See if you recognize yourself in any of the following patterns:
When asked for your preferences, you respond with something like: “It doesn’t matter to me. Whatever you want.”
It’s not unusual for your conversations with friends or associates to end up 95% focused on the other person.
You never, ever miss a friend’s birthday or stop searching until you’ve found exactly the right card. Neither illness, natural disaster nor loss of a loved one exempt you.
Nobody, at least nobody you know, makes you angry, no matter what they do.
You attack yourself mercilessly if you feel you’ve disappointed someone.
Maybe you thought everyone thinks, feels and behaves in these ways. But the examples above actually represent a highly destructive style of relating to others we might call the “good girl” reflex. “Good girl” reflexes are extremely common among both young and grown women who have eating disorders.
What is the “good girl” reflex?
At its heart, the “good girl” reflex is a compulsive pattern of paying attention to everyone else’s needs and concerns while treating your own as if they don’t matter. A “good girl” often pays so little attention to her own needs and desires, she couldn’t even tell you what they are. You could say the “good girl” reflex is an extreme version of what we’ve traditionally been taught makes for a good woman. Selflessness is the key.
What’s wrong with selflessness, you ask. Isn’t the world too full of selfish people and deeds? Well, it’s hard to argue with that. But the best correction for an extreme in one direction is seldom an extreme in the other direction. Why do some girls and women get stuck in such an extreme pattern? The “good girl” reflex is frequently an example of what we call an attachment strategy.
Attachment strategies are ways of relating to others that are unconsciously designed to keep the relationship secure; that is, to keep people from disapproving of you or, worse, leaving you. When early experiences with caregivers are highly conditional or characterized by great uncertainty, a child lives with undue fear of disapproval or abandonment. These fears carry forward to color all future relationships. For such people, attachment strategies take on a certain desperate urgency.
Women who develop the “good girl” reflex become focused on figuring out and supplying what others want as an attempt to ward off disapproval or abandonment. They are calming their fears (for the moment) but at great cost. Enacting “good girl” reflexes is very hard on selfhood and self–esteem. How can you learn to know yourself when all the focus goes outward to others? How can self–esteem flourish when you are daily living the message that you don’t matter?
What does the “good girl” reflex have to do with eating disorders?
Many women who develop eating disorders started life with the kind of caregiver insecurity that can give rise to a “good girl” attachment strategy. Lacking the reliable internal guidelines that can only develop out of knowing yourself, such women may attempt to substitute the external “guidance” of calories and pounds. Or they seek others’ admiration for their thinness to stand in for the missing self–esteem that only an internal sense of worth can supply.
There’s more. Learning that you’re not supposed to have needs of your own can lead to anorexic restricting or the cycle of bingeing and dieting. A woman with anorexia denies having even the most basic of needs; that is, for food and nourishment (although restricting is usually more about control and perfectionism which is a close cousin of “good–girlism”). The woman who binges is in a fierce struggle with her desires, alternately expressing them by bingeing, then denying them with the next diet (or purge).
How do you update the “good girl” reflex? How does that help with eating disorder recovery?
It can feel very risky at first to even think about letting go of “good girl” reflexes. They’ve seemed like your key to being accepted and loved.
Here’s an exercise for you: start by thinking of a friend or some other woman you really admire who clearly considers her own needs right along with the needs of others. Got your person? How do you feel about the way she balances her needs and wishes with those of others? Is there anything about it you’d like to borrow? Can you find one very small example of her behavior or thinking that you could experiment with? Who can you count on to support you in your experiment?
Remember that when you take your own needs and wishes seriously, your self–esteem automatically begins to improve. As a bonus, you’ll get more respect for showing that you respect yourself. Healthy people instinctively shy away from extremes of selflessness just as they do from selfishness. On the other hand, they gravitate toward people with solid self–esteem.
