Belle Burden: The Burden of Being the "Good Girl"

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary
Good Inside with Dr. Becky
Episode: Belle Burden: The Burden of Being the "Good Girl"
Release Date: July 21, 2026
Guest: Belle Burden, author of Strangers

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Overview

In this insightful episode, Dr. Becky Kennedy sits down with Belle Burden—whose childhood nickname, “Belle the Good Burden,” reveals much about the episode’s focus: the long-term costs of being the “good girl.” They explore how the identity of being a compliant, self-sacrificing child can become a burden in adulthood, especially in the wake of personal upheaval—like Belle’s sudden divorce. Together, they trace the origin and repercussions of this identity, how it shapes family patterns, parenting, and individual growth, and how one can begin to reclaim a truer sense of self.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Moment Life Became Unrecognizable

• [01:57] Belle’s Story: In March 2020, just after the pandemic lockdown began, Belle unexpectedly discovered her husband’s affair via a voicemail from a stranger. The revelation—and her husband’s departure just hours later—left her life and future unrecognizable.
  • Quote (Belle, 02:17): “My life became completely unrecognizable to me, including my future, which I had really thought would look a certain way and be a certain way. And then all of a sudden it was going to be something completely different.”
• [04:34] Violation of Expectations: Dr. Becky reframes Belle’s experience through the lens of child development—a “violation of expectations,” when reality diverges radically from what was believed, causing deep destabilization.

2. Psychological Insights: Parts, Compartmentalization, and Coping

• [05:58] Multiple Parts of Self: Dr. Becky discusses how people operate in “parts.” Compartmentalization—like that seen with Belle’s ex-husband—can make it possible to live in seeming contradiction until forced to confront internal dissonance.
  • Quote (Dr. Becky, 06:03): “What you saw was what you were getting. You maybe just never had access to this other part that suddenly showed up… that can be a part of it, too.”
• [07:20] Belle’s Reflection: Belle recognizes that this explanation clarifies her experience: her husband seemed to truly live as “multiple versions,” and she only encountered the hidden part during the crisis.

3. Blame, Fault, and Shifting the Spotlight

• [09:09] Rethinking Fault: Belle discusses the tendency to assign fault after a relationship ends, and how the lack of transparency from her ex made it impossible for her to engage or fix anything. She moves past blame by turning the investigative spotlight inward—not to take blame, but to understand her own choices and patterns.
  • Quote (Belle, 11:19): “Once I did that, I really think it unlocked me and really like made me able to literally shift to looking forward, rather than looking behind.”
• [12:23] Dr. Becky on Learning vs. Blame: Distinguishing blame from curiosity allows for learning and growth instead of shame or resentment.

4. Family Patterns and Emotional Inheritance

• [13:28] Family Legacy: Belle unpacks how family history, including her father’s death and financial chaos, influenced her to seek security and let her husband “take care of her.” She also notes the multigenerational legacy of infidelity and silence in her maternal line—patterns she ultimately rejects by choosing openness and sharing her story in Strangers.

5. The “Good Girl” Paradigm

• [18:32] Becoming the Good Girl: Belle describes adopting the “good girl” identity in a family of strong personalities, keeping the peace by being compliant and attentive rather than disruptive.
  • Quote (Belle, 18:51): “I became like I was just gonna be the good girl and follow the rules so that the apple cart didn’t get upset even more than it was.”
• [20:13] The Burden of Goodness: Dr. Becky and Belle reflect on the paradoxical burden carried by “good girls”—noting that such girls become experts at attuning to others, often at the expense of their own needs or desires.
  • Quote (Dr. Becky, 20:29): “Being a good girl really just means I have learned to pay attention outside into my environment... My own needs is actually the greatest threat.”
  • Quote (Belle, 21:13): “It's true. It’s a dangerous proposition.”

