are you a good daughter?

If you were raised to be one, then you are probably…

• used to meeting other people’s needs, often at the expense of your own

• exhausted, but feel like you can’t stop

• unsure of who you are at your core

Guilt, shame and obligation fill your days.

You have been surviving this whole time. Your nervous system has been intelligently keeping you safe. But the part of your brain that fixates on survival and safety doesn’t care about happiness. It doesn’t care about your life goals, or finding fulfillment or purpose. It doesn’t care about spiritual connection, about fun or joy.

It only cares about conforming, following rules, climbing ladders, getting the job done — even if all of this is silently squeezing the life out of you. Even if the cost is so great, yet invisible to most at the same time. To other people, you’re just someone who’s ‘so responsible’.

To release the good daughter role, we need to claim our inner wisdom

When we are disconnected from our own wisdom, we dry out. The inner desert grows and grows and one day it just feels like you’re wandering through the Sahara on a daily basis, with no promise of an oasis.

I’ve learned that not only does our inner wisdom require cultivation, it requires protection. Once you learn to listen to your inner voice, it requires intelligence and fierceness to not allow the forces in this world to stamp it out again. Because it certainly will — so many systems benefit from keeping the good daughter subjugated, and we have been conditioned to comply.

But time and time again I’ve seen the strength, creativity, talent and intelligence of the woman who is buried under the good daughter. I’ve seen how there is a craving, a deep thirst to be set free from the roles that bind her. Walking this path myself, I know firsthand the obstacles and fears that keep a good daughter frozen in fear, and stuck in place.

Your inner voice is calling, will you listen?