home—body podcast
sacred sound waves hosted by grace allerdice.
home—body podcast
RIP Good Girl 🪦
What if you don’t have to “deserve” a beautiful life? But as long as you’re trying to be very, very good… you can’t actually have one?
In this episode, grace unravels the false promises of the “good girl” and invites you to release the belief that being good is how you get what you want.
Press play and let’s escape good girl jail together.
“My life didn’t truly begin until I put the good girl on the altar and let her get torn to shreds and eaten by wolves.” — grace allerdice
we discuss —
- the many forms of “good girl jail”
- how to release the dreams that keep us trapped
- the three fears behind the good girl persona
- projection + when victimhood becomes the wholes tory
- how being a good girl blocks manifestation
- the problem with virtue performance + personas
- how people pretend to solve the good girl issue
- the medicine of the Crone + the Whore-Mother
LINKS
If you enjoyed the episode, check out —
Mentioned in the episode—
Free Resources —
Learn the 3 ingredients that bedrocked every major transformation in my life. Get 3 Keys for the Soul here for FREE. 🗝️
Stay Connected —
Subscribe to the home—body podcast wherever you get your listens.
This podcast is produced by Softer Sounds. ✨
thanks for listening. peace, be well. 🙏
grace allerdice [00:00:05]:
My name is grace, and you're listening to the Homebody Podcast.
How to be a good person. This is what most people think about when they think about cultivating a spiritual life. And today I'm going to talk about the Persona or the Identity, or I think we could even call it the Wound, the Jail of the Good Girl, and some of the fears and entanglements and invitations we can find when we're trapped in this persona. Humans love a clear code. We love a clear set of rules to follow so that we can identify who's being very good, who's being very bad, and it's even become embedded within our commercial Christmas mythology to determine who's very nice and gets presents and who's naughty and gets coal. And increasingly, as we live in a a dominant culture that's spiritually impoverished and also very childish in how we meet these kinds of complexities, things have become less complex. What constitutes being very, very good instead of being some complex spiritual reality around wholeness, it's transferred its authority to the Internet, to the news, to political party talking points, to the marketing language of the people that you buy from.
grace allerdice [00:01:47]:
And, of course, there's nothing wrong with trying to do good in the world. But what I'm gonna talk about today with a good girl identity, that's more when we're making choices solely based around being the good person,
grace allerdice [00:02:00]:
when we have an identity constructed around doing the right thing,
grace allerdice [00:02:00]:
when we're constructed around doing the right thing, when we're only doing something because it's right or we perceive it as good, and there's literally nothing else inside of us that's behind it, that's where we start to create incoherence in our system. And we're only doing something because it's right or we perceive it as good, and there's literally nothing else inside of us that's behind it, that's where we start to create incoherence in our system, and it's where we're probably masking a deeper level of healing that wants to take place. When we're doing things or being someone based on an external, well, this is just the right thing to do. That's a very convincing avoidance of becoming a whole person. Good girl is really riding a high horse a lot of the time. Good girl is starving for life in the tight corset of her tight butthole choices and wondering why it's hard to breathe. Isn't everyone else struggling to breathe? I can't go out on the dance floor. I can't breathe.
grace allerdice [00:02:59]:
It feels tight in here. It's stuffy in here. I shouldn't really help this person, but I can't breathe. I feel like I'm gonna faint. Well, I guess all I can really do is just tell them what to do to help them be good. And good girl is feeling more restricted. She's feeling more martyred than everyone else. She's, therefore, feels better than everybody else.
grace allerdice [00:03:18]:
This persona is constructed of a lot of overly simplified shoulds. A lot of rules. And what being good is is different. It depends on your your upbringing, your caretakers, your conditioning, essentially, your political bias, your spiritual orientation. What you were praised for growing up usually has a lot to do with it, how you created a sense of safety and likability for yourself. And I know this crowd, you you guys are, like, super holy. You're sensitive, you're kind, intelligent, open hearted, graceful beings with beautiful desires and intentions for the world, and you're trying to do the right thing, and you're trying to make the world a better place, and all of your decisions and your restrictions are super thought out with, like, stacks of books behind them. And some of you are just 100% down to, like, be the martyr and lay down on the train tracks in your life or whatever cause you believe in.
