Belle Burden: The Burden of Being the "Good Girl"

Dr. Becky talks to Belle Burden, author of Strangers, about why "being good" can quietly cost you yourself, how kids notice far more than we give them credit for, and why it's never too late to tell them the truth.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  How do I raise a kid who actually trusts herself? This is one of the questions I hear most from parents because we all want our kids to have a strong sense of self. It's why I'm so excited to partner with Girl Scouts. Girl Scouts gives girls a space that's theirs, where they can start community service projects, learn to navigate the outdoors, challenge themselves, and make new friends. Girl Scouts meets girls where they are and helps them grow into who they're becoming. And here's what I love as a parent, it's girl-led. Adults are there to support, not run the show. So, girls make the decisions, solve the problems, and build confidence along the way. In a world that puts a lot of pressure on girls, Girl Scouts is a space where girls can feel joyful and empowered.

• 0:41Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, you can visit girlscouts.org to learn more. That's girlscouts.org to learn more. Raise your hand if you were the good girl.

• 0:53Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Me. I mean, you're the kid who stayed in line. You were pretty compliant. You were easy, right? I mean, you might have been favorite child.

• 1:04Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  But in today's podcast, I come across a question that I had never considered in this exact way before. What if being good is a burden? And what if the burden of being good doesn't really show up until we're a lot older, we're adults, and maybe it shows up in an especially intense way, once we're a parent?

• 1:27Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Today's guest is Belle Burden. Interestingly, Belle was nicknamed Belle the Good Burden, so we are talking about exactly that. Belle Burden wrote a memoir called Strangers about the sudden unraveling of her long marriage during the early days of the pandemic. As I read Belle's story, I kept thinking, okay, this book is about a marriage, kind of. It's about so many of the other things that we think about all the time, especially as women. How we can be very good. But maybe that's more about our ability to notice other people's needs and take care of them, and our simultaneous ability to completely ignore and distance ourselves

• 2:12Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  from the things we need for ourselves. So, today Belle and I are talking about what happens when the life you built around being good stops protecting you. I'm Dr. Becky. This is Good Inside.

• 2:29Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Belle, when, when did it start to feel like your life was kind of something you no longer recognized? And for listeners who haven't yet read Strangers, can you take us into the moment when it just feel like things were falling apart?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  So it was March of 2020, the second week of COVID lockdown. I think we all remember that time and how scary it was and how unpredictable. We did not know whether we were going to get a vaccine, how long school was going to be out. And my husband and I moved to Martha's Vineyard with our two daughters. We had an isolated place. It felt like it was going to be safe. And it really felt that way for about a week. We were cooking and taking walks. He was chopping wood and making fires. And one night after dinner, I was mopping the floor and I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. I let it go to voicemail and then I played

• 3:29Speaker 01

  it. And it was a man saying, I'm trying to reach Belle. I'm sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife. And I felt a full bodied shock. I think this is the moment where my life became unrecognizable. I thought I was very happily married. I thought we were very devoted to each other. I was very much in love with my husband. And that night, he really tried to explain it. He apologized. He said it didn't mean anything. But at 6:00 AM the next day, he came into our bedroom with a bag fully packed and said that he thought he was happy, but he wasn't. He thought he wanted our life, but he didn't.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And he wanted a divorce. He did not want any custody of our kids. And that he was leaving. And he walked out and he left the island and really became someone I didn't know anymore. And my life became completely unrecognizable to me, including my future, which I had really thought would look a certain way and be a certain way. And then all of a sudden, it was going to be something completely different.

• 4:40Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Like 12, I'm just trying, like 6:00 PM voicemail. 6 a.m. departure or is this like a 12 hour kind of thing?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  It's, you know, still hard to know. I don't know if maybe it was more planned in his head, but for me, it felt like a 12 hour turnaround. And I didn't sleep that night. He did sleep, but I didn't sleep. And, you know, it's possible that he felt caught. And so that prompted him to want to get out. We were facing being in a house together and doing therapy on Zoom, I thought, to try and work through this and figure out if we could stay married. But he was not going to do that. I did not get a minute of therapy.

