the outside while feeling entirely different inside of the body. So you can kind of think of one of those strengths as capacity and the other as survival. And for many of us, the cost of being the strong one is that no one notices when our strength has actually stopped being a resource and has actually become more like a prison. So today I want to talk about how the strong one is made, how hyperindependence becomes more of an attachment strategy, how the body keeps functioning long after we've lost access to how we actually feel, and how to begin building a life in which our capability no longer excludes us from being cared for. Because, yes, we are allowed to be strong, but we shouldn't have to be strong every minute of our lives. Okay. And we shouldn't have to suffer beautifully in order to

How the strong one is made

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be loved. Okay, so first I want to talk about how the strong one is made. And I'm going to keep referencing the strong one here. Okay. So first, I don't think most people consciously decide to become the strong one. Right. Like usually the role develops slowly. Maybe you grew up in a home where the adults were really overwhelmed or maybe emotionally unavailable or unpredictable. Maybe there was financial strain, or perhaps they were consumed by their own survival. And in many of these scenarios, it's likely that no one explicitly asked you to take care of everyone, but you could feel when the room was unstable. And from that space, you learned how to become useful inside of that instability that showed up in learning how to read the room, how to anticipate other people's moods, and how to solve your own problems and ask for very little in sibling dynamics that might have looked like you becoming the child who helped with younger siblings, or, you know, maybe you were comforting a parent or mediating, becoming the mediator of conflict, and then likely disappearing into your own kind of inner world. So sometimes the strong one is created through obvious parentification, okay, where a child takes on responsibilities that belong to adults. But sometimes it is also much more subtle, right? It's likely that no one is asking you to become responsible for the emotional climate of the home. It's just that you simply realize that life goes more smoothly when you are. And when that adaptation is then praised, it becomes even harder to recognize. You might hear things like, you're so mature, you've always been able to take care of yourself. And those statements may be affectionate and may even be true. But what a child can sometimes hear beneath those statements is your lack of need makes you easier to love. And so the nervous system then begins associating belonging with competence. From here, you learn that closeness is available when you're helpful, when you are successful or emotionally contained or even taking care of someone else. And you learn that your needs might burden people or cause them to withdraw. And because children are entirely dependent upon attachment, they will adapt themselves in almost any way necessary to preserve that attachment. And now in adulthood, that adaptation can follow us as hyperindependence. Now, healthy independence allows you to rely on yourself while remaining capable of relying on others. Hyperindependence, on the other hand, is self-reliance organized around this deep expectation or assumption that depending on someone else will eventually become either dangerous or maybe disappointing or humiliating. So hyperindependence isn't just enjoying your own autonomy. That's oftentimes what people think about it. Instead, it's going to carry this internal rule that states, I am safest when I need the least. So it is the nervous system that decides that needing anyone creates too much risk. And so it suppresses our attachment needs and invests more heavily in self-sufficiency. Right. So the person may still deeply desire love and friendship and tenderness and being known. But when care begins moving toward them, another part of them becomes uncomfortable. And so then they might minimize what they need, right? They might accept help only after they're already in crisis, or they might choose people who need them more than they need themselves because being indispensable is going to feel safer than being vulnerable. So ultimately, from the outside, hyperindependence looks like confidence. But internally, it may be an attachment system that has given up on the possibility of reliable care. Okay, so the strong one isn't always someone who doesn't need people. Sometimes they're the person who needed people so deeply and was disappointed so thoroughly that they decided never to need in that way again.

