The Nice Girl Syndrome (34 page)

Throughout a woman’s life, her confidence level will go up or down depending on how well she is received by others. But at some point, it is hoped, each woman will reach a stage where her confi- dence level becomes more stable and is affected less by how others react to her and her offerings and more by what she thinks and how she feels about her own value.

Confidence Builder #1: Discover Your Essence

Generally speaking, we usually consider our body, our personal his- tory, and our emotional makeup to be the most distinctive and unchanging aspects of ourselves and what define and distinguish us from others. In reality, they are only part of who we are. They only define our outer layer.

To build up your confidence, you need to discover that there is another aspect of you not related to your physical characteristics and not defined by your emotions or personality type. It is not a result of your history and conditioning, nor is it affected by your beliefs or opinions. This aspect of you is sometimes referred to as your
true nature
, or your
essence
, because it is the essence of what you are
beneath
your individual history.

The negative messages you received from your parents (spoken

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and unspoken) became an
overlay
on top of your essence, often hid- ing it from your awareness. For our purposes, we will use the word
essence
because it has the connotation of going beneath the negative parental messages you received, beneath the inner critic, and beneath your own self-judgment, to discover your true self.
Essence
also refers to the part of you that is most permanent and unchang- ing—that which is central in defining who you are.

This is how Byron Brown, the author of the wonderful book
Soul without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within
, defines
essence
:

The soul’s true nature exists most fundamentally as a now- ness; it is a nature that does not depend on the past or the future, nor does it depend on the experience of being a phys- ical body. The more you have a sense of yourself as soul, the more you are aware that who you truly are is not really defined by your body. Neither is it defined by what you have learned or known in the past. Who you are is something much more intimate and immediate and something much more mysterious and harder to define. To be aware of this is to begin to open to the true nature of the soul, your own beingness
now
in your life.

According to Brown, essence manifests itself uniquely in every person, and that uniqueness is inherent in you at birth. It is not achieved, nor can it be destroyed. It is not dependent on your appearance or anything you do or accomplish. You can, however, lose touch with your true nature—or even forget that it exists. Unfortunately, this is true for many of you reading this book.

The belief in the existence of essence means you have qualities or capabilities beyond those learned or instilled in you by your par- ents and other caretakers. Your essence is made up of what are called
essential qualities
—attributes essential to what is most true in the experience of being human. These qualities include
truth
,
joy
,
com- passion
,
will
,
strength
,
awareness
, and
peace
, to name a few. Essential qualities lie deeper than habit, preference, and early conditioning, and they always exist as potentials buried in the unconscious depths of each person.

The ultimate value of who you are is based not on your

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attributes—your physical appearance, your IQ, your talents, or your financial success. It on the miraculous fact that you exist and that at your core you are essentially good, wise, and strong.

E
XERCISE
: H
ONORING
Y
OUR
E
SSENTIAL
S
ELF

1. Find a space inside yourself that symbolizes your internal goodness, wisdom, and strength. Using your internal voice, say your own name. Fill up the whole space with your name. Pronounce your name boldly and lovingly and imagine that your name signifies the importance of your existence. Know that there is only one you, that there is no one else like you, that you are unique.
   

2. Fill your chest with your name so that you begin to feel alive inside. Remind yourself that you are a precious person, because everyone is precious.
   

Although we all need validation from others, the true source of your self-esteem and your power comes from within. To access your power, you need to stay connected with yourself. You need to develop the habit of going inside and connecting to your inherent strength, goodness, and wisdom. Doing this throughout the day, every day, will not only help you raise your self-esteem but will help you to feel more inner strength and security.

Confidence Builder #2: Shed Your Idealized Self-image and Embrace Who You Really Are

As children, we learned what was required from us to be liked and accepted by our parents. The result was that we became fixated on an ideal but distorted sense of ourselves. This imagined ideal self became an internal image of how we believe we should be so that everything will turn out all right and we will be loved, accepted, and appreciated. This ideal self-image includes personal standards for action, thought, feeling, behavior, appearance, and accomplishment.

The biggest difficulty with pursuing our ideal self-image is that it doesn’t work. Although striving for the ideal as children may have brought us parental approval, it did little to give us inner peace. First of all, the strain of constantly comparing ourselves to an ideal is anx- iety provoking and exhausting. Second, since it is impossible to reach

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an ideal, we are bound to fail and thus always find ourselves lacking, deficient, or not good enough. This sets us up to feel shame and guilt. At some point, we need to question just how valid it is to have an ideal when we use it as a way to continually put ourselves down.

E
XERCISE
: A
CCEPT AND
E
MBRACE
Y
OUR

L
ESS
-T
HAN
-I
DEAL
S
ELF

1. Write out a description of yourself and make two lists, the first being all your positive qualities, abilities, talents, and areas of growth. The other list will include negative quali- ties, traits, limits, and bad habits.
   

2. Read over your list of negative or less-than-perfect qualities. Try to be neutral and simply acknowledge these aspects of yourself without becoming judgmental about them.
   

3. Now read over your list of positive qualities and really take them in. Allow yourself to feel the pride that comes from acknowledging that you do, in fact, possess these good qualities.
   