• 5:24Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  I'm trying to think about, there's this phrase, I think a lot about in child development, like just called violation of expectations, right?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 5:33Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Um, we have a lot of feelings and intense reactions in our body to anything that's a violation of expectations and, um, and there's the pain. But in some ways, a violation of expectation is like a surprise you never saw coming, which is almost separate from the pain. And I'm thinking about the violation of expectation around who he is, about your marriage. But, and I guess this is my question to you, maybe you could tell me a little bit about that. But sometimes when an intense violation of expectation happens, we look around and we're like, is that even, is that even a coffee mug? Like, is that, is this, is the sky, like, everything feels like it's in question almost.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Um, yes, it really felt that way. And if you put COVID on top of that,

• 6:19Speaker 01

  and how surreal and like the Twilight Zone that felt, if you put the violation of expectation on top of that and on top of feeling vulnerable and scared, it did feel that way. Every, as you said, every object, every meal, every task that used to be routine suddenly became something, um, just, I looked at everything with completely different eyes. That it felt that destabilizing.

• 6:50Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Something I'm thinking about, I'll say it out loud, is yes to what you're saying, and the way I think about people is we operate in parts and, you know, we all have multiple parts of ourselves. And one of the things that Is kind of different between all of us is how much separation or almost like knowledge of the other parts, the other parts have, right? Where like the most extreme version of this is multiple personality disorder. One part has no idea. That's very extreme, but we lose the fact that that can, you know, happen in a lot of our lives. I'm one version of myself at work and another job comes and I'm like, wow, why can I be capable or right? And so sometimes I just want to put it out there. And I, you know, I've worked with so many people whose partners have had affairs. And yes, that kind of question,

• 7:34Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  what did I miss? And what were the flags? And that's a worthwhile exploration because that can help us empower ourselves going forward. And the other thing I want to say is there are some people who are, um, they're the separation of those parts is so extreme. And some ways like that compartmentalization is so well practiced that, um, what you saw was what you were getting. It's just you didn't, you maybe just never had access to this other part that suddenly showed up after you heard that voicemail, you know? And I'm not saying that's true for you, but that, yeah, that, that can be a part of it too.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  I actually think that is true for me. I think that is true about my ex. Um, I think that they, he's a compartmentalizer. And I think that, um, it actually makes me feel a little bit better because I do think there were different versions of him, maybe coexisting. And, um, the, the virgin that showed up that morning looking like his affect was completely different. Um, that was another, a part of him that I may not have seen, uh, ever or in a long time.

• 8:39Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Yeah. If I, again, I know very little and clearly there's much more that happened than you just shared in your book. But I think about a situation that, that has happened with some of the people I've seen in practice where it's like, you find out about it. And when you bring it up, it's kind of actually the first moment in your marriage that that partner has to confront both parts at the same time. And then maybe get the part of husband, no, okay, I'm good. And then kind of the next morning, that other part takes over and it's like, I'm gone. You know, and maybe, maybe that was the first moment 12 hours before that you kind of met that other version of your husband, or you saw a flicker of it.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Or maybe he, for the first time, was in a house with both versions of himself, right?

• 9:27Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Exactly. Exactly. I have the chills. I think, yeah, 100%.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  And that makes you want to flee. You know, I, I can see that.

• 9:35Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Right. Then all of a sudden, it feels like a choice instead of a multiplicity. Which part? I'm gonna have to choose, right?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 9:42Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  When hard things happen, I think we go into fault mode a lot. Like, whose fault is this? Is it your fault? Is it my fault? Sometimes I think, I don't know, fault is useful. It's like a way of learning. But yeah, how did fault come into play? Oh, it's his fault. It's my fault. And where is that now?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  It's, it's a really important question because I think I was so conscious in a vat and writing the book that I did not want to write a book that was all about placing blame at his feet.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  But I do think, you know, and people say to me and have said to me in the past that the end of a marriage is 50/50. It takes two to tango. It's always two sides. And that can be true. I'm a child of two divorces and that was certainly true in both of those cases. But I think it's hard to say that when the part, the departing partner doesn't share at any point that they're unhappy, right? So there's no opportunity for me, for him to say to me, I don't like how you do this.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  I'm not happy about this. I feel, you know, suffocated or whatever it was gonna be. And to give us a moment, not that I could have fixed things, but to give us a moment to work on it. I think it's, it's hard to place fault at my feet when I wasn't given an opportunity to, to work on it. So I, that's how I sit with fault. That said, what, what helped me and what, what made things shift for me, and you can see me do it in the book too. Um, which we felt like a separate process of doing it is to look at myself in terms of

• 11:38Speaker 01

  the decisions that I made during the marriage, 20 years of marriage or before the marriage.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  And think about how that redirected my life, what I was giving up, what, how I was turning away from my true instincts, how I might have been burying my ambitions, financial choices that I made. And when I started to look at that, because I wasn't getting any answers from him, like I've just, the, the investigation of him was going nowhere. It was like trying to get blood from a stone. So when I shifted to me and really started looking at decisions that, again, not for fault, but to, that landed me where I was. How did I get to this place that I'm in? Once I started going through that inquiry,

• 12:31Speaker 01

  and my stepmother uses this trick of shifting the spotlight on a stage from him to me.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Once I did that, I really think it unlocked me and really like made me able to like kind of literally shift to looking forward, right? Rather than looking behind.