grace allerdice [00:04:15]:
Like, you're you're really wrestling with a lot of things. And others of you are grappling with new levels of power, and it's messing with how good you think you are. And there's a way that we can make beautiful choices from an authentic and coherent place, from a place of freedom and grace. But there's also a way that we can do all of it from good girl jail, where our parts or the whole of our identity need to make sure that we are good. And this identity, when it's coming from that place, it keeps her boxed in to where she's living in this one dimensional way so that she can fulfill the requirements of this good identity in her head. And it's very flat and it's very powerless because it's not paradox, and it's in avoiding developing one's true will. Good girl might be avoiding getting on the airlines because of fossil fuel and only buy secondhand clothes and lives under all this pressure to never make waste and never buy something from Target and make every single thing that goes into your mouth and talk to every plant in your garden every day, and I can't believe I didn't do that yesterday. Bad me.
grace allerdice [00:05:30]:
Or might be forming all the bulletproof arguments that are perfectly defended, and she forces herself to live in absolute obedience to these perfect arguments so that no one can match her or catch her in a moment of true vulnerability. Good girl might secretly hate hanging out with her family, but she does it anyway, and then gets caught up in their drama again, because she lets them make her feel guilty about all the things they've done for her. Or good girl might be doing all the seva at the yoga studio, teaching for free or at no cost so that everything she does can be super accessible to anyone at any time, saying yes to any and all of the cries for help. There might be good girl business owner who really wants to make an impact and make abundance, but definitely does not wanna do it in the way those other problematic business owners do it. I mean, I wanna make money, but I don't wanna make, you know, money money, you know? Because money is bad and marketing is bad, so I'm just gonna share and, like, be really nice and hope it all works out. Or good girl might define herself by not needing anyone or anything. She has so much privilege after all. Just to need to be self sufficient as possible and make sure that all my needs are met and I'm not a burden on anyone or anything else.
grace allerdice [00:06:42]:
I don't ask for anything. You can find her anywhere. But like I said earlier, there's a way that all of these external choices and actions can be coming from a coherent and authentic place. But there's also a way they can be coming from a scab that's covering up pain, that's keeping you from wholeness. And settling for a good girl identity is deeply impoverishing to the psyche. It leaves us bland, lifeless, immature, and frankly, boring. It's immature because it's overly simplified, and it has an identity that's built around transaction and obedience. Good Girl is living in accordance with the rules, whatever those rules are, whoever made them, and has a whole identity that's constructed and depends on that.
grace allerdice [00:07:35]:
She's looking to life into the nearest structure, to tell her what to do to get her a plus plus. The pursuit for the appearance of goodness with a little g's leaves the soul very starved. And it will always be looking for the nearest Daddy to tell her what to do to be accepted and to be loved, to be deserving of love. And if she doesn't receive that adequate love and acceptance in exchange for her good behavior, she then becomes angry, and hurt, and resentful, or depressed. And if you're listening to this thinking, Wow, sounds like Grace really knows this archetype really well. I do. Breaking out of good girl jail was a massive shift in my life, and I'm intimately familiar with it. So if I if you're listening to me talk about it today, sounds like I know a lot of the ins and outs, it's because I do.
grace allerdice [00:08:25]:
And I can smell it from miles away, and I can see it absolutely everywhere these days because we're so stuck in separation right now. And being a good girl is a great way to maintain a parent separation. A lot of the time, good girl is living in her secure dollhouse. It often began as a way of safety or to create safety. You know, being good was a way to guarantee safety in daddy's house, following daddy's rules, whoever daddy is or was. And this identity outsources center. We can't be okay unless everyone else is okay, unless everything is okay, because then they're uncomfortable. And if somebody doesn't feel good, well, then I'm not being good.
grace allerdice [00:09:07]:
So it can show up in the ways that we compulsively fawn or people please because, again, we're only okay if other people like us and think well of us. And before you're like, well, I oppose the patriarchy, so this doesn't apply to me. It does. As I said in the judgment to mystery episode, any enslavement to ideology is patriarchy. So you could be, you know, being a very good girl in the, oh, I oppose absolutely everything that I perceive as the patriarchy kind of way, or a very good little activist girl, or a very good little Democrat girl. Whatever the rule palace is, it's possible to be a good girl in any room in that house. It's just this way that it's not living through truth. It's not living through true will.
grace allerdice [00:09:51]:
It's not a full alchemy of the self. I know that for me, my life didn't truly begin until I put the good girl on the altar and let her get torn to shreds and eaten by wolves. I grew up in a very, you know, traditional religious values with, in hindsight, what was kind of vague, confusing rhetoric about what I had to do to not go to hell. And my particular strategy, not everyone's strategy, but mine was just to on the safe side, I'm gonna be very, very good. And I always had a craving for the divine. I always knew I wanted God. I've always had a propensity for the mystical. But the years of being the good girl with the servant's heart really left me high and dry, with nothing and no one, except a lot of anger, a lot of soul crushing grief, a lot of loneliness and broken dreams.
