The Nice Girl Syndrome (6 page)

I suggest you go back up to the top of this list and circle the sen- tences that you believe are true. For some of you, this may mean that you actually circle each one of these beliefs, whereas others may circle only one or two. Now put a checkmark next to those beliefs that you still act on even though you really don’t believe they are true.

These circled and checkmarked items will be the false beliefs you will need to exorcise out of your mind and heart. In addition to the information in this chapter, there will be a separate chapter devoted to each of these false beliefs in part 2 of the book.

As you read over the list, you may notice that there may be a seed of truth that mutated into some of these false beliefs. For exam- ple, although there certainly is good in everyone, we don’t have to get burned over and over again by waiting around for it to finally emerge in someone. Kindness and tolerance can often soften even the hardest heart, but these traits can also be an open invitation for others to continue manipulating and taking advantage of us.

Nice Girls need to learn that these beliefs and attitudes are sim- ply not working for them. In some cases, this is due to the fact that Nice Girls need to practice beliefs and attitudes opposite to those listed. For example, it is true that anger can be a destructive emotion; many people cause a great deal of harm to others because their anger is out of control. But this is generally not true of Nice Girls, who tend to have the opposite problem—that of repressing and suppress- ing their anger. They usually need to give themselves permission to

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acknowledge, feel, and express their anger in constructive ways, to not continue to ignore or deny righteous anger. They need to learn that anger itself is not a negative or destructive emotion—it is what we choose to do with it that determines whether it is positive or negative.

In many cases, women have been brainwashed to believe these false beliefs, often starting when they were small children. Sometimes this brainwashing came from society at large; other times, it came from specific messages or behavior from parents or other authority figures.

How Do We Reverse This Brainwashing?

Needless to say, it can sometimes be difficult to reverse this brain- washing and help women to face the truth. In part 2, I offer reme- dies specifically designed to counter false beliefs and to help install beliefs that are more conducive to becoming a Strong Woman. I also offer the concept of “positive and powerful statements” to help counter the negative messages that drive Nice Girl behavior.

Positive and powerful statements are sentences that you will cre- ate to help cancel out the false beliefs that have contributed to, or in some cases, created, your Nice Girl behavior. Until very recently, it was accepted that early childhood was the only time when the brain was malleable enough to be significantly influenced by external stim- uli. However, in the last decade or so, new technology has revealed that even adult brains are changing in response to stimuli. Most important, we now know that brains can be significantly restruc- tured under the right learning conditions.

This is where positive and powerful statements come in. The more you repeat a positive and powerful statement, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and the greater your ability to “rewire” your brain. Generally speaking, a positive and powerful statement is the
opposite
of a false belief. For example, let’s take the first false belief, “Other people’s feelings and needs are far more important than my own.” What would be the opposite of that statement? It would probably be something like, “My feelings and needs are as important as anyone else’s,” or even (God forbid a Nice Girl would

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say this), “My feelings and needs are more important than anyone else’s.”

As you read each of the chapters in part 2, I will recommend that you create a positive and powerful statement to counter each false belief and that you repeat that new belief to yourself over and over, several times a day. Retraining requires repetition. This repetition, along with the remedies suggested at the end of each chapter, will help you alleviate these false beliefs from your life.

Are positive and powerful statements like affirmations? No. Affirmations usually don’t stick because there isn’t the strong limbic component. Affirmations are more a cognitive exercise, whereas pos- itive and powerful statements are focused, intensive work aimed at retraining the brain.

Let’s examine each false belief more closely to help you recog- nize exactly why it is a false belief, recognize how each false belief contributes to the Nice Girl syndrome, and help you begin to rec- ognize where this false belief comes from in you.

It is extremely difficult to prove to most women that this is actually a false belief. “What do you mean?” you might be thinking. “Of course we need to think of others first. Otherwise, we are just being selfish.”

One of the main reasons women believe that thinking of their own needs first is selfish is that biologically those of the female gen- der of any species are hardwired to be mothers and nurturers. Until very recently, girls and women were considered to be the caretakers of the family. (Nature has an investment in mothers’ being unselfish when it comes to their children—otherwise, their young would be left to their own devices and would starve or go unprotected and be killed.)

You may think that every human being is taught to put others’ feelings and needs first when he or she is young, because adults wish to teach all children to be kind, considerate, and generous, but this simply isn’t true. It seems that girls are taught it much more than boys.

Girls are repeatedly taught that they should put the needs of

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others before their own and that they are selfish if they think of their own needs first. Although some boys are taught this belief as well, they are not generally taught to consider other people’s feelings at the expense of their own, as girls are taught.

Rachel Simmons, the author of the best-selling book
Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls
, found that this need to put other people’s feelings first was a theme that ran through her interviews with girls. No matter how upset they were, the girls said that they would rather not hurt someone else’s feelings. Their own needs seemed utterly expendable. They learned to shrink their prob- lems and feelings into “little things,” calling them “unimportant,” “stupid,” and “not worth a fight,” and to stow them away somewhere inside.

