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If you're tired of feeling never enough, of constantly being derailed by your own fears or the reactions of others, then you are in the right place. I'm Deb, a licensed psychologist, and this is Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to women who've spent their lives trying to stay within the lines of what's acceptable, who've never felt good enough and who are ready to break free and bloom. Let's talk about how you can build a solid foundation connected with your strength and your wisdom. Before we start, I need to make sure that you know that the information I share with you is just that. It's just information. It's not meant to be a prescription for what you should do or meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers. It also doesn't mean that we have a professional client-therapist relationship.

Hi there and welcome. In this episode, I want to continue focusing on the struggle to be ourselves in the world and share the hypothesis that the battle that most women find themselves in, that of striving to be good enough, may not actually be their battle to fight. I realize that probably sounds confusing and hopefully it will make more sense when I finish. 

I decided to start out this episode by reading from my book, Never Enough, from the beginning of the welcome section. I decided why reinvent the wheel.

I start out my book by asking whether you dream of feeling confident in your own skin, of not spending your day worrying what other people think and whether they will approve of you? Are you exhausted from trying to keep others happy or from saying yes when you really want to say no? Or can your day change with a look or a comment? And has all of that left you feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or depressed? or maybe turning to food for comfort and all the while asking yourself, what is wrong with me? 

It's not a very easy way to walk through life, is it? I know because I've been there. And as a licensed psychologist, I've worked with many women sharing similar struggles, smart, creative, capable women feeling stuck, overwhelmed, anxious or depressed. 

Many didn't realize that their worth was tied with the approval of others. They simply felt a pull to do more or be more. They couldn't find peace no matter how hard they tried. There was always one more thing they needed to work on or to get done before they could relax. 

Some knew the opinions of others were derailing them, and they couldn't break the pattern, leaving them feeling weak, guilty, or ashamed. If you see yourself in what I just read, I doubt that you are weak or defective in whatever way you describe it to yourself. 

There are strong pulls both internally and externally keeping women looking outside of themselves for validation that we are okay, that we're doing enough. 

My goal for this episode is to consider the role the experiences of our ancestors may be playing in this constant worry about not being good enough. My hope is that listening will encourage you to consider other explanations for your struggles with never feeling good enough, besides seeing it as a personal defect or deficiency. 

I'm hoping it will get you thinking about how you have explained this tendency to yourself and that you will consider the possibility that you are actually reliving the experiences of the women who came before you through your genes. And as a result, you come by this tendency quite naturally and through no fault of your own, simply by being female.

I've alluded to the influences on our tendency to continually strive to be better, to never feel that we are good enough, and as a result, never find time to relax or do the things that we enjoy. I decided to start focusing on it directly in this episode because I believe it's so important, so pivotal in understanding so many of our struggles as women.

And I think it's something that we just don't talk enough about. There are many other contributing factors to this striving, and I will come back to them in future episodes. And in this one, I want to focus on our history as women and the fear that was likely passed down to us from them. Before I do that, I want to be clear that what I'm sharing, I'm sharing from the perspectives of a white cisgender woman of privilege in the United States. I'm not pretending to know or understand the experience of women outside this perspective. If you are a listener with a differing experience than those I touch on today, I would love to hear from you. Those of you who know me or who are familiar with my work know that learning is one of my major choice in life.

And so if you have ideas to share with me, I would love to hear them. Okay, let's back up. For many years, probably the majority of my career, I took a pretty narrow minded focus when it came to thinking about the issues women wanted to work on. If they were struggling with their eating, that's where we focused. If it was anxiety, we focused on anxiety. And of course I considered their environment, their growing up years, their relationships. And I did that from a focus on their individual life. 

What I didn't consider was the society they lived in or their ancestors. After years of hearing women talk of never feeling good enough and witnessing their constant striving and of hearing women utter almost identical words once we peeled back the layers of the concerns that were bringing them to describe the fear that was driving their striving, words connecting worth or being lovable with approval. Only then did I stop and wonder, what in the heck is happening here?

