Episode 165 - The Good Girl Rules are a High-Demand System
A high-demand system is any structure that requires a significant amount of your time, energy, and identity in exchange for belonging. We often think about high-demand religions, workplaces, families, or cultures, but there is one system that is hard to recognize because it’s so ingrained in society that it just feels like the way things are supposed to be: the good girl rules. The unspoken expectations women absorb throughout their lives function like any other high-demand system. They reward compliance, create fear around stepping outside the rules, and keep us so focused on being good enough that we never get the chance to fully discover who we are. But understanding the systems we live in is the first step toward finding our way back to ourselves. Here’s what I cover:
The characteristics that most high-demand systems have in common
How high-demand systems reward compliance and discourage deviation from the rules
Examples of high-demand systems and the ways they shape identity and belonging
Three of the biggest things women lose when living by the good girl rules
Questions to help you examine the systems you live in and what they may cost you.
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Transcript
00:59
When I was Mormon, I had an almost constant undercurrent of anxiety. And I woke up almost every single day wondering if I was enough. And it was in a religious context, for sure.
01:16
It was like, am I doing enough to make God happy? Am I doing enough to be saved the way that Mormons teach and talk about that? Am I doing enough for my community? Am I doing enough for my family? Am I doing enough for my kids, for my parents, for my friends?
01:33
And this constant like grinding anxiety actually came alongside being a very good Mormon. I wasn't half-hearted about it. I was all in and I was doing all the things. In Mormonism, there are few places where women actually get to hold positions of influence.
01:53
And I had them all. Those are only given to women who can prove that they are worthy and very observant. And so I had a lot of standing in my community. I had a very clear identity and I had like a very clear answer every single day to the question of who am I and what am I supposed to be doing?
02:19
And everything felt very certain. And even though there were things that would go wrong, the certainty that I knew who I was, that I knew what I was supposed to be doing was really, really helpful. But then there was the constant anxiety that kind of made it hard.
02:39
But I didn't know that I was so anxious. In fact, a couple of years ago, my husband found some of my old journals and was reading them out loud to me. And over and over and over again, I would say things like, I've got to try harder.
02:53
I know God is disappointed. I know I'm not measuring up. I know he expects more. I know that there's more I could be doing. I know that, you know, I just need to buckle down and try harder, which is so interesting for me to reflect on now, because if you had given me like a list, and there are lists of, you know, all of the things that a Mormon woman has to do to be quote unquote worthy and obedient,
03:18
I was doing all of them, but it was never enough to arrive at that feeling and then just have it. And then there was the resentment, because I would look around at people who in my judgment weren't working as hard as I was, weren't doing as much as I was.
03:39
And I would feel simultaneously like jealous and also angry. And it sounded in my mind like, listen, I am over here bussing my ass to do all the things right. Why aren't you? And then, of course, I would feel ashamed of myself for feeling that way because good Mormon women don't feel that way.
04:01
Good Mormon women feel, you know, it's like you keep your eyes on your own paper and you feel grateful and you just do your own get to work, put your shoulder to the wheel. That's literally a song we used to sing about.
04:13
You just, if anything is going wrong in your life, you just put your shoulder to the wheel and you get to work. And so when I left the church, it was a loss of lots of things at one time. My belief system, my worldview, my identity, my community, a lot of my friendships.
04:37
And it was the loss of that system that rewarded me for keeping the rules. And I wasn't prepared for that. I had to come face to face with how desperately I wanted other people's approval. I didn't recognize it as desperately wanting other people's approval because it was God's approval that I was after.
04:59
And so it was a little fuzzy for me there. Like you're supposed to seek God's approval, but also that approval translated down to all the other men who were running the show in my congregation. I wanted them to approve of me.
05:11
I wanted them to think I was worthy. And then the women too, and everyone else. So I really did not know how desperately I wanted other people to approve of me and validate me. And I also did not yet know how long and how much effort I had spent protecting myself from them knowing how badly I wanted them to approve of me.
05:39
I had really built some high walls, protective structures around like how much of myself I let other people see because it felt really dangerous. And so that is the work that I had to do, first of all, to get to know myself, because myself was gone.
06:02
And that's how I came to do the work that I do now. I did read about it, right? I did hear about it. I did have some really great coaches and therapists who've helped me a ton. And I had to do it myself because I had no choice.
06:17
And as I have been kind of reflecting on those early years of how did I figure out who I am and what I want, those are two of the most common questions that I hear from women. And they're not all ex-Mormons, right?