6. Parenting Through Trauma

• [22:16] Parenting in a Crisis: The pandemic lockdown paradoxically gives Belle more time for emotional processing, but parenting through trauma is grueling. Guidance from a therapist about handling disclosure to her daughters—waiting until the pandemic felt less scary—failed to account for kids’ deep perception.
• [24:52] Children as Expert Perceivers: Dr. Becky explains that even in the absence of explicit information, children are acute observers. When kids’ perceptions don’t match adult narratives, self-doubt and maladaptive coping can develop, akin to self-gaslighting.
  • Quote (Dr. Becky, 26:43): “So I can't… I guess like not trusting myself is something I should just hold with me as I get older because I kind of keep messing this up.”

7. Rebuilding and Reclaiming Self

• [27:24] Life After Loss: Belle describes how the devastation of divorce stripped her to her emotional core—but also unlocked creativity and authenticity she hadn’t accessed since childhood. Writing became a way to reclaim her identity beyond the “good girl.”
  • Quote (Belle, 28:05): “I just became more relaxed with my kids, in my life, with friends. I can tolerate mess and chaos… All of this came. And I think it's a different life... closer to my true nature.”

8. Where Is “Belle the Good” Now?

• [30:04] Integrating the Good Girl: The “good girl” part isn’t gone but no longer dominates. Belle is now more willing to tolerate criticism and prioritize her needs, even when it evokes discomfort.
  • Quote (Belle, 31:11): “It’s a part of me, but there are more parts of me now… I'm more able to tolerate [judgment] than I would have been before.”
• [31:40] True Goodness Comes from Within: Dr. Becky offers a reframing: “good girl” behavior is about external validation, but genuine “good inside” comes from within and can weather criticism.

9. Practical Tools and Gentle Challenges

• [34:11] Dr. Becky’s Homework: To help listeners address their own “good girl” habits, Dr. Becky promises to provide three low-barrier steps in the show notes—ways to gently loosen the grip of this identity.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the shock of betrayal:
  “I felt a full-bodied shock… my life became unrecognizable.”
  — Belle Burden [02:12]

• On compartmentalization:
  “Maybe he, for the first time, was in a house with both versions of himself.”
  — Belle Burden [08:29]

• On breaking intergenerational silence:
  “The most important thing was actually sort of cleaning it up and protecting the man in the story. And where I ended up was, I think that's really part of the problem.”
  — Belle Burden [15:08]

• On children’s intuition:
  “Kids are expert perceivers... when the things they notice aren’t confirmed... self-doubt becomes a very adaptive coping strategy for kids.”
  — Dr. Becky [25:00]

• On reclaiming self:
  “It's a different life. I think it's a more interesting life and a more fun life and probably closer to my true nature.”
  — Belle Burden [28:57]

• On the internal “good”:
  “Goodness comes from gazing out, getting something outside of us and bringing it back in... It sounds like you have an increasingly developed or you’re just back in touch with something that I think was never missing.”
  — Dr. Becky [31:40]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:57] — Belle’s pivotal moment: discovering the affair
• [04:34] — Violation of expectations and the impact of shock
• [09:09] — The discussion on fault and turning focus inward
• [13:28] — Family patterns: financial security and infidelity
• [18:32] — Growing up the “good girl” in a turbulent family
• [20:13] — The true cost of “being good”
• [22:16] — Parenting during and immediately after the crisis
• [24:52] — Dr. Becky unpacks children’s perception and self-doubt
• [27:24] — Belle reflects on rebuilding her selfhood post-divorce
• [30:04] — Integrating (but not erasing) the “good girl” identity
• [34:11] — Actionable advice for unwinding the “good girl” paradigm

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Tone & Style

The conversation is empathetic, thoughtful, and candid—marked by Dr. Becky’s clinical insight and Belle’s vulnerability as a memoirist. The tone balances warmth, reflection, and practical wisdom, with both women weaving personal and universal experiences into a dialogue that feels both validating and motivating.

