Ep 108 Breaking the Good Girl Curse

Episode Summary:

Were you raised to be a “good girl”? To be polite, agreeable, and put others’ needs ahead of your own? If so, you’re not alone. In this episode, we’re unpacking the deep-rooted Good Girl conditioning many of us inherited and how it affects our ability to set boundaries, express needs, and feel truly seen.

We’ll explore:
✅ How we were trained to be good girls—and why that meant suppressing our true selves.
✅ The hidden costs of this conditioning: emotional suppression, dysregulation, resentment, and burnout.
✅ The attachment and relational impact—when love feels conditional, kids learn to abandon their own needs to stay connected.
✅ How to break the cycle for our kids by teaching boundaries, emotional regulation, and healthy relationships.
✅ The power of worthiness and modeling self-advocacy so our children don’t inherit the Good Girl curse.

If you’ve ever struggled with asking for what you need, feeling too much or not enough, or constantly putting others first, this episode is for you. And if you’re a mom raising daughters (or big-feeling sons), this conversation will help you parent in a way that fosters self-worth, emotional intelligence, and healthy boundaries.

Ready to go deeper?

If this episode hit home, you don’t have to keep carrying this alone. Join me inside Living CALM—my program designed to help moms release stress, regulate their nervous system, and set boundaries without guilt.

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Resources & Links:

✨ Join the Living CALM Program – A step-by-step system to help you regulate stress, shift emotional patterns, and feel more ease in motherhood.
✨ Follow Me on Instagram – Daily tools & insights for emotional wellness, nervous system regulation, and breaking the burnout cycle.
✨ Share This Episode! If this resonates, screenshot it and share it on Instagram—tag me @ParentingTherapistPam so I can cheer you on!

Loved this episode? 🌟 share it with a friend and leave a review—it helps more moms break free from the Good Girl curse!

The best thing you can do for yourself and your kids is effectively regulate your nervous system. And a great place to start >> to wire the brain for gratitude. Research tells us that gratitude increases happiness and a peaceful mindset. Make the shift and watch how things in your life start to change. Sign up today! www.pamgodbois.com/gratitude

