What Growing Up in a Caribbean Household Taught Me About Strength, and About Silence
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
I want to start by saying that strength in Caribbean culture is not small. It is not quiet. It is not the kind of strength that gets celebrated in a LinkedIn post or acknowledged in a performance review. It is the kind of strength that moves across oceans.
I remember the day I moved from New Jersey to Georgia. I was born in this country, raised in this country, and educated in this country. I spoke the language fluently. I had the world at my fingertips with just a flick of a button. And still, I woke up that first morning and thought, what am I doing here? Everything that had anchored me, my family, my friends, my sense of belonging, my doctors, my hair salon, my community, was gone. And it destabilized me in ways I did not expect.
And then I thought about my mother.
She came to the United States in the 1980s. She did not know the language fluently. She did not have the comfort of being a phone call away from everything familiar. She came into a completely different world and found a way. Not because it was easy, but because that is what was required of her. That kind of strength doesn't always come with a choice attached. A lot of us grew up in households where there was no option to sink or swim — you swam, because the alternative wasn't really an alternative. That is Caribbean strength. And I think we underestimate it constantly.
Growing up, my mother talked about her trauma. But not in the way a therapist might encourage you to. She talked about it the way a woman who had already survived it talks about it: logically, purposefully, with the lesson already embedded. I went through this. It was hard. But I made it through. And so can you. There was not much room to sit in the pain. There was not much time to grieve. You get through it and you keep moving. And if you are lucky, maybe one day you come back and unpack it. But often, nobody comes back. Because why would you want to return to the thing that hurt you?
That is what silence looked like in my house. Not cruelty. Not avoidance. Survival.
And here is what I have learned from sitting with so many people who carry that same kind of silence. It costs something. The pain does not disappear because we do not speak it. It just finds another way to live in us.
One of the most important things I have had to unlearn is this: sitting in it does not make you weak. In fact, it is the hardest part. And it is the part we most often skip.
When the coast is clear, when the crisis has passed, when we have survived the thing, we exhale and we move on. But skipping that part has a price. We wake up one day and realize we are repeating the same patterns. Making the same choices. Carrying the same wounds in a different decade. And then we look around and see our children doing it too. And their children after them. Because that is how generational cycles work, not through malice, but through silence. Through the coping strategies we inherited and never questioned.
It is so much easier to look outward. To point to circumstances, to systems, to other people. And sometimes those things are absolutely a factor. But healing asks us to also look inward. To ask ourselves: what is my role in this? What have I been carrying that was never mine to carry? What have I been repeating because no one ever taught me there was another way?
That is the work. Not blaming. Not shaming. Just looking, honestly and courageously, at what has been passed down, and deciding what you want to pass forward.
That is why I do this work. Not to ask people to abandon the strength that got them here. But to create a space where strength and healing can coexist. Where you do not have to choose between who you are and how you feel.
If any part of this resonates with you, I would love to connect.
www.mlcounselor.com
mlamour@mlcounselor.com
908-423-9428
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