grace allerdice [00:10:44]:
And like all initiates into the mystery, my true journey didn't begin until I was willing to let her die. Good girl had to die. And I remember one day, I was sitting outside of a ballet company studio on the balcony, and I'd just been told, again, that I wasn't going to get hired. I was too old, blah blah blah. And in the past, I had not really let that sink in. This has been a truth that I just could not accept, because my whole identity was wrapped around succeeding as this dancer in this way. I had prioritized being a dancer my whole life. I'd put in the reps.
grace allerdice [00:11:18]:
I'd put in the hours. I'd done the diets. I'd worked out extra. I'd stretched more than everybody else. Listen to all the dumb inspirational advice that's like, well, if you just want it bad enough, if you just work harder than everybody else. And I did that. I wanted it bad enough. I worked harder than everybody else.
grace allerdice [00:11:35]:
Oh, if I can just be perfect, it will happen. Done. But that day and that moment on the balcony, I was at the end of that strategy. I had given it my all. I had done all the things. And I finally let it sink in that this dream wasn't going to happen, even though it had cost me pursuing it more than anyone else that I knew. And I'd refused to accept it before. I always switched back into hyperdrive of, well, I'll just be even better.
grace allerdice [00:12:04]:
But I finally realized that this is not what this moment was asking of me. I had to accept that I wasn't going to be invited through this door to this dream, to this thing that I had worked my whole life, my whole childhood, my whole education for, twenty years plus of following all the rules, striving for perfection, in the hopes that all the sacrifice and obedience would earn me some special, special favor, some yes, that would enable me to enjoy and love my existence, finally. And finally, I let it crumble into nothing because that's what it was. So I'd followed all the rules. I'd been super good. I'd been undeniably good. Anyone would tell you that. And I looked around, and I saw all these people my age having a great time, breaking what I thought were the rules, working not nearly as hard as I was, not getting punished.
grace allerdice [00:12:54]:
Quite the contrary, they seemed to be having way more fun than me, and getting way more of what they wanted than I was, which was, of course, very confusing. I gave up dance, I gave up God, I gave up my values, I gave up my worldview, all the practices and beliefs I had used to create and sustain my identity. And I allowed myself to become no one. I didn't know who I was going to be, but I knew I couldn't be this girl anymore. And the good girl died that day. And I couldn't see it yet, but it was the beginning of something more wide and wild being born. And I'm very grateful for that death now. And I didn't know it at the time, but this is how all alchemical stories start, with death, with something we're laying down, something we're willing to let go of.
grace allerdice [00:13:46]:
So we're going to talk about the good girl today and why it might be a good time to put her down and let her rest in peace. As we've talked about in previous episodes in this season, what we are cohering around inside of us relates
grace allerdice [00:14:05]:
to
grace allerdice [00:14:05]:
what we're cohering around outside of us, how we experience what's outside of us. This good girl identity is often a crusty scab hiding over a gaping wound, and the wound says, I'm not good enough. I hear this story all the time from every kind of person, this plaguing sense that she's just not good enough. And the response to not good enough is almost always the same. Very few people respond by, I'm not good enough, whatever that means. There's love for me anyway. Let's move on. Almost everyone responds by trying to up their game and be even better.
grace allerdice [00:14:47]:
But this will never make us feel good enough. There will always be someone being better. There will always be somewhere we're falling short. And this rat race of trying to be so very, very good becomes this clenched sphincter blocking the force of life from coming to meet her. And ironically, when we're trying to be very good girl, consciously or unconsciously, it's because we don't feel like we're good enough. And at the same rate, the world outside also becomes increasingly not good enough. It's not clean enough. It's not nice enough.
grace allerdice [00:15:23]:
It's not the way that we want it. It's not up to par. It's not to our standard. It's not doing what we want. The world becomes not good enough for her. Her relationships aren't good enough for her. Her work isn't good enough for her. Nothing is ever good enough.
grace allerdice [00:15:37]:
And it becomes a big waiting and complaining game. Oh, when I feel good enough or when everything out in the world is good enough, then I will feel better, and then I will do x, y, or z. And again, as I dive into this today, I'm not speaking from a perspective of, like, me, I'm so above this. I know this dynamic so well because I've lived it so hard. I know how entrapping it can be because it looks really good. It looks very right on the outside. Everyone's praising you and complimenting you and, Oh, you're so helpful, and so sweet, and so kind, but it's not true kindness. It's obligation.
grace allerdice [00:16:11]:
I know what utter misery good girl jail is on the inside. I have been completely possessed by this archetype. I was the queen of this whole situation, and now I'm no longer dominated by it in my life, which is why I'm the perfect person to talk about it, at least on my own podcast. So I can smell it from a mile away, and I've been smelling it a lot lately. So there's no judgment for this. There's awareness for this. So all you good girls out there, don't listen to this and then be like, I feel called out. I mean, called in.
