The Nice Girl Syndrome (16 page)

.”

My mother always told me, “Your reputation is all you’ve got.” But in actuality, there is something more important than reputation:

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how we perceive ourselves. Other people may admire you, but if you don’t like yourself, you won’t be able to take in their admiration. They may judge you negatively; this can certainly hurt. But if you judge
yourself
negatively, the result will be far more damaging to your self-esteem. It will take time to redirect your focus from the outside to the inside, but in time and with a real commitment, you can do it. Believe me, the time and effort will be well worth it.

7

Stop Trying to Be Perfect

I would rather be whole than good.

—C
ARL
J
UNG

False belief:
I need to be perfect to be accepted.

Empowering belief:
I don’t have to be perfect to be wonder- ful (or loved).

or

Everyone is both good and bad, including me.

This chapter is especially beneficial for Pretenders, Prudes, Enlightened Ones

N

ice Girls have a powerful need to be good and perfect. Again, this partly comes from our societal conditioning. Even those

girls who managed to get through childhood without disowning important parts of themselves in their quest to be accepted are confronted with another test—adolescence. In her book
Making the Connection
, Carol Gilligan discussed how a dramatic change occurs in girls when they enter adolescence—they fall asleep to themselves: “Adolescence is a time of disconnection, sometimes of disassociation or repression in women’s lives. Women tend to forget or cover over—what as girls they have experienced and known.”

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The self-confident, competent, talented, exuberant, outgoing girl in middle childhood vanishes as she judges herself against an impossible feminine ideal—to please others; to be selfless, nice, and pretty; and to make herself the object of someone else’s life.

To attain the culturally prescribed ideal, a girl must stash away a great many parts of herself. She must silence parts of herself and stop speaking out. She must stop expressing her feelings. Instead, she must focus on trying to please others, especially those of the opposite sex.

Parental Messages

Sometimes the pattern of trying to be good enough or perfect comes from having a parent who is never pleased. Justine came into ther- apy because she was deeply depressed. She knew she needed to get away from her current boyfriend but seemed to be unable to do so. “All my friends tell me that Frank is no good for me. They tell me that they’ve seen me getting more and more depressed since I’ve been with him, and they’re right. Frank is unwilling and unable to commit to me. He always tells me that if I would only do such and such, he could commit. But then I do what he’s asked and it’s still the same story. He’ll have another reason why he can’t commit: I need to lose weight. My kids need to be older. I need to quit my job and get another, better-paying one.”

As I questioned Justine, I discovered that Frank was not the first man she had gotten involved with who had been impossible to please. This made me wonder whether Justine had a parent who was a per- fectionist. When I asked her about it, she replied, “I spent my entire childhood and most of my young adulthood trying to please my father. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t please him. He wanted me to become a nurse, and I became a nurse. He wanted me to have grandchildren for him and I did. But he is never happy. There is always something else I should have or could have done.”

Justine did what many other women do—she became involved with men who were like a parent; in this case, her father. Time after time, Justine chose men who could never be pleased. “I don’t know why I never noticed this before,” she told me after I pointed out the pattern. “It’s absolutely amazing to me that I picked men like my father without even realizing it.”

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Perfectionistic Parents

We’ve all heard of perfectionistic parents who push their children to excel in a particular sport, in academics, or in other endeavors. These children are given the powerful message (sometimes spoken, often unspoken) that they have value only if they perform to their parents’ satisfaction. Oftentimes, this is because a parent is living through his or her child, trying to make up for his or her own lost dreams.

René also had a perfectionistic mother. When she was growing up, she was supposed to help her mother around the house, bring home all A’s in school, learn the piano, and take dance lessons. Needless to say, this was a heavy burden for a child. She hardly ever had a minute to herself to just relax, and whenever she complained about being tired, her mother would roll her eyes and say, “You don’t know how good you have it.”

Over time, René found that she gained a lot of recognition from others by getting good grades and excelling in music and dance. What had begun as her mother’s desire for her to be perfect turned into her own need for personal perfection.

Perfectionistic parents put great value on appearances, status, material possessions, and what other people will think. Many feel strongly that anything short of perfection is failure. They also tend to disdain flaws of any kind. This makes them especially critical of their children’s appearance. “My mother was always concerned about the way I looked,” my client Veronica told me. “She hated my teeth, which were crooked like my father’s, so she taught me how to smile without showing my teeth. She couldn’t wait until I was old enough to get braces, but even then she seemed to be embarrassed by the fact that I had to wear them.”

Her mother’s concern about Veronica’s appearance made Veronica very self-conscious. “I thought I was a real ugly duckling,” she confided. “I thought everyone had the same reaction to my teeth and my braces as my mother did—that they couldn’t stand to look at me. Today, even though I have nice straight teeth, I still smile with my mouth closed and put my hand in front of my mouth a lot.”

