What if the things that make you a good woman, are the very same things that keep you feeling like you’re never good enough?

That’s the question I’m mulling over and the one I will be teaching in upcoming live online workshops (Break the Good Girl Contract).

It’s one that cuts deep when we sit with it long enough to let the truth surface.

We’ve been taught that to be a good woman we must:

• Put everyone else first, always

• Stay silent about our pain

• Don’t be too much (though we never know what “too much” is)

• Make sure everyone else is emotionally comfortable and safe

• Use exhaustion and depletion as a measure of our virtue

What’s worse is that we believe there’s something inherently wrong with us.

And so we automatically feel shame, guilt, regret, and second guess everything about us.

On a constant search for evidence that we’re not enough.

Not desirable. Not wanted. Not measuring up.

We look for proof that our fear beneath our fear is true: that we’re not lovable.

And our Inner Critic, the critical self-talk in your head that bullies and derides and shames you into staying in those beliefs, does a great job of convincing you that it’s all true.

I don’t write this as a woman who has solved this. I’m right in the thick of it with you.

I am writing this as a woman who is waking up, who is aware, who now sees the bigger story behind what we’ve been taught is “just us.”

And who is no longer willing to stay silent.

I call it the Good Girl Contract – invisible conditioning that has been reinforced by the Patriarchy and generations of us who continue to be unaware of it.

This conditioning defines what it means for us to be a “good woman.”

It’s been largely shaped by Christianity and the Christian Patriarchy, to the degree that we’re all inundated with it in Western society.

(If you're a Christian, your instinct right now is to click away and avoid reading the rest of this article. I'd ask you to reconsider that. You've been taught to avoid anything that might cause you to "doubt your faith". You've been taught that anything that contradicts the Bible is the "work of the devil." When something is genuinely true, you don't need faith in it. It can't be doubted. It's just true. Period. So please, let yourself keep reading. Because ultimately, this is about your freedom as a woman and not your religion.)

This conditioning includes men. They are as unaware of this invisible conditioning and the soul-crushing harm that the Patriarchy has done to humanity as we are.

Which is why nothing I do in my work as a transformative spiritual life coach and healing guide for women is about bashing men. My focus is on women. (I spent a decade counseling combat veterans who were primarily men, and my belief that most men are good and that men are injured by the Patriarchy stands firm.).

But beneath the dictates of what it means to be a “good woman” lies something more corrosive.

The denial and erasure of ourselves.

For the Patriarchy to become dominant in what had been a matrilineal world (meaning property was inherited through the mother’s line), it had to strip women of their power and convince the world to give up their reverence for the sacred feminine.

For 25,000+ years before Judeo-Christianity, women had been revered as life-givers, wisdom bearers, healers, the connection between the Unseen and the Seen, representatives of the Goddess Creator, the One Who Gave Life. Not better than men. Not inferior either. As hard as it is for us in Western society to comprehend this, when the world at large thought of the Creator Of All That Is, they thought of a female God.

Life flows through the feminine.

Not to the exclusion of the masculine. But the masculine was in balance with the feminine.

In fact, people had female and male pairings of Gods. Both were needed. Both kept balance.

Judeo-Christianity stripped the feminine out of the equation. (I should clarify that Judaism and Christianity are two very distinct religions, with deeply different doctrines. I was raised in the evangelical church, and taught that Judaism was basically the same as Christianity, except that Jews didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah. This is incredibly incorrect.)

But, both religions forcibly and violently removed women from their sacred roles.

It was not enough to remove us.

They needed to vilify us so that they could punish anyone who continued to honor the Goddess concept of the Creator.

Those idols in the bible are not just statues of stone.

And they weren't gods.

They were representations of the Divine in the same way a physical Cross is to Christians today.

The men who wrote and curated the stories of the bible very intentionally minimized the reality of the Goddess religion. To erase it from memory.

And then, they wrote the story of Adam and Eve.

To further their narrative that women are evil, dangerous, not to be trusted, will lead men astray, are cunning, are weak, give into temptation.

The downfall of humanity.

The reason that Jesus needed to be sent.

The men who wrote that story needed women to be vilified. Then punished.

What you will never be told within Christianity is that the symbols of the story of “the fall” were very intentionally selected and had a deep meaning to anyone then who heard it.

The serpent? A key symbol of the Goddess religion.

The tree of life/knowledge? A key symbol of the Goddess religion.

The fig leaves? A key symbol of the Goddess religion.