• 12:52Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  And I think what you're saying is, that's why I think fault and blame are unhelpful frameworks. Because if it's my fault, I can't look at it anyway. I'm just shrouded in shame. If it's your fault, okay, I'm angry, no learning. But you're saying a shifting the spotlight is, is a little more curious. What's going on? Like, what, what can I put pieces together just to understand the drawing a little better? So what, what did you, what did you put together?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Um, I think there are a few different like buckets, but I think I thought a lot about.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Being a track, meeting my husband and husband. Uh, we were both at law firms and I met him two years after my father died. And my father died very suddenly at 54 and left a mess of a financial situation. And um, I think part of my financial story with my husband is was looking for some kind of protection.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  And he said to me, I'm going to take care of you. And that in that moment um, felt really romantic. It felt very wonderful. I think I would have fallen in love with him anyway. I was madly in love with him, but my father dying suddenly and dealing with all that financial stuff, I think, put me more at risk of um, uh, just handing over my financial life in a way that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  And my ex-husband was very good with finances. He wasn't unethical. He was very honest. Um, but I really put my head in the sand and did not have um, a lot of visibility or understanding of of where our assets sat and um, whose name was on what. So I think that was part of it. I think um, I thought a lot, and this started pretty quickly thinking about this, about the legacy of infidelity in my family and my maternal line. Um, both my mother and my grandmother were with um, partners for decades that were unfaithful in a serial way.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  And I thought I had stopped that pattern by marrying someone who was so um, uh, like just very private, not a public figure, very calm, very mild mannered, um, seemingly very loyal. And there I was, having repeated this pattern in a way that was sort of even more explosive because my grandmother's husband and my um, Mother's boyfriend of a few decades always wanted to come back. My husband didn't want to come back. So I thought, how have I ended up in this place? Like now we're at three generations and is this going to happen to my kids? And specifically my daughters?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And I really wrestled with that. And where I came down on it was that I had watched both of them, both very formidable women in their own fields. The way they managed it was to stay totally quiet about it and to not talk about it and to not explain it to me, not even mention it, not talk to their friends. The, the, the most important thing was actually sort of cleaning it up and protecting the man in the, in the story. And where I ended up was, I think that's really part of the problem. And when people don't talk about things, I think they get sort of in your bones

• 16:31Speaker 01

  and in your DNA and have a greater chance of being repeated. I do not have a background in psychology or anything like that. So you may disagree with me, but I, I, it felt that like that kind of pattern in my family. And then that kind of dovetailed with this thing inside me that I still can't fully explain, which is that from the first week I did not, I couldn't bear to lie about what was happening. He had wanted me to say that it was amicable and I just couldn't do that. So where that all, that's sort of the thread that led me to starting to talk about this, both, you know, in verbal conversations, but also in writing.

• 17:19Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  You know that time in summer when it's about 4:00 PM? You've been with your kids all day. You're drained because you're driving them everywhere. You've made snacks 15 times and honestly, you want something around them that just feels like yours. Now, this is the part that gets a little serious, but stay with me. That's often a moment when a lot of parents reach for a glass of wine. And this is not a referendum on wine, but so many parents I know. Tell me, I don't even want to have it. I don't like the way it makes me feel in the moment or the next day. But I think what the real need is, is that we are looking for something adult. We are looking to hold something that tells us, I am not just a caregiver setting up a slip and slide and making my 19th meal of the day. And honestly, that's

• 18:02Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  one of my favorite reasons for Element. See, you can use Element as your adult summer drink. It can be just yours, not for the kids. And then it's 4:00 PM. And what you might be looking for isn't necessarily alcohol. You might be looking for something that just reminds you of you, that you're an adult, you're not only a caregiver, and you're allowed to have something of your own. Plus, the fact that it's healthy, no sugar, and actually hydrates you is going to take you through the rest of the day and help you stay calmer while it still meets that need. You can check out Element at drinkelement.com/goodinside. That's drink L-M-E-N-T dot com slash good inside.

