The Nice Girl Syndrome (4 page)

Anita is a good example of a martyr. Like many women, she sac- rificed her own happiness for that of someone else. She felt it would be selfish to think of her own needs first. She couldn’t tolerate the idea of being responsible for someone else’s unhappiness. Like many women, Anita believed strongly in being fair. She always tried to balance out any critical feelings she had of someone (in this case, her distant husband) by trying to also see the person’s good points. Donna’s husband is emotionally and sometimes physically abusive toward her. “He doesn’t beat me or anything like that. He just pushes me around a little. And he’s always sorry afterward,” Donna explained. When I told Donna that her husband’s abusive behavior would likely escalate, she said, “Oh, no. He’s not a batterer

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or anything. He’s just under a lot of pressure right now at work and, frankly, I think I sometimes provoke him. I need to learn to keep my big mouth shut.”

Donna is what I call an Innocent. Women like Donna jeopard- ize their happiness, their safety, and sometimes their very lives because they are naive. Their gullibility blinds them to the manip- ulations and harmful behaviors of others. They want to believe that other people are good no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.

Why do so many women like Anita and Donna think and behave in these ways? In this book, you will find the answers to that ques- tion, as well as to the following:

• Why can’t many women bear to hurt another person, even when holding back means hurting themselves?
  

• How does the need to give others the benefit of the doubt make some women blind, deaf, and dumb when it comes to spotting unhealthy behaviors in their spouses, children, and others?
  

• Why do some women prefer to see only the good side of others?
  

• Why do some women always blame themselves?
  

• Why is it that so many women have difficulty confronting those who hurt or anger them?
  

• Why is it, in these enlightened times, that women continue to sacrifice themselves for their mates, their friends, and their bosses?
  

• Why is it that females who are abused as children often end up being revictimized as adults, whereas males who are abused as children often end up becoming victimizers?
  

• How do women, in some ways, play a role in their own victim- ization?
  

  You’ll learn the myriad ways that being nice prevents you from achieving the success and happiness that is rightfully yours.
  The Nice Girl Syndrome
  will show you how girls and women are socialized to be nice and how this socialization sets them up for failure, unhappi- ness, and even abuse. Most important, it will show you how to trans- form yourself from a Nice Girl to a Strong Woman.
  

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  Nice Girls versus Strong Women
  

  Strong Women are not girls at all. The word
  girl
  is supposed to be used to describe young females—not grown women. Yet the word
  girls
  is often used to describe even mature women. This may serve to make women feel younger, but it also takes away their power. For this reason, apart from our term “Nice Girls,” we will use the word
  woman
  exclusively when talking about any female over the age of eighteen.
  

  So how do we differentiate a Strong Woman from a Nice Girl?
  

• Strong Women have learned that niceness does not guarantee that others will treat them fairly or with respect. They know that by being too nice, they actually encourage others to walk all over them. They’ve learned they have to earn respect by first respecting themselves and then by demanding the respect of others.
  

• Strong Women never put their safety or their self-esteem aside to please someone else or to keep a man. If someone acts inappropriately or abusively in any way (including becoming emotionally abusive), Strong Women stand up for themselves and make it abundantly clear that they will not tolerate the abuse. If this doesn’t work, they walk away.
  

• Strong Women want men in their lives but not at the price of their safety, their children’s safety, their self-respect, their self- esteem, or their peace of mind.
  

• Strong Women know what they want and believe they have a right to have it and can figure out by themselves how to go after it. They don’t walk over anyone along the way, but they don’t let anyone walk over them, either.
  

• Strong Women respect the rights of others, but if their own rights are not honored and respected, they know how to stand up for themselves.
  

• Strong Women realize their voices have power, so instead of remaining silent to avoid displeasing someone or hurting someone’s feelings, they let people know where they stand on important issues. They understand it is far more important to be true to themselves and their beliefs than for someone to like them.
  

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• Strong Women work toward making themselves the best ver- sion of themselves they can become and then expect others, especially men, to accept and appreciate them the way they are. They aren’t willing to change just to please someone else, and they have the wisdom to realize that if someone doesn’t accept them there is always another who will.
  

• Strong Women have learned that a lot of feminine behavior and attitudes simply no longer work (for example, that women need men to support and protect them). They’ve had the courage to discard these outdated beliefs and ways of acting and to embrace an entirely different way of life. For example, in the past being nice could get a woman pretty far. If she was a Nice Girl, people looked upon her fondly and went out of their way to treat her well. If she was a Nice Girl, she gained a good reputation in her community. Boys treated her with respect and protected her from danger—including from the lurking eyes and lurching hands of those unscrupulous types who would dare to take advantage of a Nice Girl. If she was nice enough and pretty enough, she would probably get her- self a man.
  

  Today, all that has changed. Being nice no longer guaran- tees that you will be treated with kindness and respect. Having a good reputation can’t protect you from the tremendous backlash that is occurring against women. While books like
  The Rules
  still teach women that they need to be nice to cap- ture a man, the men Nice Girls capture are usually not worth having.
  