(Gives a different meaning to the passage in the New Testament where Jesus curses the Fig Tree and its leaves shrivel up and fall off, doesn’t it?)

Every element of the Fall story was carefully crafted to convince hearers that the Male God was dominant, and the Female Goddess was to be shunned and no longer worshipped.

And people really struggled to accept that.

Imagine someone coming along now and trying to convince you that God is ONLY FEMALE, and that you must no longer think of God as male or worship him the way you do now.

Imagine being taken captive by your enemies, forced to marry their men, and be forbidden to worship God as male, as you know God to be.

You’d most likely reject your oppressors’ religious beliefs, or take your true worship practice underground, wouldn’t you?

(Like the Christians do in communist countries.)

You would continue to love and worship your God because that’s the God that most people loved and worshipped and that’s what you know to be true.

When the Old Testament talks about idol worship and the Israelites seemingly having problems returning time and again to “false gods” … it’s because of THIS.

They were sticking with the predominant belief system where God was female, there were multiple male “sons of god” and the concept that God was ONLY MALE was foreign to them.

(Keep in mind that the people who became known as the Israelites got their land by invading and killing the people who already lived there. They were not first on the land and they showed up where people had been worshipping the Goddess for thousands of years before them.)

So, in the bible when people are worshipping false gods and God commands them “to have no other gods except me” – it’s a concept that doesn’t feel right to them. Anymore than it would feel right to you if someone where to insist you now believe that God is female and a She.

The people were not bad for worshipping the way they had done for generations. They were rebelling against a small tribe that was forcing a new religion upon them.

Eradicating the Divine Feminine from the people’s inherited belief system was no small task.

And the best way to do it was to strip the women of their rights.

So, Eve became the “proof” that women are dangerous, untrustworthy, gullible, and not worthy of being seen as the powerful humans that until then, they had been.

This major uprooting of an entire belief system is intentionally missing from the memory of the church.

Christianity has obliterated it and the Roman Empire’s mandate that made Christianity the only viable religious belief system ended up creating a belief that the Christian story was the only truth. It set Christianity up as something to be enforced with violence if necessary, and with conviction that it was the only way, the only truth, and so it felt it had permission to deny and dismiss any other relationship to the Divine.

It became the foundation for Christianity’s bloody history of forced conversions, the genocide of people with other religious beliefs, and its quiet mandate today to “win hearts for Jesus” and “grow the Kingdom of God”… Christianity and the love it professes to have for people always comes with an agenda. Because it is still convinced that it is the only way to be in relationship with God. (It's not.)

Christianity hinges on the belief that humanity is inherently sinful and born separated from being in right relationship with God.

And whose fault was that?

Eve’s.
The feminine.
The goddess.
Women.

Which brings me back to the fact that the things that make you a good woman are also the very things that keep you feeling as if you’re never good enough.

The system has been designed to keep you disconnected from your true nature, your true power, your true worth, your true sacred connection to the Divine.

We’ve been living under this Patriarchy for 2,000 years now.

So when you look in the mirror and you think you’re not enough, and when you deride yourself for being too afraid to speak your truth, and when you assume that you’re not worthy, and when you feel like you aren’t wanted and that there’s something inherently wrong with you….

It’s because of this.

This is the legacy you carry in you.

And the Patriarchy is counting on us to continue blaming ourselves.

Staying unaware of this invisible conditioning.

Because as long as we believe this story, we can be controlled.

As long as we are unaware, we will keep ourselves silent.

What makes you a good woman is your inherent goodness.

And it’s time we start believing what is actually true about us.

I created the Break the Good Girl Contract experience because I want as many women as possible to wake up to this conditioning.

If you’re a Christian, you don’t have to leave your faith to start shifting the narrative that the Patriarchy insists is true about women.

But I will tell you, as an ex-Christian, I am a living testimony that you can love and live close to God without Christianity, without being “saved”, without Jesus. The God Who Holds All Things is here to be with you and has never once been separated from you.

That’s the reality I experience and it IS possible, despite what the bible says.

If you’re interested in Break the Good Girl Contract, I am offering live online workshops once a month where we gather in the safety of one another and journey through 7 core invisible “rules” that keep us stuck in this Patriarchal narrative. It is also available as a 2- hour on-demand course with a free private online community. Each option costs $67.

It's time we become aware. Because the problem has never been us.

Please note: I will NOT respond to comments/messages designed to convert me or engage in apologetic debates (I was trained in evangelical apologetics). Comments with that intention will be unanswered or deleted. I am happy however to have genuine, respectful conversations about loving God without Christianity.