Welcome And Series Context

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Hi there. Welcome back to another episode of the post separation abuse podcast. Yes, it is that time of the week again. And we're diving into another part of the Good Girl Contract series. I'm your host for this episode, Principal Coach at Danielle Black Coaching, Danielle Black. In last week's episode, part two of our Good Girl Contract series, we spoke about some of the various ways that the contract can be reinforced, can be encouraged in popular culture, in our society in general. We spoke about the literature that the wounded man trope features in, the fairy tales. It got me thinking about some of the books that I've read over the many, many years that I've been reading, which has obviously been a long time considering that I'm closer to 50 than 40, and reading something that I've really enjoyed doing for so many years. It's actually one of my favourite ways to unwind. With the work that I do, I veer very much towards fiction when I'm not working, when I'm not in work mode. I read a lot of non-fiction as part of the work that I do. So I really love being able to escape into fiction, into the worlds, the stories, the lives of characters, even into fictional fantasy worlds. I read quite widely where fiction's concerned. And what I know about myself is that despite the fact that I recognize the problematic tropes that reinforce the good girl contract, that reinforce that training, that conditioning, that overfunctioning, the men who are moody and broody and maybe a little bit dangerous, but deep down inside they've actually got this soft center. You know, I'm not gonna lie. If you were to go into my books app on my iPhone and look in my library, you might be surprised. You might be surprised at uh what you will see there, and um I thought, you know what, why not share a little bit about that with you? I mean it's just you and I here, right? It's just the two of us, we're you know, having a coffee together,

Fiction Tropes And The Wounded Man

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maybe a glass of wine, maybe a glass of whiskey, that's actually my favorite alcoholic beverage. It's just the two of us, we're just here having a casual chat. You're not gonna tell anyone about what I've been reading, are you? So I've opened up my library on my books app and let's see what we've got here. At the moment I'm actually currently reading the Shetland series by Anne Cleves. Um, I don't think we need to dive into that. Okay, here's one for you. It is called Star Side. I'm going to now go to where I can view it in the store so that I can read for you what's in the store about the book Star Side. What I read that actually prompted me to think, yeah, I'll I'll have a go at that. Here goes. Hundreds of years ago a brutal war split a land in two. Starside is the realm of magic and immortals, the descendants of the gods living in a power-rich paradise. Stormside is where mortals fight for scraps of that magic. Every fifty years the gates between them open, and fifty challengers are allowed to journey across star side on a deadly quest for magic that can heal, grant wealth, or extend life. Everyone has their reasons for entering, but Aris has only one vengeance against the gods who killed her family. Winning one of the fifty spots on the quest won't be easy. An orphaned blacksmith's apprentice, Aris doesn't have the superior weapons of the heirs from the great houses, but the greatest swords, ones that contain power, are not inherited or bought. They are claimed by both sides. And when Aris claims a great sword, it makes her not just a real competitor, but a target. Countless dangers await on Star Side, with a blade most would kill to take. Aris can't trust anyone, especially not Harlan Raker, the merciless and mysterious knight who betrayed her years ago, and who may now be the key to her survival. But Aris is hiding a secret tied to her family's death, and when it's revealed, not even the gods will be able to stop what's coming. Okay, this is just one example of a book that I read. And that was the information from the publisher that led me to think, yeah, you know what, I'll give that a go, and I would be lying if I told you that that brief mention of the merciless and mysterious knight, Harlan Raker, did not leave me curious. Now, Harlan Raker, he he is the a wounded man, there's no denying it. I'm sorry to say that I kind of enjoyed the narrative in this book. I loved the escape. Again, as I said, with the work that I do, I do really enjoy being able to lose myself in a storyline, in a plot line, to really become engrossed in the lives of the characters, the main protagonists. And I enjoyed this. I enjoyed it even though I recognised the problematic tropes. And so I guess that's the point that I'm wanting to make here. Recognizing the contract within yourself, recognizing the problematic tropes, the wounded man narrative, the man that needs saving, the man that's deep and mysterious, maybe a little bit hardened, but has a soft interior that only one woman can reach. Recognizing those things doesn't mean that you won't still enjoy them in movies, in books. It doesn't make it wrong to enjoy reading about them, particularly if there's an awareness there. If we're able to hold both things at once, a recognition of the trope and of how it can reinforce the contract, but also then just enjoying it for the sake of enjoying a story. Now I will say here that the bulk of what I read tends to be more from authors such as Patricia Cornwall, Kathy Rikes, Ellie Griffiths. I do love murder mysteries, some suspense, some forensic thrillers. But again, I'm not immune to some romance, dare I say romantic, the combination of romance and fantasy, things that are set in different lands with, as I've just outlined, some storylines that can be a bit problematic when we're looking at it through the lens of the Good Girl contract, when we're thinking about that wounded man trope. But I wanted to share all of that with you again because recognizing the problems, recognizing the contract, recognizing the problematic tropes, that doesn't mean we have to completely discard the things that we've once loved or still love. We can hold both, but we can hold both with a mature awareness.