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Closing Thoughts

This episode is an honest, moving reflection on the “burden of being good”—illuminating how childhood survival strategies can become adult limitations, and how loss or crisis can catalyze true personal change. Listeners are encouraged to practice gentler self-inquiry, recognize learned patterns, and take small actionable steps toward more authentic living.

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For Dr. Becky’s “3 small steps,” refer to the episode show notes.

Transcript

[Dr. Becky]

Raise your hand if you were the good girl.

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Me?

[Dr. Becky]

I mean, you were the kid who stayed in line. You were pretty compliant. You were easy, right? I mean, you might have been favorite child, but in today's podcast, I come across a question that I had never considered in this exact way before. What if being good is a burden? And what if the burden of being good doesn't really show up until we're a lot older? We're adults, and maybe it shows up in an especially intense way once we're a parent. Today's guest is Belle Burden. Interestingly, Belle was nicknamed Belle the good Burden. So we are talking about exactly that. Belle Burden wrote a memoir called Strangers about the sudden unraveling of her long marriage during the early days of the pandemic. As I read Belle's story, I kept thinking, okay, this book is about a marriage kind of. It's about so many of the other things that we think about all the time, especially as women, how we can be very good. But maybe that's more about our ability to notice other people's needs and take care of them and our simultaneous ability to completely ignore and distance ourselves from the things we need for ourselves. So today, Belle and I are talking about what happens when the life you built around being good stops protecting you. I'm Dr. Becky. This is good inside. Bel when. When did it start to feel like your life was kind of something you no longer recognized? And for listeners who haven't yet read Strangers, can you take us into the moment when it just feel like things were falling apart?

[Belle Burden]

So it was March of 2020, the second week of COVID lockdown. I think we all remember that time and how scary it was and how unpredictable. We did not know whether we were going to get a vaccine, how long school was going to be out. And my husband and I moved to Martha's Vineyard with our two daughters. We had an isolated place. It felt like it was going to be safe and it really felt that way for about a week. We were cooking and taking walks. He was chopping wood and making fires. And one night after dinner, I was mopping the floor and I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. I let it go to voicemail and then I played it and it was a man saying, I'm trying to reach Bell. I'm sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife. And I felt a full bodied shock. I think this is the moment where my life became unrecognized. I thought I was very Happily married. I thought we were very devoted to each other. I was very much in love with my husband. And that night he really tried to explain it. He apologized, he said it didn't mean anything. But at 6am the next day, he came into our bedroom with a bag fully packed and said that he thought he was happy, but he wasn't. He thought he wanted our life, but he didn't. And he wanted a divorce. He did not want any custody of our kids and that he was leaving. And he walked out and he left the island and really became someone I didn't know anymore. And my life became completely unrecognizable to me, including my future, which I had really thought would look a certain way and be a certain way. And then all of a sudden it was going to be something completely different.

[Dr. Becky]

Like 12. I'm just trying, like 6pm Voicemail. 6am Departure or is this like a 12 hour kind of thing?

[Belle Burden]

It's, you know, still hard to know. I don't know if maybe it was more planned in his head, but for me it felt like a 12 hour turnaround and I didn't sleep that night. He did sleep, but I didn't sleep. And you know, it's possible that he felt caught and so that prompted him to want to get out. We were facing being in a house together and doing therapy on Zoom. I thought to try and work through this and figure out if we could stay married, but he was not going to do that. I did not get a minute of therapy.

[Dr. Becky]

I'm trying to think about. There's this phrase I think a lot about in child development just called violation of expectations. Right. We have a lot of feelings and intense reactions in our body to anything that's a violation of expectations. And there's the pain. But in some ways a violation of expectation is like a surprise you never saw coming, which is almost separate from the pain. And I'm thinking about the violation of expectation around who he is about your marriage.

[Belle Burden]

But.

[Dr. Becky]

And I guess this is my question to you, maybe you could tell me a little bit about that. But sometimes when an intense violation of expectation happens, we look around and we're like, is that even a coffee mug? Like, is the sky? Everything feels like it's in question almost.

