Softness Is Strength: How to Feel Safe in Your Body Again
For generations, Black women have been taught to carry strength the way others carry breath. We inherited it through whispered encouragement, through watchful mothers, and through the necessity of surviving a world that demanded our resilience long before it ever considered our humanity. Strength was how we protected ourselves. It was how we protected each other. It was the crown placed on our heads and the armor strapped to our bodies. But armor, as Rev. Sheila P. Johnson reminds us, has a cost.
She sits with this truth not only as a psychoanalyst but as a woman who has spent years listening to the stories bodies tell when words cannot. When she talks about the “strong Black woman” archetype, there is no judgment. There is only compassion for the way many of us live in a kind of quiet vigilance. A jaw that never fully releases. A breath that pauses before completing itself. Shoulders that rise without permission. Thoughts that scatter before they land. “Strength kept us safe,” she explains, “but it also kept us braced.”
That bracing becomes a way of life. We do not always feel stressed. We feel capable and responsible and like the one everyone can count on. Yet underneath it, the body never stops scanning. Even rest can feel dangerous because safety itself feels unfamiliar. Rev. Johnson describes this state with a clarity that feels like being seen. The body rehearses for impact even when no threat is present. Muscles harden. Digestion dulls. Thoughts slip away mid-sentence. Hope becomes something we remember rather than something we feel. “You forget what you meant to say,” she notes. “Small tasks blur into overwhelm. Thoughts scatter. And all of it hides beneath ‘I’m fine.’” But then she offers a revelation.
"The body can be taught to return to safety, and softness is the bridge back."
When the body begins to trust that it is no longer in danger, small miracles unfold. The jaw releases. The breath lengthens. You drive home and realize your hands never clenched the wheel. Food tastes like food again instead of fuel for survival. The heart stops practicing emergencies. Memory steadies. Curiosity returns. “The nervous system,” she says, “becomes a home again.” Softness is not a collapse. It is restoration. It is the body remembering itself.
The Armor We Mistake for Personality
In her work, Rev. Johnson often meets women who only recognize their emotional armor once it begins to crack. Armor hides in the traits we call efficiency or independence. It disguises itself as perfectionism. It appears in the way we over explain, over perform, or pretend we are unaffected. It is humor that cuts pain short or silence that looks like grace. “Armor helped us move through rooms that were not built for softness,” she reflects. “But protection can turn into distance. It can keep joy out as easily as it keeps pain out.”
Her guidance is not to rip the armor away. Softening does not begin with exposure. It begins with noticing. When your voice tightens. When your stomach knots. When your shoulders rise. These are invitations rather than failures. A single breath can shift the body’s entire chemistry. A full exhale reactivates the vagus nerve and tells the nervous system it is safe to slow. Calm is not an idea. It is a physical event. “Softness refines strength,” she says. “It lets us respond instead of react.”
Becoming Soft Again, Safely and Slowly
For women who have lived too long in survival mode, softness can feel like a risk. Rev. Johnson acknowledges this with honesty. You cannot rush your way back into your body. You cannot force safety. Instead, softness begins through steady sensory grounding.
She teaches women to orient by letting their eyes move around the room, telling the brain it is safe enough to look rather than hide. She guides them to anchor their breath, inhaling for four counts and exhaling for six, allowing the heart to meet the rhythm of peace. She encourages micro-movements to free the freeze response and allow adrenaline to exit the body rather than accumulate. She invites cooling touch to bring awareness back to the present. Softness is not an aesthetic. It is a practice. A discipline of returning to the body again and again until safety becomes familiar. Each repetition tells the nervous system that stillness is not danger.
How Softness Changes Our Presence in the World
There is a quiet power in someone who is soft and steady at the same time. Rev. Johnson describes how our internal state influences others long before we speak. Humans regulate each other unconsciously. One grounded heartbeat can slow an entire room.
She offers the example of an ordinary conversation. Someone interrupts you and the old reflex rises to defend, correct, or explain. Instead, you pause and breathe. Your voice softens and the room follows your pace.
“That is embodied influence,” she explains. “Not dominance, but coherence.”
Softness becomes leadership. It becomes the ability to change the emotional climate around you without exertion. It becomes a way of being that invites peace into spaces where people have forgotten what calm feels like.
Rebuilding After Burnout or Loss
When life asks you to rebuild after trauma, disappointment, burnout, or major transformation, Rev. Johnson stresses that healing begins with small and consistent practices that reopen the body to ease. Every revolution, she says, begins with a quiet moment. Touching water in the morning to awaken the senses. Stretching with long exhales to signal safety. Grounding the feet when anxiety rises. Dimming lights in the evening so the body remembers how to rest. Letting joy return through laughter, movement, connection, and play.
She speaks of joy not as indulgence but as biology. When we laugh deeply or move freely, the body releases serotonin and oxytocin, the very chemicals that repair the nervous system. Boundaries become another expression of softness. Each honest “no” protects the body from returning to the edge of overwhelm. Each pause gives the nervous system the space it needs to remain whole. “Softness is strength unlearning its armor,” Rev. Johnson says. “It is the knowing that peace is not surrender but sovereignty.”
The Revolution of the Unclenched Body
By the time Rev. Sheila Johnson finishes describing this work, softness no longer feels like a luxury. It feels like a reclamation. A returning. A truth that has always lived inside us. The storm may still rage outside. The world may still demand more than we have. But inside the body we can build a steadiness that does not fracture.
“You are not strong because you never break,” she tells us.
“You are strong because you know when to soften. And that softness is the revolution.”
