I’ve been down a deep rabbit hole these last few months exploring the ‘Good Girl’ syndrome. This isn’t a new concept for me, but this deeper exploration was triggered by a workshop at a women’s retreat I gave recently.
I began by asking the following:
‘To move into health and happiness, what do you need to let go of and what is no longer serving you?’
As we talked about what was no longer healthy or serving us, a key theme emerged: the ‘Good Girl’ mindset. I have never yet met a woman who does not nod knowingly when I use this term!
Three key aspects emerged:
1. Good girls are expected to give but not receive.
2. Good girls can cry but they must not feel or show anger.
3. Good girls do not listen to their inner truth…their intuition…and consequently learn to doubt themselves, which is manifested in over-apologising and low self-worth.
My last two articles have explored the first and third aspects, see links below. * It’s no coincidence I have left the second aspect to last: ‘Good Girls can cry but they must not feel or show anger. It’s inextricably linked to the other two and it’s the one I found hardest to change in myself. Unlike the other two, showing anger has a direct impact on others who might not approve or like us for it.
I instinctively love harmony but beyond a natural predisposition for beauty and equanimity, I’ve also been trained from a very early age to be a peacemaker, soothing and diffusing jarring dynamics, not adding to them. I come from a family that has very high IQ but underdeveloped EQ, i.e. the incapacity to understand and manage emotions, so uncontrolled/unprocessed anger was always erupting. Of course, I was born with the capacity to feel anger but because I learned the hard way that Good Girls do not show anger, I swallowed it and my focus was on helping/giving to others and not focusing on myself, hence ‘Good Girls are expected to give but not receive.’
Swallowing anger is dangerous. Anger turned inwards becomes depression and makes us ill. It also makes us passive aggressive, i.e. not owning our anger cleanly but channelling it indirectly. This is at the core of the victim mindset, a refusal to take personal responsibility for our actions, and it can also manifest in behaviour such as backstabbing, trolling, forming excluding cliques etc. One of my favourite books is Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. I read it as a student and passionate feminist…I am still both!..and it shocked me. It essentially explores a nasty bully-victim relationship between two women that started as girls. It was the first time I had read a feminist writer look so dispassionately at the damage women can do to other women. Atwood was challenging a long-held taboo.
By the age of 9, I was going through a very dark time: physically…I had pneumonia and I wasn’t healing… and also emotionally and psychologically. I wrote about this in: Know thyself: our fascination with the psyche
‘It was a book that saved my life. ‘Marianne Dreams’ written by Catherine Storr, was, before she became a novelist, a Senior Medical Officer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at Middlesex Hospital, London. It is an extraordinary book about a girl, Marianne, who is bedridden with a long-term illness. She finds a magic pencil and draws a picture of a big house in a bleak landscape. That night she dreams she is in the picture she has drawn. As time goes by, she becomes sicker in the ‘real’ world and spends more and more time trapped within the nightmarish, fantasy world. Her only companion in her dream world is a boy who is also a long-term invalid in the ‘real’ world. Marianne learns that she can only save them both by facing her fears hidden in her unconscious…by literally drawing them out!... and finding the courage to overcome them. It is a dark book but one ultimately about hope and embracing life. And it ends with a rescue by that beacon of light…a lighthouse! It was reading this, as a 9-year-old, that made me choose life and a different way of seeing the world. As simple as that. I learned that however dark life is, there is always hope…light …and always someone out there who will help.’
It really did save my life. I learned that there is always help if I have the openness, humility and courage to receive it. And, as crucially, I learned that I had to change my mindset, that being a Good Girl was killing me. At such a young age, it was pure instinctive survival: I didn’t make this fundamental choice consciously to live or die. It was many years later, as I was therapeutically processing this point in my life, I realised that I had made a key existentialist choice. My pivotal decision to let go of the unquestioning Good Girl in me was the catalyst that propelled me on my path to health on all levels.
It took time of course. It was a gradual and circuitous path and I still continued to behave primarily as a good girl but with increasing inner questioning. And then I reached 15 and I rebelled and became a bad girl! I realised that certain anger was permissible, that I was allowed to be angry on behalf of others, to champion others, and I relished this release of energy. Unhooking from the good girl in us means we necessarily swing to the other extreme and it proves a welcome release from the suffocating prison of trapped good girl energy. But this new bad girl anger was expressed in a way that was not ultimately loving to me. Bad Girl anger stems from a fragile ego, full of petulant, infantile and impotence, raging that ‘Mummy/Daddy’ are not listening to them. It is still reacting to others we perceive as more powerful, and we are still not listening to our inner voice as to what is healthy and right for ourself.
Most of us are quite rightly wary of anger. We have all been on the receiving end of destructive unhealthy anger at some point and we learned as very little children to either emulate it and/or find strategies to deflect and avoid it, all of which are equally harmful to others and to ourselves.
I didn’t witness or learn that anger can be a healthy and enabling energy until I was in my early thirties. I was in a women’s therapy group as part of my ongoing psychotherapeutic training, and we were all experienced practitioners with many hours of individual therapy behind us. This meant that we were strong enough in ourselves to be paradoxically vulnerable and open to challenge each other to go into even greater healing. Being part of a therapy group wasn’t new for us: we’d all experienced this as part of our practitioner training. What was very new was working at such psychological depth with women only, focussing on issues such as our relationship with anger. This was not a cerebral academic group: it was experiential, and I had to let go of that polite, nice girl in me. It was liberating and empowering and I experienced anger for the first time as a healthy, connecting energy not a distancing one, i.e. not a ‘kill or be killed’ attitude, but one that aims to reach and connect more healthily and intimately with others.
So, what does healthy anger look like? The cover picture is a drawing of the Statue of Liberty. Given to the USA in 1885 by the French in honour of the friendship between the two countries, the statue is based on Libertas, the Roman Goddess of liberty and personal freedom, specifically enslavement. Look at her strong and authoritative stance, her calm and commanding face and her arm held high in fierce pride. This woman means business! She knows her boundaries and has deep self-respect. She very rarely roars…she doesn’t need to and often a simple raised eyebrow or tone of voice is enough…but, like a lioness protecting her cubs, she would kill in self-defence. She also knows anger is sometimes a necessary motivational energy to change what needs to be changed.
So, where does this leave our Good Girl? It is very tempting to want to kill her off and feeling angry with her is a very healthy part of our healing, but we weren’t born with her like this. We are all born with what’s called psychologically an inner ‘Free Child’. This inner child is the only place within us where we can experience a visceral, not cerebral, awe and wonder. It is the gift of joy. Our ‘Good Girl…or Boy’ was originally this beautiful Free Child: innately wise, very sweet and gentle, trusting and loving and who connected very easily with others, seeing the best in them. But we didn’t know how to navigate the world with its pits and serpents and if others were not equally gentle and kind, this precious openness left us exposed and vulnerable. This is why we became that Good Child, stuck in a loop of wanting to love and please those who should have responded in kind.
Rather than killing off our Good Child, how about we compassionately transform it into our Free Child again, the child that loves to laugh, dance and play? Today is the Summer Solstice in London, the first day of summer. It has been a very grey and wet Spring here and we are yearning for the healing power of the sun and the joy and fun of summer to begin. Wherever we are in the world, how about we allow our beautiful and wise Free Child to come out to play? Now, what might that look like?!
Hannah Elizabeth Greenwood
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