SERIES 1: BREAKING THE SILENCE · ARTICLE 4 OF 5

Strong Women Can Still Struggle:Letting Go of the Superwoman Myth For every woman who has been too strong for too long;

 She had not taken a day off in three years. Not a real one. Even when she was ill, she kept going. She cooked, she cleaned, she showed up for her children, her mother, her job, her church, her community. She remembered everyone’s birthdays. She was the one people called in a crisis.

Nobody called to check on her.

She told herself this was fine. She was strong. She could handle it. She had always handled it. This was just what women like her did.

Until the morning she sat in her car outside the supermarket and could not make herself go in. She just sat there, engine running, not crying, not thinking. Just… nothing. She had finally run out of herself.

If you recognise yourself in any part of that story, this article is for you.

What Is the Superwoman Myth?

The Superwoman Myth sometimes called the Strong Black Woman stereotype, or the Strong Woman schema, is the cultural and social expectation that certain women, particularly women from BAME, migrant and working-class communities, are naturally more resilient, more capable of enduring hardship, and less in need of support than other women.

It tells us that our strength is endless. That we were built to carry more. That asking for help is a luxury we cannot afford, or a weakness we cannot afford to show. That our pain is private and our power is public.

It is a myth that comes wrapped in compliments. “She’s so strong.” “I don’t know how she does it.” “She can handle anything.” These words feel like praise. But underneath them is a quiet, dangerous message: that we are not permitted to struggle. That when we do, we should hide it.

The Superwoman Myth does not celebrate our strength. It exploits it.

The Myths We Were Told And the Truth Underneath Them

❌  The Myth

“Strong women don’t need help. They find a way.”

✅  The Truth

Needing help is a sign of being human, not of being weak. Even the most capable women have limits and reaching those limits is biology, not failure.

❌  The Myth

“Our community needs us to hold it together.”

✅  The Truth

You cannot pour from an empty vessel. A woman who is falling apart cannot hold anyone else together. Caring for yourself IS caring for your community.

❌  The Myth "Showing vulnerability is dangerous for women like us.”

✅  The Truth

Hiding vulnerability has costs too to your body, your relationships and your sense of self. Safety in vulnerability is something we can build, together.

❌  The Myth

“Suffering in silence is strength.”

✅  The Truth

Suffering in silence is survival. And survival is not the same as living. You deserve more than endurance.

❌  The Myth

“I can’t fall apart who will hold everything together?”

✅  The Truth

Things do not fall apart when you rest. And if they do, perhaps they were held together in a way that was not sustainable. Your wellness is not the enemy of your family’s stability.

Where This Myth Comes From

The Superwoman Myth did not come from nowhere. It has deep roots in history, in culture, in the specific conditions that many of our communities have survived. For Black women, it is rooted in the legacy of slavery and colonialism, during which Black women’s pain was systematically denied and their capacity for suffering was exploited. The ‘strong Black woman’ trope was not a compliment created in freedom it was a survival adaptation created under oppression. It helped women endure the unendurable. But it was never meant to become a permanent identity.

For migrant and refugee women, it often emerges from the sheer necessity of survival in a new country where showing weakness might feel unsafe, where there is nobody to catch you if you fall, where the family’s hope rests on your shoulders.

For women across many cultures, it is reinforced by religious and community expectations: the good wife, the self-sacrificing mother, the pillar of the household who places her own needs last, always. Understanding where this myth comes from helps us to carry it differently. It was a tool created to help our foremothers survive. But we are not obligated to keep carrying a tool that is now injuring us.

“The ‘strong woman’ who never struggles is not real. She is a mask. And the woman wearing the mask is exhausted.”

What Wearing the Mask Actually Costs

There is a price to performing strength you do not feel. And it is paid in ways that are quiet, cumulative and very real.

Emotionally, it means you never fully grieve, never fully rest, never fully allow yourself to be held. You become very good at supporting others and very unfamiliar with the experience of receiving support. Over time, you stop asking. Over time, you stop noticing that you have stopped asking.

Physically, chronic suppression of emotion and chronic stress have documented links to elevated blood pressure, increased inflammation, disrupted sleep, immune dysfunction and heightened cardiovascular risk. The body carries what the mind refuses to put down.

