Belle Burden: The Burden of Being the "Good Girl"

0:00Hey parents, I want to take a minute to tell you about something close to my heart. You may not know this, but I was a Girl Scout troop leader, which means that I've actually seen a lot of girls, not just my own daughter, find their voices and form a community they can count on. Because in Girl Scouts, the girls are in charge. Your daughter isn't just a participant. She's a decision maker and a problem solver. As parents, we spend so much energy trying to build our kids' confidence. Girl Scouts is one of the few places where girls actually get to practice making decisions in real situations with real stakes.

0:37And it's a place where girls can feel joyful and come as they are. Whether your daughter is getting ready for kindergarten, middle school, or high school, there's a troop for her. And joining is easy. Just visit girlscouts.org to learn more. That's girlscouts.org to learn more. Raise your hand if you were the good girl. me. I mean, you're the kid who stayed in line. You were pretty compliant. You were easy, right? I mean, you might have been favorite child. But in today's podcast, I come across a question that I had never considered in this exactly before. What if being good is a burden? And what if the burden of being good doesn't really show up until we're a lot older, We're adults, and maybe it shows up in an especially intense way once we're a parent.

1:33Today's guest is Belle Burden. Interestingly, Belle was nicknamed Belle the Good Burden, so we are talking about exactly that. Belle Burden wrote a memoir called Strangers about the sudden unraveling of her long marriage during the early days of the pandemic. As I read Belle's story, I kept thinking, okay, this book is about a marriage, kind of. It's about so many other things that we think about all the time, especially as women. How we can be very good. But maybe that's more about our ability to notice other people's needs and take care of them and our simultaneous ability to completely ignore and distance ourselves from the things we need for ourselves.

2:21So today, Belle and I are talking about what happens when the life you built around being good stops protecting you. I'm Dr. Becky. This is Good Inside.

2:36Belle, when did it start to feel like your life was kind of something you no longer recognized? And for listeners who haven't yet read Strangers, can you take us into the moment when it just feel like things were falling apart? So it was March of 2020, the second week of COVID lockdown. I think we all remember that time and how scary it was and how unpredictable. We did not know whether we were going to get a vaccine, how long school was going to be out. and my husband and I moved to Martha's Vineyard with our two daughters. We had an isolated place. It felt like it was gonna be safe and it really felt that way for about a week.

3:20We were cooking and taking walks. He was chopping wood and making fires. And one night after dinner, I was mopping the floor and I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. I let it go to voicemail and then I played it and it was a man saying, I'm trying to reach Belle. I'm sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife. And I felt a full-bodied shock. I think this is the moment where my life became unrecognizable. I thought I was very happily married. I thought we were very devoted to each other. I was very much in love with my husband. And that night he really tried to explain it.

4:03He apologized. He said it didn't mean anything. But at 6 a.m. the next day, he came into our bedroom with a bag fully packed and said that he thought he was happy, but he wasn't. He thought he wanted our life, but he didn't. And he wanted a divorce. He did not want any custody of our kids and that he was leaving. And he walked out and he left the island and really became someone I didn't know anymore. And my life became completely unrecognizable to me, including my future, which I had really thought would look a certain way and be a certain way. And then all of a sudden it was going to be something completely different.

4:47Like, I'm just trying like 6 p.m. voicemail, 6 a.m. departure. Or is this like a 12 hour kind of thing? It's, you know, still hard to know. I don't know if maybe it was more planned in his head. But for me, it felt like a 12 hour turnaround. And I didn't sleep that night. He did sleep, but I didn't sleep. And, you know, it's possible that he felt caught. And so that prompted him to want to get out. We were facing being in a house together and doing therapy on Zoom, I thought, to try and work through this and figure out if we could stay married. but he was not going to do that. I did not get a minute of therapy.

5:30I'm trying to think about, there's this phrase, I think a lot about in child development, like just called violation of expectations, right? We have a lot of feelings and intense reactions in our body to anything that's a violation of expectations. And there's the pain, but in some ways a violation of expectation is like a surprise you never saw coming which is almost separate from the pain and i'm thinking about the violation of expectation around who he is about your marriage but and i guess is my question to you maybe you could tell me a little bit about that but sometimes when an intense violation of expectation happens we look around and we're like is that even a is that even a coffee mug like is that is this is the sky like everything feels like it's in question almost.

