The Strong Friend · A letter from Dr. Dezetta Burnett

The Strong Friend Needs Somewhere to Put It Down

Dr. Dezetta Burnett, DSW, LCSW · Burnett Clinical Group

There is a woman everyone calls first.

When the group chat has a crisis, they call her. When the committee needs a chair, they nominate her. When the family needs a decision, the room goes quiet and looks in her direction. She runs the department, or the classroom, or the caseload, or the business, or the ministry, or the household. Often several at once.

You know her. You may be her.

Here is what almost nobody asks the woman everyone calls first: who does she call?

I have sat with hundreds of these women, and I can tell you what her 3 a.m. looks like. She is replaying a conversation from three days ago, editing what she should have said. She is running tomorrow's logistics: the permission slip, the deliverable, the appointment nobody else remembered to make. She is feeling something she would never say out loud, a low hum of resentment toward people she genuinely loves, because the asking never stops. And underneath all of it, a quieter thought she pushes away fastest: I don't remember the last time I felt like myself.

She would never call it anxiety. She calls it being tired. Being wired. Being "fine."

Here is the inheritance most of us were handed, especially those of us raised to be strong: rest is something you earn after everyone else is taken care of, and struggle is something you keep private. So she earns and she keeps, and the account never settles, because the people who love her most have learned, through no fault of their own, that she doesn't need anything. She trained them well.

I want to offer one reframe, the one I offer in the therapy room:

Being the strong one is a role, not an identity. And roles come with shifts. Yours was never meant to run twenty-four hours.

The strongest thing the strong friend ever does is not another rescue, another deadline, another held-together holiday. It is the moment she lets one trusted place exist where she does not have to perform, where nothing is required of her, where she can finally set it all down and be tended to for one hour that belongs entirely to her.

That place can be a therapist's office. It can start somewhere smaller: one friend you stop editing yourself for. One evening a week that is not available for other people's emergencies. One honest answer the next time someone asks how you are.

But it has to exist somewhere. A weight with nowhere to land doesn't disappear. It just gets carried at 3 a.m., alone.

You have carried it long enough.

Until next month,
Dr. Dezetta Burnett, DSW, LCSW
Founder & Clinical Director, Burnett Clinical Group

Burnett Clinical Group, a California LCSW Professional Corporation. Dr. Dezetta Burnett, DSW, LCSW, California License #64299. This letter is educational and is not therapy. In an emergency, call 911 or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Privacy