Enjoying Stories With Mature Awareness

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This is part three of our good girl contract series. In part one, we named the contract and walked through where it came from. In part two, we spoke about what happened when we took the contract into adult intimate relationships, the tropes that we were trained to fall for, the martyrdom and why at times it actually felt good until it didn't. The intermittent reinforcement mechanism that kept us locked in. And the recognition that we were the perfect pairing for the men whose training complemented ours. Today's episode is asking a different question. What if the fingerprints of the contract are not only in the relationships we've had that have ended up what if they're also in the ones that we're still in? In our friendships, in relationships with family, with co-workers, colleagues, clients, with our children, and just as importantly, in how we respond to other people's boundaries with us, this is where we look at the pattern operating in current life. Not just a retrospective analysis of what happened. And what we're going

The Contract In Current Relationships

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to describe today might land a little bit closer to home than what we've already discussed. The retrospective work can be easier in many ways. Looking at what we're doing right now can be harder. It can be more confronting.

A Quick Regulation Reset

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Before we get into it, I'd like to invite you to take a few deep breaths in, to hold them and to release, to lift your shoulders up to your ears, to hold them there for a moment, to let them drop, to unclench your jaw, to unclench your hands, to be in your body, to notice the way that you're taking up space in the environment that you're currently in. To recognise that right now you're safe. This sort of daily practice is important in terms of ongoing regulation work and you're here with me for this conversation. So why not? Why not get some regulation practice in while we're here? Back to the content.

Why Hearing No Can Sting

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A lot of content in this space treats boundaries as a one-directional problem. It gets framed as struggling to hold my own boundaries, needing to learn to say no, needing to stop overgiving, needing to learn to hold our own boundaries. That framing is real, don't get me wrong, but it does name something really important. Most women trained by the contract do genuinely struggle to hold healthy boundaries, to both set them but also to maintain them over time. That's not what I'm challenging here. Rather, what a lot of content misses is the other direction of the same problem. Women who struggle to set and maintain their own boundaries also often struggle to accept the healthy boundaries of other people. The boundaries that other people might have with them. Now, this is not about hypocrisy, it's not a moral failure, it's not wanting freedom for yourself and control over others. Rather, it's the same underlying pattern showing up in two directions. And I think it's really important to look at because it's one of the ways that the contract can stay hidden. Let's unpack that mechanism. If the contract has trained your nervous system that saying no is dangerous, that saying no might mean that the person you're saying no to could reject you, might withdraw from you, might punish you in whatever way, you know, whether obviously or whether subtly. But now let's look at what can happen when the logic runs in reverse. When someone says no to you, your nervous system that has learned that no equals rejection, it doesn't read the no of someone else as they have a life, they have limits, they have healthy boundaries that they're protecting. Rather, it reads as they said no to me. Maybe they don't like me. Maybe I've done something wrong. Maybe I need to fix something. Now the reverse is not a separate problem because it's the same wiring, it's just sort of being triggered in reverse. If you can't say no, if you struggle to say no, the reality is that you can often struggle to hear no. The same nervous system that struggles to hold a healthy boundary, struggles to set and maintain healthy boundaries, can also struggle to receive the healthy boundaries of others. What we're talking about here is the personalization of everything. If your nervous system reads other people's responses as always being about you, then their withdrawal, their limits, their no's, their unavailability, their tiredness, their bad days, all of that can register as data about your worth. Not just factual information about their life, but rather specifically about you. That's exhausting. And it's not a personality trait. Rather, it's the specific cost of a nervous system that was trained to read other people's states as evidence about you. The reason that you might struggle to accept somebody else's boundaries isn't that you're demanding or entitled. Rather, it's that the same nervous system that struggles to say no struggles to hear no. It's essentially the same pattern, and both of those patterns can be interrupted.