• 18:46Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  There's just something about summer that makes parents think, maybe this is the time to finally tackle potty training. And if that's where you are right now, I want to offer a minor reframe. Potty training isn't really about the potty. Now, I know what you're thinking, um, Dr. Becky, what do you mean? Potty is in the name. But actually, it's really all about independence. See, your kid wants to do more things on their own. Your kid wants to build confidence and feel like a big kid. That's why I like Pampers Easy Ups. They fit and feel more like underwear than a diaper, so kids can practice pulling them up and down on their own. And those moments of, I did it, really matter in confidence

• 19:27Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  building. They even come with Peppa Pig Designs, which, if you have a toddler, you know can make almost anything more exciting. And because accidents are part of learning, Pampers Easy Ups are designed to protect day and night, which means less stress for you and more room to focus on helping your child learn. The goal isn't a perfectly dry day. The goal is to help your kid feel more capable. And I like that Pampers Easy Ups helps make room for that.

• 20:00Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  I want to go back to Belle the Good because there's no topic, I think, that I like talking about as much as this concept of the good girl, which by the way, I was too. Such a good girl, so many years of unwiring what that really meant. Because I think it's one of those words and terms that what's really going on underneath is a lot more complicated than good would assume on the surface. So what did that mean, Belle the Good, when your brother said that? Like, what, yeah, give me the stuff underneath.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  I think part of me came out that way. I was always very quiet. I did not speak until I was three, but then I spoke in full sentences. I was always an observer, always sort of hiding a bit. I was in a family with very strong personalities and some tempers. Nothing physically violent, but a lot of tempers. And in that, and I would say that my mother, my father, my brother, my stepmother was not like that, but she was kind of managing everybody else.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  So in that, I think I became like I was just gonna be the good girl and follow the rules so that the apple cart didn't get upset even more than it was.

• 21:23Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  I'm sure you've talked about this, but when I was reading your book and thinking about Belle the Good, okay, and I know you're like Becky, you and everyone, I just couldn't help being like, are you kidding me? Her name is Belle the Good Burden? The Good Burden? Like, the burden of being good? Like, did someone make that up?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  They did not, yes.

• 21:48Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Tell me about that. It's like so both poetic and it feels like AI wrote it because it's so obvious, you know?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Right, it's really true. My name is quite, it fits into all of this a bit too closely, but it is a family name. Flobel is my real name. But yes, and Burden is obviously a family name.

• 22:09Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  But just the good burden, like the burden of being the favorite child, the burden of being so good, the burden of being so contained. And I have come to think, the good girl, because I was one. No longer, Belle, no longer.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  No longer.

• 22:26Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  But I was.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Good, good.

• 22:28Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  That being a good girl really just means I have learned to play, I have learned to pay attention outside into my environment, and I am an expert at noticing what every person wants at the exclusion of ever gazing in and wondering what I might want for myself, because I have learned that attachment and closeness and worth and therefore peace comes from becoming so expert at other people that my own needs is actually the greatest threat. Like it becomes a threat. And then all of a sudden, the term good girl doesn't sound so great at all when you describe it that way.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Yep, it's true. It's true. It's a dangerous proposition.

• 23:13Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Oh, okay. I want to turn to some of the parenting moments here because I'm reading your book. I'm hearing your story and so many of your interviews. I kept thinking, okay, so here you are, ultimate violation of expectations. You went from, oh, my goodness, my husband's cheating on me. Okay, we're going to work through it without 24 hours. Oh, my goodness, I don't have a husband. He's gone. He doesn't want custody of my children. I mean, I don't even know how the body can process both those things. And still, life doesn't say, Belle, we're going to give you a pause button. Okay, we're going to like, just give you a pause button. You need a couple of months to process this. Just your kids are taken care of. Like you're making waffles or you're dealing with homework. I mean, there's like things. And so tell me a little bit about you.

