The Good Girl Contract
Why so many women feel responsible for EVERTHING
This is part of the “From Liminal To Intentional” Series, where we examine transitional spaces in life, dispel expectations, explore authenticity and embrace our righteous selfishness…
There is an invisible contract many women sign long before they know it exists.
It sounds something like this:
Be easy.
Be helpful.
Be good.
Don’t make things harder than they need to be.
Don’t cause problems. Don’t be loud. Don’t offend. Don’t distract.
And whatever you do, make sure everyone else is comfortable.
Most women never remember signing this contract.
But they spend decades trying to honour it.
Often, without even knowing they’re doing it, let alone why.
Staring You In The Face
You might recognise the signs.
You are the one who keeps things running.
You notice when tension enters a room before anyone else does.
You smooth conversations.
You pick up tasks that others forget.
You anticipate problems before they happen.
You are reliable.
Responsible.
Capable.
And often, quietly exhausted, resentful, fed up and even worse, riddled with anxiety and depression with a life you’re not even sure is yours.
This is often a screaming sign that what you think of as your own core values were instead bred and forged, long before you could even spell your own name.
Employee Mug Of The Month
In workplaces, this pattern is often praised.
You become the person who “holds the team together.”
You organise the things no one else organises.
You check in on people when they are struggling.
You absorb the emotional static that would otherwise disrupt the room.
From the outside, it looks like competence.
From the inside, it can feel like responsibility without end…
Constant external buffering wining over an internal depletion like no other.
The Good Girl routine never stops.
And so rarely, do you.
When Performance Forms A Mask
What many women slowly realise is that this pattern is not just a personality trait.
It is conditioning.
It’s bred.
It’s expected within this masculine, patriarchal world.
Girls are often raised to become emotional regulators of their environment.
They learn early to notice moods.
To prevent conflict.
They “keep the peace” - even when it’s a war on this inside.
Sometimes this comes from something psychologists call parentification, where a child takes on emotional responsibilities that belong to adults, then continues this overbearing management into their own adult lives.
But even in “ordinary” families, the message is often similar for girls:
Be the good one.
Be the helpful one.
Be the one who understands.
Over time, this becomes identity.
And this identity forms the stories you tell yourself to keep you in place and just functional enough to bear it.
How often is our culture are we used to seeing the “boys” have the opportunities to discover themselves, go inward, be selfish, adventure away, play the sport, be the “golf cunt” (as the legendary Hannah Gadsby once called them)?
Only for the girls to bake, sew, mother dolls and then to evolve that “goodness” into teaching boys how to be caring men, only for them to leave you for another anyway or to become the “fountain of knowledge” at work a.k.a Doormat Dorma.
It’s An Inner-Family Affair
The Good Girl is not just someone who behaves well because it helps her feel good, whole, perfect or complete.
She is someone who feels responsible for how everyone else feels.
And that is a very heavy job to carry into adulthood.
Because it is a presumption you’ve never known to even question.
But it’s ok, the Good Girl in you isn’t alone in this…
The Good Girl’s best friend, the People Pleaser might show up too, or even her cousin, the Perfectionist… all protective mechanisms to exist inside systems never designed for your authenticity anyways.
Errrr, no thanks… cheque please!
It Is Not Your Job… Your Actual Job Is
In teams and organisations, this pattern often goes unnoticed.
Because the Good Girl looks like the perfect employee.
She is organised.
Emotionally intelligent.
Reliable under pressure.
But what others experience as helpfulness can sometimes come from a deeper reflex:
“If I don’t hold this together, everything will fall apart.”
A.k.a, “if I don’t do it all, I’ll never be good enough or worthy of love for who I really am when I don’t try too much.”
This reflex makes women extraordinary contributors.
And easily abused. Yep. I said it.
It also makes them vulnerable to burnout, but not only that… chronic pain, autoimmune disease, digestion problems, long-term stress, thyroid dysfunction and so much more.
