I spent six years mapping women's coping strategies. I completely missed six of them.

How a single conversation changed everything I thought I knew

Sometimes the most important intellectual moment isn’t a breakthrough.

It’s a gap.

A place where you’ve been looking so carefully at what’s there that you’ve completely missed what isn’t.

That’s what happened to me with Sophie Jane Lee.

Sophie is the author of Beyond Palatable - a book about women refusing to make themselves digestible for others. If you haven’t read it yet, add it to your list. Immediately. I had just been interviewed on her Unapologetic Voices Marathon.

We were talking about my Good Girl Roles work, the patterned ways women learn to stay safe, acceptable, valued and hard to criticise, and she said something that stopped me cold.

The Rebel is still part of the Good Girl stuff.

And I had one of those deeply irritating and exhilarating moments where your whole body knows before your brain catches up.

Oh.

Oh no.

She’s right.

I had a blind spot.

A rather significant one.

The question underneath the model

By that point I had already mapped out the roles I saw again and again in women’s lives and workplaces.

The Pleaser. The Perfectionist. The Rescuer. The Peacemaker. The Performer. The Caregiver. The Chameleon. The Rule-Follower. The Invisible One. The Over-Responsible One.

They were useful. They were real. They explained so much.

They explained why women say yes when they mean no. Why we smooth things over instead of naming them. Why we over-prepare and over-deliver and over-function. Why we self-silence in rooms where we actually have something important to say. Why we shape-shift to fit whoever we’re with. Why we carry too much and then blame ourselves for being tired.

It was a strong model.

But Sophie’s comment made me step back and ask a different question.

Not just: what are the Good Girl Roles?

But: what nervous system responses are they actually built on?

And that is when I started thinking about the classic framework.

Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn.

The automatic ways our brains operate to ensure our survival.

Looking at the roles through that lens

Once I laid the roles against that framework, something became very clear very quickly.

The model was already doing a brilliant job of capturing the socially acceptable versions of fawn, flight and freeze.

Fawn was there. The roles that keep us safe by pleasing, adapting, appeasing and staying relationally useful. The Pleaser, the Caregiver, the Rescuer, the Peacemaker. These are the roles that say: I will stay safe by being kind. By being needed. By not upsetting anyone. By becoming who the room wants me to be.

Flight was there. The roles that keep us safe by striving, achieving, perfecting and outrunning criticism. The Perfectionist, the Over-Responsible One, the Rule-Follower. These are the roles that say: I will stay safe by getting it right. By doing more. By staying ahead. By being impossible to criticise.

Freeze was there. The roles that keep us safe by shrinking, disappearing and going very quiet. The Invisible One, the Chameleon. These are the roles that say: I will stay safe by not drawing attention. By not making trouble. By staying small enough that nothing lands on me.

And then I saw the gap.

Where was fight?

Where was the role that says:

No. You cannot make me. I will not comply. You do not get to reach me.

Where was the protest energy? Where was the resistance? Where was the hard edge? Where was the woman who learned to survive not by pleasing or perfecting or disappearing, but by pushing back?

It was barely there.

And once I saw it, I could not unsee it.

What I had built (without meaning to) was a map of compliant survival

The pleasing strategies. The perfecting strategies. The performing strategies. The disappearing strategies.

All real. All important. All deeply gendered.

But not the whole story.

Because women do not only cope through compliance.

Sometimes we cope through resistance. Through defiance. Through going cold. Through becoming difficult to control. Through becoming difficult to reach. Through refusing the rules entirely. Through enduring in silence until the silence itself becomes a kind of power. Through distancing from other women to stay safe in systems that weren’t designed for any of them.

That was the blind spot.

I had mapped compliance beautifully. I had not yet mapped resistance.

The six roles we had missed

Once I saw the gap, other missing roles started coming into focus.

The Challenger.

The woman whose nervous system learned that compliance was dangerous and resistance was the only safe response. She pushes back openly, questions authority, and refuses to be managed. Her anger is real and often righteous. And it costs her, because women who fight too visibly still pay a price for it.

The Gatekeeper.

The woman who learned to survive by controlling access, to herself, to information, to influence. She decides who gets in and who doesn’t. She uses social architecture as armour. She is not difficult. She is the woman who learned that power in other people’s hands didn’t feel safe.

The Stoic.

The woman who carries everything in silence and calls it strength. She never complains. She never asks. She endures. And underneath the endurance, she keeps a careful, quiet account of everything she has given and everything that has gone unnoticed. Her suffering is real. Her resentment is real. And neither of them ever quite makes it into words.

The Outsider.

The woman who opted out before she could be pushed out. She resists belonging, resists labels, resists being defined by systems that were never designed for her. She tells herself she prefers it this way. Sometimes she does. And sometimes, underneath the independence, there is a loneliness she rarely lets herself name.

The Permission-Seeker.

The woman whose nervous system learned that acting without authorisation was dangerous. She waits. For the green light. For the validation. For someone she trusts to tell her she is ready. She has been ready for a long time. She just hasn’t quite been given permission to know it yet.

The Defector.