• 24:00Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Processing feels like the wrong word, just living through that while I think the day to day demands of parenting are still very much alive. Are you talking to your kids? Are you not like, what's going on?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So first, I would say that I did get more time than people normally do because of COVID. So we were on an island where I did not have to go to school pickup. I did not have to go to meetings. I did not have to show up at a social event and pretend like everything was fine. I could spend, and I did spend hours walking.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Um, miles walking and I would weep as I walked. So I think people talk about walking through pain. I think I literally did because I had that room to really feel every inch of it. Um, I'm not sure I was making sense of it or making significant progress, but I definitely felt it, all of it. Um, whereas when my father died, I think I, I went right back to work or I was in law school. I went right back to like being studious and all that stuff and didn't really process a lot of it. At the same time, yes, I had a 15 year old and a 12 year old and, um, they, uh, I talked to a therapist about

• 25:23Speaker 01

  what, what to tell them and the therapist advised to actually wait until the pandemic became less scary. And of course it didn't. So there was a month where I thought I was pretending everything was fine and their dad was in New York working, but I was not eating. I was, my face was swollen. Um, and my older daughter, uh, had read a text on my iPad before I turned off notifications. So she knew already, um, and I think would have noticed anyway. And she went into caretaker mode of starting to cook and feed me. Um,

• 26:02Speaker 01

  my younger one did not know. So she was kind of operating as she normally would have, but I think, um, my older daughter really stepped in and parented her too.

• 26:15Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  So I walked through the motions of it. I went to the grocery store. I cooked sometimes. My daughter cooked more. I made sure they got on Zoom school. Um, but I did, was doing a really terrible job of it. I was, I was.

• 26:29Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  I mean, please, you are surviving. It, I just want to get to that advice from the therapist and this is not about lambasting some advice. I just, at all, there are no, there are no right answers for awful situations. That they're just, that's not a thing. So.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  But I think this was the wrong advice, but go ahead.

• 26:48Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Yeah. I think, I think the interesting thing to tie some of it together. Is kids are expert perceivers. They're always better than we are because their survival depends on us. So if you think about like a baby animal in the forest and then you think about the big, stronger parent animal, that because the adult animal can survive more independently, they have to, they can be a little less hypervigilant to threats in the forest. They actually, it's, this is not actually psychological, it's just evolution. Where any younger child is inherently more helpless. So it's interesting, they actually have to be more hypervigilant for their survival. Cause they have to know, wait, could that be a threat? I don't know, but it could, I better go act as if it is, because I'd be less likely to defend myself.

• 27:32Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  So they're actually better at perceiving things, right? What do we do as humans, especially kids who don't have the language we do? What do you do as a kid when you notice something off? Just off? This is so weird. I hear the word grandma cancer all the time. Grandma, I don't know, it's just, right? Or, oh, I noticed my mom in bed a lot. Or every time my mom says dad's in the city, it just, I feel like it feels a little tone different than two years ago. And she said, okay, so I'm noticing all that. What do I do? Because then everything else in my environment is telling me everything's normal, normal, normal as a, you know, whatever, day at the park.

• 28:15Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  I have to compartmentalize.

• 28:18Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  I have to self doubt. Self doubt becomes a very adaptive coping strategy for kids when the things they notice aren't confirmed. Because it's very uncomfortable to be like, I think something's going on, no one's saying it. So the only answer to get back to homeostasis is I must not be that good at perceiving my environment.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Hmm, it's like gaslighting yourself or something.

• 28:40Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Yeah, it's actually, I must not. Other people must know better than I do. People must be better at perceiving the things I perceive with my eyes than I do because clearly nothing's going around, so going on. So I can't, I guess like not trusting myself is something I should just hold with me as I get older, because I kind of keep messing this up.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  So interesting. It's, it really makes so much sense.

• 29:03Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Curious if you could speak a little bit. Just like where you are now, like this happened, you survived it, you walked through the pain, you wrote about it, you've been on a tour about it, you've had lots of things happen since you released the book. I mean, yeah, just tell me a little about what's going on for you now.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  For me, I think what happened, which was to have all of these structures fall apart and like sort of be stripped down to this emotional core was actually, and I listened to your podcast with Maya Shankar, is that how you pronounce her last name?

• 29:40Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Uh huh.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yes, which was so great. And I think she said it beautifully that these moments of change are really opportunities because when I got stripped down to that core, it was actually when I was able to write again, which is something I thought I was going to do at 18 and took a 30 year, you know, diversion into law from. And to, and putting the book aside and the unexpected reception of it, it is such a miracle to me that I'm writing again and that I can have a life as a writer. And I don't think I ever would

• 30:22Speaker 01

  have gotten there if I had stayed where I was in my marriage. I also think that I kind of became a more relaxed and easygoing person because I think when you're gripping so tight to everything being good in your family and

• 30:42Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  perhaps things looking a certain way, when all of that is like blown up, you, I feel like I just became more relaxed with my kids and in my life with friends. I can tolerate mess and chaos and all of that a lot more. And I think I have deeper and more real friendships. So I never would have chosen this. I wanted an intact family more than anything and I loved my husband so much. But out of that pain and shock and, and difficult, really difficult few years, all of this came and

• 31:26Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  I think it's a different life. I think it's a more interesting life and a more fun life and probably closer to my true nature. And I love when I've had a lot of young people read the book, like young twenties, and some of them have said that it makes them feel hopeful that even if things don't go according to plan, that there can be this other life on the other side. And I love that.