Everyday Signs You Personalise Everything

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Now I'd like to give you some specific examples, drawn from what I see in my own coaching practice and in the broader work that I do. Not identifying anyone, rather just naming the patterns clearly enough that you can look for them in your own life. So let's talk about some of the examples that I see most often. And again, this is absolutely not anything that anyone should be using against themselves. Please don't use any coaching, anything that we say here on the podcast against yourself. You send someone a message or an email, or you try to call them. They don't respond within the time frame that you wanted, the time frame that you expected, the time frame that your nervous system needed in that moment of dysregulation. But rather than coming to the conclusion that they're busy, they're unavailable, they've got something else going on that they need to address, or maybe they're holding a boundary that you might not be aware of, you send another message or another email, or you attempt to call again, or maybe if you've called, you follow up with an email. Maybe if you've sent a text message, you follow up with an email and a phone call. Maybe if you've sent an email, you follow up with a DM. And maybe another. The escalation is not really about the specific request. Rather, it's about the intolerance of the silence, because the silence can register as rejection, as needs not being met. And sending another message or another email or attempting another phone call. It's not really about a situation being genuinely urgent, at least not most of the time. It's about you feeling as though you need an answer from that person. You need that person's attention, you need that person's time, you need to end the silence. It's important that we're able to hold that really clearly separate from shame. This is not something that anyone should feel ashamed of, although I understand that many of you might be listening to this and feeling really seen, perhaps thinking about the ways in which you've communicated with lawyers, with psychologists, with friends, with family members, maybe even with a coach. Maybe with me, for those of you who are one on one clients of mine. I've watched this pattern in so many women over many, many years, and it's not evidence of being demanding or entitled. Rather it's the evidence of a nervous system's intolerance of silence, intolerance of the unknown. And when silence on some level equals rejection, silence becomes unbearable. And sending another message, another email, another DM, attempting another phone call, it's not really aggression. It's an attempt at self soothing. Unfortunately, it can be self soothing that can look like aggression from the outside, particularly if you're the person on the receiving end of all of the communication attempts. So that's just one example. It can manifest in a number of ways in the fabric of your daily relational life, and most of the time you're probably not noticing it. Because in the moment it feels like emotion. It doesn't feel like a pattern of behaviour. Some more examples. A friend or family member who didn't text back for several days, and you spent those days quietly wondering if that person's upset with you, not reaching out and asking, just holding the possibility of them being upset with you, running it in the background of your day until they eventually get back to you and it was really clear that they'd just been busy or unwell or dealing with sick kids, whatever the situation might be. A colleague who seemed to be a bit abrupt with you in a meeting, and you replay the exchange for hours searching for what it was that you've done wrong, not concluding that they've just had a hard day, that they're dealing with a whole lot of stuff in their personal life, rather concluding that you had somehow caused the abruptness, turning their mood into your responsibility. A partner who's quiet at dinner, and you start mentally cataloguing the possible reasons that they're pulling away from you, not asking them, not reading it as they're just a bit tired after work, reading it as data about your relationship, about whether they still love you, about what you might have done wrong. Your child who doesn't want to talk after school, and you take it personally rather than reading it as just simply being tired after school. Your mum or another family member who says that they can't make it to something, and you feel a specific rejection of they don't want to see me rather than they already had plans. Every one of these is a particular pattern. Every one of these can register as data about your worth when it's really just data about the other person's life. The exhaustion of taking everything or many things personally, it's not a personality trait. It's the specific cost of a nervous system that was trained to read other people's emotional and energetic states as evidence about you. And it's important that we reflect on just how fucking exhausting that is. And I feel pretty sure that a lot of you may at times have been wondering why you are just so tired, why you spend so much energy processing other people's moods, why you can't ever seem to take things at face value. And the quick answer, the superficial answer, the easy answer would just simply be to say that you're anxious, that you're just a bit oversensitive. Really, it's because your nervous system was trained to treat other people's emotional states as the most important data in the room. And it's still doing that job faithfully every day.