Functional freeze and capability vs. capacity

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Okay, so let's talk nervous system. Okay. Because here's a bit of a juxtaposition to consider. You can be highly functional and deeply dysregulated at the same time. Think about it this way: we often imagine nervous system dysregulation as something dramatic, right? Like we picture a panic attack or maybe an emotional outburst or someone visibly falling apart. But sometimes the nervous system allows us to keep functioning by reducing our access to the very emotions that might interrupt our functioning. So people sometimes describe this as functional freeze. It's not like a formal diagnosis, but it is a useful description for a blended state of the nervous system in which someone remains outwardly productive from that mobilizing, sympathetic flight response while feeling internally shut down, detached, maybe numb, or just absent from their own life. And that happens through that dorsal response. So think of it like going through the motions without emotion. When we're here, there can be enough of that sympathetic activation, okay, that the healthy stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol to keep the body moving. And so outwardly, you're answering emails, you're attending meetings, you're taking care of the kids and making decisions and smiling, right? When someone asks how you are. But underneath that mobilization, there may also be that shutdown or dorsal response. And so your body is moving, but you don't feel fully alive inside of it. You are going through the motions. You're doing what needs to be done, but you can't maybe remember the last time that you felt deeply rested or connected and present, maybe playful, curious, or just moved by your own life. So some people call this being hashtag unbothered. Okay. And again, often we praise people for that. But being unbothered isn't always peace. Sometimes it's what happens when the nervous system decides that feeling the full weight of what's happening internally would interfere with our survival. So the strong one may not look burned out. Okay. They might still be building and parenting and traveling and helping and producing and doing all of the things. Okay. But their capability conceals that depletion. So people see their output, right? And they assume that they must have the capacity for it. But capability and capacity aren't always the same thing. Human beings can perform capability far beyond their sustainable capacity for a period of time. Right. Especially when identity and safety and income and belonging, they have become attached to that performance. Right. So I've lived in seasons or through seasons where I could accomplish almost anything placed in front of me while feeling increasingly distant from myself. I could build programs, I could run launches, I could create websites, I could do my own bookkeeping and take care of my kids and manage the household and financial decisions and continue showing up publicly in this performance while some quieter part of me was still trying to just survive the day. So I'll just share, you know, just very personally, this past year for me has held a lot of stress and a lot of change from, you know, the grief of losing our pet, our dog, to really, really major decisions about home and family and relationships. During that time, my children still needed consistency. My students were still enrolling in programs and I still had clients that needed me and a community that needed me. I still had employees that depended upon the business. There were decisions that couldn't simply be ignored until I felt ready to make them. And so I'm genuinely proud of the way that I've carried myself through this season. Now, of course, I don't want to, you know, pathologize my own competence, but my strength and humility has definitely protected me. And some of that inheritance that I was talking about, my discipline that was passed on to me and has also been sharpened over the years, that has served me. And my ability to organize and lead and create and act has made an extraordinary life possible. An extraordinary life possible, even in the midst of one of the hardest chapters of my life. But I am also learning that capacity becomes dangerous when everyone, including yourself, begins treating it as consent. Okay. Just because you can carry something doesn't mean that you want to. It doesn't mean that it should belong to you. Just because you can keep moving doesn't mean that movement is evidence that you're okay. So healing requires more than am I still functioning? We have to ask, what is it requiring from my body to continue functioning this way? That is the question.

