The Good Girl’s Guide to Somatics

What gets lost when embodiment becomes self-surveillance

Jun 16, 2025

What began as a path toward self-awareness is, for many women, becoming yet another way to observe, evaluate, and edit themselves in real time, another internalized performance of acceptability.

For many women, the pursuit of somatic healing begins with a sense of relief; a way out of the mind and back into the body. But that relief is short-lived if the deeper forces shaping how we’ve been conditioned to be in a body are never named. From a young age, women are trained to perform emotional control, to be agreeable, to be composed. Embodiment, then, becomes fraught terrain. The good girl grows up learning that stillness is strength, that quiet is virtue, and that even healing must look graceful. What begins as a journey back to ourselves can quickly become another performance of being palatable.

What begins as tracking so often becomes judging. What starts as awareness becomes performance. And what is sold as regulation becomes respectability, wrapped in the language of healing.

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What I wish more of my female clients knew as a Chartered Psychologist is that the “good girl” is not just a social role; it’s a deeply embedded archetype. In Jungian and depth psychological traditions, especially in the work of Marion Woodman, the good girl represents the part of the feminine psyche that survives by splitting off from instinct, hunger, and embodied truth in order to stay loved. She is polished, contained, pleasing. She keeps things light. She is emotionally fluent but rarely emotionally honest. Many women enter healing with this part still in control; fluent in the language of well-being, but terrified of what might happen if they stop holding it all together.

What I see in my clinical work, and have come to understand in my own life, is that the good girl cannot lead us home to the body. She is the part of us that performs healing while avoiding transformation.

And yet, even as this part performs healing with precision, something essential remains untouched. Beneath the fluency, a quieter fear often emerges—the fear of getting it wrong. Instead of asking, "What is my body trying to tell me?", I hear more and more women asking something quieter, but more dangerous: "Is this the correct response?" This is not curiosity. This is self-surveillance. Somewhere along the way, somatic practice stopped being about relationship and became about getting it right. Nervous system literacy became nervous system compliance. Embodiment became another way to be good.

I see it every day. Women arriving in my practice, deeply fluent in therapeutic language, but quietly fractured. They know how to track sensations, name states, identify triggers. But beneath the precision, there is tension.

They are split; half inside themselves, half watching themselves.

Monitoring. Managing. Policing. Tracking not just to know, but to perform knowing. Regulating not to feel safe, but to appear regulated enough to belong.

This is the good girl’s nervous system; fluent in the language of regulation, but still tethered to the rules of acceptability. She has learned to make her distress digestible. To be emotionally articulate, but never too emotional. To be embodied, but never disruptive. Even in her healing, she seeks to be pleasing.

In this space, stillness becomes a cultural status symbol. Neutrality becomes virtue. Calm becomes currency. And regulation, the word we have come to worship in the wellness world, becomes code for something much older and far less innocent: Do not be disruptive.

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What has become evident to me, especially with the rise of vagal toning, cold plunges, cacao ceremonies, nervous system education, and inner child work, is that wellness culture has sold women the good girl in a new outfit. She no longer needs to be thin and silent; now she must be “regulated,” “conscious,” “self-aware.” She posts nervous system infographics. She references her attachment style. She eats clean, hydrates, sets boundaries but only the kind that don’t make her too unavailable, too angry, too much. Her embodiment must be aesthetically pleasing. Her grief, poetic. Her rage, alchemized. This is not liberation. This is rebranding. It asks for composure, not consciousness. And for many women, the reason healing doesn’t seem to work is because the part of them doing the work is still the part that’s trying to be acceptable.

This is the unspoken contract. To be less reactive. Less emotional. Less chaotic. Less demanding. To make sure our embodiment never makes anyone else uncomfortable. How often does somatic practice become a covert way to discipline the unruly, the grieving, the hungry, the angry? How often does it reinforce the ancient idea that we are only worthy when we are contained, consistent, and convenient?

This is not embodiment. This is performance. This is submission repackaged as self-awareness. This is not healing. It is adaptation; to systems that have always asked women to make themselves smaller.

What I wish were more well-known is that culture does not simply shape what we think. It shapes how we hold ourselves. How we breathe. How much we eat. How loud we are allowed to be. Nervous systems, especially those shaped by gendered, racialized, and marginalized experiences, have been trained across generations to master regulation not for health, but for survival. Survival through self-containment. Survival through silence. Survival by staying within the narrowest margins of acceptability.

Women, especially, are taught to feel just enough to function, but not enough to disrupt. To regulate, but not rebel. To notice, but not name.

I see the cost of this daily. Not only trauma, but exhaustion. Exhaustion from trying to heal politely. From trying to feel only what is appropriate. From trying to regulate into belonging. Clients arrive fluent, hyper-attuned, spiritually literate — and quietly terrified of what will happen if they stop performing.

Because when somatic work is stripped of its political and cultural context, it stops being liberatory. It becomes adaptive. It becomes another way we contort. Another way we comply. Another way we gaslight ourselves into silence.

This is perhaps the most painful kind of erasure… the one that happens from within. When the voice asking you to shrink no longer comes from parents, partners, or media, but from the parts of you that now speak in fluent therapeutic language. Parts that have internalized the oldest cultural instructions: be quieter, be easier, be less emotional, be good. This is the good girl rebranded, self-regulating, not for safety but for acceptance. She has mastered the aesthetics of healing while continuing to abandon the truth of her body.

But your body was never meant to be tamed to be loved. It was never meant to perform composure in order to belong. It was never meant to be regulated into submission. Your body was meant to be lived in; honestly, unapologetically, and without conditions.

Embodiment is not about mastery. It is not about control. It is about relationship. And true relationship with the body includes contradiction, hunger, mess, anger, grief, and joy. It includes showing up as you are; not who you’ve been taught to be.

So if your somatic practice leads to more self-monitoring than self-trust, pause. Not because you've failed, but because the lens you were handed was too small to hold your truth. Healing that demands you remain good, calm, or digestible is not healing. It is compliance.

The good girl was never the goal. Wholeness is.

And your body, as it is, as it has always been, was never the problem. It is the place where truth lives. The place you return to. Not to be better, but to be home.