More Fury/Good-Girl Relevant stuff from Victoria Secunda: “Every daughter starts out as an Angel…Being a good girl has enormous rewards. And not being good has terrible consequences. If I’m not good, I will be abandoned. Well, perhaps not literally. But when a mother yells, or doesn’t come when a child cries, or shrugs us off when she’s irritated, it is a kind of abandonment. So she tries even harder to be a good girl. She may even become angelic. The Angel is the best little girl of all… ‘The best little girl role is easy to learn,’ writes Dr. Louise J. Kaplan, ‘if one is intelligent, if one is not too aggressive, if one is fairly adept at reading what one’s audience wants and then mirroring it back. The rules are relatively simple. One looks into the other’s face and emulates what one is supposed to be.’ And partly it is the Angel’s natural temperament to be so very good.  Generally she is an unusually empathetic sort and realizes that something is missing in her relationship with her mother.  She will fix it by being ideal… These Angels take their ‘jobs’ very seriously.  Since they have nowhere to hide—most of them have passive fathers who seldom take their part, and (because many are firstborn children) lack an older sibling’s comforting arms—they have no alternative but to take up the cudgel of their mothers’ expectations. The tragic flaw in the Angel’s survival mechanism is that the very thing she seeks by her good behavior—closeness—is often the very thing that makes her mother recoil. The Angel is not merely imagining that her mother doesn’t love her enough. There is something about the Angel that, indeed, does turn her mother off like a switch: It is that while the mother may love servitude, she often hates dependency. If the Angel is All Good, how then can her mother be the most perfect? The mother cannot allow her daughter to outshine her saintliness, cannot permit a comparison wherein she doesn’t measure up to her child’s goodness.  She must therefore keep her daughter not good enough. But the Angel doesn’t get it: she doubles her efforts to please, becoming her mother’s most ardent supporter and feverish servant… When the Angel is growing up, she is too young to understand the bargain she has struck, or its consequences: She gives up herself to gain her mother’s love.  But often she very well understands, if only on an instinctive level, that there is something that feels phony about her good-girl role—she feels as though she were performing a tap dance, doing a routine.  There is no denial like an Angel’s denial. Says psychotherapist Ann Gordon: When a client shows up in my office with her life in shambles, at the same time claiming she had a wonderfully happy childhood, I suspect that claim represents a strong defense against fear and guilt. She learned well and early never to criticize her mother. It takes a strong transference of trust to the therapist to dare to admit that there was something amiss in her childhood. The mother exploits the Angel to gain herself what she lost in childhood—her mother’s own unconditional love.  Now, at last, she will extract from her Angel a sense of worth.  It is a worth that needs constant attention, and the Angel is on perpetual duty.  Consequently, the mother’s bad behavior is reinforced. The Angel uses a coping mechanism called “identifying with the aggressor.” As we know from people who join cults as well as from victims of terrorism or prisoners of war, when your survival depends on pleasing a person who has complete power over you, it is a matter of life and death to be nice. Only with a lot of help can the Angel give up her idealization of her mother, taking the good parts of Mom and coming to terms with the bad.  Only then can the Angel decide how far she is willing to go in her emulation, and how willing she is to become a separate individual with a mind of her own—perhaps resembling her mother in some ways, but without becoming her mother’s clone.” - Victoria Secunda Photo Credit: Flickr/Elli 19

More Fury/Good-Girl Relevant stuff from Victoria Secunda:

“Every daughter starts out as an Angel…Being a good girl has enormous rewards.

And not being good has terrible consequences. If I’m not good, I will be abandoned. Well, perhaps not literally. But when a mother yells, or doesn’t come when a child cries, or shrugs us off when she’s irritated, it is a kind of abandonment.

So she tries even harder to be a good girl. She may even become angelic.

The Angel is the best little girl of all… ‘The best little girl role is easy to learn,’ writes Dr. Louise J. Kaplan, ‘if one is intelligent, if one is not too aggressive, if one is fairly adept at reading what one’s audience wants and then mirroring it back. The rules are relatively simple. One looks into the other’s face and emulates what one is supposed to be.’

And partly it is the Angel’s natural temperament to be so very good.  Generally she is an unusually empathetic sort and realizes that something is missing in her relationship with her mother.  She will fix it by being ideal…

These Angels take their ‘jobs’ very seriously.  Since they have nowhere to hide—most of them have passive fathers who seldom take their part, and (because many are firstborn children) lack an older sibling’s comforting arms—they have no alternative but to take up the cudgel of their mothers’ expectations.

The tragic flaw in the Angel’s survival mechanism is that the very thing she seeks by her good behavior—closeness—is often the very thing that makes her mother recoil. The Angel is not merely imagining that her mother doesn’t love her enough. There is something about the Angel that, indeed, does turn her mother off like a switch: It is that while the mother may love servitude, she often hates dependency.

If the Angel is All Good, how then can her mother be the most perfect? The mother cannot allow her daughter to outshine her saintliness, cannot permit a comparison wherein she doesn’t measure up to her child’s goodness.  She must therefore keep her daughter not good enough.

But the Angel doesn’t get it: she doubles her efforts to please, becoming her mother’s most ardent supporter and feverish servant…

When the Angel is growing up, she is too young to understand the bargain she has struck, or its consequences: She gives up herself to gain her mother’s love.  But often she very well understands, if only on an instinctive level, that there is something that feels phony about her good-girl role—she feels as though she were performing a tap dance, doing a routine. 

There is no denial like an Angel’s denial. Says psychotherapist Ann Gordon: When a client shows up in my office with her life in shambles, at the same time claiming she had a wonderfully happy childhood, I suspect that claim represents a strong defense against fear and guilt. She learned well and early never to criticize her mother. It takes a strong transference of trust to the therapist to dare to admit that there was something amiss in her childhood.

The mother exploits the Angel to gain herself what she lost in childhood—her mother’s own unconditional love.  Now, at last, she will extract from her Angel a sense of worth.  It is a worth that needs constant attention, and the Angel is on perpetual duty.  Consequently, the mother’s bad behavior is reinforced.

The Angel uses a coping mechanism called “identifying with the aggressor.” As we know from people who join cults as well as from victims of terrorism or prisoners of war, when your survival depends on pleasing a person who has complete power over you, it is a matter of life and death to be nice.

Only with a lot of help can the Angel give up her idealization of her mother, taking the good parts of Mom and coming to terms with the bad.  Only then can the Angel decide how far she is willing to go in her emulation, and how willing she is to become a separate individual with a mind of her own—perhaps resembling her mother in some ways, but without becoming her mother’s clone.”

- Victoria Secunda

Photo Credit: Flickr/Elli 19