 Why are all of these women, these bright, capable, engaging women, not feeling good enough and trying so hard to get to the place where they finally feel good enough? That's when it hit me that I needed to look at my client's struggles through a larger lens, a lens that would consider what it means and has meant to be female.

In thinking about our history, I began to consider a history of being marginalized, of not having the rights and protections, the privileges that men have had. Certainly things have improved, and that's a topic for another episode. What I realized is that marginalized groups tend to show common characteristics stemming from a lack of power. Without power there is fear, a fear that I will do something wrong. Without rights or power, that's a pretty scary proposition. 

Then I considered what we know from the study that has gone on in epigenetics and how we now know that stressors and fears are passed from one generation to the next. 

Considering that, it is very likely that even if you don't feel marginalized in your life, you very likely carry the fears and experiences of those who were marginalized and felt powerless in your DNA. I've probably said this before, and survival is the number one priority for the brain. 

And so anything that is frightening, or connected with staying alive will be wired really tightly in the brain. What I mean by that is those connections are not easy to talk ourself out of. If they were, we wouldn't have survived as a species. If one day I decided, ⁓ predators aren't really a threat, my chances of survival would be slim. 

And in fact, It's believed that those who were on the anxious side and were thinking about those connections that had been made and wired in the brain indicating danger and who were looking for signs of that danger were the ones who survived, thus passing on that tendency To their young.

Let's back up and go back to the life of the early humans. Whether you were male or female, being part of a tribe was essential to staying alive. If you were expelled from the tribe, you would die. Because of this, all of us, male and female, most likely carry with us a fear of rejection or abandonment.

As time passed, the history of men and women began to diverge. Men gained more freedoms, they were able to live independently, while women's survival depended upon being with a man. This had a practical basis as men were typically physically stronger, and it also had to do with the rights or lack of rights that women had.

I'll come back to talk about the rights piece in a moment. So being with a man was essential for survival early in our history as a woman. And how did we end up with a man? In some cultures, marriages are arranged.

And I imagine there were some arranged marriages in this country. And it was more likely that to be with a man, we needed to be chosen. And to be chosen, we needed to be found attractive. If our survival as females depended on being attractive and chosen, being attractive and chosen is very likely wired in our female brain with survival in very much the same way that predators are, that staying warm is, that escaping fire is.

And these fears, because they had life and death consequences, have very likely been carried forward to future generations. Remember the mice and the cherry blossoms. Future generations feared the fragrance of cherry blossoms, never having had experienced the shock themselves. So we didn't have to live through this fear of not being chosen to have this connection in our brain. And if my survival depends on finding a mate, I would want to stand out, to be noticed, and there would likely be fear if I felt like I wasn't as desirable as others who might be chosen. Are you beginning to connect our constant striving to be good enough with those fears of the women who came before us and who needed to be chosen in order to survive.

And if this fear of not being chosen is carried forward in our genes, then what would mothers want to do? What are they going to want to teach their daughters? How to be chosen, right? I could say much more about that piece, and I will come back to socialization and the pressures on young girls to please in another episode.

So we have this basic connection between survival and being chosen. And then on top of that, we were kept in a place of dependence on our male partners because we lacked the rights that would have given us power, the power to live on our own, to make decisions for ourselves, to buy a home. It took us a very long time to gain the rights we have today. 

And even though we have those rights, they aren't always respected. As I was thinking about this, I remembered a time when I was switching accountants, this was years ago, and I had mentioned this to my father and his automatic without thinking comment was, not another woman.I could see in his face that he felt badly that he said it to me, and I don't think that changed the truth in his mind of what he said. We take so many of these rights for granted.

And I bring up the time when women didn't have them because not having rights limits power and safety. When groups don't have power or are marginalized through a lack of inclusion or by not having rights, it has an impact on how those individuals see themselves and the ways in which they try to stay safe and get their needs met.

Marginalized groups learn how to stay safe, how to stay under the radar to not draw attention to themselves. They learn how to keep those in power happy to avoid negative consequences. I'm imagining that many of you are good at intuiting what others are feeling or needing. 

