Episode 91 - Good Girls, Glinda and Upholding the Patriarchy

When we cause harm to someone else, the good girl tendency is to feel shame and defensiveness. Instead, if we get to a place where we are generous and can grieve our mistakes, we can move on to be better versions of ourselves. In this episode, I talk about how the themes of Wicked relate to my journey of becoming an ex-good girl and the importance of self-compassion when you have to question your beliefs. Here’s what I cover:

• How the representation of power structures fueled by patriarchy in the Wicked movie relate to our society
• Why you can't grow into better versions of yourself without acknowledging that past versions made mistakes
• How my experience as a member of the Mormon church has similarities to Glinda’s character arc in Wicked
• Two good-girl beliefs that are roadblocks to learning from our mistakes and becoming better friends and allies
• How we have been conditioned to react to shame and think negatively about changing our mind
• Why we often jump to defend our beliefs instead of being open to the idea of exploring new ones

I can't wait for you to listen!

Read the Substack essay mentioned in the episode: Defying Gravity: Wicked and the Weight of Social Justice

Find Sara here:
https://sarafisk.coach
https://pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
https://www.instagram.com/sarafiskcoach/
https://www.facebook.com/SaraFiskCoaching/
https://www.tiktok.com/@sarafiskcoach
https://www.youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333

What happens inside the free Stop People Pleasing Facebook Community? Our goal is to provide help and guidance on your journey to eliminate people pleasing and perfectionism from your life. We heal best in a safe community where we can grow and learn together and celebrate and encourage each other. This group is for posting questions about or experiences with material learned in The Ex-Good Girl podcast, Sara Fisk Coaching social media posts or the free webinars and trainings provided by Sara Fisk Coaching. See you inside!
Book a Free Consult

Transcript

You are listening to the Ex-Good Girl Podcast, episode 91.

00:05

I'm still thinking about Wicked.

00:08

And seeing so much of what has been written about the movie and the characters in the couple of weeks since it's been out, it's really been on my mind because there is a good girl element at play here.

00:24

And I want to talk a little bit about it, offer some of my thoughts.

00:28

This is not a definitive discourse on anything.

00:31

No podcast episode ever is or should be.

00:34

And this is really some of my thoughts about how good girls uphold structures of power, just like you see Glinda upholding structures of power in the movie because she is not able for, I think, a lot of different reasons to to really challenge them in a way that would make her decisions the same decisions as the ones we see Elphaba making.

01:02

And you don't even have to know the plot of the movie to get something out of this episode, because I'm going to make it really personal.

01:12

You just need to know that Wicked is about fascism and genocide.

01:19

And what keeps the different characters from seeing that is the way that the structure of the power in Oz keeps them singing and dancing and not paying attention to what's going on, literally behind the curtain where you might find out that Oz is just a man with no power, but it also keeps them from seeing the harm that he is causing and their complicity in it.

01:52

And I want to talk about it from a personal vantage point, because I have been Glinda.

01:59

And I have been Glinda for a lot of different reasons, none of which are that I was a bad, malevolent person who wanted to harm other people, but I harmed other people.

02:14

I have been just kind of going back through the memory of when I was an active member of the Mormon Church and how I contributed to the power structure that keeps that religious organization going even today.

02:32

And I just wanted to name a couple of times when my participation in upholding that power structure, how I can see it clearly now,and what I've done about it, because here's what I know.

02:49

All of us are at different places of development and education and understanding.

02:57

And the way that we usually treat ourselves when we feel like we've made a mistake is with shame and self-destructive judgment, criticism, self-doubt, self-blame.

03:16

And I think that is one of the major roadblocks to us becoming better, better feminists, better ex-good girls, better allies to marginalized groups of people who need us, and to ultimately discovering how powerful we really are.

03:40

So let's start back at the beginning.

03:42

Well, not totally the beginning, but when I was an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which I refer to as Mormon land, that's for me a loving term and not a disparaging term.

03:54

I went to BYU.

03:55

Brigham Young University is the college, the university that the church pays for and runs.

04:03

And as you might guess in a conservative religion, there are a lot of rules at BYU.

04:10

And there is something called the honor code, and you are encouraged to report other students who break the rules.

04:19

And I did that once.

04:21

I knew someone who was engaging in premarital sex against the rules, and I wrote a letter to the honor code office about them.

04:32

I also.

04:35

wrote a letter to the school newspaper called the Daily Universe.

04:42

And I tried to find it, but their archives are like ridiculously hard to search.

04:48

And I wanted to be able to like quote my past self, but it's not going to happen.

04:52

So I'm just going to give you the gist.

04:53

The gist is I wrote a letter that said, anyone who comes to BYU and breaks the rules should leave.

05:02

because we are here to be obedient.

05:05

We are here to learn how to keep the rules and you should get out because there's someone else who could benefit from the place that you and your rule breaking are taking up.

05:20

I wrote that letter.

05:23

As I think about what was motivating me at the time, it was a belief that that's what was so important.

05:34

It was a belief that I was actually doing what was right, that that's what God wanted me to do.

05:42

And so one of the ideas that I really want us to explore together is what do we do when we realize that we caused harm?

