9 steps to stop being the good girl

Catherine Andrews
6 min readOct 2, 2022

It’s time.

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

Happy Sunday, Soothers. If you grew up socialized as a woman, and you identify as a sensitive person, it’s likely that you suffer from what could be referred to as good girl conditioning. “Good girl” is a phrase tossed around a lot, and what it could mean to each person who uses it could be totally different, so I’ll just state what good girl conditioning, at least in part, means to me:

It means focusing on being polite, virtuous, palatable, pretty, youthful, respectful and respectable (and the patriarchy’s definitions of those words and phrases, not your own)… at the cost of your soul, your core desires, and your authenticity.

You can begin to know if you struggle with good girl conditioning if you constantly feel resentment; to me, that is the number one tell-tale sign. Resentment is a signal that your needs and desires are being trampled on, but you feel you can’t or don’t deserve to articulate your needs. If you need it explained a bit more clearly, and I include this because I felt deep resentment for decades but didn’t understand that’s what I was experiencing: resentment shows up as ruminating a lot about other people and their behaviors or how they get to do something that you don’t get to do and “must be nice for them.” You may experience feeling like a victim or a martyr to circumstances or other people’s…

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Catherine Andrews

Teaching awakening + healing through vulnerability + self-compassion. Finding hope in a messy world. Author of the Sunday Soother. http://catherinedandrews.com