Endurance, recovery, and allostatic load

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Okay, so let's transition here, my friends, because I want to talk about endurance. Okay. I feel like our culture has kind of a distorted relationship with endurance. We often define endurance as the ability to push beyond fatigue or override our discomfort and to continue long after the body has begun asking us to stop. And in that sense, we celebrate the person who keeps producing and enduring through grief and heartbreak and exhaustion and my goodness, caregiving and crisis. But biologically, endurance doesn't mean permanent exertion. Real endurance depends upon the ability to mobilize and recover. So let's get into the science for just a minute here. Okay. When the brain perceives a demand, the stress response of the body, which is the release of that adrenaline and cortisol to mobilize us, it organizes the body around meeting that demand. Right. So the sympathetic nervous system increases into mobilization. Stress hormones make energy available. Our heart rate might rise. Our blood flow and our attention are going to be redirected toward whatever appears most urgent or the demand in this case. And so processes that are less essential for immediate survival may be temporarily deprioritized in the brain and the body. Okay. So that response, in and of itself, isn't inherently unhealthy. And it's one of the reasons that human beings can respond to emergencies and protect and defend and complete our projects and adapt to change and stress. So the problem isn't the activation or the mobilization. The problem is activation without sufficient recovery. Okay. The body is designed to move through cycles of effort and rest, mobilization and settling, exertion and repair. So even an endurance athlete, they don't become stronger through endless maximal output. Okay. Their training is going to provide a stimulus or stress, but recovery is where that adaptation actually occurs. And so without it, the same effort that once built capacity begins breaking the system down. Think about it this way, okay. Researchers use the term that we talk about a lot in the body first healing program, okay, called allostatic load. And they use this term to describe the cumulative strain or stress that develops when the stress response systems are activated repeatedly or chronically or remain active for too long. Okay. Or you can kind of think of it like they're not returning to baseline. So this is what we often refer to as accumulated wear and tear. Now, in everyday language, this means that the body keeps paying for every emergency. Okay, even the emergencies that we have normalized. So this can include the relationship in which you remained continuously vigilant. It can include the grief that we postponed because other people needed us, or the years of telling yourself, I just have to get through this week when the week kept turning into just another season. Okay. The body can make stress chemistry available so that you can meet a demand, but that chemistry was never meant to become your personality. And this is where the strong one can become trapped. Okay. Where the strong one may experience activation as productivity. They might feel most powerful when there's a problem to solve or know exactly who to be when everyone else is struggling. And then when the crisis ends, instead of relief, they feel restless. Okay, so now stillness. Is going to make them anxious. And rest, I felt this a lot, created guilt. Right. And then when they have unstructured time, what starts to emerge? Grief or anger or loneliness or uncertainty. And so when this happens, they likely find another task or another person to help, right? To distract themselves. And this is when the nervous system begins preferring constant mobilization, not because it feels necessarily good, but because it is going to feel familiar. Now, for me personally, there have been times when I believed that I was resting because I was no longer, you know, actively working, but internally I was still organizing and anticipating and forecasting and preparing for things to come. And so my body may have been, you know, sitting on the couch, but my nervous system was still like standing guard. So recovery isn't simply the absence of activity. Okay. Recovery requires a felt reduction in demand. It requires moments when the body receives credible information that nothing is currently being required of it. Sometimes that can come through sleep. You know, movement, laughter, time outdoors, that's a huge one for me. But recovery is also relational. So sometimes what allows the nervous system to settle isn't just another self-regulation technique or something that you do alone. Sometimes it's hearing someone say, I've got this. You don't need to think about it anymore. And it's the experience of another capable nervous system entering the room and reducing the number of things that your nervous system has to track. Okay, so resilience is not the ability to withstand or endure unlimited stress. It is the ability to move through activation and find your way back to baseline.