05:54

I harmed the person that I reported to the honor code office, I harmed people who read the letter that I wrote to the editor and felt my judgment and criticism for the ways in which they were on their own personal journey, learning about themselves in this structure of obedience that was BYU.

06:18

And it's not the only harm I caused.

06:23

I said things to my gay brother-in-law that hurt him about beliefs I had, about what it meant to be gay, about how I would never let him babysit my children.

06:34

I have such a different view now that I would never, I don't believe, I would never say those things, but I did.

06:43

I caused that harm.

06:46

I went on a mission for my church that I did not know was a multi-billion dollar organization.

06:55

AndI sat in the homes of some of the poorest people in the world.

07:01

And I told them that to get baptized into the church, which I was there to encourage them to do, they had to pay tithing.

07:10

They had to pay money to an organization that already had billions of dollars and did not need their money.

07:19

I participated in moving money out of the hands of the poor into the coffers of one of the richest religious organizations on earth.

07:29

I think the current count is somewhere around $265 billion.

07:36

I did that.

07:38

I judged women in my congregation who complained about the lack of power and influence that women had in the church.

07:45

And I encouraged them to be grateful that we had what we had.

07:50

I was a teacher, and as I gave lessons to children and youth groups and women's organizations and Sunday school, you know, mixed gender I encouraged people to not critically think, to just have faith and obey.

08:10

And then once I was aware of the way that the church treated gay people and the way that the church treated women, and once I was beginning to really understand and have a personal problem with that, I still measured my words and worried about getting into trouble and losing the influence that I had.

08:30

And there were often times that I didn't say things as clearly or as precisely as I wanted to. I pretended, I performed.

08:42

I didn't rock the boat.

08:45

I obeyed those good girl rules and they caused harm.

08:51

And so what I want to talk about specifically is what we do when we realize that we have caused harm or that we are participating in perpetuating a system that has caused harm.

09:05

Because let me say right now, I don't believe that Glinda, as a character in Wicked or any of the women who are ignorantly supporting power structures that are fueled by patriarchy, we need to be hard on the systems, right?

09:23

We need to recognize that, you know, even in this movie, Glinda and Elphaba are just pawns in this bigger system of evil perpetuated by the wizard.

09:39

A man who is pretending to have power and keeping it by pitting groups of people against each other and creating enemies so that they don't recognize the genocide that is going on against, in the movie, the animals.

09:53

And the same thing is happening to us today.

09:57

There are groups of people who need people with the kind of privilege that I have, that many of you might have.

10:05

And remember, privilege just means we aren't struggling.

10:09

I'm not struggling with being an immigrant.

10:12

I'm not struggling with living below the poverty line, those just aren't obstacles that I am having to face.

10:21

And so I have the privilege of being a white-passing person who is able to speak in rooms that other people are not listened to.

10:34

I am not struggling with meeting day-to-day financial obstacles.

10:40

So that means I have some extra room in my life and in my mind to think about howI might be a better defender, a better ally, a better friend.

10:53

And I want to talk about what gets in the way of that.

10:56

I think there's two things.

10:58

First of all, we have a wrong-headed view of what it means to change our mind.

11:07

It is a socially taught idea that if we change our minds, that means we were wrong and that somehow we lose our credibility, or that if we were wrong in the past, we have to be hard on ourselves about that, that we can't apologize for wrongs that we held without looking like we are somehow less now.

11:36

This idea, I think, really is embedded in our religious institutions, because I I know that's where I got it from, and let me just speak for myself.

11:46

Because if a religious institution is led by God, then how can God change their mind without giving up the power that makes them God, this omniscient this omnipresence, right, whatever.

12:01

And I think that by being in a country that is so deeply embedded in Christianity, I think some of that leaks over into our personal idea of what happens when we change our mind.

12:19

We have the idea that someone who changes their mind is not trustworthy.

12:27

We see it you know in our politics, in the way that we attack or lose interest in politicians who change their mind.

12:37

And that trickles down.

12:39

Our ego takes a hit if our beliefs are tied to our goodness or our sense of self.

12:47

I am a person who believes this and I can't let it go.

12:52

because I've already believed it for so many years, or because if I change my mind, it means I'm bad or I'm wrong.

13:00

And that introduces, I think, the second obstacle, which is we all have parts that we're conditioned to react to shame.

13:12

And so we take the first obstacle, is this, we have this wrong-headed belief about what it means to change our mind, and we infuse it with shame, and then it becomes an exercise in defending our beliefs, rather than exploring different beliefs.

13:34

Why did I believe that?

13:36

Where did that come from?

13:39

How might that belief have served me, and how might it no longer serve me?

13:46

Because when I sat in homes of poor people and asked them to pay money, I was operating from the belief that that sacrifice of their money would bring God's blessings to them.

14:03

So I can have a lot of compassion for why I believed that.

14:10

It was my whole world.

14:12

That was everything I had been taught was right and true and good and the best thing I could do would be to bring other people into that belief.

14:23

If I have a shame response about that, then all I can do is go into defense, defending why I did that, defending why I believed that.

14:37

And that's when I get stuck in defensiveness rather than exploration.