And I'm imagining that that skill must have been an essential skill for our female ancestors in order to stay safe, as well as to try and get what they needed without having the rights to get them otherwise. I'm not gonna talk about how all of these learned reactions to marginalization show up in the patterns many women have in relationships today, as that would be way too much. And I'll just give one example.

And that is the difficulty many women have in asking directly for what they need. I'm wondering if that's something you struggle with. And I'm wondering if you try indirectly to get the other person to see that what you want would be a good choice for them to make. This is what I've experienced in talking with women, and I also find myself doing.

Marginalized populations don't have the freedom to ask directly for what they want, and they often put themselves in danger when they do that. And so they often get creative in influencing those in charge in order to give them what they need. There's really, really way too much to say about this in one episode. 

And in a nutshell, being yourself and being female has both been prohibited and risky in our history. Staying within the lines of what's acceptable, not making waves, was connected with survival. And my hunch in thinking about the cherry blossom study and in talking with so many women who at a very deep level are terrified at the thought of facing disapproval is that this fear has been passed down to us both through our genes as well as through our socialization and that it continues to be reinforced today in other ways, which I'll talk about at another time.

And because of this, the fear that we may be experiencing may actually belong to the women who came before us rather than to ourselves.

Just as the offspring of the mice feared cherry blossoms because of the electric shock their predecessors

We may feel a fear, a need to keep striving to be good enough that doesn't really belong to us.

That's really interesting and powerful to think about, isn't it?

that all of this fear, all of this striving we do may not actually be coming from our lives and instead becoming from the fear that was passed down to us.

Okay, back to the rights that were denied. I think it can feel nebulous to imagine not having the rights we have. And so I thought I would mention just a few of them before winding up. Women did not have the right to defend themselves in court. I couldn't find the exact date when this changed. And maybe it was in 1879 when women were allowed to argue cases before the Supreme Court. 

Prior to that time, we as women had no say. If a charge was brought against us, unless we could get a male to argue the case for us, we were out of luck. Thinking back to the times of the witch trials, it must have been terrifying to be accused of witchcraft knowing that you could burn at the stake and have no way to defend yourself. There would be no way to counter the accusations of an angry husband or suitor or even a male in the community who felt you were stepping outside the bounds of your defined role.

I think about how terrifying this would have been and how because of that terror, this fear of doing something wrong or staying within the lines of what's acceptable would have been passed down through our genetic heritage. Women didn't gain the right to vote until 1920. This was just a little over 100 years ago, five years before my mother was born. So we couldn't even use the vote to change our situation.

And prior to 1970, women couldn't refuse to have sex with their husband. They couldn't safely be pregnant and keep their job, or in other words, they could be fired for getting pregnant. Prior to 1974, lenders could legally deny mortgages, credit cards, and bank accounts to unmarried women, or require a male relative to cosign. 

It wasn't until the 1980s that sexual harassment was officially defined. In my very first job, which was all the way across the country from where I grew up, I experienced sexual harassment. I didn't realize that at the time I had no idea what it was or what to do about it.

Looking back, I know that that's what it was. I didn't know that then. Luckily, I wanted to leave that job anyway. I hope all of this that I've shared is helping you to put your polls for approval or the fears that you have about being disapproved of in a new light. Yes, of course, we each bring our own personal history and what has been previously wired as essential for survival is a strong force and is most likely the reason most women struggle changing this pattern or experience great fear in even thinking about doing so.

I hope it will also encourage you to stop and consider whether the striving that you're doing in your life is as life-threatening as it may feel. you don't finish on your list today and instead take some time to laugh or play? Or is it possible the fear that is driving you is actually the fear of the women who came before you, who did actually fear for their lives if they weren't good enough?

Okay, that's it for this episode. We'll definitely come back to this tendency to keep striving to be good enough and look at it from other angles. Until next time, take good care and bye-bye.

This has been Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to supporting you in blooming into all you are meant and wish to be. If you enjoyed it and gained value, please consider leaving a review, as it will help other women to find it and please share it with anyone who would benefit from it. And if you would like to be notified when new episodes become available, be sure and follow on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, how will you light a candle of self-acceptance? Because you deserve to be you, even if others disagree.