The Nice Girl Syndrome (12 page)

74
T
HE
N
ICE
G
IRL
S
YNDROME

Note that if you are involved with an abusive partner, there is something you need to understand: abusive people insist that their partners focus on their needs. The main way out of the abusive cycle is for you to reorient your thinking so that you devote your atten- tion to yourself and your children. You need to stop trying to appease the abuser and turn your energy toward yourself.

One reason it is so difficult to give up focusing on others’ needs and feelings is that helping others can result in immediate rewards. People respond positively to those who are kind, considerate, and selfless. They show their appreciation by smiling at you, thanking you, telling you what a wonderful, caring person you are. It also feels good to do things for other people. As Sheila put it, “It’s such a win in the moment.” But just like any addiction, the good feelings usu- ally don’t last very long before you need another fix. In addition, just as it was with Sheila, if you
don’t
get the acknowledgment you need, you may start to get resentful.

Like giving up any addiction, it is going to be difficult to stop putting other people’s feelings and needs first. It has become auto- matic for you to put yourself last. That is why you need to create a routine, a practice of meeting your own needs. The more you repeat this new pattern, the more likely it, too, will become automatic. The habit of doing daily or even hourly “feelings checks” is a good place to start.

Often, in order for us to take the action needed to create a real change in our lives, we need to make a commitment. This commit- ment needs to be a promise we make to ourselves—not to anyone else—that we will do something
no matter what
. We can’t put it off, we can’t make excuses for not doing it—we are
committed
to doing it.

1. Start by thinking about what you wanted from your parents but didn’t receive. For example, did you want their encour-
   

   S
   TOP
   P
   UTTING
   O
   THERS
   ’ F
   EELINGS AND
   N
   EEDS AHEAD OF
   Y
   OUR
   O
   WN
   75
   

   agement? Their approval? Did you crave more affection? Make a list of all the things you wished you had received from your parents but did not.
   

2. List the ways you plan to start giving to yourself what your parents didn’t give to you. For example, if you didn’t receive encouragement, write on your list that you will begin to encourage yourself.
   

3. Make a commitment to immediately begin doing one con- crete thing that will provide you with what you missed as a child.
   

As you can see, I’ve listed many remedies in this chapter—more than in any other chapter, as a matter of fact. This is because learn- ing to put your needs ahead of others’ needs is one of the most difficult habits for Nice Girls to break. You may not need every rem- edy listed, but take your time and address each remedy that applies to you.

5
‌

Stop Believing That Being Nice Will Protect You

Life isn’t fair.

—U
NKNOWN

False belief:
If I am nice (and fair) to other people they will be nice (and fair) to me.

Empowering belief:
I can protect myself and be fair to myself.

This chapter is especially beneficial for Prudes, Enlightened Ones

N

ice Girls believe that the way to protect themselves from being hurt, rejected, or abandoned by others is to be supernice to everyone. They believe that if they just don’t rock the boat, if they smile sweetly and agree with everyone, no one will get angry with them or be mean to them. In other words, Nice Girls use being nice

as a protective shield.

Where Did We Get the Idea That Being Nice Would Protect Us?

Once again, we need to remind ourselves of our history as women to fully understand this way of thinking. It wasn’t all that long ago

76

S
TOP
B
ELIEVING
T
HAT
B
EING
N
ICE
W
ILL
P
ROTECT
Y
OU
77

that women were considered property—first of their father and then their husband. Their safety and welfare depended on the goodwill of men. If a girl or a woman was not nice to the men in her life, she was punished, rejected, or even abandoned by them. Much like the black slaves in the South, women learned to be nice—pleasant, polite, gra- cious, agreeable, and compliant—to survive. I believe we hold the memories of these not-so-distant times in our collective memories and in our very cells.

Another source of the false belief that being nice will protect you from being hurt by others is the concept of “magical thinking”—the idea that thoughts are as potent as actions. Young children often use the innate tendency toward magical thinking to ward off fears and to gain an illusion of control over what happens to them. A good exam- ple of childlike magical thinking is believing that if you are good and do all the things your parents ask you to do, they won’t get a divorce. It is easy to understand how the belief that “being nice” can ward off harm could be created in a child’s mind.

Around the age of seven or eight, children normally learn that there is a difference between wishing and making something happen in reality. By puberty, most magical thinking has been transformed into reality-based plans and action or into culturally acceptable forms, including faith and prayer. However, some childlike ways of thinking—some magical thoughts—can stay with us even as adults, especially when such thoughts provide relief from fear and anxiety. Even when we examine these magical thoughts logically and realize they are no longer true, we may still secretly hold onto them.

This is particularly true when a painful or traumatic childhood experience is associated with the belief in the protective power of niceness. For example, a child may believe that by being nice, he or she can actually prevent something bad from happening, or, con- versely, that by doing or thinking something that was not nice, he or she actually
caused
the bad thing to happen.

Believing in Fairness Is Also Magical Thinking

The magical thinking that being nice will shield you from harm is closely related to the idea that life is fair or that it ought to be: the view that being nice is protective is firmly grounded in the core expectation that life is fair.

78
T
HE
N
ICE
G
IRL
S
YNDROME

The belief that life is fair is a childhood fantasy. It, too, is mag- ical thinking rooted in a conviction that we can control what hap- pens with our minds and our behavior. For a time, children need that innocent belief that everything happens for a reason and that they have power and control over their lives. Without this illusion, they would be overwhelmed by a world that feels unpredictable and unmanageable. Even as adults, we want some reassurance that we have some control over the events of our lives.