• 31:54Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Yeah, yeah. And where's Belle the Good now? How's she doing? Where is she?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  So Belle the Good, she's still there. She's still there. She's still compliant, I think, to a certain degree, and any task that's assigned to her, she will do. But I think, I think I'm more conscious of, of how that restricted me. So I'm, I'm trying to let that go. And I'm actually going to be thinking a lot about what you said about the, how you framed the good girl paradigm as maybe being a real negative.

• 32:34Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  And look, you know, something I said to my eight year old when he was having trouble falling asleep a little while ago, but I don't know, I'm thinking about it relative to what you just said. He's very worried at night, you know, what if this? And he can worry about like big worldly things and what something happens to you, you know? And that's like his worry. That's his worry part, right? And I'm not going to undo the worries. Logic doesn't help with worries or it temporary soothes and then makes it worse the next day. And, you know, but I just, I said something that that part is, it's a part of you and not all of you. It kind of sounds like that's what you're saying.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a part of me, but there are more parts of me now. And there's, there's a part of me that's very willing to have people judge me and willing to have people be shocked by me. And maybe just some even condemn me for what I'm doing. But I, I, I'm, I'm still hard, but I'm, I'm more able to tolerate that than I would have been before.

• 33:37Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  Well, well, look, if we, if we go back to this idea of good goodness, not true goodness, like I couldn't say I think about goodness inside. But if I think about the good girl, it's almost the opposite. It's goodness comes from gazing out, getting something outside of us and bringing it back in. Belle, the good would probably be eviscerated with all the criticism because if she's so dependent on something outside to define herself, it sounds like you have an increasingly developed or you're just back in touch with something that I think was actually never missing, it was just probably blocked.

• 34:07Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  A part of you that like has that goodness and belief and conviction and clarity inside of you and so, oh, that criticism sucks, like I've had that, it's no fun and it's very different than that evisceration kind of feeling.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  That's so helpful to frame it that way and I think that's right. I think this allowed me to get to that internal place where I can find it within me rather than trying to bring it in. I think we all have those, that, you know, that voice that's a little bit worried about something or a little bit, you know, whether it's about finances or about your marriage. And I will just say, because it worked for me, I do think having a practice, you don't have to want to be a writer, you don't have to want to publish a book, but writing things down, I think can be really helpful to just kind of push yourself to articulate maybe

• 35:05Speaker 01

  something that you're feeling that you can't quite put your finger on. I think that was really, really helpful for me when everything kind of fell apart and I wish I'd had a practice of doing that before. I think maybe it would have helped me wake up a little bit.

• 35:30Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  That was one of the most meaningful conversations I've had in a while and I don't even just mean on this podcast. Right after we ended this recording, Belle and I were saying, geez, gotta go get coffee, we've got to continue this conversation. And the other thing it left me with is something that I think you might also be wanting more of. I don't think Belle and I are the only two women on this planet who had that good girl identity when we were young and who are still in many ways trying to figure out what about that still works for us and what works against us. And that's kind of just step one, okay, it kind of works against me, now what? Okay, what do I do? And don't tell me something that's gonna be 10 out of 10 hard. Here's what I want to do for you. I want to give you three things you can do today.

• 36:16Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  If you have still that kind of good girl part inside you, speaking really loudly, or kind of driving the car most of the time, and I promise you, these are three things that for each of them, you're going to say, oh, a little uncomfortable, maybe like a two out of 10, but that's totally manageable. I'm going to type those up and I'm going to put them as a link in my show notes. And when you click and you get them, I love your feedback. Honestly, email me, [email protected]. Dr. Becky, you think that's a two out of 10, that's a nine out of 10. I love being wrong because if I'm wrong, that helps me get it better for you the next time. So please let me know. Now let's place

• 36:54Dr. Becky Kennedy?

  your feet on the ground. Me too. Let's place a hand on our heart. And let's remind ourselves, even as I struggle on the outside, even as I try to untangle being the good girl on the outside, I remain good inside. Looking forward to hearing from you.

• 37:44Dr. Becky Kennedy?

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• 38:27Dr. Becky Kennedy?

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