Instead of receiving encouragement and support from their par- ents, children of perfectionists often receive only criticism, demands, and sometimes ridicule. Consequently, they may grow up feeling inadequate, incapable, awkward, or inept. Since they receive little

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praise or constructive guidance, their self-esteem is usually very low, and they have little faith in their own abilities. They are often over- whelmed with anxiety whenever they have to perform in any way, and this sets them up for failure. In addition, those raised by perfection- istic parents often suffer from any or all of the following problems:

• A sense that they are valued for what they
  do
  instead of for who they
  are
  (
  doing
  versus
  being
  )
  

• A tendency to be self-critical and never be satisfied with them- selves or their performance
  

• A tendency to doubt and second-guess themselves
  

• An inability to identify and express their emotions
  

• Compulsive behaviors (extreme dieting, overexercising, com- pulsive cleaning)
  

• Depression
  

• A tendency to be a Nice Girl
  

  Hypercritical, Shaming Parents
  

  Hypercritical and shaming parents send the same message to their children as perfectionistic parents do—that they are never good enough. Parents often deliberately shame their children into mind- ing them without realizing the disruptive impact shame can have on a child’s sense of self. Statements such as “You should be ashamed of yourself” or “Shame on you” are obvious examples. Yet these types of overtly shaming statements are actually easier for the child to defend against than are more subtle forms of shaming, such as con- tempt, humiliation, and public shaming.
  

  There are many ways that parents shame their children. These include belittling, blaming, contempt, humiliation, and disabling expectations.
  

• Belittling.
  Comments such as “You’re too old to want to be held” or “You’re just a cry-baby” are horribly humiliating to a child. When a parent makes a negative comparison between his or her child and another, such as “Why can’t you act like Jenny? See how she sits quietly while her mother is talking,” it is not only humiliating but teaches a child to always compare himself or herself with peers and find himself or her- self deficient by comparison.
  

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• Blaming.
  When a child makes a mistake, such as breaking a vase while rough-housing, he or she needs to take responsibil- ity. But many parents go way beyond teaching a lesson by blaming and berating the child: “You stupid idiot! Do you think money grows on trees? I don’t have money to buy new vases!” The only thing this accomplishes is shaming the child to such an extent that he or she cannot find a way to walk away from the situation with his or her head held high.
  

• Contempt.
  Expressions of disgust or contempt communicate absolute rejection. The look of contempt (often a sneer or a raised upper lip), especially from someone who is significant to a child, can make him or her feel disgusting or offensive. When I was a child, my mother had an extremely negative attitude toward me. Much of the time she either looked at me with the kind of expectant expression that said, “What are you up to now?” or with a look of disapproval or disgust over what I had already done. These looks were extremely shaming to me, causing me to feel that there was something terribly wrong with me.
  

• Humiliation.
  There are many ways a parent can humiliate a child, such as making him or her wear clothes that have become dirty. But as Gershen Kaufman stated in his book
  Shame: The Power of Caring
  , “There is no more humiliating experience than to have another person who is clearly the stronger and more powerful take advantage of that power and give us a beating.” I can personally attest to this. In addi- tion to shaming me with her contemptuous looks, my mother often punished me by hitting me with the branch of a tree, and she often did this outside, in front of the neigh- bors. The humiliation I felt was like a deep wound to my soul.
  

• Disabling expectations.
  Parents who have an inordinate need to have their child excel at a particular activity or skill are likely to behave in ways that pressure the child to do more and more. According to Kaufman, when a child becomes aware of the real possibility of failing to meet parental expectations, he or she often experiences a binding self-consciousness. This self-consciousness—the painful watching of oneself—is very
  

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disabling. When something is expected of us in this way, attaining the goal is made harder, if not impossible.

Yet another way that parents induce shame in their children is by communicating to them that they are a disappointment to them. Such messages as “I can’t believe you could do such a thing” or “I am deeply disappointed in you” accompanied by a disapproving tone of voice and facial expression can crush a child’s spirit.

The Legacy of Shame

Since shame is so debilitating, it makes sense that we would do almost anything in our power to try to avoid it. Human beings strive to stay in control, partly because we are raised to believe that we are responsible for what happens to us and that we can control our own lives. When something goes wrong, we may feel ashamed about the fact that we have lost control. This is especially true of children who, instead of simply believing that something bad “just happened,” usu- ally believe that they somehow caused or contributed to the events and are therefore responsible.

If one or both of your parents was perfectionistic, hypercritical, or shaming, you will probably be perfectionistic as well. You’ll expect yourself to do things right the first time, and when you make a mis- take you will not be forgiving of yourself. Instead, you’ll berate your- self with such comments as “What’s wrong with you?” and “Stupid, you can’t do anything right.” Your self-chastisement may sometimes be brutal, causing you to become depressed or despondent when you make a mistake. Although others seem to be able to move on after making a mistake, you are inclined to dwell on it, and this continu- ally damages your self-esteem and makes you try even harder to be a Nice Girl.

Another legacy of having been shamed as a child or having per- fectionistic parents is to have a tendency to continually evaluate yourself, judge yourself harshly, and set unreasonable expectations and standards for yourself.

You may also become involved with partners and friends who are perfectionistic. In fact, it is very common for women who were raised by perfectionistic parents to become involved with partners who are perfectionists, as it was with Justine, whom you met earlier in the chapter.

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Your Inner Critic

Your inner critic (also known as the superego or the judge) is a per- vasive yet often invisible presence in your life. It speaks to you inside your head with harsh, critical words. A woman raised by nurturing, supportive parents normally develops a healthy inner critic who rep- resents internalized rules and consequences. This healthy inner critic causes her to feel “signal anxiety” when contemplating an action that goes against her value system, and guilt and sometimes depression if she actually transgresses. In this way, a healthy inner critic provides self-imposed punishment that keeps the woman’s behavior under the control of her system of morality. Anxiety, guilt, and depression are kept within reasonable bounds since her con- science is modeled on her parents’ reasonable attitudes. We internal- ize the inner critic and its standards to keep our parents with us and to give ourselves a sense of protection, safety, and imagined power over ourselves and reality.