The GGTG Collective met last week to discuss the Good Girl archetype and explore what it means to each of us, how we can heal her, and how to identify her habits. The replay is available on the GGTG online community for GGTG Collective members.
The Emergence of the Good Girl
The Good Girl is an archetypal representation of what our inner child becomes when she is forced out of her natural state into people pleasing and inauthentic behaviours, patterns and paths due to pressure from society, family, and peers.
From an early age, little girls are expected to behave a certain way, and the consequences of a lack of conformity appear dire to a young person – either conform to expectations and maintain our attachment or stick to our instinctive behavior and maintain our authenticity.
For most of us, the decision doesn’t even feel like a real choice. That’s because as far as children are concerned, a loss of attachment could risk our survival. Of course, in retrospect we can see that the consequences were not actually that dire, but at that young age we’re still inexperienced with the world and operating mostly on instinct.
Try to remember when you first felt anxiety around a choice to either conform in order to maintain attachment, or to flout expectations and behave in line with your authentic desires – at what point in your personal timeline did that dance between attachment and authenticity begin for you?
Healing the Good Girl
The answer to this question will help us determine when in time we need to go back to heal our inner child, to tell her that what she wanted was perfectly valid, and to apologize for abandoning her needs.
Other ways we can heal our Good Girl is to reclaim the parts of ourselves that we rejected when we were young. What "unacceptable" behavior did you have to leave in childhood?
It is also important to identify persistent Good Girl habits (we list some below) and catch ourselves in the moment between the wound or trigger and the action itself. Walking back toward the wound can feel scary and painful, but it’s an essential step on the path toward healing.
Making friends with our inner child again is a key step to healing the Good Girl, which frees us to shift into Goddess mode.
During our next GGTG Collective meeting, we will explore the Goddess – what are her characteristics, when does she emerge, and how can we operate from her authenticity, strength and empowerment more often?
Good Girl Habits
This list of common Good Girl habits can help you identify your own so you can locate the related wounds and get started healing them:
- Looking outside for approval / proof that we are on the right path / achieving / succeeding
- People pleasing /putting other people first
- A sense of noidentity / chameleon-like
- Control / manipulation of others / situations
- Anxiety that others will reject us
- Uncertainty of our own needs, wants, desires, values
- Rejection of self, needs, desires
- Performing to the point of exhaustion / illness in order to “get things done”
- Excessive generosity to one’s own detriment
- Tolerating abusive behavior from others
- Feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, anxiety, depression
- Desire to please / perform / achieve at all costs
- Self-abuse, self-criticism, negative self-talk
- Desire to punish oneself
- Feeling that when bad things happen, they are deserved
- Anger, resentment, rejection of oneself
The “Nourishment List”
It can be difficult to admit that we are engaging in these behaviors, and the temptation for any Good Girl is to resort to the self-critical voice or to feel guilty or ashamed – but we can't use Good Girl tactics to heal our inner child!
Instead, we can deploy self-care techniques to comfort ourselves – something that might not come naturally at first. This is why the GGTG Collective recommends keeping a “nourishment list” handy full of things you can do that make you feel good!
This can be anything from going to the gym, enjoying a walk outside in nature, calling a loved one, reading your favorite book – anything that lifts your spirits is perfect to include on the list.
Get in touch with us at info@ggtg.me or on our Instagram account @ggtg_collective and tell us what’s on your nourishment list! We’d love to see you at our next GGTG Collective meeting, taking place on May 31 at 8am PT, 12pm ET, 4pm UKT, and 5pm CEST.