The Nice Girl Syndrome (13 page)

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girls Jared had probably been with while he was involved with her. “I feel so betrayed and I feel so stupid. How could I have let this

go on for so long? I was so sure I was right—that Jared would never cheat on me. I don’t know if I’ll ever trust anyone again.”

Briana had gone so overboard in her attempts to be fair that she had been taken advantage of by her friends and her boyfriend. Don’t let this be you. The following remedies will help you let go of your need for fairness and to stop believing that being nice will pro- tect you.

Remedies

Believing in the protective power of niceness and fairness are holdovers from childhood. The truth is, we will not be spared loss, failure, or sorrow, no matter how good or fair we are. Life doesn’t distinguish between saints and sinners when it dishes out tragedies and disasters.

The time for magical thinking is over. It is time to grow up. I understand that it may sound ludicrous for me to say this since most of you reading this book are already adults. But being an adult
phys- ically
is different from being an adult
emotionally
and, unfortunately, many Nice Girls still have some work to do in that regard. A good place to start is by letting go of some of your most cherished assump- tions, namely: “If I play by my parents’ rules, if I do everything right, and work really hard to be nice, bad things won’t happen to me,” and “If I am nice and fair to other people they will be nice and fair to me.”

To become a bona fide adult, you need to disentangle yourself from the web of illusions that provided you a sense of false comfort and protection when you were a child. The false assumptions that “life is fair” and that “bad things only happen to bad people” inter- fere with a deeper connection with your authentic self.

E
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The following exercise will help you to counter the sometimes pow- erful false belief that life is supposed to be fair.

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1. Make a list of the most unfair things that have happened to you.
   

2. Read over your list. Notice if you come up with rationaliza- tions as to why these unfair things happened (for example, “I learned a big lesson because of it,” “I deserved it because I
   

   .” ).
   

3. Now go back over your list and say out loud, “It’s not fair!” regarding each of the items on the list.
   

4. Go one step further and say out loud, “It’s not fair and I hate it that this happened!”
   

If you are like Briana, you need to not only face the fact that life isn’t fair but to stop thinking in black-and-white terms. Because Briana’s mother had been so unfair to her, Briana went overboard in her attempts to be fair. Being overly fair is just as much an extreme as being unfair and can be just as damaging to ourselves as being unfair to others is to them. Briana needed to learn that she could be fairer than her mother had been by being willing to listen to other people’s excuses, perceptions, and realities. But that didn’t mean she had to believe their perceptions or accept their excuses. She needed to connect with her own instincts and trust her own feelings to determine whether she believed someone and felt their excuse was valid.

This was difficult for Briana at first. Because her mother never believed her excuses, she continued to feel that she was being unfair when she questioned or discounted the excuses of others. But soon she was able to make the important distinction—she was, in fact, giving other people a chance when she listened to their excuses, unlike her mother. She learned that giving people a chance is not the same as giving them carte blanche. She still had a right to her feelings of hurt or disappointment, and she had a right to protect herself from being hurt in the future.

Briana told me at our last session, “It was always so important for me to be fair to other people but, ironically, I wasn’t being fair to

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myself! Now I can be both. I listen to other people’s excuses or expla- nations, but I also listen to my own intuition. If something doesn’t sound right, I tell myself, ‘I’ve got to listen to myself just like I lis- tened to them.’ And what I’m finding is that my intuition is right on. Now I don’t get suckered by other people anymore.”

If you identify with Briana, I suggest you do the following:

• When someone gives you an excuse for why he or she did something that hurt your feelings, disappointed you, or made you angry, remember that you can accept the excuse and still have your feelings about the offense, oversight, or omis- sion.
  

• Say something to the person like, “I understand that you feel you had a good reason for [being late, forgetting to meet you or pick you up], but I want you to know that what you did hurt my feelings [or made me angry].”
  

• You can also take care of yourself by making sure the other person understands that you expect him or her to avoid mak- ing the same mistake again. You can say something like, “I’ll let you off the hook this time, but please don’t do this again” or “I forgive you this time but I don’t want it to ever happen again. If it does, I won’t be so understanding.”
  

You can be fair and still be strong. You are being fair when you listen openly to other people’s excuses or their side of the story. You don’t have to do any more than that to be fair. You certainly don’t need to accept their excuses or put yourself in the position of being hurt or disappointed in those individuals time after time. Giving people the benefit of the doubt doesn’t mean you let them walk all over you.

Modifying your assumption that life is fair will go a long way toward helping you to grow up. Refer to chapter 4 for instructions on how to create a positive and powerful statement to replace the false belief that “being nice to others will guarantee that they will be nice to you” or that “life is fair.”

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Instead of relying on magical thinking to provide you comfort, start relying on yourself to give yourself the reassurance you need—not based on illusion but on the reassurance of reality. You can begin to soothe yourself with words of encouragement, as we discussed in the previous chapter.

6

Stop Worrying about What Other People Think of You

What other people think about me is none of my business.

—S
ANDRA
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False belief:
What other people think of me is more impor- tant than almost anything else—including my self-esteem, my health, or even my safety.

