Introduction: InfluencedIs there a truer version ofyou hiding in there?When I wrote On Our Best Behavior, I wanted to pull apart the cultural programming that was running my life: specifically, the impulse I felt inside compelling me to be a good woman, the cattle prod pushing me to actually perform this goodness in the world. What is this? I wondered. And where did this come from? And more pointedly: Why am I so terrified to give up this act?
As I began my research, I knew I was working with a core premise: In our persistently patriarchal culture, women are conditioned for goodness, just as men are conditioned for power. To deviate from these edicts—for a woman to be perceived as “bad,” for a man to be perceived as “weak” or “feminine”—is a type of social death. If we want something different for both women and men, we need to change these constructs. But we cannot do this until we come to understand how they constrain our lives.
Being a “good” woman, in a culturally sanctioned and adjudicated way, feels like the only real path to safety in our society. Reputational harm for women is dangerous, if not deadly: All you have to say is that a woman is bad, an unreliable friend, a cold mother, a toxic co-worker or boss, and she’s done. Women will disappear themselves when these assaults on their goodness come: Cue every celebrity takedown, the removal of female founders, and so on. Our culture is a graveyard of women’s reputations, and we are our own gravediggers. What’s particularly pernicious is that women are trained to police not only ourselves but each other. Meanwhile, men can pretty much do anything that’s grievous and harmful, so long as we perceive them as powerful.
You might scream, “I don’t believe this” or “I don’t choose this,” but this is a (current) endemic reality in our Western society. I wish we could hit the “Unsubscribe” button or send this messaging straight to a spam folder with a single click, but that’s not how our culture works. As I wrote in On Our Best Behavior:
Culture is contagious: We pass it on to each other like a virus. It permeates everything. No one wholly invents themselves. Culture is whispered into us, transmitted through almost every interaction. “Nature” and “culture” are conflated and debated—the question of whether culture drives behavior or behavior creates culture will never be answered. What is apparent, though, is how twisted many of us feel, like a snake eating its own tail: What’s me, versus the me I think I’m supposed to be?
By culture and nature I simply mean that we’ve been told stories as old as time about what a good woman is (hint: she hangs out in caves, nursing and tending to her young, waiting for her valiant man to return from a hunt or fight so she can reward him with sex), and we’re convinced this is some version of our destiny—that to do something other than what our “nature” dictates is deviant. But this is actually a cultural story: Women were hunters too. Men have been caregivers since the dawn of time. It’s our culture that dictates narrow bands of behavior. We may think we can opt out by ignoring these ideas, but it’s not that simple.
Can you relate to any of this? A good woman is never tired. A good woman doesn’t really want anything for herself; in fact she’s happy to subjugate everything she wants to other people’s needs. Speaking of needs, a good woman needs no attention, affirmation, or praise. A good woman has no appetite; in fact she has unswerving discipline for keeping her body small, under control, and compliant. A good woman doesn’t talk about money (it’s base!) and keeps the general economy humming and her own budget tightly constrained. A good woman is desirable but never desiring, sexy but not sexual. And a good woman is never upset—furious or depressed—about any of this.
This paragraph upsets me—in part, because I can recognize that despite doing the work to disentangle myself from these stories for many years, I’m still susceptible to them. They’re tricky, particularly the idea that a good woman should subjugate her wants to other people’s needs. To pursue what you want for yourself feels selfish, specifically in a culture that mandates that women should actually be selfless. Courtney and I are here to offer that there’s a middle path—a way to prioritize self-expression and relationship simultaneously.
On Our Best Behavior explores why and how these rules about women and goodness came to be. This workbook will help you figure out what to do. It reveals how you can choose something else instead. We outline a process that begins by identifying the stories that are running your life, stories so closely held they’ve actually become your unconscious beliefs. As we tease these out in the following pages, you will choose new stories and beliefs that do not impinge on your ability to be yourself. The original word for sin—hamartia—means “to miss the mark”: Our very human instincts, appetites, and desires are GPS points. When we get rigid about our stories, and about who we should or should not be, we lose our ability to attend to this internal radar.
You can’t shift the world alone. Too often, we’re fed the lie that all problems are personal and that working on ourselves is enough—and that if it’s not enough, there’s something wrong with us. But changing culture is collective work, not individual work—even though it begins with ourselves. This workbook is about identifying what’s running us, all of us, and helping each other become free. As you do this work, help a friend do it too so that you model your freedom for each other and support each other on a path to wholeness—a wholeness that includes every part of you.
After I published On Our Best Behavior, a good friend and Jungian psychologist commented that I had written a book about the cultural shadow of femininity. I had named everything that we’ve been conditioned to label as “bad” and thus disown—our appetites, our need for recognition and rest, our desire to say what we really want, and feel, and think. These natural human urges don’t go “elsewhere” when we disavow them: we simply repress and suppress them in our bodies, and then ultimately project them onto other people (see the “Envy” chapter in On Our Best Behavior).
The poet Robert Bly offers a handy metaphor for this in A Little Book on the Human Shadow, as he likens our shadow to a trash bag that we haul around: “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding which parts of ourselves to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” I had to laugh because not only was my friend’s observation true—On Our Best Behavior is about the cultural shadow of femininity—but as an obsessed Carl Jung freak who works with a Jungian therapist, I had failed to see what I was up to. While I kept filling my Hefty until I was forty, I had just done two years of shadow work while writing the book, extracting all the parts of myself that I had denied. This work continues to this day.
As I wrote On Our Best Behavior, people often asked me if the book was about being really bad as an antidote—you know, was I going to spend a year pursuing all the sins, like sleeping with strangers, eating my way through the county’s myriad buffets, and telling off strangers in the security line at LAX. “Not quite,” I would reply, often to looks of disappointment. “It’s a book about balance, about letting all our very human appetites and impulses come up so that we can reconcile them rather than pretending that they don’t exist.” On Our Best Behavior is about swapping out the pursuit of “goodness” and its veneer of perfection for the pursuit of wholeness instead—a wholeness that’s large enough to contain every single part of us. I recognize that it can be terrifying for women to give up the label of goodness: “Who am I if I’m not a good mother?” Or “I don’t know who I would be if I weren’t a good citizen, an activist, someone who stands up for what’s right.” We’re not asking you to give up goodness wholesale; we’re asking you to replace the rigidity with which you hold this pursuit of perfection and its dialed-up behavioral code with something flexible and human instead. We are asking you to relax into the recognition and understanding that the depth and texture of your character and humanity come from your shadowy parts too. Let them in. It takes an awful lot of energy to stuff those parts away and keep that trash bag closed as you haul it through your days. Meanwhile, that trash bag is full of gold, should you dare to look.
Copyright © 2025 by Elise Loehnen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
