It starts way too young. Quietness, accommodation, and selflessness are encouraged, while assertiveness, leadership, and stepping outside the norms are often chastised, all at the cost of the girl’s well-being. We learn to “good girl.”
What Is ‘Goodgirling’?
Annaline Howling is a trauma specialist and author of the forthcoming book Unapologetic: Unshackle Your Shame, Reclaim Your Power. Goodgirling is a term that she uses to describe behaviors demanded of women to keep them in control. It’s often a strategy, driven by shame, to minimize ourselves. I met with Annalie to explore this behavior and how women can overcome it.
Annalie explains, “On the surface level, [goodgirling] can look a lot like people-pleasing.” She adds, “We fear being too much, but no one ever told us what too much is.” Goodgirling is a betrayal to the self through muting, apology, and avoiding conflict.
Often, through interaction with everyday society and magnified by trauma, we can develop self-limiting beliefs that reinforce these behaviors. We can get the idea that our emotions, needs, and selves are inglorious and, as such, ought to be hidden. Annalie shares that we can mistake self-kindness and showing our true selves for something “ugly, a threat or dangerous; it’s outside the lines.”
These behaviors even affect how we express our emotions. Annalie shares, “If we start crying, we apologize immediately. We are taught to be a good girl and keep things neat and tidy—emotions are messy.” Doing so chips away at our well-being.
Trauma Responses
Traumatic experiences, particularly childhood abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence, magnify these behaviors. Annalie explains, “We people-please and good girl because we actually don’t want to get to the next layer down, and the next layer down is where a lot of these injuries happen, which is a conflict that elicits all these trauma responses. A lot of us people-please to avoid conflict.”
Tragically, children experiencing abuse are routinely indoctrinated with a message that what is happening is their fault. In cases of childhood sexual abuse, perpetrators customarily inflict wicked doses of shame on their targets, often followed by threats to keep the target from outing them. Annalie says, “They internalize being a good girl, not telling anyone. They were told to be a good girl by the abuser. You can’t understand the world or yourself anymore.” In turn, women can internalize a sense of being dirty and wish to disappear. Goodgirling offers a way to do that.
What begins as a survival strategy betrays us. We begin to engage in automatic trauma responses bent on the sympathetic nervous system. In Annalie’s words, “Trauma responses are activated far quicker than conscious choice. The prefrontal cortex is offline. The trauma responses are elicited to protect us.” We may be engaging in people-pleasing as a protective mechanism to prevent us from reaching hypervigilance and the tornado that can emerge when we are reminded of trauma.
Over time, diminishing ourselves turns into an injury. We lose our sense of self while embracing a mask of who we believe we are supposed to be. Annalie uses a metaphor of the Horcrux from Harry Potter: Through trauma, shame, and the responses that can follow (including goodgirling), we can shatter.
The Other “S” Word
Research shows that shame is among the most common responses to traumatic stress. What is tricky is that shame is both insidious and overwhelming. Annalie shares, “Shame is like in our rearview all the time just for us to see, just like a little threat, don’t forget, don’t forget, I’ve got this on you, I’ve got this on you.”
She points to two other “S” words: should and shouldn’t. Shame sometimes disguises itself as shoulds and shouldn’ts. These spur a judgmental thought spiral that holds us back. Annalie suggests that we treat it as a curse word. Not only is it not productive, but it is destructive.
Rather, it makes sense to notice when these two words show up in our minds and to be curious. These words can be clues that we are not being authentic to ourselves and putting norms/expectations above our needs.
Healing
Healing is possible. One modality of healing that Annalie advocates for and utilizes in practice is Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), a specialized psychotherapy that relies on specialized techniques coupled with courageously facing the origins of self-limiting beliefs. EMDR is an evidence-based therapy for PTSD that has been shown to be effective and, in some cases, slightly more effective than CBT (Chen et al., 2015).
In Annalie’s words, “The reclamation of our full self is almost learning where we lost it.” She accents that we are never too much, clarifying, “There is enough room for all of us. You can have a shame-less life.” Her hope for her forthcoming book, Unapologetic: Unshackle Your Shame, Reclaim Your Power, is that it may “break some spells, some generational curses. That it unshackles and gives people back those pieces of their souls.”