grace allerdice [00:16:39]:
Well, I just gotta up my game. That's the opposite of the point that I'm making. No one's calling you out. You're being invited to a deeper awareness and a more complex understanding, a more whole and life giving life. That's the invitation. As I said earlier, this good girl porcelain persona is often the scab on top of the wound of I'm not good enough. And often, lurking behind the surface are three fears. Possibly more, probably more, but there's these are three dominant ones.
grace allerdice [00:17:14]:
They're the fear of losing control, fear of being misunderstood, and fear of being abandoned. Fear of losing control, AKA fear of uncertainty, because being good or being perceived as good is a full time job with no breaks, and it's something that we think we can control. Whatever it is, it is being maintained as this palace of safety, which we think is certainty. And losing control would mean losing this image, losing identity, losing the rules who tell you who you are. And then who would you be? Oh my god. Would I just be this out of control mongrel? And ironically, the question of who would I even be is the antidote to lean into. And then there's the fear of being misunderstood. Good girl wants to be seen, but she wants to be seen in the right way.
grace allerdice [00:18:11]:
Remember that control piece. When I hear people say, I have a fear of being seen. What they're really saying is, I have a fear of being misunderstood most of the time. It's not that you don't wanna be seen, it's that you don't wanna be misunderstood. It's that you want everyone to like you and see it how you see it, which is impossible. So you think, well, I just have I just have a fear of being seen. So there's a very controlled level of visibility, controlled image. How how can she explain every possible future misunderstanding? Make a disclaimer for everything someone could take the wrong way.
grace allerdice [00:18:44]:
Practice all the times with who she is undeniably leaving receipts of her goodness to all. And then there's the fear of being abandoned, because Good Girl's internal logic goes, who would wanna be with me, with someone who isn't good enough? And so Good Girl partners well with a lot of codependent energy and attachment issues? I know for me, it absolutely did. For one, if you're in Good Girl Jail, you don't have real intimacy. You have the performance of goodness. So people can obey you or pedestalize you or they can need you, And those are the ways people be close to you. But also building a whole identity around being good is outsourcing center. Good to whom? Good by what standards? How much is good enough? And when we don't have a center of freedom inside of ourselves that we're constellating around, we have to have something to organize our life around. And then enter the cause, the role that tells you how to good you need to be and by what standards.
grace allerdice [00:19:49]:
The best activist, the best friend, the best mom, the best partner, the best podcast, or, you know, the best queer person, whatever it is. I know for me, I was massively codependent, which, of course, had all of these fun attachment issues that came with it. I was always seeing myself through my projection of other people's eyes. The muscle that should have been my center was almost nonexistent. I was super codependent with god. Like, I could trick god into giving me what I wanted by being so good and so quiet and so helpful. Lol. And I, of course, would do the same to other people, be so helpful, so needed, so I can guarantee their attention and their love and the feeling that I could then deserve that love.
grace allerdice [00:20:35]:
We think if we can just be good enough, then we'll deserve it. But this is also a pretend rat race to nowhere. I didn't have love. I had obligation and guilt and transaction and control, because that's all I knew how to receive. And ironically, this is what happens. In this good girl place, we're avoiding the raw vulnerability, the spontaneity of real presence. We don't have a center for people to gather around or to magnetize reality. We're afraid of who we'll be, how much we'll slack, how bad we'll become if we can just accept ourselves and won't what's happening.
grace allerdice [00:21:10]:
Won't it make us like them? Another thread that weaves through this good girl entanglement is being a victim or conflating with the identity of a victim. Because good girls are not dumb. You have to be very smart to keep track of all the right things to say and do. And also, deep down, she knows that trying to be good enough is a losing game. It's a mark she'll never hit. If she stays on the good girl hamster wheel, trying to win the good girl race, she will shrink, and shrink her capacity for life until hardly anything can get in. And the good girl can be the victim if she can see that she's not going to win the race. If she can see that she won't be good enough, maybe she can be the victim.
grace allerdice [00:22:01]:
Because here's the thing, life isn't good. Life is beautiful. You can't make life perfect, but you can love it. And if a very smart, good girl thinks that proving her goodness isn't working, then identifying with the victim is a good way to convince others of her worthiness and her deservingness. If she can't win by being good, being the victim is the new salvation. If she can't be good enough to deserve what she has or what she wants, well, if she's the victim, at least she can access this sense of having a right to be here. If she can't be loved or can't love herself in her not good state, at least people can feel sorry for her. And if they can't feel sorry for her, at least she can be a martyr, which is still better than being bad.
