I recently wrote a trilogy of articles on ‘Letting go of the Good Girl’, each one exploring a key aspect of the Good Girl. I’ve been reflecting further on one particular aspect: ‘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.’
In one article I wrote: ‘It’s no coincidence we talked about the ‘good girl’ as the block to our healthy growth and what we need to let go of. She is what keeps us in the darkness. She was born knowing how to listen to her intuition, her inner voice, but at some point, the voices of others took over and she stopped listening to herself and began to doubt her own truth. She would initially fight back and be a ‘bad’ girl but that was still reacting to others and not listening to what was healthy and right for herself. Eventually she swallowed the messages, and the judgmental voices became internalised into what is psychologically called the ‘Critical Parent’. This cynical inner voice has the good girl in a tight grip. The two are inextricably dependant on each other for their existence.’ https://www.cascad.co.uk/post/spring-equinox-receiving-joy
I have known for some time that self-doubt is my Achilles heel. Someone told me, at a pivotal moment in my life many years ago, that the only thing stopping me from really fulfilling my potential was that I didn’t believe in myself and that when I internally changed that, I would fly high. His gift propelled me on a long and very winding road of inner healing and, externally, many exciting adventures. I am not the same woman that was too often frozen in self-doubt, hearing but not acting on my inner voice that was increasingly clamouring to be listened to.
The word ‘doubt’ originates from the Latin, ‘dubitare’ which means to hesitate. I am not talking here about a healthy pause, using our fine mind to question rigid, unprocessed beliefs and opinions in ourselves and in others. I am talking about paralysing self-doubt: the clash between our inner voice that knows intuitively what we need to do and the ‘Critical Parent’, that inner judgmental, harsh voice which insidiously attacks us, rendering us powerless and exposed. It is this impasse that forces us to hesitate, not trusting what is best and most life enhancing for us.
My deeper exploration into understanding self-doubt was recently triggered by watching the film, ‘It Ends with Us’ and the play, ‘Prima Facie’ with Jodie Comer. Both are about assaults on the female protagonists, and both focus on the disconnect between their truth/experience and others’ distorted interpretation of the same events. I saw the two shows back-to-back, and I wept. I was weeping because, after a lifetime of assaults…and what woman has not had a lifetime of assaults in some form?... I was not only witnessing women calling it out so masterfully, but they were naming the insidious and corrosive damage others not believing our truth has on us.
This is how self-doubt starts. Like all very young children, I saw and spoke my truth: I unwittingly named behaviour and dynamics I observed around me and asked questions…the ‘Why?’. I remember my son doing this when he was young and how powerful and unsettling his comments could be. Young children don’t know to collude, to keep the family secrets no-one talks about. They innocently speak and name what they see. Fortunately, my son was not punished for speaking his truth, rather his clear vision helped me to have the courage and confidence in mine too. But I grew up in a very different world and the adults around me found hearing truth very threatening and they reacted in anger telling me I was mad and bad. So, I learned to swallow my truth, internalising this script that I was mad and bad if I spoke it and I grew up deeply doubting my perception and inner voice.
What can we do to change this? Well, we need to heal. We need to understand why we have such harmful self-doubt and do the therapeutic work that will cure us. I began my healing in a very smart way: I became a psychotherapist. As I entered my training, I thought I was doing this to heal the world, but my unconscious knew this was the only way I would give myself permission to do the necessary work on myself. As part of the training, we had to enter into our own therapy…physician heal thyself… and so began a lifetime of personal healing and development.
Then fourteen years ago, I began my training in intuitive intelligence with my superb Coach, Mary Hykel Hunt:https://www.iqx2.co.uk. There is a fundamental difference between intuition and intuitive intelligence. As with our emotions, instincts and cognition, we are all born with intuition but we need to train it so we can interpret its data with skill and discernment.
So yes, we need to keep healing, but awareness is not enough: it is hot air until we change our mindset and start to act differently.
The Confidence Gap is an excellent article which explores why women are generally less confident than men. When I’m recommending this article, I always urge that it needs to be read to the end. The research makes for depressing reading as evidence after evidence builds up to show why so many women are up against it in terms of inner confidence: ‘Delving into research and interviews, we more than once found ourselves wondering whether the entire female sex was doomed to feel less than self-assured. Biology, upbringing, society: all seemed to be conspiring against women’s confidence.’
Then finally there is hope as the journalists bring in evidence of what we can do to transform this heavily fatalistic outcome: ‘The natural result of low confidence is inaction. When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, we hold ourselves back. But when we do act, even if it’s because we’re forced to, we perform just as well as men do… The essential chicken-and-egg question still to be answered is to what extent these differences between men and women are inherent, and to what extent they are a result of life experiences. The answer is far from clear-cut, but new work on brain plasticity is generating growing evidence that our brains do change in response to our environment…
The simplicity is compelling, and the notion that confidence and action are interrelated suggests a virtuous circle. Confidence is a belief in one’s ability to succeed, a belief that stimulates action. In turn, taking action bolsters one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed. So confidence accumulates—through hard work, through success, and even through failure.
The natural result of low confidence is inaction. When women hesitate because we aren’t sure, we hold ourselves back…
The advice implicit in such findings is hardly unfamiliar: to become more confident, women need to stop thinking so much and just act. Almost daily, new evidence emerges of just how much our brains can change over the course of our lives, in response to shifting thought patterns and behavior. If we keep at it, if we channel our talent for hard work, we can make our brains more confidence-prone. What the neuroscientists call plasticity, we call hope.’ Katty Kay and Claire Shipman: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/
This is a compelling article that I re-read often. It inspires me to take action, including voicing my truth, whenever I intuitively know I have to do/say something that is ‘right’. And through the years, I have found that each time I take action, I steadily build my faith and trust in my inner resources…my own wealth bank… to respond to all that life brings and create extraordinary alchemy. This is what true confidence is.
Hannah Elizabeth Greenwood