Empowering belief:
It is far more important to know myself and take care of myself than it is to look good to others.

This chapter is especially beneficial for Prudes

N

ice Girls want everyone to like them. They want this even when they do not like the other person. “It’s funny, really. I get

so upset if I find out that someone doesn’t like me. But often, if the truth be told, I don’t like that person, either.” This is what my client Amber told me when we began our work together. Why was it so important that people like her? As I got to know Amber, some pos- sible answers emerged. First of all, her mother always worried about what other people thought of her. Also, she stressed to Amber the importance of being liked by others.

However, the primary reason Amber wanted everyone to like

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her was that she had some abandonment issues. When she was twelve years old, a very vulnerable time for a girl, her parents got divorced. Instead of staying with her mother and seeing her father on weekends, which would have been the typical arrangement, she ended up living with her father. Amber’s mother and father thought it was better if she stayed with her dad in the same house, in the same neighborhood that she grew up in. When Amber cried and begged her mother to let her come live with her, her mother explained that she needed time alone to “find herself.” Besides, her mother tried to explain, she wouldn’t be able to take care of Amber because she had to go to work. This didn’t make any sense to Amber since her father had to go to work, too. Amber felt horribly abandoned by her mother, who she believed had stopped loving her.

Following the divorce, Amber’s friends became overly impor- tant to her. Now, whenever someone doesn’t like her, it triggers Amber’s feelings of abandonment.

My client Leslie also had a need for everyone to like her. This extended even to her ex-husbands. “Even though we are divorced, I want everything to be nice between us,” Leslie explained. When I asked her why this is, she started to cry. “I don’t know exactly. If someone is not thinking well of me, I feel horrible. I go out of my way to be nice to them so they will like me again.”

The major problem for Leslie was that both her ex-husbands were emotionally abusive, and she really needed to have as little con- tact with them as possible. The more contact she had with them, the more she doubted her perceptions. They were both able to twist the truth so much that Leslie ended up feeling confused and disoriented. But because of her need for their approval, she felt bad when she wasn’t connected to them. She was in a real bind.

We needed to get to the source of Leslie’s need for her ex- husbands’ approval. As is often the case, the situation began in her childhood. Leslie was raised by a mother who liked girls and didn’t like boys. “Girls were easier to control,” Leslie told me. Because of this, Leslie and her sister got preferential treatment, while her two brothers were badly treated by her mother. This created a great deal of tension between the male and female siblings. Her brothers were older than she, and, when she was young, they picked on her relent- lessly. But the worst treatment came when she was older. Her broth- ers either ignored her or showed obvious disdain for her. They made

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faces when she talked, argued with her when she stated her opinion, and talked negatively about her to others. “To this day, my oldest brother can’t stand me,” Leslie admitted to me. “His wife doesn’t like me either, and I know it is because of things he’s told her.”

Because of this experience with her brothers, Leslie felt so uncomfortable and afraid when someone showed any sign of dislike or disapproval of her that she went out of her way to change the per- son’s mind about her.

Women and Self-Image

In addition to childhood issues that set us up to worry too much about what others think of us, women in particular are socialized to worry about their appearance. A lot has been written about the cur- rent focus on body image. One of the main reasons so many women perceive their bodies negatively is that we live in a culture that dic- tates that women must be beautiful to be worthwhile and then sets up standards of female beauty that are not only impossible for most women to live up to, but are unhealthy as well. For example, many diets and all surgery to control weight are physically dangerous.

Getting and staying thin have become major pastimes for women, consuming a significant amount of our time, energy, and money. The entertainment and advertising media not only promote certain ideals concerning our appearance but often, in the absence of other sources of information, teach us untruths about what a nor- mal and healthy body should look like. By trying to conform to our culture’s ridiculous ideas, we place ourselves in a no-win situation in which we will never be satisfied with our bodies.

Ellie was constantly worried about what other people thought of how she looks. She always wanted to make a good impression, so she spent a lot of time on her wardrobe, her makeup, and her hair. “It’s almost a full-time job making myself look beautiful,” she shared during a luncheon with a group of women. “You won’t believe what I went through to get ready for today,” she added with a laugh. Several of the other women nodded in agreement.

This particular group of women was from Atlanta, Georgia, where I was attending a conference. The subject of how Southern women worry about their public image came up. “I think Southern women worry more than most people about what others think about

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them,” one woman volunteered. “Our mothers drum it into our heads that we need to be concerned about our reputation. It’s like we live our lives in the public spotlight—and we aren’t even movie stars!”

Many of the women in the group agreed and told stories about how their mothers had stressed the importance of looking good to the public. One woman recalled that her mother had repeatedly told her, “You just can’t afford to give anyone the opportunity to bad- mouth you.”

While women in the South may have an extreme version of wor- rying about their public image, they are not unique in this regard. Most people are concerned about their appearance; however, women tend to focus on “what other people think” a lot more than do most men. Some of this is due to the amount of importance put on girls and women to be feminine or ladylike. As mentioned earlier, to attain the culturally prescribed feminine ideal, girls are taught early on to appear to be nice, pretty, and selfless and to hide their true selves if it conflicts with what is expected in their peer environment.