Trauma Patterns Versus Neurodivergence

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Something else that I think is important to address is that a growing number of women, including many of the women that I work with one on one in my coaching. Practice are being diagnosed or maybe are curious about whether they should seek diagnosis with some kind of neurodivergence, including but not limited to autism and ADHD. What these diagnoses typically capture is hypervigilance, sensory sensitivity, difficulty resting, the ability to hyperfocus when the stakes feel high, extraordinary capacity to read other people, cycles of overfunction and collapse, waves of exhaustion that can arrive without warning. But here's an observation that has been sitting with me. And again, this is an observation, not a diagnosis. But some of that presentation can actually describe neurodivergence and it can describe what happens to a nervous system that was trained to be extraordinarily alert to earn safety and love and connection through performance to never be caught unprepared, to never rest. Now, this is certainly not me saying that anyone with a diagnosis shouldn't have that diagnosis. I'm certainly not saying that the diagnosis isn't accurate. What I am saying is that it could be really easy to dismiss a lot of the things that we've been talking about, to pathologize them under the heading of that diagnosis, and to completely miss the impact of the good girl contract, to completely miss some of the things that might actually be explained by something other than neurodivergence, than something going on neurodevelopmentally. I think it's absolutely an error to assume that every high functioning trauma survivor with a hypervigilance response and capacity for hustle must be neurodivergent. When for many of them the pattern could absolutely be a complete and elegant description of what can happen to a nervous system trained by childhood danger. The error is in jumping to medicalize a survival adaptation, to hand the person an identity that can absorb the entire pattern without ever requiring them to look at what else may have happened. Now another error is assuming that someone who presents with the pattern can't also be genuinely neurodivergent. Assuming that her childhood, her history completely explains the presentation, that error also has real costs. There's so many women that I work with who have absolutely been correctly diagnosed. But it's worth saying that there could absolutely be plenty of women who have received a label that's absorbing what is actually the imprint of coercive control or childhood abuse. And again, we have to make space that there can be both things happening at once. Unfortunately, our culture, in my view, is not currently equipped to hold the complexity of that. It seems to either want everyone diagnosed or it wants trauma to explain everything. But why it's important, why it's something that I think about, why it's something that I'm speaking about here, is because a survival adaptation, like the contract, can be renegotiated by the same nervous system that created it, whereas a neurodevelopmental condition can't. It's an important distinction. Now, if you have both, as many women do, the work is layered. Some parts of your presentation are neurological, neurodevelopmental and won't change. But some parts have been trained, conditioned, their survival responses, they're the contract, and those things can be changed. Being able to distinguish between them is not something that I'm suggesting is easy. But I think reflecting on what pieces of your life can be renegotiated I think reflecting on that's important.

Building The Boundary Muscle Both Ways

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Now none of this is with a view to ultimately becoming someone who doesn't care what other people think. That would be a different kind of dysfunction. The goal is not indifference it's a lot more nuanced. It's about becoming someone who can hold more than one thing at any one time. Being able to hold space for the fact that other people's responses are primarily information about them, not a judgment of you. You can recognise that whilst still caring about the connection that you have with that person. You can care about the connection that you have with someone and not make everything in their behavior about you, about your safety, about the state of the relationship that you have with them. And this comes from firstly, recognizing when the pattern is alive and well within you, when the contract's been activated. Someone doesn't respond to your message for a couple of days. Instead of immediately concluding that they're angry with you, or maybe you do do that, but then you notice it and then work to build the reflex of thinking they're probably busy, they're tired, they're dealing with something in their own life. This is not about me. It's not about me being unimportant. My safety is not compromised. They'll get back to me when they can. That's not indifference, that's healthy adult regulation. Someone sets a boundary with you, instead of experiencing it as rejection, as a severing of the connection or as a threat to the connection or to your safety, the reflex that we want to be building is they're protecting something within themselves or within their own lives, and that's legitimate. It's not a statement about me, it's a statement about them. Now these things are like muscles, muscles built through small movements, regular movements in this situation moments of noticing the pattern, naming it and then deliberately choosing something different. The more we work that muscle, the less the reflex fires, the less we start to see that pattern. Holding your own boundaries and accepting someone else's, it's kind of the same muscle. We can't really build that muscle without being able to hold both things. We can't really build the muscle of being able to set and maintain healthy boundaries for ourselves if we can't also accept and ultimately be okay and acknowledge someone else needing to set and maintain their own boundaries, and in conjunction with that, accept that that does not mean anything about us. It does not say anything about us, rather, it's a information about them and respecting their right to hold that boundary, respecting the boundary, not repeatedly pushing against the boundary, even in a way that's just oh so polite. Yeah. I know, like if you know, you fucking know. And I know that there's some of you that will absolutely know. You all know that there are times when you have been oh so politely push push pushing on somebody else's boundary. If you recognize that within yourself, again, this is not a moment for shame, even though I know that you might be feeling seen in a way that's quite uncomfortable. But you know, transformation, growth, it exists in moments of discomfort. It's, you know, actually a good thing, as crazy as that might sound.