What the body carries

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Okay, so I feel like this wouldn't be a body first healing podcast episode without talking about the body here, okay, and the cost on the body when it comes to being the strong one. So when someone has spent years overriding their limits, the body often begins communicating in ways that are really difficult to dismiss. And I, of course, want to be thoughtful here because I don't believe in, you know, simplistic body maps. For instance, you know, shoulder pain doesn't automatically mean that you're carrying too much responsibility. Okay. But physical symptoms can have many causes, and new or persistent symptoms do deserve appropriate medical evaluation. Okay. But stress is a whole body experience. It involves muscular, cardiovascular, endocrine, immune, digestive, respiratory, and neurological processes. And there are patterns that many strong people recognize. Okay, so maybe that's the jaw that remains clenched during sleep. It could be the shoulders that never seem to fully rest, settle, or let go. It could be headaches that arrive weeks after concentrated effort, or maybe digestive symptoms that seem to intensify whenever life becomes really emotionally demanding. Now, globally in the body, it could be fatigue that never goes away, or, you know, you could also experience in the body numbness, which again is part of that shutdown or dorsal response while we're in kind of that functional free state. Okay. So again, this is going to look like difficulty crying, difficulty identifying hunger or desire or anger, or even just that underlying fatigue. You could feel disconnected from pleasure or just really strangely like unaffected by circumstances that you know should matter to you. Okay. And again, that's that hashtag unbothered feeling that's coming in. And then cognitively in the brain, how this can show up is your attention can become really fragmented, which means that even just small decisions can feel really overwhelming or even impossible. You might notice that you begin fantasizing about disappearing and not necessarily because you want to leave your life, but because you want one hour in which no one can require anything from you, right? You're imagining disappearing to a beach or a mountain somewhere. This was me for a season. Okay. So sometimes the body creates symptoms because the personality has made direct refusal feel unavailable. In other words, when the conscious self is unable to say, I can't keep doing this, the body may begin removing access to the energy required to continue. And this means that symptoms can carry information about the conditions on which we are living. Now, since you guys know I love analogies, I want to share one with you. Okay. I often think of the body as, you know, kind of presenting us with like an unpaid invoice. Like you may have postponed the cost through adrenaline and discipline and perfectionism and urgency, you know, maybe dissociating or sheer willpower, but postponing something isn't the same thing as erasing something, right? Eventually, the body asks to be included in the life that it's been helping you to survive.

