Dr. Molly Boyd, PhD, LPC-S LMFT | Photography by Brittany Strickland
I sit across from women every week who are tired in a way that sleep alone will not fix. They are often the people everyone counts on. They manage the schedules, remember the appointments, soothe the hurt feelings, and notice what everyone else needs. They are raising children, supporting spouses, helping aging parents, building careers, and quietly filling whatever gap appears in front of them. They are capable, strong women, and many of them are not okay.
Some feel anxious, irritable, disconnected, or numb. Some are surrounded by people yet profoundly lonely. They can identify what everyone else needs but cannot answer a simple question about what they need. I understand how women arrive here.
We become so accustomed to carrying pain quietly that we mistake emotional suppression for strength. We swallow grief, anger, disappointment, resentment, and unmet needs, because we do not want to burden anyone, disrupt our families, or appear ungrateful. There is always something more urgent to handle. Someone else needs us. The work still has to be done.
So we say we are fine, and we keep moving. We keep everyone else fed while parts of us slowly starve. Eventually, we can begin to function like machines. We complete the tasks, solve the problems, and respond to whatever needs our attention next. From the outside, we appear capable and composed. Inside, we are becoming detached from our own lives.
But… trouble is…we are not machines. We have souls, and our souls need room to breathe. We need to know ourselves. We need connection, softness, rest, laughter, and play. We need dreams that belong to us and moments that are not measured by what we accomplish for someone else.
Yet even when we find a quiet moment, many of us do not know how to be still. We reach for our phones. We scroll, work, shop, clean, organize, or turn on something to fill the silence. Sometimes what we call relaxing is really another way of avoiding ourselves.
Stillness can feel threatening when years of unacknowledged pain are waiting beneath the noise. If we slow down, we may have to admit that we are angry, grieving, or lonely. We might recognize how long it has been since we felt truly known by the person sleeping beside us. We may have to face the possibility that the life we have worked so hard to maintain is not a life in which we feel fully alive.
Women are often praised for how much we can endure without inconveniencing anyone. We are expected to be grateful, pleasant, productive, and smiling. No one wants to be the “Debbie Downer.” But there is something freeing about finally saying, “I wear all these hats. I take care of everyone. I do everything I am supposed to do…and I am not okay.” That is not self-pity. It is honesty, and honesty is often where healing begins.
Of course, emotional suppression is not always unhealthy. Sometimes setting a feeling aside allows us to care for a child, respond to a crisis, or simply make it through the day. It can be protective. The problem comes when temporarily setting pain aside becomes the way we live. We put it on a shelf and never return for it.
What we refuse to acknowledge does not disappear. It can continue shaping our relationships, choices, boundaries, self-worth, and capacity for joy. It may show up as anxiety, resentment, perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-functioning, chronic tension, or emotional numbness. Prolonged stress can also affect sleep, concentration, energy, and physical well-being. Our minds and bodies are connected, and often, our bodies tell us the truth long before our minds will allow us to consciously know it.
In therapy, we sometimes talk about a person’s “window of tolerance,” the range in which we can experience emotion while remaining grounded enough to think and connect. Outside that range, we may become overwhelmed, panicked, or reactive. We may also move in the opposite direction and shut down, becoming numb, exhausted, or detached. Some women have lived between these states for so long that they assume it is simply who they are.
Sometimes it takes a major life transition for them to notice. A woman may have been married for twenty-five or thirty years when her children begin leaving home. For decades, her life moved according to the rhythms of raising a family. Then the house becomes quiet.
Without the constant movement of caregiving, everything she postponed begins floating to the surface. She notices her exhaustion and the grief she never allowed herself to feel. She may look at her husband and realize they no longer know one another. The marriage may have been distant for years, but the demands of family life made it possible not to name it. Now she has enough space to realize that she does not know herself either. There is a particular loneliness in being needed by everyone and known by no one.
Often, these patterns begin long before adulthood. Many women learned early that love was easier to access when they were helpful, pleasant, successful, quiet, or undemanding. Perhaps there was little room for their anger, fear, sadness, or sensitivity. Maybe they became responsible for other people’s emotions before they understood their own.
They adapted. Children do that. But the little girl they once were did not stop needing connection, nurturing, protection, softness, margin, and play. She still wants to know that she is lovable when she is not being useful.
This is why healing often requires grieving first. We grieve what happened, but we also grieve what did not happen: the comfort we needed, the protection that should have been there, the apology that may never come, and the years spent believing our needs were too much. We grieve the parts of ourselves we abandoned to preserve a relationship, maintain peace, or become acceptable to others.
Healing does not require us to declare that everything in our past was terrible, nor is good therapy an endless excavation of painful memories. Healing should be paced and emotionally safe. The goal is not to drown in our feelings. It is to become able to feel them, understand what they may be telling us, and choose how we want to respond.
Anger may tell us that a boundary has been crossed. Resentment may reveal that we have been over-giving. Loneliness may expose the difference between being surrounded and being known. Numbness may be the mind’s way of saying, “This has been too much.”
Our feelings are not always facts, and they should not make every decision for us. But they are not enemies. They carry information about our inner lives. “You can’t harvest what you don’t heal” does not mean we must become perfectly healed before we can experience joy. There is no perfectly healed person. It means we cannot neglect the soil of our souls indefinitely and still expect our lives to produce connection, peace, creativity,
and joy.
Healing may begin with something small: becoming still long enough to notice what is happening inside you, admitting that something hurt, journaling your honest feelings, or telling a friend, “I am really struggling right now.” You do not have to solve everything the moment you name it. You do not have to dismantle your life or reopen every wound at once. You may simply need to stop leaving yourself behind.
Before anything new can grow, we must be willing to tend honestly to what has been hurting beneath the surface. And with every step toward healing, we move closer to the harvest that comes from discovering ourselves again.
Dr. Molly Boyd, LPC-S, LMFT, is the founder and clinical director of Flourish: The Counseling Center of Shreveport-Bossier. With more than 20 years of clinical experience, she is a certified EMDR practitioner specializing in individual, couples, and family counseling. She has presented nationally and internationally and is passionate about helping people build healthier relationships, pursue emotional healing, and live with greater freedom and authenticity. She and her team offer in-person and telehealth counseling.
To schedule an appointment call or text (318) 840-2922 or visit https://flourishcounselingsb.com