With No Power Comes All The Fucking Responsibility
Let’s be clear, the problem is not kindness.
There is nothing wrong with being “good” or a “girl”…
The problem is over-responsibility.
When one person becomes responsible for everyone’s comfort, tension, organisation and emotional temperature, something subtle happens.
Their own needs slowly disappear from the room… and with it, their ability to claw that back with ease.
Because it’s like smiling at that creepy, awkward guy at the gym that one time; once you did it, it was too late to hit that undo button.
But I’m here as an example to tell you, there is a way. 🦸🏼♀️
Don’t Get Me Wrong, There Were Signs
Many women who begin to question this pattern feel immediate guilt.
They worry they are becoming selfish.
Or difficult.
Or less supportive.
But stepping back from the Good Girl contract is not about becoming uncaring.
It is about becoming appropriately responsible.
Responsible for your work.
Responsible for your behaviour.
But no longer responsible for everyone else’s emotions, reactions and wellbeing.
Part of you may want to fight it, you may think being ideal or perfect is a great character disposition and maybe even that your own childhood of being emotionally available for your own caregiver’s needs wasn’t that bad.
Hun, it probably was.
Good Girl or Simply Great?
This shift and these sudden revelations can feel uncomfortable at first.
And whether you know that you’re in this Good Girl bind or are even trying to convince yourself you’re not, why not experiment and see how you truly feel about it anyway?
Cause at least then, you’ll know. 💁🏼♀️
The three tests of the Good Girl Contract:
Letting someone else solve a problem you would normally fix (often ten times quicker).
Allowing silence instead of filling it (my personal fave).
Not volunteering for extra tasks that appear (even though you’ll probably do it better).
For women trained to manage the emotional weather of every room they enter, these changes can feel surprisingly radical.
But they are also deeply liberating.
Let the fuck-up, fuck up.
They’re not your problem.
You are.
#SorryButIt’sTrue
We All Do What We Have To, To Survive
The Good Girl was never the root cause of all this.
She was an intelligent adaptation.
A way of staying safe, staying liked and staying needed in environments that rewarded those qualities, or even punished you without them.
But adulthood allows for something else.
Not the rejection of kindness.
Not the abandonment of care.
But the slow return to a different question:
What happens when you are no longer responsible for holding everything together? - When you do my favourite thing: drop all of those “shoulds”!
I Should Drop The “Shoulds”
What kind of life becomes possible when you finally step outside the contract you never meant to sign?
I have the answer already, if you want it…
You become:
Less bitter
Less resentful
Less tired
Less internal noise
More honest
More authentic
More inner-balance
More clear on your own path and goals
Ironically, more giving… just in the way that you curate it
How poetic it is that the more “you” you become, the more them everyone else becomes too.
That’s called balance. That’s called fairness. That’s called real.
And by proxy, that gets you a lot more space to breathe, create and grow… and to be loved for who you are, not what you provide.
Healing Is A Spiral, Not A Line
Many women were taught to hold everything together, long before they were ever allowed to become themselves first.
And whilst this can be freeing to not only hear but to understand, it does demand something of you in return.
It demands your next layer of inner work.
To unravel, strip back, unwind and reveal the real you.
And that takes not only courage and humility but also an acceptance that who you are at your very core was already enough, looooong before you volunteered for the emotional labour of the world.
You’d never question the worth of a newborn baby and so why would you question your own, let alone give yourself a lifetime of pressured presumptions and weighted wants of others?
The Good Girl contract is a contract, after all.
And it’s up for renewal…
You get to decide if you sign on that line.
Lilith x
Thank you so much for reading and being here with me on this messy, beautiful journey.
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This reminds me of when I worked in a team of about 30 people. The men would often take it easy and the women expected to pick up their slack. If we complained, we were told that it's our problem. It was made worse by that, me, being one of the hardest workers, was then targeted by a woman supervisor who monitored my every move. If I paused, she wrote it up. And the boys still were chilling. It was so toxic.