6:19Yes, it really felt that way. And if you put COVID on top of that and how surreal and like the twilight zone that felt, if you put the violation of expectation on top of that and on top of feeling vulnerable and scared, it did feel that way. Every, as you said, every object, every meal, every task that used to be routine suddenly became something just, I looked at everything with completely different eyes. It felt that destabilizing. something i'm thinking about i'll say it out loud is yes to what you're saying and the way i think about people is we operate in parts and you know we all have multiple parts of ourselves and one of the things that is kind of different between all of us is how much separation or almost like knowledge of the other parts the other parts have right where like the most extreme version of this is multiple personality disorder one part has no idea that's very extreme but we lose the fact that that can, you know, happen in a lot of our lives.

7:29I'm one version of myself at work and another job comes and I'm like, wow, why can I be capable or, right? And so sometimes I just want to put it out there. And I, you know, I've worked with so many people whose partners have had affairs and yes, that kind of question, what did I miss? And what were the flags? And that's a worthwhile exploration because that can help us empower ourselves going forward. And the other thing I want to say is there are some people who are, the separation of those parts is so extreme. And in some ways, like that compartmentalization is so well practiced that what you saw was what you were getting.

8:05It's just, you didn't, you maybe just never had access to this other part that suddenly showed up after you heard that voicemail, you know? And I'm not saying that's true for you, but that, yeah, that can be a part of it too. I actually think that is true for me. I think that is true about my ex um i think that he's a compartmentalizer and i think that um it actually makes me feel a little bit better because i do think there were different versions of him maybe coexisting and um the the virgin that showed up that morning looking like his affect was completely different um that was another a part of him that i may not have seen uh ever or in a long time Yeah, if I again, I know very little and clearly there's much more that happened than you just shared in your book.

8:53But I think about a situation that that has happened with some of the people I've seen in practice where it's like, you find out about it. And when you bring it up, it's kind of actually the first moment in your marriage, that that partner has to confront both parts at the same time. and then maybe you get the part of husband no okay i'm good and then kind of the next morning that other part takes over it's like i'm gone um you know and maybe maybe that was the first moment 12 hours before that you kind of met that other version of your husband or you saw a flicker of it or maybe he for the first time was in a house with both versions of himself right Right.

9:33Exactly. I have the chills. I think, yeah, a hundred percent. And that makes you want to flee. You know, I can see that. Right. Then all of a sudden it feels like a choice instead of a multiplicity, which part I'm going to have to choose. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. When hard things happen, I think we go into fault mode a lot. Like whose fault is this? Is it your fault? Is it my fault? Sometimes I think, I don't know, fault is useful. It's like a way of learning. But yeah, how did fault come into play? Oh, it's his fault. It's my fault. And where is that now? It's a really important question because I think I was so conscious of that in writing the book that I did not want to write a book that was all about placing blame at his feet.

10:20But I do think, you know, and people say to me and have said to me in the past that the end of a marriage is 50-50, it takes two to tango, it's always two sides. And that can be true. I'm a child of two divorces and that was certainly true in both of those cases. But I think it's hard to say that when the departing partner doesn't share at any point that they're unhappy, right? So there's no opportunity for me, for him to say to me, I don't like how you do this. I'm not happy about this. I feel, you know, suffocated or whatever it was going to be. And to give us a moment, not that I could have fixed things, but to give us a moment to work on it.

11:13I think it's, it's hard to place faults at my feet when I wasn't given an opportunity opportunity to, um, to work on it. So I, that's how I sit with fault. That said, what, what helped me and what, what made things shift for me, and you can see me do it in the book too, um, which we felt like a separate process of doing it is to look at myself in terms of the decisions that I made during the marriage, 20 years of marriage or before the marriage. Um, and think about how that redirected my life, what I was giving up, what, how I was, um, uh, turning away from my true instincts, um, how I might've been burying my, um, ambitions, um, financial choices that I made.

12:09And when I started to look at that, cause I wasn't getting any answers from him. Like I've just, The investigation of him was going nowhere. It was like trying to get blood from a stone. So when I shifted to me and really started looking at decisions that, again, not for fault, but that landed me where I was, how did I get to this place that I'm in? Once I started going through that inquiry and my stepmother uses this trick of shifting the spotlight on a stage from him to me. yeah um once i did that i really think it unlocked me and really like made me able to like kind of literally shift to looking forward right rather than looking behind and i think what you're saying is that's why i think fault and blame are unhelpful frameworks because if it's my fault i can't look at it anyway i'm just shrouded in shame if it's your fault okay i'm angry no learning but you're saying shifting the spotlight is is a little more curious what's going on?

13:12Like, what can I put pieces together just to understand the drawing a little better? So what did you put together? I think there are a few different, like, buckets, but I think I thought a lot about meeting my husband and husband. We were both at law firms, and I met him two years after my father died. And my father died very suddenly at 54 and left a mess of a financial situation. And I think part of my financial story with my husband was looking for some kind of protection. And he said to me, I'm going to take care of you. And that in that moment felt really romantic. It felt very wonderful.

