Welcome To The Good Girl Contract

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Welcome back to the post-separation abuse podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Black. Today's the first episode of a new series. It's called The Good Girl Contract. The series is about the specific ways that women are shaped from very early in life to earn love through performance, to be pleasing, to manage other people's emotions before their own. To read the room, to perform highly, to be indispensable, to make themselves useful enough that they cannot be discarded. It's about what that shaping produces in adult intimate relationships. While the partners we ended up with were often the partners that our training had prepared us for. It's about what the shaping produces after separation. In the way that we hold or fail to hold boundaries with our former partners, with the professionals in the family law system, with our friends, and with ourselves. And it's about what the shaping produces in the way that we parent. And what it might take to give our own children something different. Over a number of episodes, this series walks through where the shaping began, what it did in adult relationships, the patterns that it produced in how we relate to other people's boundaries as well as our own, and what it looks like to hold boundaries anyway, even when your whole nervous system is telling you not to. We'll unpack why the pattern doesn't end when a relationship does. And finally, we'll talk about what our children actually need from us in the wake of everything that we've carried. This first episode contains references to childhood abuse. I'm not going to describe specific incidents. There won't be details. But I'm going to talk about my own experience at a surface level because it's the ground that the whole series stands on. If that's not something that you think you're able to sit with today, perhaps take a step back and come back later, if and when you can. The rest of the series will still make sense, even if you don't listen to this episode. Before we begin, I'd like to invite you to take a slow deep breath in, to hold it for a few moments, and then slowly release it. To loosen up your body, unclench your hands, your jaw, to lift your shoulders up to your ears, to let them drop, to allow some of the tension that you might be holding in your body to ease, even if just a little bit.

1980s Parenting And Abuse Context

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Some context first before we get into the content. I grew up in Australia in the 1980s. In that era, in this country, corporal punishment of children was widespread and culturally sanctioned. The wooden spoon, the belt, the threat of wait until your father gets home. In so many families, that was normal. I'm not saying that it was right, but for many, it was normal. It was familiar. If what happened in many Australian homes in that decade was happening today, child protection agencies would be involved in a serious way. But at the time they weren't. Because that was what parenting looked like for a lot of families in that era. I want to name that context before we dive in with anything else for a number of reasons. First, because I know that a lot of you listening will have lived through that same era and will recognize it. And second, because what I'm about to say sits inside that context again. It's not about excusing that context, rather, just acknowledging it. Having grown up in that era and looking back on my childhood, I experienced what would now be considered physical and emotional abuse in childhood. Consequences for having emotions, consequences for having needs, punished for answering back. The punishments were sometimes physical, sometimes they were relational, isolation, withdrawal, emotional coldness. The consequences were severe enough at times to leave lasting bodily impact. I still carry some of that in my body today. I'm not going to give you more detail than that. Because what I want you to have is not the details of my childhood story, rather it's the context and the category. And that context and category is that from very early in life I learned that having needs wasn't safe. That being inconvenient had consequences, that the safest thing that I could do at the level of my whole nervous system was to be useful, to be pleasing, to be good. Now I want to say something about my parents before I go further. My parents did what they had been taught was appropriate. They were shaped by their own upbringing, their own conditioning, and by the era. I've processed what happened in my childhood in my own therapeutic work over a long period of time. I have relationships with both of my parents today. There have been periods of six months or longer where I haven't spoken with either one of them over the years. And at those times it was because I had a boundary that I needed to hold. There have also been many, many hours of connection that I value. All of this is possible. What happened in my childhood did not determine the ending of the story. It shaped the beginning of it. But what came after, what and what is still coming has been mine to build. I wanted to share that with you because for so many of the parents listening to this, one of the fears that you might be carrying is that what your children have been through will determine the rest of their life, the rest of their story, will determine the ending. And what I want to share is that that doesn't actually have to be the case. In fact, it's likely not the case. What's happened can shape the beginning, but the rest, what comes next, can be different. There's

Boys Allowed To Be

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something else that I want to name about my own story, and it's the piece that shapes this whole series. My brother did not experience a lot of what I experienced. Not in the same ways, not in the same intensity. We were living in the same house, we had the same parents, the same era. But he was not punished to the same extent that I was. He did not face the same consequences that I did. He wasn't punished the way that I was punished. He was allowed to be, to just exist, in ways that I wasn't. Now that fact has sat with me for a very long time, and that dynamic that contains a message that I've reflected on over the years. That for me in childhood meant that there was something about me specifically that caused the treatment that I received. That my brother was okay as he is, but I wasn't. And that is that boys are allowed to be, girls have to be shaped. That was what my nervous system decoded before I even had words for it. And it's what shaped everything that came next.