[Belle Burden]

Yes, it really felt that way. And if you put Covid on top of that and how surreal and like the Twilight Zone that felt. If you put the violation of expectation on top of that and on top of feeling vulnerable and scared, it did feel that way. As you said, every object, every Meal. Every task that used to be routine suddenly became something just. I looked at everything with completely different eyes.

[Dr. Becky]

It felt that destabilizing something I'm thinking about. I'll say it out loud, is yes to what you're saying. And the way I think about people is we operate in parts. And, you know, we all have multiple parts of ourselves. And one of the things that is kind of different between all of us is how much separation or almost like, knowledge of the other parts the other parts have. Right. Where, like, the most extreme version of this is multiple personality disorder. One part has no idea. That's very extreme. But we lose the fact that that can, you know, happen in a lot of our lives. I'm one version of myself at work, and another job comes and, like, wow, why can't I be capable or right? And so sometimes I just want to put it out there. And I've worked with so many people whose partners have had affairs. And yes, that kind of question, what did I miss? And what were the flags? And that's a worthwhile exploration because that can help us empower ourselves going forward. And the other thing I want to say is there are some people who are. The separation of those parts is so extreme in some ways, like that compartmentalization is so well practice that what you saw was what you were getting. It's just you didn't. You maybe just never had access to this other part that suddenly showed up after you heard that voicemail, you know, And I'm not saying that's true for you, but that. Yeah, that. That can be a part of it, too.

[Belle Burden]

I actually think that is true for me. I think that is true about my ex. I think that he's a compartmentalizer. And I think that it actually makes me feel a little bit better because I do think there were different versions of him maybe coexist. And the virgin that showed up that morning looking like his affect was completely different. That was another part of him that I may not have seen ever or in a long time.

[Dr. Becky]

Yeah. If I. Again, I know very little, and clearly there's much more that happened than you just shared in your book. But I think about a situation that has happened with some of the people I've seen in practice where it's like, you find out about it, and when you bring it up, it's kind of actually the first moment in your marriage that that partner has to confront both parts at the same time. And then maybe you get the part of husband. No. Okay, I'm good. And then kind of the next morning, that other part takes over, and it's like, I'm gone, you know? And maybe. Maybe that was the first moment. 12 hours before that, you kind of met that other version of your husband, or you saw a flicker of it,

[Belle Burden]

or maybe he, for the first time was in a house with both versions of himself.

[Dr. Becky]

Right, Exactly. Exactly. I have the chills, I think. Yeah, a hundred percent.

[Belle Burden]

And that makes you want to flee. You know, I. I can see that.

[Dr. Becky]

Right Then all of a sudden, it feels like a choice instead of a multiplicity. Which part I'm going to have to choose. Right, yeah, exactly.

[Belle Burden]

Exactly.

[Dr. Becky]

When hard things happen, I think we go into fault mode a lot. Like, whose fault is this? Is it your fault? Is it my fault? Sometimes I think. I don't know if fault is useful as, like, a way of learning, but. Yeah. How did fault come into play? Oh, it's his fault, it's my fault. And where is that now?

[Belle Burden]

It's a really important question, because I think I was so conscious of that in writing the book that I did not want to write a book that was all about placing blame at his feet. But I do think, and people say to me and have said to me in the past, that the end of a marriage is 50, 50. It takes two to tango. It's always two sides. And that can be true. I'm a child of two divorces, and that was certainly true in both of those cases. But I think it's hard to say that when the departing partner doesn't share at any point that they're unhappy. So there's no opportunity for him to say to me, I don't like how you do this. I'm not happy about this. I feel suffocated, or whatever it was going to be. And to give us a moment, not that I could have fixed things, but to give us a moment to work on it. I think it's hard to place faults at my feet when I wasn't given an opportunity to work on it. So that's how I sit with fault. That said, what helped me and what made things shift for me, and you can see me do it in the book, too, which felt like a separate process of doing it, is to look at myself in terms of the decisions that I made during the marriage, 20 years of marriage, or before the marriage, and think about how that redirected my life, what I was giving up, how I was turning away from my true instincts, how I might have been burying my ambitions, financial choices that I made, and when I started to look at that. Because I wasn't getting any answers from him. Like I just.

