Losing Yourself for the Sake of Being Nice

I picked up a book at the library recently about the development of girls as they move through adolescence, and was struck by a process that was described over and over, where young girls let go of who they really are in order to say the “right things” and act the “right way” – the way that seems necessary to keep their friends and build the life they think they want. 

Most of my adult clients hire me to become more of who they really are: to discover what will make them happy, to communicate more authentically, to develop healthier relationships, and in general to begin living life on their terms.

I don’t know if it ever occurred to me to wonder when and why they stopped living life on their terms in the first place.  But reading this book made me think about it. 

Essentially, the researchers interviewed girls every year from when they were nine years old to sixteen years old.  What they found is that when the girls were nine, ten, and sometimes eleven, they handled conflict with their friends directly.  They spoke out about their disagreements, stood for what they wanted, and were comfortable having friendships with kids who had different opinions, wants, and needs.   But between the ages of eleven to thirteen things began to change, and the girls began to use their observations about relationships to gauge what they should say to “be nice”, and that began to take precedence over their real thoughts and feelings.   

During this transition, many of the girls sensed the duality of how they really felt about things compared to what they were willing to say, but they felt it would be easier to get along and keep their friends if they were careful, and only said things that wouldn’t make the other kids mad.  Angry and “selfish” feelings were buried, and replaced with lies that kept everyone “happy” and smiling on the surface.   The irony of all this is that the girls craved authentic and genuine relationships, and the motivation for their inauthentic behavior was to maintain relationships.  They created plastic relationships based only on niceness and happy feelings, and buried the darker sides of themselves, feeling isolated and misunderstood.  Meanwhile, girls inadvertently hurt each other more by talking behind backs instead of confronting each other, making up lies, avoiding, and otherwise pouring a lot of energy into trying to manipulate social situations.  The more plastic friendships they struggled to maintain, the fewer real friends they had whom they could trust and be themselves with.

Most women have continued this pattern into adulthood.  We are kind and nice and helpful and giving on the outside, and we avoid conflicts and differences of opinions.  We don’t know how to tell our friends that we’ve been hurt by their actions, so we bury the hurt and handle it quietly, then pretend nothing was ever wrong.  We agree to help each other when we really don’t want to, we pretend to be friends with people we really don’t like, we stay superficial and sweet on the surface, and feel lonely and isolated underneath, not ever sure of who we truly are or what we truly want.

This is what we teach our daughters and the cycle continues.

I would love to teach my daughter how to be completely authentic in her relationships and get real joy from her friendships.  But the best way to do this is to model it, and I realize that means I have to find the courage to express my full self in my own relationships so she can witness and model it.  It’s not easy when you have a habit of monitoring yourself to make sure nothing you say is hurtful, and negative feelings are so buried they don’t even seem to exist anymore.  But I’ve been working on becoming more and more authentic over the years – and it really does work better!

What about you?  Where have you lost your real self, for the sake of being an ideal version of what society says you should be?  What would you be willing to do to get your real self back?

For any of you who would like to read this book, it is called, “Meeting at the Crossroads – Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development” by Lyn Mikel Brown & Carol Gilligan, and the link is to the book on Amazon.  It is a bit of an academic read in the beginning, but gets better once you get into the actual conversations with the girls.

Would love to hear your thoughts!