At work
Your reviews say calm under pressure. You have never missed a deadline, and you have never told anyone what it took to make one. When your manager asks how things are going, you say good, busy, you know. Some evenings you sit in the car for ten minutes before you can drive. I can hold it together through the workday. It's when I get home that I come apart.
At work the Strong rule often looks like never letting anyone see the strain, which protects your reputation and can keep help from reaching you. The gap between how you look and how you are can have other explanations, and this page may not have yours.
What you do at work
The ten minutes in the car come at the end of a day of small concealments.
You say you have room when you don't. You report a problem only after you have solved it. In a check-in you give the short bright answer and then ask about the other person's project.
When there is more to handle, you look calmer. Nobody watching would know which weeks were the hard ones. People count on me, so I figure they need to see me steady. Not scared, not too excited either.
This often gets rewarded. The person who never looks rattled can become the one people bring the difficult things to.
What it costs
One cost may be the load itself. If fine is read as has room, more may arrive.
Another may be timing. A problem that is only mentioned once it is fixed is a problem nobody could have helped with, and a risk that is carried quietly can surface late.
The team may be affected as well. A team may copy the member who never shows strain, and stop showing its own. And colleagues who would gladly have helped may never find out there was anything to help with.
As a parent
Your kids have never seen you cry. When something goes wrong you get calm and efficient, and whatever you feel about it waits until they are asleep. Other parents tell you they don't know how you do it. You say oh, we manage. I was raised not to show what I feel. You keep it in.
In parenting the Strong rule often shows up as never letting your children, or anyone else, see that you are having a hard time. None of what follows is parenting advice, and none of it is about how your kids are doing. The subject is you, and what may be behind the calm.
What you do as a parent
The calm is real, and useful. It also has a pattern.
Bad news gets handled out of sight. If your eyes are red, you are just tired. You wait until the house is quiet.
With other adults it is the same. At school pickup you are fine. With your own parents you are fine. With your partner, if there is one, you are mostly fine, and the hard part comes out days later or not at all.
Nobody would call any of this a problem. Children do need a steady adult, and you are one.
What it costs
For you, the cost may be carrying every hard season without company. People who would have helped may never have known.
For the other adults in your children's lives, the cost may be never being asked. A partner or grandparent or friend may assume all is well because that is what they were shown.
Then there are the children. This page makes no guess about what they notice or what they make of it. The cost it can name is yours: keeping every hard day out of their sight can be work, and you may be doing it with no help.
In the body
Someone asks how you are, and you hear yourself say good in a bright voice. A second ago something was wrong. Now it does not show, and you did not choose that. Later, when you are alone, it comes back. I got so good at looking okay that I'm not sure I feel much of anything now.
Under the Strong rule the physical sign tends to be composure that arrives by itself, before you have decided how to respond. This page describes what tends to go with the rule. It does not explain it. What a body is doing, and why, is a question for a clinical source, and a physical complaint that persists belongs with a doctor.
When it shows up
This one is hard to catch, because what shows up is the lack of anything showing.
It tends to come when you are asked how you are. When someone notices that something is off. And at any moment where what you feel might become visible to another person.
In those moments the steadiness is already in place by the time you notice. The voice is even. The answer is short and fine. It can feel less like something you did and more like something that happened.
What sets it apart
The order of things is what stands out. The composure tends to come first, and any decision about how to respond comes after. You may find you are already performing fine before you have decided to perform.
You may not be able to place it anywhere in particular. I do all of it in my head.
Look-alikes
- Burden (owing, rather than being seen)
- Unseen, a research candidate
Strong often runs alongside Burden or Right. Most people are running more than one rule. Subtraction does not force a single root when the evidence shows two.
Questions to observe
- What was the exact moment it fired? Not the topic, the second.
- What did your body do first?
- What did the moment seem to mean about you?
- What did you immediately want to do, and what were you protecting against?
- Would this rule explain your last three moments like this, across different parts of life? If not, which ones does it fail on?
How subtraction tests it
In subtraction, Strong is one of several hypotheses tested against your evidence: moments from work, relationships, conflict, success, failure. If it accounts for what keeps repeating without forcing the evidence to fit, it survives. If it only explains some of the moments, it goes, or it gets paired with whatever explains the rest. How subtraction works.