[Dr. Becky]

The.

[Belle Burden]

The investigation of him was going nowhere. It was like trying to get blood from a stone. So when I shifted to me and really started looking at decisions that again, not for fault, but that landed me where I was. How did I get to this place that I'm in once I started going through that inquiry? And my stepmother uses this trick of shifting the spotlight on a stage from him to me. Once I did that, I really think it unlocked me and really like made me able to like kind of literally shift to looking forward. Right. Rather than looking behind.

[Dr. Becky]

And I think what you're saying is that's why I think fault and blame are unhelpful frameworks. Because if it's my fault, I can't look at it anyway. I'm just shrouded in shame. If it's your fault, okay, I'm angry. No learning. But you're saying shifting the spotlight is, is a little more curious what's going on? Like what, what can I put pieces together just to understand the drawing a little better? So what did, what did you, what did you put together?

[Belle Burden]

I think there are a few different, like buckets. But I think I thought a lot about being attract meeting my husband and husband. We were both at law firms and I met him two years after my father died. And my father died very suddenly at 54 and left a mess of a financial situation. And I think part of my financial story with my husband was looking for some kind of protection. And he said to me, I'm going to take care of you. And that in that moment felt really romantic. It felt very wonderful. I think I have fallen in love with him anyway. I was madly in love with him. But my father dying suddenly and dealing with all that financial stuff I think put me more at risk of

[Dr. Becky]

just

[Belle Burden]

handing over my financial life in a way that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise. And my ex husband was very good with finances. He wasn't unethical, he was very honest. But I really put my head in the sand and did not a lot of visibility or understanding of where our assets sat and whose name was on what. So I think that was part of it. I think I thought a lot. And this started pretty quickly thinking about this, about the legacy of infidelity in my family. On my maternal line. Both my mother and my grandmother were with partners for decades that were unfaithful in a serial way. And I thought I had stopped that pattern by marrying someone who was so like just Very private, not a public figure, very calm, very mild mannered, seemingly very loyal. And there I was, having repeated this pattern in a way that was sort of even more explosive because my grandmother's husband and my mother's boyfriend of a few decades always wanted to come back. My husband didn't want to come back. So I thought, how have I ended up in this place? Like, now we're at three generations and this is going to happen to my kids, specifically my daughters. And I really wrestled with that. And where I came down on it was that I had watched both of them, both very formidable women in their own fields. The way they managed it was to stay totally quiet about it and to not talk about it and to not explain it to me, not even mention it, not talk to their friends. The most important thing was actually sort of cleaning it up and protecting the man in the story. And where I ended up was, I think that's really part of the problem. And when people don't talk about things, I think they get sort of in your bones and in your DNA and have a greater chance of being repeated. I do not have a background in psychology or anything like that, so you may disagree with me, but it felt that kind of pattern in my family. And then that kind of dovetailed with this thing inside me that I still can't fully explain, which is that from the first week I did not. I couldn't bear to lie about what was happening. He had wanted me to say that it was amicable, and I just couldn't do that. So where that all. That's sort of the thread that led me to starting to talk about this both, you know, in verbal conversations, but also in writing.

[Dr. Becky]

You know that time in summer when it's about 4pm You've been with your kids all day, you're drained because you're driving them everywhere. You've made snacks 15 times, and honestly, you want something around them that just feels like yours. Now, this is the part that gets a little serious, but stay with me. That's often a moment when a lot of parents reach for a glass of wine. And this is not a referendum on wine. But so many parents I know tell me, I don't even want to have it.