The relational cost and building interdependence

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Okay, now let's talk about the relational cost of this. Here's the tagline. Okay. The strong one can become deeply admired and profoundly unknown. Like just think about that for a second. People know what you can do, they know the problems that you can solve and the way that you can show up when everyone else needs reassurance, but they may not know when you've reached your limit because maybe you've spent years making your limits invisible. Sometimes we become resentful that no one is helping us while simultaneously rejecting or minimizing or controlling every attempt to help. And I say that without judgment, okay, because I understand it so deeply. We train people to believe that we have everything handled. And then we feel heartbroken when they believe us. And so that might sound like, oh, I'm fine, or it's easier if I just do it, right? But then there's kind of this quieter part of us that wonders why no one noticed when we were drowning. Now, I just want to say, okay, this doesn't mean that your lack of support is your fault. Okay. Some people genuinely don't show up. Some relationships are painfully one-sided. And I'm sure we've all experienced that, right? Some families are so accustomed to your labor that they resist any version of you that now requires reciprocity. Okay. But healing may also require becoming honest about the ways that we keep support at a controlled distance. Now, I want to share a story with you guys because I saw this in myself recently. So I recently had a surgery, I had a medical procedure. And I want to share this as an example, just to show you that the work is always continuing. Okay. I prepared for this surgery in the same way that I know how to prepare for almost anything. I meal prepped before the surgery. I organized my home. I made sure that everything that I might need was accessible to me. Okay. I designed like an entire recovery plan around the assumption that I would take care of myself. And then come surgery day. Okay. Friends and family and even my surgeon began asking questions that seemed completely obvious to them, but maybe not me. Brit, why are you alone on surgery day? Who is staying with you? Like, why don't you have a meal train? Like, why didn't you tell anyone that you had a surgery come up? And I realized, you know, that I had taken a circumstance in which dependence was completely reasonable and expected. And I built an elaborate system to avoid depending on anyone. I was still practicing independence in a moment that was designed to require care. And so the lesson here wasn't that preparing for myself was wrong. Okay. There is so much tenderness in making sure that your future self has what they need. The lesson for me was how automatically I assumed that I'd be the person responsible for providing all of it. Like it hadn't occurred to me to ask, like, who would want to take care of me? My mind directly went to how do I make sure that I need as little as possible? And although that breaks my heart to say that, I know where that wound comes from. I know it's from abandonment and my birth story and my earliest years. And so it's a lesson that I am still learning, even as I teach nervous system work, right? I teach about attachment and co-regulation. I lead communities built around the truth that healing doesn't happen in isolation. And I'm still learning how to let care reach me before I've made myself so easy to care for that almost nothing is really required from the other person. Okay. That is the humility of this work. So if you're finding that it's hard to ask for support, it's hard to reach out, just know that you're not alone. Okay. And understanding a pattern, for me, I can understand the pattern, but understanding the pattern isn't the same thing as no longer having it. Okay. Now, I guess since I'm in a state of just sharing so openly, I guess I can also, you know, just talk a little bit about how I saw this pattern a lot in my businesses as well. And this is an area where I have really, really grown and put in so much work. So, you know, I've built beautiful things, right? Because I am passionate about the work that I do. And because I know, again, pass down to me, work ethic, independence. I know how to work. I know how to hold a vision. I know how to be an entrepreneur. I know how to communicate it, teach it, make it real. But early on in my business, there were seasons when the very businesses that I was creating reached a wall because I was too afraid to let other people truly help me carry those businesses. You know, sometimes I would delegate tasks, but I was still retaining the entire psychological burden of the task. For instance, like, you know, I would hand someone the work, but I would continue tracking every detail and I would anticipate every problem and I would prepare to intervene and just kind of micromanage. And so technically I had the help, right? But physiologically, I was still carrying everything. Like I never fully gave it over. Now, there were also times when the vision expanded faster in my businesses than my willingness to relinquish control, right? The business didn't lack opportunity in these moments, it lacked a structure that allowed that opportunity and that growth to exist without consuming my nervous system. So in these seasons, I would unintentionally make myself the load-bearing wall. Okay. And when one person becomes, you know, the infrastructure beneath every part of a business, the business can only grow to the limit of that individual person's capacity, right? So for me, allowing people to help, which has happened over the past seven years, has never been only about, you know, just delegating the work. Because delegation for my nervous system touches into attachment and trust and the fear of abandonment. So, you know, can I trust this person to follow through? Can I rely on them? And so if this sounds familiar to you, you know, I'm sure that you can probably agree that carrying everything is exhausting, but it's predictable, right? It makes so much sense how we end up in these strategies because letting another person carry something is not predictable, right? It's uncertain. And when uncertainty has historically resulted in disappointment, control, our own control, can feel safer than that potential relief that this person can bring in. But we have to remember that control doesn't come without a cost, right? Okay, my friends. So I kind of saved the best for last year. Okay. So let's talk relationships. And I'm going to start by saying this, okay. You don't have to endure to be loved. I'm gonna say that again, okay. You do not have to endure to be loved. So at the center of this pattern, there is often a very old belief about love, right? Many strong people have unconsciously learned that love is something they earn through endurance. And it's gonna sound like if I stay through enough pain, my loyalty might finally be recognized. If I continue giving without asking for much, I'll become impossible to leave. And so it's kind of this belief that can keep us in relationships long after the relationship has stopped being reciprocal. And it can make suffering feel romantic, and it can also make boundaries feel like uh betrayal, but your suffering does not make you more lovable. Okay. Like love isn't supposed to be awarded at the end of some endurance test. And being the person who can survive almost anything doesn't mean that you should keep building relationships that require survival. Okay. Secure love will never require you to erase your limits and your boundaries. It's not going to punish you for having needs, and it's not going to make you audition for care by proving how useful or forgiving or undemanding you can be. Instead, healthy and secure love is going to create room for your full humanity. And what I often see in the Body First Healing program and in this work as a somatic practitioner is that one of the deepest griefs of healing is realizing how much of what we called strength was actually just an attempt to become too valuable to abandon. Right. Because we thought that if everyone needed us, they'd stay. But being needed isn't the same thing as being