But if we scratch the surface of our illusions, we find fear. It is a fear rooted in childhood—a fear of abandonment, rejection, and, ultimately, death. We carry our childhood beliefs into our adult lives to ward off the reality of how little control and power we actually have.

The dilemma that Nice Girls often face is that when the world doesn’t work the way it should, when life isn’t fair and people hurt them even though they are nice, they become confused and frus- trated. They also feel angry because their expectations of how oth- ers
should
treat them when they are nice are not being met. Of course, Nice Girls are too nice to direct that anger toward others who may have wronged them. Instead, they are more likely to turn that anger inward, against themselves, and to blame themselves for not being nice enough or for deserving the mistreatment for some other reason. In that way, they can hold onto their false beliefs and life remains fair in their minds.

This kind of magical thinking can set you up for self-blame and recrimination. If you continue to believe that others will be nice to you if you are nice to them, you are left with thinking that you have only yourself to blame when others let you down. After all, in a fair world, only good things happen to nice people because they
deserve
to be happy. If life were fair, bad things would happen only to bad people, because they
deserve
problems and unhappiness. So if people are mean to you, or rejecting or abandoning, it must be because you deserve it, right?

But the truth is that bad things
do
happen to nice people, even nice people like you. If you continue to believe that life is fair and that niceness should protect you from bad things, you are setting yourself up for an avalanche of feelings of guilt when bad things happen to you, as they inevitably will. Because you tend to turn your anger inward, you will likely experience a great deal of depression as well.

S
TOP
B
ELIEVING
T
HAT
B
EING
N
ICE
W
ILL
P
ROTECT
Y
OU
79

Where Do Our Ideas about Fairness Come From?

Women are expected to be fair, patient, and tolerant. This is part of our biological and cultural heritage. As the primary caretakers of children, women usually do possess the inherent qualities of compas- sion, tolerance, patience, unconditional love, and forgiveness. But women tend to take these qualities to the extreme when it comes to their adult relationships.

Women often have a strong need to be fair or for things to be fair. They have a tendency to want to look at both sides of a situa- tion. This need for fairness often prevents women from taking a stand on important issues and sets them up to be easily manipulated. “My parents always told me to play by the rules. They told me that if I was a ‘good girl’ everything would work out for me. But that’s not the way things turned out. I did everything right and I still got screwed.” These are the words of a woman who had been emo- tionally abused for years by a man who was an expert at using her need for fairness to manipulate her. Each time she tried to stand up to him concerning his abusive behavior, he managed to turn things around on her by saying something like, “So, you’ve never done this before yourself, right?” Or, “You raised your voice at me last week; how can you criticize me for yelling at you?” (Of course, he didn’t make the distinction that she raised her voice at him because he had

been berating and belittling her for hours.)

Teaching girls that they need to be fair, understanding, and kind no matter what is a disservice to them. As one twelve-year-old girl told the author Rachel Simmons, “Teachers tell us that we have to respect each other and treat other people how you want to be treated. But that’s not how it works out. People can be mean. Am I supposed to be nice to them even when they are mean?”

Another reason some women are overly fair and understanding is that they are working hard not to be like others who have been unfair to them. This was the case with Briana. “When I was a kid, my mother was extremely unfair to me. She would tell me to do something like water the yard, and I would go outside to do as she asked. Then she’d come out and yell at me for letting water flow onto the street. ‘You’re wasting water,’ she’d shout at me, often loud enough for the neighbors to hear. I’d try to explain that I couldn’t

80
T
HE
N
ICE
G
IRL
S
YNDROME

help it, that we lived on a hill and the water flowed downhill. But she wouldn’t listen. She never listened to me when I tried to explain why I did something. She always just assumed that I was a screw-up. I’d get so angry with her. I remember telling myself that when I grew up I was never going to be unfair to my kids like that.”

The problem was that Briana took her need to be fair to extremes. Whenever someone messed up in some way—whether it was a friend, a co-worker, or a boyfriend, Briana always gave the per- son the benefit of the doubt. This might seem to be a good quality but, in reality, it set up Briana to be taken advantage of. For exam- ple, Cindy, a good friend of Briana’s, borrowed money from her over a year ago. Each time Briana asked Cindy to pay her back, she had some excuse: she didn’t have any money because she got in a car accident and had to pay for the deductible, she needed all her money for books for school, she got a smaller paycheck because she was out sick. When I asked Briana if she believed all the excuses, she said, “I’m not sure. But I don’t want to be unfair to her. What if she is telling the truth?”

Briana was even more extreme in her need to be fair when it came to her boyfriend, Jared. She and Jared had been seeing each other for two years and they had promised to be faithful to each other. But Briana kept hearing from her friends that Jared was cheat- ing on her. “I refused to believe the rumors. Jared told me he wasn’t cheating and I believed him,” she told me firmly. Briana’s faith in Jared was really tested when she found a pair of girl’s underwear in his bed. “I was devastated. It seemed like my friends had been right all along,” Briana said. “But Jared explained that he and his friend Kyle had gone out the night before, and Kyle had hooked up with a girl. He couldn’t take her home, so Jared let them stay in his room and he slept on the couch.”

I looked straight into Briana’s eyes and asked if she really believed Jared. “Oh, yeah, that seemed like something he’d do.” Eventually Briana could no longer give Jared the benefit of the doubt. She walked in on him while he was having sex with another girl.

Briana hadn’t been feeling well, so she skipped her last class and came over to see Jared. She had his key and thought she’d sur- prise him. She did. Briana was devastated. She cried for weeks and eventually started therapy because she couldn’t get over the fact that she’d been so naive. She couldn’t stop thinking about all the