Am I “Being Good” or am I not Being at All?

A lot of my clients struggle with the pressure of being a good person. While the specifics of their version of ‘good’ varies, the impulse is the same. It’s the move toward self-erasure before the body has had a chance to register its own needs.

Goodness is inherently relational; it’s about how we appear in the eyes of others, which we have internalized as our own self-view. In this way, goodness is always about how we impact others, and usually in the negative. That is, being good is not upsetting, disappointing them, or otherwise inconveniencing those around us. Of course, any negative definition of self is inherently about our absence, and thus, about self-erasure. If the most "good" version of us is the one that demands the least, then the perfectly good version of us is the one that doesn't exist at all. Unfortunately, our internal world will always be a “inconvenience” in a relational world in which we are valued for what we offer and not by what we experience.

For many of my clients, goodness is not a conscious choice; it is lived. Asking ‘how is this affecting me?’ isn’t a question that even appears. There's a sense of betrayal for even asking it.

When we live our lives this way, accommodation becomes unthought, unfelt, and just embodied. Our nervous system learns to inhibit spontaneous impulse, reduce friction, and signal safety to others. These patterns have been discussed clinically in several frameworks:

• As appeasement: a functional survival response in complex trauma, often confused with fawning (Walker, 2013)

• As dorsal vagal shutdown: a freeze/collapse state within the autonomic nervous system described in Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011)

• As role-confused attachment: in which children become emotional regulators of dysregulated caregivers (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 2008)

What links these patterns is that preserving relationships becomes more important than preserving our authenticity, and avoiding conflict becomes more important than self-expression.

It’s extremely difficult for us to change such an oppressive sense of needing to be "moral” or “good.” Cognitive insight often only intensifies shame. We may already know we override ourselves, but we struggle to feel anything from the inside. Our work then is not about encouraging expression at first, but instead about slowing down enough to build tolerance for our internal signals. Somatic pacing is critical. So is the clinician’s tracking of any reflex to “offer” insight inside the therapy relationship itself, in real time.

For those of us with inherited stories of always “being a good…” partner, daughter, son, father, student, employee, or otherwise, it can be freeing to know that the one way we can most authentically care for someone else is not be appeasing them, but by showing up coherently. Coherence is simultaneously the most dependable and exciting thing we can offer. This is not selfishness at all. Instead, it’s the only thing that allows us to feel a sense of closeness at all.

You're Already Here

It’s almost impossible to grow up in this world without inhaling a deep breathe of inadequacy. Our families, schools, religious institutions, and cultural forces—despite their best intentions—often pass along a heavy script: you are not as you should be. Shame becomes the undercurrent of our days, not necessarily because anyone is trying to harm us, but because shame, tragically, is one of the primary socializers of human behavior (see Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007 for an excellent review).

When pain inevitably arises, the message is clear: Escape it. Distract. Optimize. Improve. If you are hurting, uncomfortable, or simply not at your best—get out. Get anywhere but here. Whether through achievement, endless scrolling, or envisioning a shinier, more functional version of ourselves, we learn to treat our current experience as a station to depart from, not a home to inhabit (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, Follette, & Strosahl, 1996).

It’s not hard to see why. Emotional pain activates the same brain regions as physical pain; our bodies can literally cringe at our own shame or inadequacy (Piretti et al., 2023). Avoidance isn’t a failure of willpower—it’s a deeply embodied survival strategy. But the strategy has a cost. When we flee our pain, we also flee our lives. The entirety of our human experience—what we call our “self”—does not live in some imagined future where everything is resolved. It lives here, in this messy, aching, imperfect now.

In interpreting our pain as proof that we are wrong or deficient, we doom ourselves to endless striving, spiraling farther away from the only place we can ever actually live. Alternatively, to open up to our present experience does not mean to like it, justify it, or find it redemptive. It means letting it be. Especially when it feels unbearable. Depression, anxiety, feelings of insufficiency—these are not detours from life. They are life. Our task is not to get better so we can start living; it is to live even here, even now, even within these conditions of our heart and mind.

Being "here" means feeling the tightness in our chest without immediately solving it. Noticing the blankness or restlessness without weaving it into a story about who we are or who we will become. It means allowing our sadness, our fear, our longing to exist without compulsively labeling it a problem. Being here also does not mean being here alone. Human connection—emotional openness to others—remains the strongest buffer against existential pain (Kahn & Hessling, 2005). Yet it is difficult to invite others to meet us somewhere we have yet to meet ourselves.

So starting with where you are in this moment—opening up to it fully, without it having to mean anything about you, about your future, or about the world around you—is a radical place to begin. Perhaps even now, as you read this, you feel yourself unmoored, exhausted, sad, or fearful. What might it be like to simply be with the sensations of unmooredness? To notice the ache in your chest, the restlessness in your hands, the heaviness in your limbs, without rushing to explain it or fix it? How might it feel to really be with these painful sensations; and, each time we might seek to make meaning or do something about them, come back to them like we might come back to a sleeping child; tender, curious, open.

You are already here; there’s no where else to get to. And even in the most painful moments, our painful present self remains the only—and the most beautiful—place to start.