14:09I think I would have fallen in love with him anyway. I was madly in love with him, but my father dying suddenly and dealing with all that financial stuff, I think put me more at risk of just handing over my financial life in a way that maybe I wouldn't of otherwise. And my ex-husband was very good with finances. He wasn't unethical. He was very honest. But I really put my head in the sand and did not have a lot of visibility or understanding of where our assets sat and whose name was on what. So I think that was part of it. I think I thought a lot, and this started pretty quickly thinking about this, about the legacy of infidelity in my family and my maternal line.

15:03Both my mother and my grandmother were with partners for decades that were unfaithful in a serial way. And I thought I had stopped that pattern by marrying someone who was so, um, uh, like just very private, not a public figure, very calm, very mild mannered, um, seemingly very loyal. and there I was having repeated this pattern in a way that was sort of even more explosive because my grandmother's husband and my mother's boyfriend of a few decades always wanted to come back my husband didn't want to come back so I thought how have I ended up in this place like now we're at three generations and this is going to happen to my kids and specifically my daughters.

15:57And, um, I really wrestled with that. And where I came down on it was that I had watched both of them, both very formidable women in their own fields. Um, the way they managed it was to stay totally quiet about it and to not talk about it and to not explain it to me, not even mention it, not talk to their friends. The, the, the most important thing was actually sort of cleaning it up and protecting the man in the story. And where I ended up was, I think that's really part of the problem. And when people don't talk about things, I think they get sort of in your bones and in your DNA and have a greater chance of being repeated.

16:43I do not have a background in psychology or anything like that. So you may disagree with me, but I, I, it felt that like that kind of pattern in my family. And then that kind of dovetailed with this thing inside me that I still can't fully explain, which is that from the first week, I did not, I couldn't bear to lie about what was happening. He had wanted me to say that it was amicable and I just couldn't do that. So where that all, that's sort of the thread that led me to starting to talk about this, both, you know, in verbal conversations, but also in writing.

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20:06I want to go back to Belle the Good because there's no topic, I think, that I like talking about as much as this concept of the good girl, which, by the way, I was too. such a good girl, so many years of unwiring what that really meant. Because I think it's one of those words and terms that what's really going on underneath is a lot more complicated than good would assume on the surface. So what did that mean? Bell the good when your brother said that? Like what? Yeah. Give me the stuff underneath. I think part of me came out that way. I was always very quiet. I did not speak until I was three, but then I spoke in full sentences.

20:45I was always an observer, always sort of hiding a bit. I was in a family with very strong personalities and some tempers, nothing physically violent, but a lot of tempers. And in that, and I would say that my mother, my father, my brother, my stepmother was not like that, but she was kind of managing everybody else. So in that, I think I became like I was just going to be the good girl and follow the rules so that the apple cart didn't get upset even more than it was. I'm sure you've talked about this but when I was reading your book I'm thinking about Belle the good okay and I know you're like Becky you and everyone I just couldn't help being like are you kidding me her name is Belle the good burden the good burden like the burden of being good like did someone make that up did not yes like yes it's tell me about that it's like so both poetic And it feels like AI wrote it because it's so obvious, you know?

22:01Right. It's really true. My name is quite, it fits into all of this a bit too closely. But it is a family name. Flo Bell is my real name. But yes, and Burden is obviously a family name. But just the good Burden, like the Burden of being the favorite child, the Burden of being so good, the Burden of being so contained. And I have come to think the good girl, because I was one. No longer, Belle. No longer. No longer. But I was. That being a good girl really just means I have learned to pay attention outside into my environment. And I am an expert at noticing what every person wants at the exclusion of ever gazing in and wondering what I might want for myself.

22:56Because I have learned that attachment and closeness and worth and therefore peace comes from becoming so expert at other people that my own needs is actually the greatest threat. Like it becomes a threat. And then all of a sudden the term good girl doesn't sound so great at all when you describe it that way. It's true. It's true. It's a dangerous proposition. Oh, okay. I want to turn to some of the parenting moments here because I'm reading your book. I'm hearing your story and so many of your interviews. I kept thinking, okay, so here you are, ultimate violation of expectations. You went from, oh my goodness, my husband's cheating on me.

23:35Okay, we're going to work through it. Without 24 hours, oh my goodness, I don't have a husband. He's gone. He doesn't want custody of my children. I mean, I don't even know how the body can process both those things. and still life doesn't say, Belle, we're going to give you a pause button. Okay, we're going to like just give you a pause button. You need a couple months to process this. Just your kids are taken care of. Like you're making waffles or you're dealing with homework. I mean, there's like things. And so tell me a little bit about you. Processing feels like the wrong word. Just living through that while I think the day-to-day demands of parenting are still very much alive.