• Strong Women have learned that they can’t depend on others to save or protect them. They’ve learned that few chivalrous heroes or supermen exist to pluck them from the arms of dan- ger. Consider the occurrence several years ago in New York City’s Central Park after the Puerto Rican Day parade. Many women were harassed, taunted, and even attacked while bystanders of both genders stood by and did nothing to pro- tect them. By many accounts, the police refused to help, even when women specifically asked them to intervene. With the exception of one man who quietly led a woman to safety, other men either stood idly by while women were being molested,
  

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  or they joined in the melee. Because of this lack of support from others, Strong Women have learned they have to save and protect themselves—physically and emotionally. They have become their own heroes.
  

• Strong Women have learned that being too nice can have dire consequences, that there can be no room in their lives for being naive and innocent. It simply isn’t safe, since it invites others to take advantage of them. And it isn’t honorable, since it is often used as an excuse for women to avoid taking respon- sibility for themselves.
  

How Do Nice Girls Become Strong Women?

Being too nice can be a difficult habit to break. Because this unhealthy behavior is instilled in women at a very early age, some women have an easier time shedding it than others do. Letting go of the need to be seen as fair, understanding, or even selfless can be a painful process. Some have a fear of confrontation, most often brought about from having experienced constant conflict in their childhood homes or having been emotionally or physically abused as children. More than simply becoming more assertive or learning to establish boundaries, the process of letting go of niceness involves unearthing and then discarding deeply buried false beliefs and replacing them with the truth.

In this book, you will get help in unearthing these often illusive false beliefs. You will then learn to replace these unhealthy and false beliefs with healthy ways of thinking about yourself and others.

So how do Nice Girls become Strong Women? By confronting the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that keep you stuck in your Nice Girl act and by replacing these beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors with others that will empower you.

I’ll start out by encouraging you to examine your beliefs and atti- tudes. Once you have come to recognize how they contribute to your unhappiness and to negative patterns, you will need to take action. Some of the action steps you will be encouraged to take include the following:

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• Stop playing sweet, gullible, and naive. It’s outdated and it invites people, especially men, to take advantage of you.
  

• Stop giving people second (and third and fourth) chances. If someone shows you who he or she is, pay attention and act accordingly.
  

• Stop being fair and start being strong. Women’s need for fair- ness often gets them into trouble. Their tendency to want to look at both sides of a situation often blurs the real issue and allows them to be easily manipulated.
  

• Learn that setting limits and boundaries and expecting others to take care of their own needs can be the greatest act of kind- ness you can perform. You don’t do anyone a favor by allow- ing people to take advantage of you.
  

• Let others know when they have hurt or angered you. By not speaking up when someone insults or mistreats you, you are inadvertently giving permission for him or her to continue to treat you in the same way in the future.
  

• Confront your own anger. Sometimes under all that niceness lies a huge storage bin of repressed and suppressed anger.
  

• Acknowledge that often the real reason you take care of oth- ers is because you secretly want to be taken care of. You hope the person you’ve been taking care of will turn around and take care of you in the same way.
  

• Acknowledge that sometimes it is easier to sacrifice yourself for others than to focus on your own problems or take the risk of going after your own goals.
  

• Be honest with yourself about your real reasons for being a Nice Girl. When we look for the motive for our niceness, we often find guilt, shame, fear of confrontation, fear of rejec- tion, and an intense fear of being alone.
  

• Allow yourself to be bad sometimes. It’s not only okay to be bad but it is healthy. In fact, if you don’t allow yourself to be bad at times, you will continue to attract people into your life who will act out your badness for you.
  

  Melanie is always attracted to bad boys. This is how she explained it: “I like them because they’re so sexy, and they’re so
  

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  much fun. Nice guys are boring.” But Melanie gets hurt a lot, too. Many of her bad-boy boyfriends have cheated on her, and some have become physically abusive.
  

  Melanie is not alone. Many women, even though it is against their better judgment, are attracted to bad boys. This is especially true of Nice Girls. Nice Girls like bad boys because they do all the things Nice Girls wish they could do but can’t. It isn’t a coincidence that girls who are raised by strict parents or in deeply religious fam- ilies are often the ones who get involved with bad boys. It’s their way of rebelling against all the rules; they’re being bad vicariously, with- out having to take responsibility for it.
  

  The Four C’s
  

  In a no-holds-barred manner,
  The Nice Girl Syndrome
  will challenge you to confront those beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that invite others to take advantage of, manipulate, and abuse you, and will show you how to give up your “sweetness and light” image once and for all and replace it with an image made up of what I call the four power C’s: confidence, competence, conviction, and courage.
  

• Confidence
  . The reason many women are too nice is that they lack the confidence to stand up for themselves, say no, disagree, or state their preferences. They fall back on the old standby niceness to get by because they do not believe in themselves or that other people will respect their wishes, pref- erences, or ideas. In this book, I will teach you how to gain the kind of confidence you need to become a Strong Woman.
  

• Competence
  . Most women are more competent than they real- ize. But because they have been taught to be modest and even self-deprecating, they believe that acting competent is the same as acting conceited, cocky, or narcissistic. I will teach you the differences between acting competent and acting con- ceited and help you to become more comfortable in the role of a Strong, Competent Woman.
  

• Conviction
  . Many women were taught that they should never disagree or argue with others, especially authority figures. Others become intimidated by those who are domineering or overly confident. Still others believe that they should avoid
  

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