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Voice]

I don't like the way it makes

[Dr. Becky]

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[Belle Burden]

I think part of me came out that way. I was always very quiet. I did not speak until I was three, but then I spoke in full sentences. I was always an observer, always sort of hiding a bit. I was in a family with very strong personality and some tempers. Nothing physically violent, but a lot of tempers. And in that. And I would say that my mother, my father, my brother, my stepmother was not like that, but she was kind of managing everybody else. So in that, I think I became like I was just gonna be the good girl and follow the rules so that the apple cart didn't get upset even more than it was.

[Dr. Becky]

I'm sure you've talked about this, but when I was reading your book and thinking about Belle the Good. Okay. And I know you're like, Becky, you and everyone, I just couldn't help being like, are you kidding me? Her name is Belle the Good Burden. The Good Burden. Like, the burden of being good. Like, did someone make that up?

[Belle Burden]

No, they did not. Yes.

[Dr. Becky]

Tell me about that. It's like, so both poetic and it feels like AI wrote it because it's so obvious, you know?

[Belle Burden]

Right. It's really true. My name is quite. It fits into all of this a bit too closely, but it is a family name. Flobel is my real name, but yes. And Burden is obviously a family name, right?

[Dr. Becky]

But just the good burden. Like the burden of being the favorite child. The burden of being so good. The burden of being so contained. And I. And I have come to thank the good girl. Because I was one. No longer, Belle. No longer.

[Belle Burden]

No longer.

[Dr. Becky]

But I was. That's good. Good. That being a good girl really just means I have learned to play. I have learned to pay attention outside into my environment. And I am an expert at noticing what every person wants at the exclusion of ever gazing in and wondering what I might want for myself. Because I have learned that attachment and closeness and worth, and therefore peace comes from becoming so expert at other people that my own needs is actually the greatest threat. Like, that it becomes a threat, and then all of a sudden, the term good girl doesn't sound so great at all when you describe it that way.

[Belle Burden]

It's true. It's true. It's a dangerous proposition.

[Dr. Becky]

Ooh. Okay, I wanna turn to some of the parenting moments here. Cause I'm reading your book, I'm hearing your story and so many of your interviews. I kept thinking, okay, so here you are, ultimate violation of expectations. You went from, oh, my goodness, my husband's cheating on me. Okay, we're gonna work through it without 24 hours. Oh, my goodness. I don't have a husband. He's gone. He doesn't want custody of my children. I mean, I don't even know how the body can process both those things. And still life doesn't say, belle, we're gonna give you a pause button. Okay? We're gonna, like, just give you a pause button. You need a couple months to process this. Just your kids are taken care of. Like, you're making waffles or you're dealing with homework. I mean, there's, like, things. And so tell me a little bit about you. Processing feels like the wrong word. Just living through that while I think the day to day demands of parenting are still very much alive. Are you talking to your kids? Are you not like, what's going on?

[Belle Burden]

So first I would say that I did get more time than people normally do because of COVID So we were on an island where I did not have to go to school pickup. I did not have to go to meetings. I did not have to show up at a social event and pretend like everything was fine. I could spend. And I did spend hours walking. Miles walking. And I would weep as I walked. So I think people talk about walking through pain. I think I literally did Because I had that room to really feel every inch of it. I'm not sure I was making sense of it or making significant progress, but I definitely felt it, all of it. Whereas when my father died, I think I went right back to work or I was in law school. I went right back to being studious and all that stuff and didn't really process a lot of it at the same time. Yes, I had a 15 year old and a 12 year old and

[Dr. Becky]

I

[Belle Burden]

talked to a therapist about what to tell them and the therapist advised actually wait until the pandemic became less scary. And of course it didn't. So there was a month where I thought I was pretending everything was fine and their dad was in New York working. But I was not eating, my face was swollen and my older daughter had read a text on my iPad before I turned off notifications. So she knew already and I think would have noticed anyway. And she went into caretaker mode of starting to cook and feed me. My younger one did not know, so she was kind of operating as she normally would have. But I think my older daughter really stepped in and parented her too. So I walked through the motions of it. I went to the grocery store, I cooked. Sometimes my daughter cooked more. I made sure they got on zoom school, but I did was doing a really terrible job of it. I was.