14:44

And as long as I'm stuck in defending myself so that I don't feel shame, I cannot adequately grieve for the harm that I caused with compassion, with graciousness for myself, with generosity for who I was and what I believed in the past, and actually work through the grief and get to a place where I feel comfortable changing my mind, where I get comfortable standing up and advocating in new and different ways for communities that need my advocacy, that need me to use the privilege that I have to speak up for them and to speak with other people who have the same privilege I have and encourage them to see the obstacles that might be tripping them up to see the harm that they cause in a loving, generous container instead of a shameful, judgmental container.

15:54

The reason that all of this matters is that all of us perpetuate and create harm.

16:01

All of us do.

16:03

It's just not possible as a human to move through the world in a way in which you never harm anyone else.

16:11

And if our only option is that shame and defensiveness, we don't ever get to the place where we can be generous and loving with ourselves and grieve, and then move on to being a version of ourselves that causes less harm in that way.

16:32

That's the trap of the good girl.

16:34

She is so busy upholding the power structures like Glinda.

16:39

She is so busy trying to preserve the access that she has that she doesn't see the harm.

16:47

I want to read an excerpt from a just really incredible Substack essay that a friend sent to me this week.

16:55

The author is Frederick Joseph, and these are the words that they wrote.

17:02

The citizens of Oz do not need to be overtly cruel or even violent to sustain the wizard's regime.

17:10

They simply need to sing the songs, perform the rituals, and avert their gaze from the hardships that others face.

17:19

In their willful ignorance, they create a system that feels insurmountable to those who dare to resist.

17:26

Complicity in Oz is the path of least resistance.

17:31

It's a comfortable existence, one where the illusion of goodness can be maintained so long as no one looks too closely.

17:40

It is the ease of doing nothing while injustice festers.

17:45

And this ease is precisely what makes complicity so dangerous.

17:50

It is not the fire of hatred, but the quiet acceptance of its warmth, the belief that so long as one's hands remain clean, they bear no responsibility for the inferno.

18:05

I have to have so much generosity for the past version of me that was complicit in so much harm.

18:18

And while it was ignorant complicity, it was complicity nonetheless.

18:25

And what I want you to consider is that every single one of us are living to some degree or another in the illusion of maintaining goodness, wanting to seem good, preferring comfort, accepting that there are injustices and horrible things that are happening to people and will happen to people as we look away.

18:55

That's a universal human experience.

18:58

And I might add, I am not saying that we always need to be plunged in the depths of the injustice and violence and sadness of the world that we live in.

19:13

I'm not saying that either.

19:15

What I am saying is that the only way we become ex-good girls who challenge power structures who uphold the dignity of every single human being on this planet is by being generous and gracious when we see times when we looked away, when we see times that we might have accidentally or ignorantly or even intentionally participated in causing harm.

19:50

My friends, we can't do that if we're going to be hard on ourselves.

19:56

I think so many of us are walking around knowing full well that if we see that we've made a mistake, if we see that a past opinion that we held or position that we took is one that we now regret, we are going to be so hard on ourselves that we put extra effort into not seeing it.

20:23

And then it becomes willful ignorance, even if it's subconscious.

20:29

And there is no blame from me in this, because I know it has been my experience as I have laid out.

20:37

And there's other instances that I'm sure I can't even remember it right now.

20:42

But my plea is that you begin to think of yourself as a growing living entity who learns, who can acknowledge, who can grieve, who can expand, who can look away less, who can choose the path of sacrifice maybe a little more often, who can resist, because I think one of the things that a Trump presidency is going to test is our ability to uphold the dignity of every single human being.

21:36

And that will demand that we grieve the times when we don't with generosity.

21:42

And that we strengthen the ability to resist.

21:49

Those two things go hand in hand.

21:51

You can't grow into better versions of yourself without acknowledging that past versions made mistakes.

21:59

I can't acknowledge and step into the power of who I want to be without also bringing along the version of me that told on other people at BYU, right?

22:12

The version of me that wrote a letter saying, Everybody who doesn't want to obey the rules, get out.

22:18

There's other people who want to be here, and you're taking up their space.

22:22

And the only reason that I'm able to do that is because I have learned to be generous.

22:30

I have learned to have so much compassion for the parts of me that were conditioned to obey and to feel ashamed if I didn't.

22:39

And what I want for you is the same generosity, not just because it feels better for you, it certainly will.

22:48

There is an ease that comes with knowing that if I make a mistake, I'm just going to feel what I need to feel.

22:57

I'm going to feel the guilt.

22:59

I'm going to feel the grief.

23:01

I'm going to feel the regret, the frustration in a loving way, and I'm going to move on to something that feels better.

23:13

I'm not going to judge myself or criticize or plunge myself into self-doubt like I did so often.

23:20

And I want that for you because it feels better.

23:24

I also want it for our world because the way forward is that everybody has a dignified existence.

23:35

The way forward is that everybody gets to feel safe and connected in communities that nurture and protect them.

23:46

And I want to live in that world with you.

23:49

Thanks for listening.

23:50

I would love to hear any comments or thoughts that this brought up for you.