The Nice Girl Syndrome (9 page)

I wanted to know what it was that didn’t please her husband. “Well, I can’t seem to keep the kitchen clean enough. He’s always finding spots on the appliances. And he spent a lot of money having new hardwood floors put in, and I keep spilling water on them when I water the plants. He likes his underwear and pajamas washed and folded a certain way and I just can’t seem to do it right. I either put in too much fabric softener or too little. And even though he taught me the right way to fold the laundry, I’m just not as good at it as he is.”

When I asked Rhonda whether she thought her husband was too particular, she said, “I guess some people might say that he is, but these things are important to him. As he tells me all the time, if I really love him I should want to do these things for him. I should be able to learn how to do them right so he’ll be happy.”

Rhonda had become so focused on pleasing her husband that she had lost touch with reality. The truth was that her husband’s demands were unreasonable. Not only was he too particular, he was browbeating her mercilessly whenever she failed to please him— which was most of the time. Rhonda was being emotionally abused. As is the case with most women who are being emotionally abused, Rhonda blamed herself rather than recognizing that her husband was impossible to please and that he had an investment in keeping her down and off balance. Had she not been so focused on meeting his needs, she would have become aware of the fact that his emotional abuse was affecting her self-esteem and making her

depressed.

Other Blind Spots

Still another problem is that if you are overly focused on pleasing others, you can be blind to the fact that you are involved with some- one who is self-absorbed or narcissistic. Beth came into therapy because she was involved with a man for over a year yet he had never

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told her he loved her. She wanted to know if she was doing some- thing wrong that might be turning him off.

From Beth’s description of her current relationship, everything has been going really well. Since she didn’t really have a strong point of view on things, she explained, she was more than happy to listen to Cliff’s opinions and to agree with him on most issues. Since she didn’t think her life was all that interesting, she was thrilled to listen to his adventures.

“I know he must care about me; otherwise, why would he want to be around me?” she shared with me during one of our sessions. But from Beth’s description, I surmised that Cliff was narcissistic. He seemed to be very wrapped up in himself and didn’t show much interest in Beth or what went on in her life. It seemed to be all about him. When I pointed this out to Beth, she immediately made excuses for him: “Oh, he just likes to talk a lot more than I do. I’m just not a big talker. And he’s so much more interesting than I am.”

As I got to know Beth better, she admitted that she had often been taken advantage of by previous boyfriends and even by some women friends. She admitted to me that both men and women often told her that she was easy to be around and she suspected it was because she let them have their way and didn’t insist on their paying attention to her needs. Beth needed to learn that until she put her needs first, she was always going to attract people who were either users, abusers, or those like Cliff, who were narcissistic.

As I was to learn later on, however, Beth didn’t even know what her needs were. She was so used to focusing outside herself that she didn’t know what she was feeling or what she needed at any given time. Instead, she spent most of her time and energy trying to please others.

Nice Girls Also Become Resentful

Women who consistently defer to the needs and feelings of others experience yet another problem: they become resentful and angry toward the very people they strive to please. Nice Girls often expect others to be as considerate and self-sacrificing as they are, only to become disappointed and resentful when those people don’t come through.

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Even more problematic, some Nice Girls become resentful of others who
do
take care of themselves and put their own needs first. This happens most often with Nice Girls who are married and/or mothers. My client Sheila was a case in point. Sheila often com- plained that her husband, Derrick, was selfish. “All he does is think of himself. He makes sure that he gets plenty of time to do the things he wants to do. For example, instead of getting up and helping to get the kids ready for school, he gets up early and goes for a run. By the time he’s back, the kids are already at school. On the weekend, no matter what else we have planned as a family, he always manages to carve out enough time to go play golf.”

Although some people truly are selfish or do not keep up their end of the bargain in terms of helping out with the kids or with household chores, a great deal of the problem really centers around the fact that Nice Girls don’t assert their right to take care of their own needs. Sheila’s problem wasn’t that her husband was selfish; it was that she was not selfish
enough
. The truth was, she envied his ability to take care of his own needs because she lacked the courage and the ability to take care of her own.

My work with Sheila centered around helping her to get over the guilt feelings she experienced whenever she took time for her- self. Instead of her “asking permission” to go to the gym, I helped her to simply state her intention: “I need to start going back to the gym. Let’s work out a plan so I can do it.”

Childhood Messages

Parental messages can also set women up to be self-sacrificing. As Sheila and I worked together to help her set aside her belief that other people’s feelings and needs were more important than her own, I began to feel that in addition to the cultural conditioning that all girls experience, something more powerful was going on with Sheila. I asked her if she remembered anyone telling her that she was selfish if she put her own needs first. Sheila’s eyes got very big and she immediately said, “My mother told me that all the time.” She explained that her mother always complained to her that Sheila always had time to do things for herself but never enough time to help her clean the house.

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I sat silently looking at Sheila, hoping she realized that she said the very same things to her husband. But she was lost in her mem- ory of her mother’s words. “I think that’s where I got the idea that I was selfish and self-absorbed,” she said quietly.