grace allerdice [00:22:48]:
Something in her believes that she isn't good enough, but if she's a victim, she can deserve mercy and forgiveness. Something in her wants to be a victim so that she can deserve grace and forgiveness for not being good enough. But what if you don't have to deserve grace and forgiveness? What if those simply exist? But as long as you're trying to be very, very good, you can't receive them. I know I'm talking about these as if they're conscious decisions. Right? But often these are not conscious decisions, which is why I'm going to the trouble of illustrating all of these little wires. These things that we just operate as if they're true, then they get fused inside and become all these micro decisions that feel like obvious conclusions. They feel like things that just must be so, but they're not. And if we're in this loop of needing to be good or needing to be a victim, it keeps us in a very childish consciousness.
grace allerdice [00:23:47]:
Because these are disempowered states of being good girl and victim. She gets stuck in this infantile state, which is often why there is also a lot of compulsive behavior with family as well, especially parents stuck in infancy. The power moves are to be helpless. The child's power move is to throw a tantrum, or the infant power move is to be on best behavior so mommy and daddy will give us our allowance or their love. And in order to outgrow this, we have to be willing to, a, let good girl rest in peace, and, b, we have to be willing to complicate our being into a mature level of wholeness. If we're in good girl prison and we've been told that being good is how we get what we want, or we've come to that conclusion ourselves. There can be a lot of opening when we realize that's actually what we're doing. We're using being good to get what we want.
grace allerdice [00:24:50]:
It can be very telling if we stand back and look at our lives and take stock of where we're doing this, where we're performing goodness as a transaction to get what we want, that we don't think we deserve or what we don't think we can have any other way. And if we can take note of that, it could reveal to us some ways that we're not living from a full dimensional place. It's that right hand path of be very, very good. Say all your prayers and say the Hail Marys and do the charities and taxes on time. Make sure you are, you know, a little miserable so you don't have to feel bad about feeling good. And make sure your carbon footprint is absolutely invisible so no one can
grace allerdice [00:25:29]:
tell you we're here. And make
grace allerdice [00:25:29]:
sure you don't wanna be a absolutely invisible so no one can tell you we're here and make sure you don't wanna be a burden on anyone. And you've gotta alert everyone to all the problematic people so that you can then signal how good you are in opposition to them. And then when God looks down, he'll smile on you and you'll get all the divine favor and mercy. And remember, you don't let yourself get too happy. And then when these little games don't work out and we double down on being very, very good, and then we ruthlessly judge everyone else from this palace of martyrdom that we've made, And then we bring forward our victimness so that we can find that place where we at least feel we deserve mercy if we don't feel loved. And of course, some people are actually in a victim stage of experience and healing right now. I would never disown them. That's just not what I'm talking about here.
grace allerdice [00:26:19]:
In this particular scenario, what I'm describing with the good girl persona is the maintenance of the story where she's a victim, which is preventing healing on a deeper level. Again, there's no judgment of any of this. I've done all of this, and there's probably still some places I'm doing it that I can't see yet. But the uncomfortable truth is no one is wholly good or wholly bad. No one is prey all the time. No one is predator all the time. And if you are or they are, then what we're actually working with is caricature or a symbol or a story to use for your own ends. But if we're willing to drop that story, we could become a very real wild, alive thing.
grace allerdice [00:27:11]:
In somatic experiencing, there are some key teachings illustrated by how animals function in the wild, because somatic work is essentially reckoning us with our wild animal body. But good girl is utterly domesticated. If we're stuck in good girl victim narrative, we've already assigned a morality to being the prey. The poor, innocent antelope getting eaten by the big, bad cheetah. But the cheetah isn't bad. The cheetah is simply a hunter, a predator in that moment. And when she goes home, she'll be a loving mother who just put food on the table for her young. Just like the antelope was out eating grass, getting what it needs to survive.
grace allerdice [00:27:50]:
On some level, we are all predators because we are all surviving. Life feeds on death. Death feeds life. And at some point we will die and then feed life. This is a truth. We have to ingest and integrate if we're going to become and own our real, wild, whole selves. And wholeness is what the world needs. It doesn't need more performative, oversimplified, obedient, judgmental goodness.
grace allerdice [00:28:18]:
It needs wild wholeness. Maintaining good girl facade is like being a porcelain doll, when you could be a panther. But she doesn't wanna be a panther, because she'll hurt someone's feelings or be too strong or too fast. And what will people think when she opens her jaws and catches her dinner? Ew. Good girl is always obeying something, saying, oh my god, I'm not perfect. Stop it. All the while spending all this time and energy trying to be perfect while telling others they don't have to be. The perfection is boring, and it's also impossible, and it's lifeless.