06:35
So as I have been thinking about that this weekend and writing a specific program that you're going to hear more about in the future around that really critical early identity piece. Who am I when I'm not in a structure that is telling me who to be?
06:52
Who am I when I'm not in a community or other group that is handing me all of these rules? Who am I? Outside of other people's expectations, outside of my resume. I had a long Mormon resume. Who am I outside of just all the things I've been told to be?
07:12
And I've been thinking about the good girl rules and about every system that demands compliance in exchange for belonging. And they all work the same way. We often refer to Mormonism as a high demand religion, but high demand is a definable term that can be applied to many systems.
07:38
Yes, religious, but also cultural, professional, familial. And it's any structure that requires a significant portion of your time, your energy, your identity, and compliance in exchange for belonging.
07:57
That's it. That's the definition. And high demand systems have a few things in common. I mentioned rules. They have lots of rules. Sometimes some of them are written, but a lot of them are unwritten.
08:10
And you absorb them just by osmosis, just by being around other people. And oftentimes, in an effort to comply, people will take the written rules and then raise the ante a little bit to make it even more restrictive or even harder so that there is extra reward in meeting the even stricter rules.
08:33
And so lots of rules. They also have a very clear hierarchy of who is doing it right and who is not. Sometimes that who is doing it right is openly rewarded and who is doing it wrong is openly punished.
08:51
And sometimes it's not such a featured element of the system, but it is always there. And those who are doing it right have extra rewards. They have extra privileges. They are given consideration in a different way than the ones who are falling short.
09:10
High demand systems reward compliance visibly and punish or make examples of any kind of disobedience or deviation. Sometimes it's overtly, and sometimes it's just through the slow withdrawal of that belonging piece.
09:32
You just get pushed to the edges or pushed to the margins. And these systems are so fascinating because they have a way of making you feel like the system's demands aren't because of the system. This is just how it is in a lot of religious contexts or familial or cultural contexts.
09:55
It's like, this is just the right way to live. This is the right way to do this. And in professional systems, like this is just the right way to be a doctor, a lawyer, or any of these other, you know, potentially high demand professions.
10:10
But here is a part that is really important. A high demand system makes you feel like there is going to be a loss if you step outside of these bounds. The loss is belonging. The loss is relationships.
10:27
The loss is community. The loss is having a place. And a high demand religion is a little different. I would say, you know, when people picture high demand religions, they picture something extreme, you know, living in a compound, very isolated.
10:47
And sure, those exist. And those are at the extreme end of the spectrum. But other organizations and other religious organizations that we are just so used to in our society look normal-ish from the outside, right?
11:03
It isn't something that really grabs people's attention because there is an overt difference. It is inside that all of that high demand really lives. And it becomes an inside policing system. There are high demand professions.
11:23
I mentioned medicine and law, right? Systems where kind of the implied contract is you're going to give us everything in exchange, you get to belong to something important. Maybe the hours are brutal and the culture kind of just treats that brutality as a badge of honor, but you get to belong to this very exclusive, very unique group who are obeying these rules.
11:54
And this kind of brings up another feature. When you are in some of these high demand professions or families, anytime you ask for a break or some kind of exception or even just some balance, I'm thinking about, you know, lawyers or doctors asking for a balance, this, you know, elusive work-life balance.
12:16
That actually is an admission that you're not serious about this, that you are not willing to rise to the high standards. And so asking for any kind of leniency or grace or generosity is always met with suspicion and punishment because now you don't belong.
12:37
There are high-demand family structures. There are families where everyone is organized around one member's needs. Maybe it's the mental illness of a parent, the addiction of another family member, or a chronic crisis that keeps happening.
12:57
And everyone in the household is kind of arranged around managing that person. This is where children learn really early that their job, their role, is to do something to hold the family together and that having their own needs is not allowed.
13:16
It's a disruption to that system. And so you can't do it. I think there are even high demand cultural identities. There are definitely high demand political identities. There are groups where the price of belonging is like total agreement, total alignment.
13:35
I agree with everything you say, all of your ideologies, all of your ideas. And if I criticize any of them, or if I ask again for some of that balance or nuance, it's proof that I'm not a real whatever it is, right?
13:49
And this happens across the political spectrum. So anytime you're thinking about a group where asking for any kind of nuance or generosity or trying to find ways to balance multiple people's needs, that ends up being coded as disloyalty.