Relationally, it creates a strange kind of loneliness, the loneliness of being surrounded by people who need you but never truly see you. Of being known as capable rather than known as real.

And spiritually, it is a kind of self-abandonment. Every time you push your own needs to the bottom of the list, you send yourself the same message: I do not matter enough to tend to. Said often enough, quietly enough, for long enough and it begins to feel like the truth.

Signs the Mask Is Getting Too Heavy

Sometimes we do not notice how depleted we are until our bodies or our circumstances force us to stop. Here are some signs that the Superwoman mask may be costing you more than it is protecting you: 

😴

Exhaustion that does not lift

You sleep but do not rest. You get through each day but cannot tell anyone how you really are.

🤣

You cry in private or not at all

The tears only come alone, late at night, in the car. Or they have stopped coming entirely, and you feel numb instead.

💢

Small things tip you over

You keep it together in crises and then fall apart when someone uses the wrong cup. The emotion has to go somewhere.

🙅

You cannot receive care

When someone asks how you are, you deflect. Compliments make you uncomfortable. Being looked after feels strange and unsafe.

🤷

You have lost yourself

You can tell people exactly what your children need, what your partner needs, what your boss needs. But what do you need? The question feels strange, even selfish.

🧠

You live in future tense

You will rest when things calm down. You will deal with your feelings later. You will look after yourself next month. Later never comes.

🤕

Your body is speaking

Headaches, stomach problems, persistent fatigue, skin flare-ups, back pain. The body tends to express what we will not allow ourselves to say aloud.

“You do not have to earn the right to be cared for. You never did.”

Letting Go: What It Actually Looks Like

Letting go of the Superwoman myth does not mean becoming someone who falls apart, who abandons her responsibilities, who stops showing up. It means something quieter, and much harder than that.

It means learning to receive as well as give. Practicing saying “I am not okay” to someone safe, even once. Noticing when you are running on empty and choosing, even imperfectly, even briefly to stop and refuel before the tank is completely dry.

It means examining the stories you tell yourself about what makes you worthy, and asking: do I believe I deserve rest? Do I believe my needs matter? Do I believe that someone can love me not because of what I do, but because of who I am? It means, sometimes, allowing other people to see the whole of you, not just the composed, competent, coping version. And discovering that the sky does not fall when you do.

To the Women Who Raised Us in the Myth

Something important: many of us learned the Superwoman myth from women we love and admire. Our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunties who kept entire families running on prayer, ingenuity and sheer will. Women who had no choice but to be strong.

Letting go of the myth is not a betrayal of them. It is not a rejection of everything they endured and everything they built. It is the completion of what they started. They survived so that we might have options they did not. The option to pause. The option to be cared for. The option to be known as whole people, not just as pillars.

Honoring their strength does not require us to replicate their suffering. We can carry their legacy without carrying their wounds.

“The strongest thing you might ever do is admit that you cannot do it alone.”

A Letter to the Strongest Woman in the Room

You have held so much. You have held your family together during things that would have broken other people. You have kept going when you were running on empty. You have smiled in rooms where you were breaking. You have shown up, time and again, for everyone who needed you. And we are not going to tell you that was wrong. Because it wasn’t. You did what you had to do, with the tools and the support you had available.

But we want to ask you something. When was the last time someone showed up for you? Not the capable, coping, managing version of you. But you, the woman who is tired, who sometimes feels invisible, who carries more than anyone knows? When was the last time you were held, instead of doing the holding?

You deserve that. Not as a reward for being strong enough. Simply because you are a person. And people need care.

The Superwoman cape is heavy. You are allowed to put it down. Not forever just long enough to remember who you are without it. Afia Clinic is one of the places where you can do that. Come as you are. Messy, uncertain, exhausted, not-okay. We are not here for the composed version of you. We are here for all of you.

💜  You Don’t Have to Be Strong Here

Afia Clinic offers peer support sessions, mental health workshops and health

awareness events designed specifically for women in our communities.

This is a space where you are allowed to be human.

📍  North East of England

🌐  Women Empowerment and Wellness Network (WEWN) North East, England

✉️  info@wewn.org.uk

 ⚠️  A note from our team

This article provides health awareness information only. It is not a substitute for professional

medical advice. If you are struggling with your mental health, please speak to your GP or

a trained professional.

Know a woman who has been too strong for too long? Share this article with her today.