grace allerdice [00:28:55]:
Obedience is boring. Commitment is interesting, but obedience is boring, and it's also exhausting. And this good girl dynamic creates breaks and cracks in the field. It creates an incoherence. It makes cracks in the system that become workarounds. And this lack of coherence creates pretending, which inevitably keeps Good Girl from having this deep, juicy, real, authentic experience of life. Like I said, in the previous episode, you aren't hiding your energy, whether consciously or not people can feel your judgment. The world responds to you when you pronounce it.
grace allerdice [00:29:36]:
Not good enough. Energy senses how she needs to feel holier than now. And if good girl is in jail, then she brings the frequency of jail, no matter how hard she tries to say or do otherwise. Let's talk about manifestation for a moment. And by manifestation, I'm talking about our ability to bring things into form, into time and space, whether that's a creative idea, a job, a home, a garden, a sensation, a kid, a book, a business, whatever it is. Because good girl identity is so impoverished on an inner level, she's disconnected from real power because she has no true will. And also because power is so bad. Right? She often lacks her own sense of manifestation power, and so she uses others as her source of power.
grace allerdice [00:30:33]:
And then gets mad that she feels powerless and other people feel powerful. This is why Good Girl is frequently accompanied by attachment issues and codependence, lot of resentment, because those are ways to get what she wants, rather than risk the vulnerability of authentic intimacy, or failure, or appearing less than perfect. Good girl's feet never touch the ground all the way. She can't be all the way here because there's so much bad stuff going on here. Remember, not good enough inside translates to not good enough outside. In order to judge life and judge self, she has to maintain her distance. She can't get her hands dirty. She can't be fully in the experience.
grace allerdice [00:31:17]:
She can't touch anything someone could think of as remotely problematic. And this aloofness, this sort of off planet, holier than thou attitude means that she also can't really be in the world, and therefore can't enjoy the world, can't bring things into the world because she isn't really here. Or if she does, it starts to be in her head with how relating to power is asking her to change. Am I still good enough? Am I still good enough though? Because good girl doesn't wanna fail. She doesn't wanna get her hands dirty. It's a lot of behind the scenes control often. It takes a lot of control to maintain this image of good and good enough. A tangible example of how this often shows up around business, because running a business, I think, is a crucible in a lot of ways, and it can bring up all the ways that we're just too good.
grace allerdice [00:32:19]:
We're too good for money. We're too good for the economy. We're too good for marketing. But, actually, the point of having a business is to make money, which means you have to market in the world that actually exists, not the ideal one that good girl wishes we lived in and the actual world we actually live in. Good girl doesn't wanna get her hands dirty. She wants to let other people do it for her. She's not gonna go kill the antelope, but she'll judge the panther for killing the antelope and then eat what the predator has brought back for dinner, because she's gotta eat. Right? An example of this that's a little more tangible.
grace allerdice [00:32:53]:
I was on a call recently with someone who was sharing with me how she was having difficulty selling in her business and making enough money even though she had a background in marketing. And then she immediately spent the next ten minutes telling me about how she didn't wanna make too much money because that would be problematic, or she didn't wanna lean into her marketing skills because those are really bad, and she would like those other, you know, those bad lady entrepreneurs just selling things. She doesn't wanna be like them. And I was like, well, that's why you're not making money. Like, you think money is bad and marketing is bad, and you don't, there's a big part of you that doesn't want it, so you don't, you're not gonna make it. Good girl doesn't want it because it would make her a problem. It would make her less than good. And if that means she's got to starve you of money, then well then she'll figure out how to sacrifice that to her ideals.
grace allerdice [00:33:38]:
Again, it's a lot of tight butthole energy. No. Life can only come to me in this one particular perfect way. And if it doesn't come to me this way, she'll send it back to the kitchen. I only want it if it's totally clean. I only wanna be successful if it makes me look good. I only wanna be visible if everyone will like me. I only wanna make money, but only the right amount of money, and only in the right way.
grace allerdice [00:34:02]:
I wanna sell my program, but only if I can do it in the perfect way where I don't really have to sell something. That's not how bringing things into actual form works. That's hiding behind the idea and the ideal, where it can be perfect and untainted and untouched. Life isn't interested in the virtue performance. That's not how life actually works. Life responds to coherence and personas are a tattletale of incoherence. Life has to be able to get in. If you're going to bring things into the world, If you wanna have a life baby, there's gonna be blood.