[Dr. Becky]

You are surviving. I just want to get to that advice from the therapist. And this is not about lambasting some advice. I just. At all. There are no, there are no right answers for awful situations. They're just. That's not a thing. So.

[Belle Burden]

But I think this was the wrong advice, but go ahead.

[Dr. Becky]

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think the interesting thing to tie some of it together is kids are expert perceivers. They're always better than we are because their survival depends on us. So if you think about like a baby animal in the forest and then you think about the big stronger parent animal, that because the adult animal can survive more independently, they have to. They can be a little less hypervigilant to threats in the forest. They actually, it's. This is not actually psychological, it's just evolution where any younger child is inherently more helpless. So it's interesting. They actually have to be more hyper vigilant for their survival because they have to know, wait, could that be a threat? I don't know, but it could. I better go act as if it is because I'd be less likely to defend myself. So they're actually better at perceiving things. Right? What do we do as humans Especially kids who don't have the language. We do. What do you do as a kid when you notice something off, just off. This is so weird. I hear the word grandma cancer all the time. Grandma. I don't know, it's just right. Or, oh, I notice my mom in bed a lot. Or every time my mom says, dad's in the city. It just, I feel like it feels a little tone different than two years ago when she said, okay, so I'm noticing all that. What do I do? Because then everything else in my environment is telling me everything's normal, normal, normal as a, you know, whatever day at the park. I have to compartmentalize. I have to self doubt. Self doubt becomes a very adaptive coping strategy for kids when the things they notice aren't confirmed because it's very uncomfortable to be like, I think something's going on. No one's saying it. So the only answer to get back to homeostasis is I must not be that good at perceiving my environment.

[Belle Burden]

It's like gaslighting yourself or something.

[Dr. Becky]

Yeah, it's actually, I must not. Other people must know better than I do. People must be better at perceiving the things I perceive with my eyes than I do. Because clearly nothing's going around, so going on. So I can't. I guess like not trusting myself is something I should just hold with me as I get older because I kind of keep messing this up.

[Belle Burden]

So interesting. It's. It really makes so much sense.

[Dr. Becky]

Curious if you could speak a little bit just like where you are now, like, this happened. You survived it, you walked through the pain, you wrote about it, you've been on a tour about it. You've had lots of things happen since you released the book. I mean, yeah, just tell me a little about what's going on for you now.

[Belle Burden]

For me, I think what happened, which was to have all of these structures fall apart and like sort of be stripped down to this emotional core, was actually. And I listened to your podcast with Maya Shankar. Is that how you pronounce your last name?

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yes.

[Belle Burden]

Which was so great. And I think she said it beautifully, that these moments of change are really opportunities. Because when I got stripped down to that core, it was actually when I was able to write again, which is something I thought I was going to do at 18 and took a 30 year diversion into law from. And putting the book aside and the unexpected reception of is such a miracle to me that I'm writing again and that I can have a life as a writer. And I don't think I ever would have gotten there if I had stayed where I was in my marriage. I also think that I kind of became a more relaxed and easygoing person because I think when you're gripping so tight to everything being good in your family and perhaps things looking a certain way, when all of that is like blown up, I feel like I just became more relaxed with my kids, in my life, with friends. I can tolerate mess and chaos and all of that, a lot more. And I think I have deeper and more real friendships. So I never would have chosen this. I wanted an intact family more than anything and I loved my husband so much. But out of that pain and shock and difficult, really difficult few years, all of this came. And I think it's a different life. I think it's a more interesting life and a more fun life and probably closer to my true nature. And I love when I've had a lot of young people read the book, like Young 20s, and some of them have said that it makes them feel hopeful that even if things don't go according to plan, that there can be this other life on the other side. And I love that.

[Dr. Becky]

Yeah.

[Belle Burden]

Yeah.

[Dr. Becky]

And where's Belle the Good now? How's she doing? Where is she?

