Permission to Break

By Rashida Saunders

Permission to Break: A Memoir of Strength, Silence, and Softness

What if the strength that helped you survive is the very thing keeping you from healing?

For years, Rashida Saunders was praised for being strong. Strong enough to endure. Strong enough to lead. Strong enough to carry the weight of trauma, responsibility, motherhood, grief, and service without letting the cracks show. But strength came at a cost.

In Permission to Break, Rashida shares a deeply personal story of emotional resilience, identity, trauma, burnout, and healing. Raised in silence and shaped by survival, she learned early how to suppress emotions, carry burdens alone, and keep moving no matter how heavy life became. As a Black woman serving in law enforcement, she built a career helping others while quietly struggling beneath the weight of expectations she rarely allowed herself to question.

Then life forced her to confront a difficult truth: surviving is not the same as living.

Through honest storytelling and hard-earned reflection, Rashida explores the hidden cost of high-functioning strength and the long journey back to herself. She writes about leadership, motherhood, community, emotional wellness, faith, grief, and the courage required to put down the armor that once felt necessary for survival. With vulnerability and insight, she examines what it means to live in survival mode for years, how silence shapes identity, and why healing often begins when we stop pretending we are okay.

Permission to Break is for women in leadership, first responders, caregivers, helping professionals, and anyone who has spent years carrying more than they could explain. It is for those who have mistaken endurance for healing, who have learned to function while quietly struggling, and who are exhausted from being everyone else's source of strength.

This is not a story about falling apart. It is a story about coming home to yourself.

Because breaking is not failure. Sometimes breaking is release. Sometimes breaking is the beginning of healing. And sometimes the greatest act of strength is giving yourself permission to break.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FZCL93QG
• ISBN13: 9798999068101
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Black Ember Press
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Inspiring and possibly career or life saving

Permission to Break is a must read for those in law enforcement and in other helping professions. It’s written by a natural public servant who chose law-enforcement as a way of helping those in her community and others. it highlights the importance of often ignored self-care and the importance of not letting your own or other people‘s traumas cause harm in your life. It reads almost as if poetry or as young people might say today, like bars. I would recommend it for those currently in or considering a professional in law-enforcement or other helping professions. It might also be important for any female working in a male dominant field, or anyone who may feel culturally or socially isolated. It speaks to the importance of being mentored and mentoring others to ensure career growth and psychological safety. Read it if you just like or collect good books.