Sheila explained that she really wanted to prove her mother wrong, and so she went out of her way to be caring and concerned for other people. “I always put myself in the other person’s shoes and asked myself how they must feel. I probably also did this because I didn’t feel like my mother cared about my feelings. I guess a lot of my life has been about proving my mother wrong and making sure that I wasn’t like her.”

Role Reversal and Parentified Children

Another reason some Nice Girls focus much of their attention on the needs of others is that they were raised by parents who insisted they put those parents’ needs first. What are commonly referred to as “parentified” children constantly receive messages about what they are supposed to be doing for their parents. The messages and expectations are so internalized that even when they reach adult- hood, they tend to respond to others in the same way they responded (and continue to respond) to their parents.

As Nina Brown, author of
Children of the Self-Absorbed
, put it: “Children who have to assume a parent’s role often have done so from a very early age and don’t know any other way of being. They are so conditioned that they assume their experience is univer- sal. Even when they become aware of other ways of being and behaving, they are frequently unable to break away from the early conditioning.”

In many cases, a parent may simply be unable to be emotionally or physically available for his or her child. Children can also become parentified when a parent is depressed or chronically ill (including being emotionally disturbed or mentally ill). In all of these situations, the parent is not able to meet the child’s needs and has become so needy that the child is forced to assume the parent’s role. The child is expected to meet the parent’s needs for attention, admiration, and emotional connectedness. In such cases, the child is given the mes- sage that his or her needs are not as important as the parents’.

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Remedies

As I explained earlier, most women’s Nice Girl beliefs and behav- iors stem from four major sources: biological, societal, familial, and experiential. To stop putting other people’s feelings and needs ahead of your own, it is important for you to determine where this false belief originated for you.

If you have only a slight tendency to focus on the feelings and needs of others, you may suffer from what most women experience as they are growing up—a biological predisposition and the societal message that women should be compassionate and empathetic care- takers. If you have a stronger tendency, it may be that you were taught to be self-sacrificing by your parents—either because they gave you this overt message or because you witnessed one parent (probably your mother) sacrificing herself for her husband and children.

But if you suffer from a strong
need
to focus on others to the exclusion of listening to your own needs and feelings, it may be that you had self-absorbed or narcissistic parents or an alcoholic parent, or that you were emotionally, physically, or sexually abused as a child. Victims of sexual abuse, in particular, learn the powerful mes- sage that the perpetrator’s needs and feelings were all that mattered and that their own needs and feelings were unimportant.

It often takes some soul-searching to discover the origin of your tendency to put your needs aside. The following example provides you with a model for this self-exploration.

Patricia: A Model for Self-Exploration

Patricia came to see me because she was concerned about her hus- band’s drinking and how it would affect her two children. For the past four years, she had been coming out of denial about just how much of a drinking problem her husband had. She told me that she had put up with inappropriate behavior from him for a long time but was now unwilling to continue to expose her children to it. “I can put up with his behavior, even though it embarrasses me and makes me angry. But I don’t want my kids to have to see it.”

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In spite of Patricia’s resolve to end the relationship, she was hav- ing a very difficult time following through. “I don’t want to hurt him. I know he’ll be devastated. We’ve been together for a long time and he isn’t really close to anyone else. I know he’s going to end up all alone and I hate for that to happen. If it wasn’t for the kids, I’d just put up with him.”

As we talked more, Patricia revealed that she hadn’t felt much love for her husband for some time. “It didn’t start out this way. I was crazy about him for the longest time. But I gradually lost any feel- ing for him because of the way he treats me. My friends and family can’t understand why I’ve stayed with him for so long. They all saw what I am just beginning to see—just how selfish and cruel he can be. They all think I deserve to be with someone who treats me with a lot more respect.”

I asked Patricia why she would be willing to basically accept a sit- uation that was obviously unacceptable. “I just don’t want to hurt him. I’m one of those people who would rather be hurt than hurt someone else.” When I asked why this was so, she answered, “I don’t know, I’ve always been that way.”

As is often the case, I felt that the best way to help Patricia was to explore her childhood. She explained that her father was a very loving man and she was extremely close to him. This was partly due to the fact that she felt sorry for him because her mother was a very dominant and demanding woman who ordered him around con- stantly. As a child, Patricia wanted to protect her father from her mother, but of course, she really couldn’t. Instead, she took care of her father in every way she could. She brought him his newspaper and a bottle of beer when he came home. Whenever Patricia’s mother would yell at him, Patricia would sit next to him or give him a hug or rub his feet to make him feel better.

But as kind and loving as Patricia’s father was, he was also an alcoholic. As the years went by, he became worse and worse. Although he always managed to go to work, he got drunk every night and typically passed out on the couch. He was less and less available to Patricia, and by the time she was in high school they sel- dom connected at all. Nevertheless, as far as she was concerned, he was the greatest father a girl could have.

When I probed further about how her father’s alcoholism affected her, Patricia visibly squirmed in her chair. “I’m sure it’s had

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its affect. I’ve had a problem with drinking too much myself in the past. And I did marry an alcoholic, after all,” she offered.

“How about the fact that you ended up taking care of your father instead of the other way around?” I asked.