Closing Thanks And Bigger Purpose

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In future episodes, we're going to look at what it actually takes to set and to hold boundaries in real time when our entire nervous system is telling us not to. And I'm going to be using some examples of my own life as well. What it looks like, what it feels like to be holding the line when there's a real internal pressure to please more, to prove more, to do more, to be more. I really appreciate that today has been a lot. And can I just say, firstly, to my one-on-one clients, you are amazing. You know, the work that my clients do, what my clients achieve, and I'm not just talking in parenting outcomes, property outcomes, court outcomes, although can I say that that is also invariably really fucking impressive? What they achieve in their lives, what they achieve for themselves personally, career-wise, with their children. You know, this work, it doesn't just relate to your former partner. In fact, I would say that the vast majority of it ultimately has absolutely nothing to do with your former partner. It's about you stepping more fully into you, truly and genuinely, and being able to shed the conditioning, being able to burn that fucking contract that you really never consented to. And, you know, my one-on-one clients, and I know the one-on-one clients of of both Trudy and Bridget, our senior coaches who work alongside me here at Danielle Black Coaching, I know that they're also incredibly impressed with their clients. So this is really just an acknowledgement of that. You know, our clients, they're showing up, they're doing the work, and it's often not easy, it is often not comfortable, but they are truly reaping the rewards in so many aspects of their lives, and I think that really, truly does need to be acknowledged because again, it takes time, it takes dedication, it takes being prepared to look at some things that can be really uncomfortable, and it also takes money for those clients. You know, they're investing not insignificant sums of money in coaching, but they recognize the value, and they're reaping the rewards of that, and so this is just me saying to all of you just how incredibly proud of you I am. I know I say that to all of you in our one-on-one coaching sessions, but this is me saying it to you publicly that I'm so proud to walk alongside you. I'm so impressed with the way that you show up, with the way that you keep showing up even when it's hard, even when you stumble, even when things don't always go to plan. You impress me every single day. I am so incredibly honored to be your coach and honestly, I would also consider every single one of you a friend. That's that really is the depth of the work that we do together, the extent to which we share with one another. It truly is just the greatest honour. Also, to those of you who are blueprint members who haven't spoken to me or spoken to any of the other coaches on the team, please know that we also see you and appreciate everything that you're doing in your world with your efforts. Everything that you're doing matters, regardless of whether you reach out for one-on-one coaching or not. Please know that. And to all of you who are listening, to all of you who tune in, thank you. Thank you. I know there are so many things that are spoken about here on the podcast. It's not necessarily easy to consume content. It is not fucking 30-second TikTok woo-hoo, you know, entertainment. And this is not me mocking any creator on TikTok or Instagram, Facebook, you know, wherever the people are, wherever the socials are. I'm I'm not on social like I've got social media accounts, uh, but we're not consistently really doing anything on socials because it just ain't my jam, frankly. Um I'm far more about the long-form content, and it's because I'm passionate about transformational content rather than entertainment. It's not that entertainment's not important, and it's not that I don't also consider myself sometimes entertaining. It's that my jam is really about helping people to transform their lives because I know what a difference I've been able to make in my own life, and my passion is in helping other people to do similar things in their own lives to reap the benefits, to reap the rewards, for their children to reap the rewards. That's, you know, other than the love that I have for my own children, my own husband, my own family, my clients in my family, blueprint members of my family, those of you who are listening and tuning into the podcast and my family, you know, I'm doing this for you. I want this for you because you know, I don't know what's next after this life, I'm not entirely sure what I believe. Maybe we do just get one crack at it and you know, why not do it as well as we possibly can? So thank you. Again, I know it's not always easy, but I want you to know that I see you, I appreciate you so incredibly deeply. And please know that you making space for this work, making space for the thoughts, the perspectives, trying things out in your own lives, it's not just transformational for you, it's not just impactful for you, but when you change, when you transform, that impacts your parenting, that impacts every relationship in your life, it impacts other people. This is how generational change happens. It starts with us and thank you. Thank you for joining me in being a change maker. Change makers and cycle breakers. That's what we are, that's where it's at. Thank you so much for being here. I'll look forward to chatting with you again soon.