Transcript

0:01

Hey there and welcome back to the Peaceful Phone Podcast. Today we're diving into something that so many of us, especially women, have experienced firsthand what it means to be a good girl. I don't mean good in the sense of being kind or having integrity. I mean good in the way many of us were trained to be quiet. Accommodating, easygoing and self-sacrificing the kind of good that meant not making waves, not asking for too much, and definitely not saying no. And while on the surface this might sound like it leads to harmonious relationships, what it actually leads to is generations of women who struggle to express their needs. Set boundaries and feel safe being their full selves in relationships. So today we're gonna break this down. We'll talk about how this good girl training happened. What the cost has been, especially in how we show up in our relationships, and most importantly, how we can make sure our daughters and our big feeling kids don't fall into the same traps because this is not just a gender. This is not just good girls. This can be good boys as well, because the antidote to the good girl trap isn't raising kids who bulldoze others or demand more than they give. It's raising kids who know how to express their needs and respect the needs of others who can set boundaries without guilt and navigate relationships with clarity and confidence. So let's get into it. As an adult woman, do you notice things that other people don't? Do you pick up on someone's discomfort before they even say a word? Do you anticipate what people might need in a situation before they even realize they need it? And do you find yourself automatically stepping in to help to soothe, to accommodate or smooth things over? Even without being asked if this sounds familiar, I want you to know something that's not just who you are. It's how you were trained. You were trained to be a good girl. I don't know about you, but my social media feed has been flooded lately with conversations about the good girl complex and for good reason because so many of us are waking up to just how deeply this condition runs. Being a good girl wasn't just about being kind or doing the right thing. It was a way of molding us into the people who wouldn't rock the boat. For most of us, this meant being polite, quiet, and agreeable. It meant making people comfortable even at the expense of ourselves or our own comfort and anticipating needs and meeting them before anyone had to ask. It wasn't just about being helpful, it was training. It was the unspoken lesson that said, if you want to be loved, accepted, and safe, you better not be too much. The better we got at it, the more it was expected and the more it was expected, the harder it became to ask for what we needed. Does this sound familiar? Remember specifically at my daughter's 13th birthday party sitting around the table with about eight of her friends. They had just gone to an escape room and we were grabbing pizza after, and one of her friends said. Oh yeah, so and so doesn't like me because I'm too much, and I just questioned that. I said, what do you mean by too much? Well, I'm just like loud and I'm a lot and I'm a lot for people to handle, and I'm just, I don't know. My mom tells me I'm too much, and this stopped me in my tracks. And I literally said to this young human, whoever told you that you are too much. That's their conditioning. It's not about you. You are allowed to be who you are and expand into that. So why did this happen? Why was this kid experiencing this? Why was she hearing from her parents that she was too much? As kids, we are wired to seek connection. Our nervous system depends on it. We are biologically programmed to attach to our caregivers because that's how we survive. So when love, affection, and approval feel conditional, meaning they're tied to how well we behave, how much we please others, or how little trouble we cause we learn to adapt. Instead of expressing our real feelings and needs, we learn to read the room, anticipate what others want from us, and keep the peace, even if it means betraying ourselves. Here's where it gets tricky. Often, our caregivers didn't consciously teach us this. They weren't sitting down saying, make sure you ignore your needs so everyone else stays happy. But they taught us this in other ways when we were praised for being easygoing, but scolded for having big emotions when we were told to be helpful, but not ask what we needed in return when we saw our moms doing everything for everyone else and never receiving help themselves. I wanna give you a few examples of how this plays out in real life so that you can recognize if this happened to you or if you see it happening in your own household. The first example is the people pleasing reflex, right? Imagine you're a 7-year-old, you're at a family gathering, and you don't really wanna hug your uncle, but your mom says, go on, give him a hug. Don't be rude. In that moment, what's the lesson that your comfort and autonomy don't matter as much as making someone else feel good? Fast forward to adulthood, and suddenly you struggle to say no. You feel guilty setting boundaries. You worry about hurting feelings if you don't comply with what people expect. Example number two is the scanning and anticipating needs. Picture this, you're 10 years old. Your mom comes home from work looking exhausted before she even says a word, you know, she's had a rough day, so you quietly go set the table or try to make her laugh. Anything to make things easier for her. This might seem like kindness and it is, but it's also an early form of self abandonment because instead of learning, Hey, my needs matter too. You learn my job is to take care of others first. Now, as adults, you anticipate everyone's needs, but no one anticipates yours, and it feels easier to just do everything yourself rather than asking for help. Example number three, suppressing big feelings. Let's say you're five years old and you have a big reaction. Maybe you're frustrated, maybe you cry easily. An adult says, oh, come on. Don't be so sensitive. What does that teach you? That your emotions are too much? So you start holding things in. You push down your feelings, and then years later you find yourself struggling with anxiety, resentment, or burnout.'cause all those years of swallowing, your needs have taken a toll. When we learn that love and approval are tied to being good, it means we start putting our real selves, our messy, loud needs, having selves on the back burner. So what happens when we do that for long enough? We become adults who struggle to set boundaries because we don't wanna hurt feelings. We do everything for everyone else without being asked because it's the only way we feel valued. We feel exhausted because we're always putting others first. We don't even know what we need because we've spent years prioritizing everyone else. We become adults who have been in this pattern for so long that we don't even know how to receive. Or adults who know we need more from the people in our lives, but we aren't even sure what would help. We struggle with worthiness, feeling like we have to earn love through what we do rather than who