[Belle Burden]

So Belle the Goode, she's still there. She's still there. She's still compliant, I think to a certain degree. And any task that's assigned to her she will do. But I think I'm more conscious of. Of how that restricted me. So I'm trying to let that go. And I'm actually going to be thinking a lot about what you said about how you framed the good girl paradigm as maybe being a real negative.

[Dr. Becky]

And look, something I said to my 8 year old when he was having trouble falling asleep a little while ago, but I don't know why I'm thinking about it relative to what you just said. He's very worried at night. You know, what if this. And he can worry about like big worldly things unless something happens to you, you know, and that's like his worry. That's his worry part. Right. And I'm not going to undo the worries. Logic doesn't help with worries. Or it temporarily sues and then makes it worse the next day. And, you know, but I just, I said something that, that part is. It's a part of you and not all of you. It kind of sounds like that's what you're saying.

[Belle Burden]

It's a part of me, but there are more parts of me now and there's. There's a part of me that's very willing to have people judge me and willing to have people be shocked by me and maybe just some even condemn me for what I'm doing. But I'm still hard, but I'm more able to tolerate that than I would have been before.

[Dr. Becky]

Well, look, if we go back to this idea of good goodness, not true goodness, like a good inside. I think about goodness inside, but I think about the good girl. It's almost the opposite. It's goodness comes from gazing out, getting something outside of us and bringing it back in. Though the good would probably be eviscerated with all the criticism, because if she's so dependent on something outside to define herself, it sounds like you have an increasingly developed or you're just back in touch with something that I think was actually never missing. It was just probably blocked. A part of you that has that goodness and belief and conviction and clarity inside of you. And so, oh, that criticism sucks. Like, I've had that. It's no fun. And it's very different than that evisceration kind of feeling that's so helpful to

[Belle Burden]

frame it that way. And I think that's right. I think this allowed me to get to that internal place where I can find it within me rather than trying to bring it in. I think we all have that voice that's a little bit worried about something or a little bit, whether it's about finances or about your marriage. And I will just say, because it worked for me, I do think having a practice, you don't have to want to be a writer. You don't have to want to publish a book. But writing things down, I think can be really helpful to just kind of push yourself to articulate maybe something that you're feeling that you can't quite put your finger on. I think that was really, really helpful for me when everything kind of fell apart. And I wish I'd had a practice of doing that before. I think maybe it would have helped me

[Dr. Becky]

wake up a little bit. That was one of the most meaningful conversations I've had in a while. And I don't even just mean on this podcast. Right after we ended this recording, Belle and I were saying, geez, gotta go get coffee. We've gotta continue this conversation. And the other thing it left me with is something that I think you might also be wanting more of. I don't think Belle and I are the only two women on this planet who had that good girl identity when we were young and who are still in many ways trying to figure out what about that still works for us and what works against us. And that's kind of just step one.

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Okay.

[Dr. Becky]

It kind of works against me. Now what? Okay, what do I do?

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Voice]

And don't tell me something that's gonna be 10 out of 10 hard.

[Dr. Becky]

Here's what I want to do for you. I want to give you three things you can do today if you have still that kind of good girl part inside you speaking really loudly or kind of driving the car most of the time. And I promise you, these are three things that for each of them you're going to say, oh, a little uncomfortable, maybe like a 2 out of 10. But that's totally manageable. I'm going to type those up and I'm going to put them as a link in my show notes. And when you click and you get them, I'd love your feedback, honestly. Email me podcastinside.com Dr. Becky, you think that's a 2 out of 10? That's a 9 out of 10. I love being wrong because if I'm wrong, that helps me get it better for you the next time. So please let me know. Now let's place your feet on the ground. Me too. Let's place a hand on our heart and let's remind ourselves even as I struggle on the outside, even as I try to untangle being the good girl on the outside,

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Voice]

I remain

[Dr. Becky]

good inside. Looking forward to hearing from you. Here's an inconvenient truth about parenting.

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