grace allerdice [00:34:38]:
There's gonna be poop. Life gets messy when it gets creative, when it gets vital. It's not clean. It's not perfect, but it's alive. So if you wanna find more of a spark for bringing things into the world, you have to heal enough to fall in love with reality and let go of the Barbie house of perfect ideals of how it quote should be. If life is going to get in, if life is going to be enjoyed and revitalized, then good girl will have to let go of the perfect high horse energy. If she wants to be in radically embodied, if she wants any vitality, if she wants to grapple with any level of meaningful transformation or power to change the world. And finally, let's talk for a moment about how a lot of people pretend to solve the good girl issue.
grace allerdice [00:35:28]:
Because most of good girl energy, like I said earlier, isn't incoherence, because it's really shadow avoidance. It's hanging out in the pretend safety of perfection and apparent goodness, all the while the poor wretched dirtiness of the world writhes beneath that she refuses to touch because it would taint her goodness. When we start to heal this energy, there's usually a big swing in the opposite direction, which makes sense, right, that there would be a big pendulation the other way. I know that was true for me. In my life, when I decided this good girl chapter was over, I didn't know where I was going or who I was going to become. I only knew how to do life in this one way, but I also knew that it wasn't it. So the baby that I was, I simply just started doing the opposite of what the good girl would have done. And I didn't have this language at the time, but I was just like, just do the opposite of what you would have done in the past.
grace allerdice [00:36:21]:
And, again, that makes sense. And this can be medicine in the moment and for a season while we lap up some of that flavor after being so repressed for so long, so tight butthole for so long. But if we only do this, if we only go to the opposite, then it becomes its own other identity facade. Yes. We embrace the opposite that we've been rejecting and avoiding. That's wonderful. But, and then, we do the work of alchemizing it into something more whole. And a lot of people stop at this stage of the good girl healing process.
grace allerdice [00:36:55]:
They do some shadow work. They discover that they've been rejecting their inner bad girl, and suddenly, they just let everyone in their email newsletter know, oh my god. I'm so sorry, you guys. I'm such a snarky bitch inside and hear some gossip. Sure. Sometimes graduating from being the five year old good girl to being the 15 year old bad girl is progress, but it's not the final destination. That's not like the the full goal here. It's still uninteresting.
grace allerdice [00:37:22]:
It's immature. It's caricature. So you see the shadow and she has a name, and it's snarky bitch. Fantastic. But that's not the alchemy of true shadow work. That's not the integration. That's just replacing one emoji with another. So the integration chapter is what then holds and pulls these two into a complex prism of harmonization and beauty that is interesting and deep.
grace allerdice [00:37:48]:
It's a story that becomes real tone and shadow and surprise and variance. And for me, that's the song that we're going for. So what's the medicine here? Of course, the good girl identity, as we said, is often a band aid covering up fear and pain. And so we need to have compassion for her. Right? Not judge her. Good girl is in pain. She's afraid she won't be loved. She's afraid of losing control because identity is control.
grace allerdice [00:38:19]:
We have compassion. I don't judge good girl baby me. I see what I was doing. I understand why I was doing it. But the good girl's initiation is choosing the wild soul and choosing the self, the animal of God. And often, it's the crone or the whore mother who comes to initiate her. Like in the handless maiden fairy tale, she doesn't stay home, where she can remain handless and obedient and a victim. She leaves daddy's house, even though he offers her all the riches.
grace allerdice [00:38:52]:
She could have stayed and had all the money her suffering bought her and had all the security of knowing when her next meal was coming from and what tomorrow was gonna look like, but she didn't stay. She needed to become something more wild and more real. The good girl image has to go on the altar and be surrendered and sacrificed. The queen of heaven must descend into the underworld to get bloody and get died and reborn. The good girl is the slave to ideology. Doesn't matter what the ideology is. She's the one doing it exactly right. And the initiation of the good girl is to become the wild woman, is to become the virgin under herself, to move through the meet and greet with the shadow, to embracing the shadow, and then getting into the magical process, the maturation of becoming a fine wine, becoming all of it, all of her.
grace allerdice [00:39:55]:
Good girl is avoiding power, but pretending to have power because she's avoiding the underworld. The underworld is the antidote. And when this episode is originally publishing, Venus has just stationed retrograde, long time synonymous with the Queen of Heaven's underworld journey. Shedding this layer. Shedding that layer. Laying down this image. Surrendering this false truth. Leaving that game.
grace allerdice [00:40:27]:
Laying down this incoherence, this pain, this fear, and going down to the empty core of the heartbeat of the earth to get reborn as something real. No more pretending. And when she emerges, belonging more to herself for this will happen many times over and over again, because if we are in life for real, not hovering above it, then we are in its initiation. There is always something dying and being reborn. And if we're not doing that, then we're not in life. Good girl will pass through the initiation into the great horror mother who invites all the good girl's ideals and inverts them and turns them upside down and eats them for breakfast and welcomes her to the margins. And together, they mix and become the fine wine, the fertile ground of the great Virgin who can receive the divine inspiration, regardless of what it looks like on the outside, because she doesn't care anymore, because she's only bound by her devotion. Imagine that being only blissfully bound by your devotion.
