I want to talk today about good girl syndrome, or good person syndrome. This is something that has infected – I think I’m going to bring some humor in this post – pretty much every person on this planet. There may be somebody who’s more in the opposite — bad person syndrome — but even underneath that, there’s a good person syndrome running too.

So what is it? We claim to be good. It’s a claim we make that we are inherently good — we are not bad, we are good. See if you can take a moment to reflect: how do you identify as good?

I am here to tell you — you, me, we’re actually bad. Let me get into this.

How It Starts

Whether you’re on a spiritual journey or not, we as humans really want to claim to be good. And often what happens when we claim to be good is that the parts of us that are bad — they don’t go anywhere. They haven’t disappeared. They haven’t gone off to some alternate universe. The only alternate universe they’ve gone to is that we’re no longer conscious of how bad we are.

When we were kids, if we were allowed, we had our feelings — and even if we weren’t allowed, we still had them. We had jealousy. We had hate. Sibling rivalry. Anger. We really wanted to get our revenge on others. Before we learned to filter it — before we learned that having all those feelings and acting them out isn’t good — we just allowed them. We had them. And sometimes we got stuck in them: maybe I felt really jealous as a child, and if I got stuck there, I’d either verbalize it or throw a tantrum, throw my whole body into it.

Children have a tendency to throw their bodies onto the ground, cry, really move their whole body — and honestly, that’s a very healthy maneuver. They know the wisdom of transforming feelings through the body so they can feel like themselves again, feel light again, feel happy again, and go play. Children don’t get stuck in their feelings the way we think — they have them, and they have an innate wisdom for how to transform them.

Then we get taught — and this is an important part of a healthy ego, we do need a healthy inner structure — that as adults, when we don’t get our way, when we feel jealous or angry, not to throw our bodies to the ground and have a tantrum. Or, if you break my cup, I’m going to break your cup. As we grow, we learn that acting it out that way isn’t going to serve us. We need to find a different way to work with those feelings, to be with them.

But a lot of times, instead of building a healthy moral structure that simply keeps us from acting feelings out, we internalize something else — we split the feelings off underneath. We don’t just feel our jealousy, our anger, our hate, our wanting revenge — we learn to split those feelings off. So we don’t feel them, or we feel them but don’t know what to do with them, so we find something to bury them under. Usually we suppress or repress the feelings in the body.

The Two Camps

That doesn’t mean we never act out — there are plenty of situations where we do. As we split these feelings off, or don’t know how to transform them because we’re caught in this image of being good, what happens is we either act them out completely unconsciously, or we act them out and it’s not unconscious at all. If we yell at somebody, we’re not pretending we didn’t yell — we know we yelled. If I break your cup because you broke mine, I know I broke it. So there are two camps here.

One camp acts out completely unconsciously — we don’t even realize these feelings are coming through, no awareness of it at all. The other camp acts it out and defends it with a sense of righteousness: I am right, and that’s why I did it.

I want to come back and emphasize — I am not in any way condoning breaking someone’s cup. That’s not the point of this. What I want to say is that it’s really important to own the feelings, so we can have a healthier relationship to them.

I think everything is really on a continuum, not as split as I’m making it sound — it’s not either you yell or you repress. Most of us fall somewhere in that range. Some of us repress more and go into pity, or victimhood — pretending to be kind and compassionate while something underneath is happening that we’re not quite aware of.

When we repress anger, rage, jealousy, some of us get our revenge from the other — an under-the-table kind of comment, something that sounds like a compliment but is actually pretty mean. That’s one way. The other is we get our revenge from ourselves — binge eating, or any number of things, really — we don’t know what to do with the feeling, so we take it out on ourselves. We cry, we lie in bed all day, we don’t take care of our bodies. Our actions are harming ourselves.

And there’s the version where we yell at somebody, or make that comment that sounds like a compliment but isn’t, or even pity someone as a quiet form of acting out. Most of this is passive-aggressive, and usually the person doing it isn’t conscious of it — though sometimes they are.

So we all have ways we act out. No one is immune from being bad. Okay, we all act out towards others, towards ourselves, consciously, unconsciously, righteously, clouded in kindness or compassion, but really acting out. Withdrawing is one way. Even making “innocent” mistakes can be one way. There are so many ways, I can’t name them all.

It’s Just an Image

What we’re really doing — in not being aware that we’re acting out, or justifying it as righteousness, or being identified with it – we are trying to preserve a good person image. It’s just an image. And why is it just an image? Because we’re still acting out all of those feelings, just not consciously.

What To Do About It

My teacher Faisal, in the Diamond Logos tradition, often tells us — when we’re doing a process — don’t worry, you’re bad.

If you can say to yourself, yes, I am bad, I am truly bad, you can start to feel the delight in it. There’s actually delight in feeling your badness. You’re no longer protecting an image of goodness — and that is so much work, right? You’re just admitting: I do good things sometimes, I do really bad things sometimes. Or, I am really bad. I have bad feelings, let’s say.

That doesn’t mean you get rid of the healthy part that says, don’t kill anyone. Don’t break that person’s cup because they hurt your feelings. That part needs to be there. We need that in our society — the healthy part that keeps us from actually behaving in bad ways. We need it.

So, first thing: admit, with delight, I am really bad. I am the worst. I am absolutely the worst. Delight in that.

Step two: allow those feelings. It’s natural to feel jealous, to want revenge, to feel hate, anger, envy, whatever it is — allow the feelings in you. They transform. They really do.

Step three: when you allow these feelings, feel them in your body. That’s the trick. If you’re feeling anger — I talk about this one a lot because it’s the easiest — feel it in your body, and as you feel it, it transforms into aliveness.

I had a moment of this while I was trying to think about this, actually. I think it was jealousy, or imagining that I was feeling jealous. And as I said, I’m just going to allow this feeling — and I noticed I started feeling embraced in my body.

The feelings come up to be felt. It takes some muscle sometimes to feel them — the capacity to ground, to not fully identify with the feeling, to keep your awareness so you’re aware that you’re feeling, instead of completely becoming the feeling. Children, when they feel something, mostly become it completely. We can do that too as adults — we feel scared, and we become fear.

So one of the tricks to not become the feeling is to also feel it: where is it in your body? How does it feel? Is it tightness in your stomach? Or is it actually warmth, as you allow it? It might feel like warmth, or lightness, or pleasure, or aliveness. The resisting, the repressing, the suppressing — that’s what often ends up as tightness or tension. Shoulders up. There’s a critical voice underneath, one we’re usually unconscious of, saying: hey, stop it, don’t feel this, you’re good.

When we do this — when we allow our badness internally, feel it in the body — the ego, the mind, automatically lets go of the content, because we’re already starting to feel so good inside.

Some of us have a tendency to grab onto it instead and recycle it back into the mind until it gets bigger and bigger — that’s strengthening the wrong muscle. We don’t want to feed that loop back into our ego so we can feel even more righteous, even more indignation about what we feel, or even more victimhood. You know – “Oh my gosh, I’m so good, they’re so bad” — and feel even more victimized. That’s not the way.

The way is to transform it in the body – to pleasure, to warmth, to lightness, to confidence, to aliveness – back to your real self. Not to the good image, but to your real self. To real goodness. It’s real goodness.

Actually, anger transforms into aliveness. Real goodness. Whatever it is that you’re feeling – jealousy, hate, whatever it is –  transforms back to pleasure or lightness – that’s the real goodness. Real goodness. Real you.