24:15Are you talking to your kids? Are you not like what's going on? So first I would say that I did get more time than people normally do because of COVID. So we were on an island where I did not have to go to school pickup. I did not have to go to meetings. I did not have to show up at a social event and pretend like everything was fine. I could spend and I did spend hours walking, miles walking, and I would weep as I walked. So I think people talk about walking through pain. I think I literally did because I had that room to really feel every inch of it. I'm not sure I was making sense of it or making significant progress, but I definitely felt it, all of it.

25:11Whereas when my father died, I think I went right back to work or I was in law school. I went right back to like being studious and all that stuff and didn't really process a lot of it. At the same time, yes, I had a 15 year old and a 12 year old. And they, I talked to a therapist about what to tell them. And the therapist advised to actually wait until the pandemic became less scary. And of course it didn't. So there was a month where I thought I was pretending everything was fine and their dad was in New York working, but I was not eating. My face was swollen. And my older daughter had read a text on my iPad before I turned off notifications.

25:58So she knew already. Um, and I think would have noticed anyway. And she went into caretaker mode of starting to cook and feed me. Um, my younger one did not know. So she was kind of operating as she normally would have. But I think, um, my older daughter really stepped in and parented her too. Um, so I walked through the motions of it. I went to the grocery store. I cooked sometimes. My daughter cooked more. I made sure they got on Zoom school. But I was doing a really terrible job of it. I was, I was. I mean, please, you are surviving. I just want to get to that advice from the therapist. And this is not about lambusting some advice.

26:43I just, at all, there are no, there are no right answers for awful situations. They're just, that's not a thing. So. But I think this was the wrong advice, but go ahead. Yeah, I think the interesting thing to tie some of it together is kids are expert perceivers. They're always better than we are because their survival depends on us. So if you think about like a baby animal in the forest and then you think about the big, stronger parent animal, that because the adult animal can survive more independently, they can be a little less hypervigilant to threats in the forest. They actually it's this is not actually psychological.

27:23It's just evolution where any younger child is inherently more helpless. So it's interesting. They actually have to be more hypervigilant for their survival because they have to know, wait, could that be a threat? I don't know, but it could. I better go act as if it is because I'd be less likely to defend myself. So they're actually better at perceiving things. Right. what do we do as humans especially kids who don't have the language we do what do you do as a kid when you notice something off just off this is so weird i hear the word grandma cancer all the time grandma that's just right or oh i noticed my mom in bed a lot or every time my mom says dad's in the city it just i i feel like it feels a little tone different than two years ago when she said Okay, so I'm noticing all that.

28:11What do I do? Because then everything else in my environment is telling me everything's normal. Normal. Normal as a, you know, whatever, day at the park. I have to compartmentalize. I have to self-doubt. Self-doubt becomes a very adaptive coping strategy for kids when the things they notice aren't confirmed. Because it's very uncomfortable will be like, I think something's going on. No one's saying it. So the only answer to get back to homeostasis is I must not be that good at perceiving my environment. It's like gaslighting yourself or something. Yeah, it's actually, I must not. Other people must know better than I do.

28:50People must be better at perceiving the things I perceive with my eyes than I do because clearly nothing's going on. So I can't, I guess like not trusting myself is something I should just hold with me as I get older because I kind of keep messing this up. So interesting. It's really makes so much sense. Curious if you could speak a little bit, just like where you are now, like this happened, you survived it, you walked through the pain, you wrote about it, you've been on a tour about it, you've had lots of things happen since you released the book. I mean, yeah, just tell me a little about what's going on for you now.

29:27For me, I think what happened, which was to have all of these structures fall apart and like sort of be stripped down to this emotional core was actually and I listened to your podcast with Maya Shankar is that how you pronounce her last name yes which was so great and and I think she said it beautifully that these moments of change are really opportunities because when I got stripped down to that core, it was actually when I was able to write again, which is something I thought I was going to do at 18 and took a 30 year, you know, diversion into law from and to, and putting the book aside and the unexpected reception of it, it is such a miracle to me that I'm writing again and that I can have a life as a writer.

30:27And I don't think I ever would have gotten there if I had stayed where I was in my marriage. I also think that I kind of became a more relaxed and easygoing person Cause I think when you're gripping so tight to everything being good in your family and perhaps things looking a certain way, when all of that is like blown up, I feel like I've just became more relaxed with my kids and in my life with friends. I can tolerate mess and chaos and all of that a lot more. Um, and I think I have, um, deeper and more real friendships. Um, so I never would have chosen this. I wanted an intact family more than anything.