Neurosception And Trained Hypervigilance

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Now I want to widen the lens because what I've just told you is not just about me, it's about a mechanism. And the mechanism is the reason that this series, the Good Girl Contract series, it's the reason that that exists. There's a neuroscientist called Stephen Porgers. He has spent decades on a body of work called polyvagal theory. Now I'm not going to do a deep dive lecture on polyvagal theory, but I do want to give you one concept from his work because I think it can change what you understand about your own body. The concept is called neurosception. Neurosception is the body's continuous unconscious scanning of the environment for cues of safety or threat. It's happening below your conscious awareness all the time. Right now. It's why your body reacts to some people before your mind has consciously assessed why. That's why some rooms feel safe and some feel dangerous before you have identified a single specific reason. Your nervous system is doing the assessment before your thinking brain catches up. And here's the specific piece that matters for this particular podcast series. When a child grows up in an environment where the source of care can also be the source of danger, where the same people who feed you and hold you and put you to bed are also the people who hurt you, that child's neurosception becomes calibrated to detect micro cues of threat with extraordinary sensitivity. Because it has to, because getting it wrong has consequences. That child learns to read the emotional weather in a room at an Olympic level. She learns to detect a shift in her mother's tone before her mother has finished the sentence. She learns to read the tightness in her father's jaw when he walks through the door and knows exactly what kind of an evening it will be. She learns to anticipate what other people need before they have to ask for it because being caught unprepared isn't safe. She learns to be extraordinarily attuned to other people because her survival depends on it. Now I want you to hold that description for a moment because I'm going to say something that might make some of you feel uncomfortable. What the wellness industry and the spiritual industry refers to as empathic sensitivity is, for many of us, a nervous system that learned very young that reading other people accurately was the difference between safety and danger. For many of us, I would go so far as to say for most of us, it's not a mystical gift. It's not spiritual attunement, it's not evidence that we're highly sensitive people or special empaths and that we have some kind of intuitive knowing that other people don't have. Rather, for many of us, it's a survival adaptation. Our nervous systems did exactly what they needed to do to keep us safe in an environment that we were in. That's not a small thing. It's not a diminishment of what we experience, it's the opposite. It's the recognition that our bodies did something extraordinary for us at an age where we had no other tools and we've been carrying those adaptations ever since. Now I'm cautious about what I am and am not saying here. I'm not saying that no one has genuine intuitive sensitivity. I'm not saying that empathy is not real. What I am saying is that for a subset of women, and I suspect the subset who finds their way to this podcast, because I think we're significantly overrepresented in that population, that what has been called empathic sensitivity is more accurately described as trained hypervigilance. And the distinction matters because if what you have is what you think of as being some kind of mystical gift, then it can't be renegotiated. It's who you are, it's a fixed identity. Some days it can feel like a superpower, other days it will feel like a curse. Either way you're stuck with it. But if what you have is a survival adaptation, the same nervous system that created it is capable of learning something different. You're not stuck with it. You can renegotiate the terms. And I think that reframes important because it does open a door to something new, to something different. There's something else from Stephen Porge's work that I want you to have because it explains something that I think a lot of you might have wondered about.

Why Boundaries Trigger Threat

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And that is the question of why does saying no feel like an intense threat? Why does telling someone no feel like it might kill me? Why does setting a boundary? Telling someone I can't help them today, telling my mum I'm not coming for Christmas, telling my former partner that no, the change that they want to schedule doesn't work for me. Why does something so small in many ways produce a physical response that feels like genuine danger? The answer is that your nervous system does not distinguish between social threat and physical threat at the level of physiology. Being disliked, being disapproved of, being at risk of losing connection. These register somatically in our bodies the same way that physical danger does. Our bodies react to the possibility of rejection the same way that they react to a predator in the room. The same increase in heart rate, the shallow breathing, the flood of stress hormones. Now for a lot of people, that stress response is manageable. Uncomfortable but manageable. For someone whose early environment made social disapproval and physical danger literally the same thing, whose parents' disappointment produced their punishment, that response is often not manageable. It can be enormous because at the level of the nervous system, saying no to someone whose approval you need is not just uncomfortable. It can feel like it might genuinely kill you. Now it won't, of course. You might know that logically, but your body doesn't know that. Your body knows what it's learned, and what it has learned is that stepping out of line got you punished. There were consequences.

