The Strong Black Mother Myth: How Emotional Suppression Harms Mental Health and What Healing Looks Like
Saturday, July 26, 2028
In the great American tradition of solving systemic oppression by blaming individuals, we built a myth: the Superwoman Schema.
Think: Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, your grandmother, your mother, you.
Coined by psychologist Cheryl Woods-Giscombe (2010), the Superwoman Schema describes the internalized belief that a Black woman must be strong, self-sacrificing, and emotionally contained at all times.
Not because she wants to be. Because she has to be.
The thinking goes: If I’m not strong, who will protect my children? Who will advocate for my family in racist institutions? Who will hold this fragile lineage of dignity together with two hands and no rest?
And so, emotional suppression becomes a ritual. Vulnerability becomes indulgence. Softness becomes dangerous.
The Data Has Feelings Too
This isn’t metaphor. It’s measurable.
Study after study shows that endorsing the Superwoman Schema leads to higher anxiety, greater depressive symptoms, lower help-seeking, and—because the universe loves irony—worse health outcomes (Watson & Hunter, 2015; Woods-Giscombe, 2010).
Meanwhile, the biological cost of stress accumulates in the body like compound interest. Researchers call it weathering—a slow burn of the nervous system under racism, sexism, and duty. A cellular price tag for decades of being “fine.”
We say Black don’t crack. That may be true on the outside.
Inside? It’s cracking everywhere.
Motherhood, Perfection, and the Sacred Lie
For Black mothers, the Strong Woman script gets even crueler.
Now it’s not just about surviving—it’s about modeling perfection for children raised in a world that may not forgive their mistakes.
Be the regulator. The anchor. The educational system. The healthcare advocate. The emotional filter for generational trauma and TikTok noise.
And if you cry in the bathroom? Clean your face before they see.
This isn’t just unsustainable. It’s intergenerationally transferred martyrdom. And daughters learn it, not through lectures, but through watching the women they love most never put the load down.
What Therapy Often Gets Wrong
Traditional therapy likes to ask, “How do you feel?”
But the Strong Black Mother doesn’t have time to feel. She has time to function. When she enters therapy—if she ever does—she often gets pathologized for the very traits that once kept her alive.
We might talk about codependence, control issues, Avoidant Attachment.
We forget to mention the culture that forced her to become this way.
Intersectional therapy—led by voices like Doctors, Thema Bryant, Joy Harden Bradford, and Chanequa Walker-Barnes—who all say this plainly:
You are not broken. You adapted.
And you are allowed to outgrow the adaptation.
What Healing Sounds Like (Spoiler: It’s Quiet)
Healing doesn’t mean tearing down your strength.
It means redefining it.
Strength that bends. Strength that pauses.
Strength that cries when the room is safe.
Strength that asks for help before the collapse.
Strength that stops performing and starts receiving.
Therapy, when it’s working, helps Black mothers:
Name the lie that says needing rest is failure
See the cape not as armor but as inheritance
Imagine mothering themselves, not just their kids
Because behind every Strong Black Mother is often a tired Black daughter—and sometimes they are the same woman.
What We Owe Her
We owe her more than celebration.
We owe her rest. Boundaries. Access. Gentle questions.
Therapists who don’t confuse survival strategies with personality disorders. Systems that actually support Black motherhood instead of extracting from it.
We owe her the right to say:
“I’m not okay,”
without being feared, shamed, or ignored.
We owe her the right to be held—not just to hold everyone else up.
Closing Thoughts: Retiring the Cape (Without Losing the Story)
There is nothing more American than demanding heroism from people we refuse to protect.
The Strong Black Mother is real. She’s sacred.
But she is also tired. And she is allowed to be something else.
Not weak. Not broken. Just… human.
Not the rock.
The river.
Let it flow.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Bryant-Davis, T. (2023). Healing the sacred self: Racial trauma, spirituality, and embodied therapy. APA Books.
Giscombe, C. L. (2010). Superwoman Schema: African American women’s views on stress, strength, and health. Qualitative Health Research, 20(5), 668–683.
Jones, M. K., Harris, K. J., & Reynolds, A. A. (2020). In their own words: The meaning of the Strong Black Woman schema among Black U.S. college women. Sex Roles, 82, 719–732.
Thomas, Z., Eaton, A. A., et al. (2022). Twenty-five years of psychology research on the Strong Black Woman. Sex Roles, 87(5–6), 257–276.
Walker-Barnes, C. (2014). Too heavy a yoke: Black women and the burden of strength. Cascade Books.
Watson, N. N., & Hunter, C. D. (2015). Anxiety and depression among African American women: The costs of strength and negative attitudes toward psychological help-seeking. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 21(4), 604–612.
Would you like a follow-up written for daughters of Strong Black Mothers? Or a therapeutic guide for clinicians working with this schema in family systems?