we are. And if this is hitting close to home, I want you to know you're not alone. You didn't choose this pattern. It was wired into you. But now as an adult, you get to choose whether or not you keep it. And if you're a parent, that brings up a big question. How do we make sure our kids don't inherit these same patterns? That's what we're diving into next. Look, I grew up in the eighties when bodily autonomy was not a right. We hugged the creepy uncle because it was impolite not to. We invited the bully to the party because we were taught to include everyone. No matter how they treated us as kids. We were expected to be quiet, obedient, and accommodating. Our thoughts and opinions didn't matter. We were the remote control, and now we're the generation of parents who are getting. Pushback from every direction. Our parents, our in-laws, even strangers on social media. Who do these kids think they are having opinions? They should respect their elders. These parents are raising entitled, spoiled kids. But here's the truth, we're not raising entitled kids. We're raising kids who are seen. And for so many of us, that is revolutionary because the good girl is invisible, and we refuse to pass that invisibility down to our children. So now it's time to break the curse. Now we don't wanna swing to the other extreme raising kids who demand without giving, who take up space without consideration of others. Instead, we're teaching our kids how to be in relationships in a way that's balanced and that all begins with worthiness. When we believe we are worthy of unconditional love and support, when we believe we deserve to be seen and heard, we model that worthiness for our children. That's how we break the good girl curse. But worthiness isn't just a belief, it's something we put into practice. Here's how. The first is by teaching boundaries. Start with the belief that you have the right to say no. Our kids need to know. They don't have to hug someone if they don't want to. They don't have to share their toys if they're not ready. They don't have to let someone copy their homework just to be nice. But more than that, boundaries are about teaching them how to decide and communicate. How they wanna be treated. And they learn this when we model it first, when they see us setting and holding our own boundaries, when they hear us say, no, I'm not available for that right now, and we don't apologize for it. When we show them that no is a complete sentence, when we recognize their discomfort and empower them to trust their feelings, boundaries are the ultimate in empowerment. They give our kids a voice and confidence to use it, A necessary component of a secure attachment. next up is emotional regulation and awareness. Emotions are our first language. Babies cry because it's the only way they know how to get their needs met, but too many of us were taught to suppress our feelings because they were too much for the adults around us. We learned that crying makes people uncomfortable, and we should stop that. Being angry is unladylike, so we should swallow it. That feeling hurt is our problem, not anyone else's responsibility. So what do we do instead? We teach our kids that emotions aren't bad. Their information. When our kids have big feelings, we don't shut them down. We teach them how to ride the wave to name what they're feeling, to sit with it and express it in a way that honors their experience. And just as importantly, we remind ourselves emotional regulation is a life learned process. We're not trying to raise kids who are always quiet, well-behaved, or good who're raising kids who are emotionally aware and capable of navigating their inner world in a healthy way. This is how they develop healthy relationships. Good mental health and lifelong emotional resilience. If you're a woman who identifies as an empath, chances are that's not just who you are, it's who you had to be. Many of us learned to scan the room, read emotions, and adjust our behaviors as a way to stay safe. Our empathy was shaped by the good girl training. It was a survival skill, but that doesn't mean empathy is bad. It's one of the most important qualities we can cultivate. True empathy isn't about abandoning ourselves to meet other people's needs. It's about seeing from another person's perspective while still honoring our own boundaries and compassion. That's empathy and action. It's when we choose to show up, stand up, and help out from a place of genuine care, not obligation. So how do we teach our kids this healthy version of empathy through modeling and real world conversations? Of course, big feeling kids do so much better when the focus is not on them. So rather than calling out one of their emotional experiences or a boundary they could have set or a conversation with a friend or a conflict with a friend. You use the world around them to help them grow. So when watching a show ask, how do you think the character feels right now? Or if there's a conflict or a problem going on, talk about that conflict or problem from a place of empathy. Look at it with boundaries and decision making in place spend some time volunteering, giving back to your community, serving at the soup kitchen, volunteering at a senior center or a nursing home. Allow your kids to see and then talk about the impact that their actions have on the world. And when witnessing big emotions, whether on the playground or with friends, with their siblings, even with us, narrate what's happening. That kid looks sad. What do you think happened? How do you think they could have dealt with that situation? What choices could they have made? What are some skills or tools or strategies that we can use to calm ourselves down when we're stressed out? Every moment with your child is an opportunity to train them away from being a good girl and towards being a whole human being. But let's be real. Breaking this cycle is hard, and it takes courage. It's swimming against the tide. It's doing things differently than our parents did, and sometimes feeling like we're doing it all wrong. But here's the thing, every time you let your child have a voice, every time you model boundaries, every time you teach them emotional regulation instead of suppression. You are changing generations of conditioning. You are offering them something you didn't get. And this is a radical act of healing, both for you and for them as well as all your future generations. And if you wanna continue this conversation. Come find me on Instagram. I'm at parenting therapist, Pam. Let's talk about it. I'd love to hear how this resonates with you. Thank you guys so much for being here this week. We'll continue to dive into this topic and start to pull apart different ways of looking at how we were raised. And how that's impacting our kids today. And if you're ready to do more of this work and to really start clearing out let this act as your invitation to join us inside Living Calm, the self-paced program for moms parenting big feeling kids who are ready to not just approach a situation differently, but to rewire ourselves to wire our kids. To create secure attachment and to truly have a peaceful home. Thanks guys, and I'll see you next week. Take care.