14:13
That's a high demand system. And another part of it, anytime there is a system that requires total agreement, where any kind of nuance or questioning is disloyal. And when leaving the group or even questioning, it means that you lose people.
14:34
I really think these systems are everywhere. And there is one high demand system that is so normal. I talk about it a lot. You're about to not be surprised at all, but the way I'm going to talk about it, I hope kind of gives you a little bit of a different perspective on it.
14:52
This high demand system is so normal that a lot of the women living inside it never have a clue that they are. And they're the good girl rules. Being a woman, specifically being a woman who has absorbed all of those good girl rules, is its own high demand system.
15:12
Let me tell you what I mean. I demand systems, again, have unwritten rules that function as the price of belonging. The good girl rules have those. Don't take up too much space. Don't ask for too much.
15:27
Make yourself useful. Manage everyone's comfort. Be grateful. Don't be angry. Put yourself last. And there is not a class that we get where everybody sits us down and they're like, listen, here are the good girl rules.
15:41
In every single workshop I have given over the last eight years of my career, in every single coaching session where I ask the question, what are the good girl rules? Unanimously, everyone can name them.
15:55
Isn't that fascinating? It's like there was a class, but there really wasn't. And yet we all observed and absorbed the exact same things. High demand systems reward compliance visibly. The good girl rules do that too.
16:14
If you're agreeable enough, capable enough, selfless enough, you get approval. You get belonging. You get to be called good, a good woman, a good mother, a good friend, a good employee. And you get to feel like you are doing it right.
16:31
High demand systems punish disobedience. Again, not always overtly, but through the withdrawal of belonging. The good girl rules do that too. If you speak up too directly, you are difficult. If you want too much, you are selfish.
16:49
If you set a boundary around the way you want to use your time and energy, just watch the reaction that people will have. And the punishment usually isn't super dramatic, but every single woman knows when it's happening.
17:04
It's just this slow, cold feeling that you have violated something, that you are in trouble, and that you need to repair it. Otherwise, people are going to have thoughts about you. They're going to think that you're a bad girl.
17:21
And high demand systems, again, they don't make you feel like the demands are coming from the system, right? Like we sat down and wrote this system together. It's just the quote unquote right way to live.
17:34
It's the right way to do it. And the good grill rules do that better than almost anything because they don't come from a church or from a boss or from some type of class or written contract. They are everywhere all at once for your entire life.
17:56
I'm 52. I'm now starting to bump up against the good girl rules of aging, right? When I see wrinkles in my face, when I see sagging things that didn't need to sag, I have the automatic reaction that I need to fix it.
18:10
Nobody taught me that, but yet everywhere taught me that. And so the weirdest thing about these rules is that they come from everywhere. And by the time we're adults, it just, it can feel like they're just my own values.
18:29
No, I just want to be skinny because I want to be skinny. I just want to be agreeable and nice because it's just what I want. It just feels like you. And that's how a high demand system works when it's at its most sophisticated, I think, and most insidious, because it gets really hard to tell the difference between who you are and who you're taught to be, what you want and what you're taught to want,
19:02
what you want to create with your life and what you're told to create with your life. It becomes really hard to tell. When you live inside of any high demand system for long enough, all of your time and energy go to keeping the rules, complying.
19:19
And that leaves like no time or very little time for growing, for knowing yourself, figuring out your wants or what matters to you when nobody's watching. I used to have this idea that while I was busy learning how to be this amazing Mormon, all of the other women were out learning how to be feminists, how to know who they were and what they wanted, and know, you know, how to spend their time and energy so that they could really create these authentic,
19:49
amazing lives. And I would say, like, yeah, I don't have any of that because I was busy trying to be the good Mormon while everybody else was finding out who they really are. And that's actually not true because the, again, one of the most common things that women say to me is, I don't know who I am.
20:10
And I don't know what I want outside of everyone else's expectations. I have a very hard time knowing, is it me that wants this? Or is it because I've just been taught to want this? It can't just be Mormonism because everybody knows them.
20:22
And so there has to be a bigger answer. And the fact that the good girl rules are their own high demand system, to me, explains a lot, because when women have all of their time, their attention, their capacity, and their life, their interior life, everything that is going on inside of them going to meet the system's demands, going to keep the good girl rules, they're not finding out who they are either.
20:51
We are spending so much time trying to be good enough, trying to stay safe, trying to meet expectations that things get lost. And as I've thought a lot about it, there's really, there's three specific things.