For many girls, the message of putting others ahead of them- selves is conveyed more by the examples of their mothers than by actual words. It is a powerful message, nevertheless. Girls who watch their mothers sacrifice their own needs and desires for those of their husbands on a daily basis receive the message loud and clear that their fathers’ needs are more important than their mothers’.

In some homes, particularly where there is rampant misogyny, girls are taught that the feelings and needs of males are more impor- tant than those of females. They are forced to wait on the male members of the family and allow the boys and men (including even younger brothers) to tell them what to do. The definition of
misogyny
is “a distrust, fear, dislike, or hatred of females.” Inherent in misogynistic beliefs is that males are superior to females. As anti- quated as misogyny may seem to be, it is a powerful force in many cultures and religions today—both in the United States and in the rest of the world.

In other families, particularly those where parents are self- absorbed or even narcissistic, the message is:
My
needs are more important than yours, or anyone else’s, for that matter. Self-absorbed and narcissistic parents teach their child that his or her own needs do not matter. Instead of meeting their child’s needs, these parents expect him or her to cater to and take care of them. In some cases, there is a reversal of roles: the child becomes the parent and vice versa. A child in this kind of family situation is often referred to as “parentified.” Such a child functions the way a parent should,

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making sure that the parent’s emotional and sometimes physical needs are met. We will discuss this phenomenon in much more depth in part 2.

Sherry: “I’d Rather Be the One Who Is Hurt”

Another version of the false belief “Other people’s feelings and needs are far more important than my own” is the belief “I’d rather be the one who is hurt than to hurt someone else.” Although many of my Nice Girl clients have acted on this belief, no one actually verbalized it to me until I began working with Sherry. During one of our sessions, much to my surprise, Sherry uttered these words: “It hurts me too much to disappoint or hurt someone else. I feel so guilty. I’d rather be the one who is hurt. I can take that. But I can’t take knowing that I was the one to hurt someone else.”

When Sherry was growing up, her mother always made her feel horribly guilty when she focused on her own needs or tried to stand up for herself. “How can you do this to me? You know I need you so much, you’re the only one who is there for me,” her mother would say. Sherry’s mother and father fought constantly, and her mother used her as a confidante, telling her private information about her father and their relationship—information she should not have been privy to.

At the core of this belief is the assumption that by being nice, you can avoid painful experiences such as someone getting angry with you, disapproving of you, or rejecting or abandoning you.

But this belief borders on superstition—and is just as effective. You might as well throw salt over your shoulder to ward off evil spir- its as to believe that being nice to other people will guarantee that they will be nice to you.

On the surface, this belief makes sense. It only stands to reason that by doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, we will elicit positive responses from them. Generally speaking, this is what happens. But there are four major flaws to this belief:

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1. Just because you are nice to people doesn’t guarantee they will be nice to you, since everyone has his or her own issues. There are people who will not be nice to you (or like you) no matter how nice you are to them. This may be because they are prejudiced against you (you are a woman, you have a dark complexion, you are “too fat” or “too thin” or “too short”), because they are envious of you, or because you remind them of someone else whom they dislike. There are many reasons that people may not return your niceness and that often have nothing to do with how you act or who you are.
   

2. There are people who can and will cause you harm even if you are nice. Some people are, by their very nature, short tem- pered, impatient, demanding, controlling, or abusive.
   

3. Sometimes Nice Girls are so nice that it turns people off. This may be because they sense that your niceness is not genuine, or because your niceness seems to have a price tag on it. Or it may be that they don’t respect you because you are so nice. Nice Girls are often viewed as being too compliant or too ingratiating, and this can turn some people off.
   

4. There are people in the world who will take advantage of your niceness or who interpret niceness as an open invitation to be cruel.
   

Bad things do, indeed, happen to good people. Nice Girls get hurt, rejected, and disliked by others all the time. Not because of what they have done but just because.

Closely related to the belief that being nice to others will guar- antee that others will be nice to you is the belief that if you are fair to others, they will be fair toward you. But once again, this is often not the case. You can be fair toward someone and have that person turn around and be unfair toward you—often for the same reasons as I listed above.

Like many false beliefs, this one is not something that women con- sciously think about and decide to believe. If you were to ask them,

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most women might even say that they don’t really believe this. But unfortunately, their behavior belies such a declaration. They show by their actions, especially their behavior with men, that what others think of them is indeed more important than nearly anything else in their lives.

Women repeatedly starve themselves because they want to be accepted by others. They put their health at risk because they care so much about what other people think. In fact, the crisis surround- ing women and their body image has to do with women’s belief that others judge them solely on their appearance. They are willing to sacrifice almost anything for the acceptance and approval of others. As was discovered from research by Carol Gilligan, a pioneer in the study of women’s development, in her book
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
, relationships play an unusually important role in girls’ social development. Girls and women care deeply about what others think about them. In fact, much of their self-esteem centers around whether others perceive them in a positive or a negative light, and for this reason they have been known to do embarrassing, hurtful, even dangerous things to