Confidence Builder #3: Get in Touch with Your Power

Nothing makes us feel more confident than getting in touch with our personal power—to feel the incredible intensity of it, to acknowledge the potential within us. Unfortunately, women may become frightened when they first glimpse their power and the potential for both good and evil it encompasses. In fact, many of us become so afraid of our power that we bury it so that we won’t have to deal with it.

Now is the time to reclaim your personal power. Start gradually by standing up for what you want and what you believe in. Learn that you don’t have to control anyone but yourself to have control over your own life.

E
XERCISE
: P
OWERFUL
M
EMORIES

1. Remember a time when you felt especially powerful—a time when you exceeded your own expectations or a time when you pushed past your limits.
   

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2. Allow yourself to experience this feeling of power. Savor it and allow it to permeate your being.
   

Our personal power does indeed need to be respected, but it need not be buried for us to contain and control it and use it for good. Start uncovering your power a shovelful at a time, then take time to get used to it before you dig any deeper. Use this positive and powerful statement: I will begin to own my personal power, learn to honor it and use it for good.

Competence

Having a sense of competence means believing we can make things happen for ourselves in the world—that we can master our environ- ment. Unfortunately, acquiring a sense of competence is no simple task if you happen to have been born female.

Children usually learn that they are competent by surpassing their parents’ limits and expectations. For example, parents tell their daughter that she is not old enough to walk home from school alone but she convinces them that she is. The next day, she walks home alone, arriving on time, safe and sound. Not only has she surpassed the limits her parents placed on her, but she learned that she is com- petent. She thought she could walk home alone, she tried it, and she did it.

The girl who thought she could walk home alone was fortu- nately already confident that she could do it. But she would have had a lot more confidence had her parents had more confidence in her. The girl’s parents, by not expecting much from her, put an obstacle in her path that a less confident child would not have been able to overcome.

The biggest help to a child in terms of developing competence are adults who believe in her abilities before she has demonstrated or proven them. Self-esteem grows out of doing those things we weren’t too sure of being able to do in the first place. If we have someone who believes in us, who expects that we can, then taking that first step is a lot easier.

When set at reasonable levels, expectations represent the strongest vote of confidence possible for a child. The problem is that parents often have far too few expectations for their daughters. The

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expectations parents and our culture traditionally have had for boys are those that lead to a far greater sense of competence than do those for girls. Being competent at cooking and cleaning, for example, doesn’t really give one a sense of power and control the way compe- tence in athletics does.

Limits also play an important role in the competence levels of girls. The “sugar and spice” view of girls promotes overprotection and the belief that girls should have things done for them rather than learning to do for themselves. A child who is raised this way experiences her parents’ competence but not her own.

Competency Builder

In addition to our parents setting limits on what girls can accom- plish, women impose their own limits on what they can achieve.

• List three limits you have set for yourself that prevent you from taking risks (for example, “I’m too inexperienced,” “I’m too old”).
  

• List three areas of your life in which you feel competent.
  

• Now think and write about how you can transfer the feelings of competency you feel in these three areas to the areas of your life where you do not feel competent. For example, I feel competent as a writer and as a therapist. An important aspect of both of these roles is doing research—gathering informa- tion. But I do not feel competent when it comes to math. For years, I dreaded doing my taxes; in fact, I would almost become paralyzed with fear. But one day, I realized that there is one aspect of doing taxes that I could actually excel in— gathering up my tax information for the year. From that time on, I focused on this aspect of the process to help me get started. Once I did that, I found I could move on to the math part of the process—adding up the amounts—quite easily (with the help of a calculator).
  

Conviction

Why do women often lack conviction? Why is it so difficult for many of us to take a stand on controversial issues? Why do we often tend to back down in an argument or confrontation, especially with men?

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Women and girls have a strong desire not to hurt others. This often impedes their ability to take a stand or even to stand up for themselves. As one student shared in Carol Gilligan’s
In a Different Voice
:

Millions of people have to live together peacefully. I person- ally don’t want to hurt other people. That’s a real criterion, a main criterion for me. It underlies my sense of justice. It isn’t nice to inflict pain. I empathize with anyone in pain. Not hurting others is important in my own private morals. Years ago I would have jumped out of a window not to hurt my boyfriend. That was pathological. Even today, though, I want approval and love, and I don’t want enemies.

Another student explained her reluctance to judge others:

My main principle is not hurting other people as long as you aren’t going against your own conscience and as long as you remain true to yourself. . . .There are many moral issues, such as abortion, the draft, killing, stealing, monogamy. If something is a controversial issue like these, then I always say it is up to the individual. The individual has to decide and then follow his own conscience. There are no moral absolutes.

Gilligan reported that this reticence about taking stands on con- troversial issues, and a willingness to make exceptions all the time were echoed repeatedly by other college women. I have also found it to be true with my female clients. Here is what two of them shared with me: “I don’t believe in condemning anyone. You just never know why someone behaves the way that they do.” “I don’t like forc- ing my beliefs onto others. Everyone has a right to believe what they believe. Who am I to decide what someone else should believe?”