Cultural Training And Overfunctioning

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I want to talk now about the cultural layer that sits on top of what we've just described. For many of you listening, not everyone, but many, the abuse itself is not what you're working with. Rather what you're working with is the cultural version of that same conditioning, delivered without violence but with all the same clauses in the contract. Cultural conditioning tells all girls to be pleasing, to read the room, to make themselves small enough to fit, to place importance on other people's emotions before their own, to not be a burden, to not embarrass anyone, to be easy, to be good. You don't need to have been hit or abused in childhood to have received this training, this conditioning. You only need to grow up female in a culture that has been training women to make themselves manageable for a very long time. There's a clinical psychologist called Harriet Lerner. Her book, The Dance of Anger, was published in 1985 and is still forty odd years on, one of the sharpest analyses of what happens to women in patriarchal families that I've ever encountered. Lerner's central concept is this. Women in these systems are trained into what she calls overfunctioning in relationships and underfunctioning in self-advocacy. Overfunctioning in relationships means you carry more than your share of the emotional load. You anticipate other people's needs. You manage the household, you remember the birthdays, you keep track of who's been offended, you smooth over conflicts, you do the invisible work that keeps everything running, and you do it without being asked, and usually without being thanked. Underfunctioning in self-advocacy means when it comes to your own needs, your own limits, your own preferences, the muscle isn't there. You can't name what you want, you can't ask for what you need, you can't hold a limit. You've spent your whole life reading the room and managing others, and you haven't spent any time developing the capacity to advocate for yourself because the training, the conditioning, explicitly discouraged it. Learner's finding is that the pattern is trained in by families that require the overfunctioning to maintain the family's stability. The girls who overfunction are doing exactly what their family systems need. The girl who's not permitted to underfunction, who's not permitted to be the one who has needs, who's inconvenient, who's a burden, she becomes an adult who overfunctions in every relationship she encounters. Cultural conditioning tells all girls to be pleasing. Violently enforced conditioning tells specific girls that the alternative is dangerous. Both aspects of this matter. What I want you to take away from this is that if you received the cultural version of this training without violence, without abuse, the training is still real. Your struggle with boundaries is not a weakness, it's not a personal failing, it's not something that you should have been able to overcome by now. Rather, it's the outcome of a specific type of training that was designed to produce exactly what it produced. And if you received the violently enforced version, if what was cultural conditioning for other women was for you, backed up by consequences and punishment, then the training sits in your body at a different depth. The nervous system does not just know that having needs was disapproved of.

Naming The Contract And Letting Go

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Everything that I've said so far is building towards one frame, and that frame is what gives the series, this good girl contract series its name, its shape. What you learned in the environment that you grew up in was not a personality, it wasn't who you are, it wasn't your natural way of being. It was a contract. It was a set of terms that you didn't consent to, that you didn't sign, that you have no copy of, but you've been operating under it in every relationship that you've ever entered ever since. I call it the good girl contract, and here are the clauses. Be pleasing, do not have nades. Read the room, anticipate what others require before they have to ask. Perform highly, accept less. Do not disappoint. Do not embarrass, do not answer back. Be useful. Make yourself indispensable. Earn love through what you do. Never rest because resting means being caught unprepared. Never say no, because saying no is what got you hurt. You didn't sign this contract. You were likely enrolled in it before you could read, and for many of you it might have shaped almost every choice that you have made in almost every relationship that you've entered, and it may continue to shape those choices until you look at it directly. That is the work of this particular series in the post-separation abuse podcast. Looking at this contract directly, noticing the clauses, deciding what stays, and what we're ready to get rid of. Here is the thing that I want you to hold on to above everything else that I've said in this episode. What was made can be remade. Your nervous system is capable of learning something else. The same brain that was shaped by danger can be reshaped, remade by safety. The story is not over. You didn't become who you are by accident. In the next episode we'll be looking at what happened when we took the contract into our intimate relationships, why the partners who we found were so often the partners that our training had prepared us for, particularly when we're talking about heterosexual relationships. We'll be looking at the specific mechanism that kept us locked in, the one that made the intensity feel like love and the withdrawal feel like it was our fault, and what it takes to see the pattern and step out of it. In future episodes we'll also be looking at the mirror problem, the specific problem of struggling to accept other people's boundaries when we struggle to hold our own.

Caring For Yourself After Listening

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I know that for some of you listening, all of this might have been a lot. A lot to hold, a lot to process, a lot to make space for. And I want to thank you for staying the course if you've been able to listen through to the end. If any part of what I have said today has landed in a way that surprised you or unsettled you, please take some time to care for yourself. Thank you so much for being here with me for this conversation. I really value your time. I deeply appreciate that you're willing to sit with difficult conversations, complicated conversations, conversations that ask you to make space for different perspectives. I look forward to chatting with you again soon.