When Endurance Becomes the Cage

The challenge for those who have endured long seasons of suffering or survived deep trauma is that they can become complacent to pain—unmoved by what most would find unbearable.

I’m not talking about a bad meeting, a rough day, or even a hard week. I’m talking about months, sometimes years, of hardship—often endured in silence.

The danger for these survivors is subtle: they can become slow to move, numb to the cues that signal change. Where others would pivot, they persist. The very endurance that once saved them now becomes a limitation to their evolution.

It’s not that they haven’t learned from their past—it’s that their threshold for pain has changed. What feels urgent to others barely registers for them. The callouses formed through trauma, once protection, can quietly become confinement.

“Resilience is not just surviving the storm, but knowing when to step back into the sun.” — Morgan Harper Nichols