grace allerdice [00:41:41]:
So in closing, what layers, what enslavements to your ideals can you surrender and lay down? What judgments are getting old? What standards? What images of perfection are you upholding? How are you so sure the world isn't good enough for you? Where are you refusing to touch it? Refusing to participate? No way you're gonna get your feet dirty. Where are you doing that? Where do you have this inner set of game rules where you think if you're a very, very good, you'll get what you want. How are you using your righteousness to get what you want? What you think you want? Where are their inner grips of control Or where are you being held in fear of abandonment or fear of being misunderstood? Where are you playing the game of if I just want it bad enough, if I just work hard enough, and if I sacrifice enough, I'll get what I want. But who will I be if I don't die on this hill every day? I don't know, and neither do you. Welcome to the mystery of the underworld. But I do know this. The more conditioning strips away, like Inanna's layers, all your smartness and your goodness, all your rule following, your virtue signaling, your control of how others see you, what you are willing to receive and not receive from life, the more you release your tight grip identification with things outside of you, your family, your school, your job, your government, the more you will get closer and closer to the clarity of your truth, your true will. All of these layers, as painful or confusing as they can be to come off, they are in the way.
grace allerdice [00:43:48]:
They are keeping you from the process of knowing and cohering, constellating the full, true, biodynamic, paradoxical self swirling around your center of a bright sun. The self is not a two d painting of pastels. It is a rich woven tapestry of shade and shadow and ups and downs, a wide range of colors and complexity that jumps out at you and moves when you look at it with eyes to see. And lastly, besides the underworld, we think we have to be perfect or we have to be the victim because we're unable or we're unwilling to guzzle the grace and forgiveness of life. The whore wants to fuck you no matter what. That is the grace you have to grok. Your perceived goodness is not the magnet for the mystery. Your wholeness, which means you have to include all of the bits you don't wanna look at or admit to, your wholeness is how you are the walking paradox.
grace allerdice [00:45:00]:
Not the overly simplified, powerless, nutritionist, white bread, anemic, fake goodness model. Okay? What if you can look at these, admit to them all these things that you avoid, don't wanna look at that hurt a little bit, the fears, and then you be the Christ consciousness. You be the slutty horror to those parts of you and be like, I fucking love you just like this. That's the level of grace we have to grok. Because, again, the world doesn't need more fake goodness. It needs wholeness. And if you need or you want help walking this underworld above world, multidimensional world, this robust process of alchemy, and working with this medicine of unconditional love and radical acceptance and what it asks of you, I invite you to join the wait list for MA, which is a new membership that I have where these powerful antidotes, these full self welcomings are on the menu. They're what we're here to do.
grace allerdice [00:46:05]:
They're the medicine we're here to be. You can find a link to join the wait list in the show notes, and I I recommend you do that. The immersion that we have coming up is focused specifically on this medicine. If you have questions about this topic, things that you'd like me to go more into in the future, send me a question. There's also a link in the show notes to do that, and I can add an answer or response to your question in a future episode. And if I get enough of them, I'll just do a Q and A episode all by itself. So join the wait list for Ma and send me a question in the show notes. During this Venus retrograde, how can you step into your contradictions, your paradoxes? Where can you surrender your need to be better than? Your need to judge.
grace allerdice [00:46:53]:
Because the secret is up. If you're judging others, you're judging yourself and vice versa. If you can see the ick in others, it's because you have the ick in you. Drink up. Shed the layers. Welcome what you find. Offer all of her, all the bits, the wine of compassion and communion. Welcome all of her to the table.
grace allerdice [00:47:22]:
Where are you being bound by anything other than devotion? Who will you be on the other side? I don't know. And you don't need to know. Because the mother is here. The mother is the underworld. She is the severance from infancy. She is here to tell all the good girls, it's time to grow up, honey. Become that fine wine. Drink up.
grace allerdice [00:47:54]:
Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a few moments to subscribe to the show, leave us a review, and share the episode. These small tasks help our independent podcast so much. Be sure to also check out the show notes below to learn more about any resources, guests, or sponsors that we shared with you today. Our intro and outro music was created by artists Erin Palovic and Jared Kelly. Our podcast logo was created by Elaine Stevenson, and this show is produced by Softer Sound Studio. Thank you for being here. Be well.
grace allerdice [00:48:28]:
Peace.