21:05
This is not, of course, this is not the definitive list, but I think it matters enough to do a podcast episode about. So first thing is your sense of self. If you think about toddlers and the way that they, as a group, of course, this is generalization, know what they want and what they don't want.
21:27
One of my favorite videos that we have of one of my sons is we're trying to get him to eat, I don't know, some kind of vegetable. And we kept putting like a small piece of watermelon on top of it to try to put it in his mouth.
21:39
And he would just spit it out and spit it out and spit it out and spit it out. And so we would have had to like forcibly, I don't even know how we would have done it, but we just laughed. But it just reminds me of how much toddlers, those two and three and four and five year olds, they really know what they want and what they don't want.
22:01
And at some point they don't anymore. It gets lost. It's quiet. It's gradual. You stop knowing what you want or what you think until you've checked in with what you're supposed to think first. You stop knowing what you want until you've checked.
22:20
Am I allowed to want this? Is this okay? And at a certain point, there's very cloudy lines between your values and the rules. At some point, you run into, maybe it's slowly over time, or maybe it's a sudden kind of collision, like it was for me leaving the church.
22:43
You look up and realize, I don't know who I am, actually. The most common thing I hear from women is I don't know. One of the most common things I hear from women is I don't know who I am or what I really want.
23:01
And this is not personal failure. This is what happens when a high demand system has had your full attention for decades. So that's the first thing that gets lost, a real sense of self. The second thing that gets lost is your emotional compass.
23:22
High demand systems are not interested in what you actually feel. In fact, there's a very prescriptive list of what you are supposed to feel, what you're allowed to feel. And the emotions that don't fit, which are often anger, resentment, rage, envy, those get pushed down.
23:43
And those are the exact emotions that are trying to tell us something important. Our anger tells us when something important to us has been violated. Your anger tells you where something important to you is being violated and needs to be better taken care of.
24:04
Your envy shows you what you actually want. And an emotion like dread tells us where our choices and our desires have gotten disconnected because now we're saying yes to shit that we really don't want to and we're dreading going.
24:23
But when you have spent years suppressing those negative emotions, you lose access to the most accurate navigation system you have, your emotions and what they are trying to tell you. High demand systems are so busy trying to tell you which emotions are okay and which get the rubber stamp of approval that we don't ever investigate.
24:48
Well, then why am I having all these other emotions and what are they trying to tell me? And that is the second thing that gets lost inside of high demand systems. The third thing that gets lost is the capacity to really be known for the unique, amazing individual that you are.
25:08
When you're in a high demand system, you learn, and this is for survival, that full honesty is a risk. That showing all of yourself, what you really want, what you really desire, what you really think, it's going to cost you something.
25:28
Probably the belonging that you need. I still remember the day that I had the realization, the personal realization, that the Mormon church was wrong in the way that it had been teaching about people who are gay.
25:46
So this is back in like 2008-ish, 2009, maybe as late as 10. The Mormon church was still teaching that being gay was a choice. And I was sitting in my front room when it just didn't make sense to me anymore.
26:00
I was like, this doesn't make sense. And I know it for myself. And my first reaction was fear and to lock that shit down because I knew that being fully honest about my questions, about my opinions was not okay.
26:22
So I locked it down. Another way that we learn to deal with this is that we just learn to only show the parts of us that will get approval and reward. It's curation. It's performance, right? We show the parts of ourselves that will stand the scrutiny of the rules and the other people in the system and hide the parts that don't.
26:48
And we get really, really good at it. So good that eventually you can't remember what it's like to be you, to be authentically, really you, and to just be real about something. One of the things that was so interesting for me to recognize in myself after I left Mormonism and leaving a high demand system is painful for many different reasons.
27:17
If you're leaving a profession, it's a lot of your identity. It's a lot of what you've spent time and energy developing and expertise and a lot of money becoming good at. If it's a family system, it's the family relationships that you thought were going to be a certain way and support you and look a certain way, you know, for the rest of your life.
27:36
But exiting is hard. What is also hard is that when you leave, the physical leaving is the thing that usually feels impossible. Then you do it, but then there's real work to do because that system just comes with you because it's internal.
27:59
It's an internal monitoring and policing system that gets installed over years and years. It can become a mental condition like OCD or scrupulosity, or it can just become what I had, which was this highly anxious system vibrating all the time with, am I enough?
28:19
Am I enough? Am I enough? Those rules don't disappear when you leave the structure that taught them to you. And your nervous system doesn't just automatically update and say, oh yeah, we don't believe that anymore.