Learn how to accept support

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known. Okay, so you might be wondering now, all right, Britt, like what do we do to change this? Okay. So the answer is not to suddenly become dependent upon everyone around you. Okay. Like receiving support still requires discernment here because, you know, not everyone is emotionally safe or reliable. So instead, we want to aim for interdependence, which is the capacity to care for yourself without insisting that you have to always care for yourself alone. Okay. And we do this by starting to become honest about the load, right? How heavy this is. Like take an inventory of what you're carrying, including the invisible labor beneath it. Okay. So the remembering, the anticipating, you know, the planning, the emotional monitoring. And then ask yourself, what genuinely requires me? And what am I still carrying because releasing it makes me anxious? Now, the next practice is going to be to communicate your needs before your body reaches collapse. Okay. Many strong people wait until they're completely depleted or burnt out, and then they ask for support in that state of desperation. But by that point, the request feels so enormous. Okay. So instead, we want to start earlier, we want to start smaller. That can look like telling someone, like, I don't need you to solve this, but I need you to sit with me while I feel it. I'm having a hard day. Or I know I look calm, but I'm actually feeling really overwhelmed right now. Okay. These small requests help the nervous system learn that receiving doesn't automatically create danger. Okay. And then notice what happens inside your body when someone does help you. Do you tense? Do you begin planning how to repay them? Do you search for something useful to do so that you don't have to remain in this vulnerable position of being cared for? Okay. And as you notice, instead of judging those reactions, can we become curious about them? Okay. In those moments, I would encourage you to feel the support beneath your body. Okay. Notice that you're being held by something that you're not actively holding in return. Okay. Doing that allows you to give your body an experience of support that doesn't require immediate repayment. And then lastly, we're also going to have to grieve the identity of the strong one. Okay. The identity may have given you belonging and purpose, you know, maybe even admiration and control, which means that some people may become uncomfortable or just completely confused when you stop overfunctioning. Okay. Because they benefited from that version of you who was limitless, who didn't have limits. So you may have to tolerate disappointing people who were comfortable with your depletion. Okay. And you might have to discover who remains when you're no longer constantly being the useful person. And in that process, it's likely that you're going to meet the younger part of you who still believes that requiring care makes love less secure. And when you do meet her, just as I've met my younger self who believes that, you know, something you can tell her is you don't have to become effortless to keep people close. You're allowed to be held without first earning it or enduring it. Okay. So sometimes strength is the moment that you finally allow yourself to just lean back. So in closing, I want to leave you with a couple of questions. Okay. And these are questions that I myself have journaled, have reflected on deeply. And so I would encourage that when you can carve some time for yourself to really sit down with these, right? And to intentionally reflect on them. So the first question is who gets to take care of you? Who gets to take care of you? Who in your life can carry something without requiring you to manage how they carry it? And who have you allowed to see you without your competence or your doing or your effort? Okay. There may be people who would love to care for you, but they've only ever encountered the version of you who insists that they don't need it. Okay. So there may also be people who've shown you that they're unable to meet you there. Okay. And so healing is going to require the discernment to know the difference between the two. But ultimately, from today's episode, I just really hope that you find it possible to begin imagining, right? Creating this life in which care isn't something that you receive only after you have earned it. Okay. So maybe the next chapter of your healing isn't about, you know, necessarily like becoming stronger. Maybe, maybe instead it's about becoming more reachable. And that is kind of the season that I am in. Okay. Because the opposite of being the strong one isn't being weak. It is being human among other humans. And what I am learning is that maybe that's what strength was always supposed to feel like. All right, my friends, thank you so much for joining me on this week's episode of the Body First Healing podcast. If you found it to be encouraging, supportive, inspiring, make sure to share. Make sure to tag me on social media, on Instagram at Heal With Brit. Send it to anyone who you feel like could benefit. If you're ready to take the deeper dive into this work, you can always join me in the six-month Body First Healing program. And if you're ready to do this work as a practitioner to guide others, remember that you can join me in the Body First Healing Institute. You guys enjoy the rest of your week, and I will see you again here soon on the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Body First Healing Podcast. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you subscribed, left a review, or shared it with someone that you love. I'll see you back here next week, and until then, be gentle with yourself. You're doing the best you can with what you have, and that is more than enough. Just a quick note this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always consult a qualified provider for personal support.