28:33
We don't go there anymore. Those old rules no longer apply. All of those rewards that kept us compliant, the approval, the belonging, and the sense that we were doing it right, we still want those badly.
28:48
And our nervous system is still keyed to get them. And when the system stops providing those, I wish we could say that we suddenly just, that's freedom, right? Now you're free. It didn't work that way for me.
29:02
And it hasn't worked that way for a lot of the women that I work with who are finding their way out of their different high demand systems. It's confusion and disorientation. The need for approval followed me right out of the door when I left Mormonism.
29:19
The self-policing followed me right out the door. The measuring of myself against invisible standards came with me. And all of those things that I had learned between Mormonism and good girl rules, they just really felt like me, the me that had been shaped by decades inside of a system where some behavior is okay and don't do this or you're going to be in trouble.
29:47
And that's where the work actually begins. It begins with getting honest about the system you were in. Not just naming it, but seeing it really clearly. What rules are required of you to belong in that system?
30:04
What are the roles that you were handed that you just had to keep playing out and meeting or you'd get in trouble? How were you rewarded for keeping those roles and keeping those rules? We have to clearly see the deal that we made and what it cost to make it.
30:28
After that, I think the next most important step is beginning to hear your own emotions again. Beginning to not judge them. The three most important emotions, I think, for women to pay attention to, anger, envy, and dread.
30:48
Those are emotions that are actively discouraged, suppressed, because the system needs things from us, right? The system needs us to be agreeable, to be kind, to be serviceable, to give up our time and energy and effort.
31:02
You can't be feeling anger, envy, and dread when you're doing that, right? You have to suppress those, but they're waiting for you. When you start to see the components of the high demand systems that you have been living in, those emotions are there.
31:20
And when you can finally start to believe that those emotions want to help take care of you, that they are good, that there's not good emotions and bad emotions, that there are just emotions that help give you data about your life.
31:33
Then you can begin to learn from them. And it begins with asking slowly and with real curiosity, what do these emotions want me to know? What does my anger want me to better take care of? What does my envy want to point me in the direction of having?
31:53
What does my dread tell me about how I have been confusing compliance with what I actually want? There's so much to learn from the richness of the full spectrum of human emotion. And then lastly, I think it begins with spending some slow, curious time asking, who am I?
32:20
Not who was I trained to be? Not what are all the roles that I was so good at excelling inside that system. Who am I underneath all of that? When I'm not answering from my resume or my relationships or the things that I'm quote unquote good at, how would I describe myself?
32:44
What are my values when nobody is checking on it? Who am I when no one's watching? So many of these questions came up for me after I left, and it was heartbreaking. It was also in some ways exciting.
33:02
It was not clean and it wasn't fast, but it was the most important work I have ever done. Because here's what I know. You cannot ask for what you want if you don't know what you want. You can't speak up for yourself in relationships if you don't know who yourself is.
33:23
You can't have hard conversations with a lot of inner sturdiness about what you really want for your life if you've spent decades self-abandoning to belong. The good girl rules are a high demand system.
33:41
And like every high demand system, they take your energy, your time, your brain space, and then they give you belonging in return. And I think the question is, whether or not that trade is still working for you.
33:56
If you're listening to this, I'm guessing it's not. So as we move forward in the coming weeks, you're going to hear more about a program that I'm creating called Known, because knowing ourselves, knowing who we are outside of everything that has been placed on us is one of the single most satisfying things we can put time and energy into.
34:22
And asking yourself some of the questions that you have heard in this episode, if they feel like, huh, I don't really know the answer to that, that's where you start. Get honest about the system. Learn to hear your emotions again.
34:38
And then ask, who am I outside of who I've been told to be? Because the time and energy that you spend doing those things will pay huge dividends. You deserve to know who you are. You deserve to know what you want and what you need.
34:56
And it's a process that keeps evolving, that keeps growing. It changes over time. I'm in perimenopause and a lot of the things that were really important to me even a few years ago just aren't anymore.
35:13
So the process of becoming known to ourselves is something that I want to be in for the rest of my life that feels like true grounding connection with me. Because when I know who I really am, then I can have real connection and intimacy with other people.
35:36
Because I can create low demand systems and low demand friendships and low demand relationships where every part of me is welcome and it is known by me and it is loved by me. And other people can see who I am.
35:54
And they get to witness and they get to be a part of the good parts of me, the parts that I'm proud to show to anyone and the parts that maybe I'm not, because that is also just part of the human experience.
36:07
It's what I want for me and it's what I want for you. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