The woman who learned that the safest way to survive a system that undervalued women was to make clear, in every possible way, that she was not like them. She distanced herself from other women to stay acceptable to the structures that marginalised them all. She is not a villain. She is a product. And she belongs in the framework because she is real, and she deserves language too.

What this might mean for you

I want to pause here.

Because this is the point where a framework piece usually turns back toward the framework. More explanation. More categories. More intellectual architecture.

But I am more interested in what this means for you.

So let me ask you something directly.

Where do you fawn?

Where do you make yourself smaller, softer, more palatable - because some part of you learned that being too much would cost you something important?

Where do you flee?

Where do you work harder, achieve more, and perfect relentlessly - because staying ahead of criticism has always felt safer than risking it?

Where do you freeze?

Where do you go quiet, go invisible, go still - because drawing attention has never felt entirely safe?

And where do you fight?

Where do you push back, pull away, go cold, endure in silence, refuse to belong, wait for permission that never quite arrives, distance yourself from women you should be standing beside?

Because here is what I have come to believe after years of working with these patterns.

Most women are not living in one role.

They are living in several.

Pleasing in one relationship. Perfecting in their career. Disappearing in certain rooms. Pushing back in others. Going cold when softness has felt too risky. Waiting for permission in the places where they have the most to offer.

The whole nervous system is in there. The whole survival system. Built over years, shaped by every environment that taught you what it cost to be fully yourself.

And none of it is a character flaw.

All of it made sense.

All of it was trying to help.

Making it all about me…

After I rewrote the model, I did what any self-respecting researcher would do.

I took my own assessment.

And here is where I landed.

The Challenger: 65%. High. The Rescuer: 50%. Medium. The Gatekeeper: 48%. Medium. The Pleaser: 15%. Low. The Defector: 3%. Low. The Permission-Seeker: 0%.

If you’d told me ten years ago that’s where I’d land, I would not have believed you.

Because I used to be 100% Pleaser.

Not metaphorically. Not almost. One hundred percent.

Pleasing others wasn’t one of my patterns. It was my entire operating system. It was how I got through the day, managed relationships, survived workplaces, earned love, stayed safe.

What I didn’t know then was that I was also undiagnosed neurodivergent.

That matters enormously to this story.

Neurodivergent girls learn very early that the way their brain works doesn’t quite fit. And so they adapt. They mask. They watch other people carefully and learn to perform the version of themselves that gets the least friction. They become exquisitely attuned to what is needed, what is expected, what will keep them safe.

They become, in other words, very good at being good girls.

The Pleaser wasn’t just conditioning for me. It was also a survival strategy for a brain that had learned, very early, that its natural way of being in the world needed to be hidden.

The deprogramming took six years. Two books. A complete reorientation of how I understand myself. Coaching, therapy, mentoring, and courses. It involved recognising the neurodivergences first. It involved the books as writing is how I think, and putting the framework on the page forced a kind of rigour and honesty that the thinking alone wouldn’t have produced. And it involved learning to love myself in a way that wasn’t conditional on being useful, agreeable or beyond criticism.

I am currently training as a love, sex and relationship coach. And the thread running through all of it, the framework, the books, the coaching training, is self-love. The belief, slowly and painfully earned, that I am worth caring for, not because of what I produce or how much I give or how little trouble I cause.

Simply because I am here. I exist.

The Challenger at 65% did not surprise me. I think the fight energy was always there underneath the pleasing, underneath the masking, underneath the performance of agreeableness. I was an inner rebel for years before I let her out. The deprogramming didn’t create the Challenger. It just finally gave her permission to exist without the Pleaser sitting on top of her.

The Rescuer at 50% is the one I’m still working on. I wrote about this recently - the moment in a Power Circle when I shared, out loud, that I was proud of learning not to rescue. Which might sound small. It isn’t.

For most of my life, rescuing felt like a purpose. Being helpful was my identity. I became a psychologist, in part, because fixing felt like what I was meant to do. But rescuing isn’t the same as caring. It removes other people’s agency. It keeps both people stuck.

I set up a WhatsApp group for my Rise Above programme and wrote a boundary into the rules on day one. This is not Michelle’s 24-hour coaching hotline. And I held it. 50% means I’m not done. But I’m somewhere in the middle of this one, which is a long way from where I started.

The Gatekeeper at 48% is the most interesting score. The woman who controls access, who tracks who knows what, who assesses people carefully before deciding how much to trust them. I looked at that score for a while. It makes sense. It has a history. She has protected me in ways I’m genuinely grateful for. She has also, I suspect, kept some people at a distance who deserved to be closer. That’s the work still in progress.

The Defector at 3% feels right. Solidarity was always more instinctive than self-preservation through distancing. If anything, this framework is the proof of that.

And the Permission-Seeker at 0%.

That one means the most.

Because I used to be as high on that as I was on the Pleaser. I sought permission for everything. My ideas, my instincts, my judgements, my right to take up space. I needed someone to tell me I was ready, that it was okay, that I wasn’t getting it wrong.

I don’t do that anymore.

I trust me now.

My instincts. My judgement. My knowing.

That didn’t come quickly. It came from six years of doing this work, from writing the books, from recognising the neurodivergences, from learning to love myself as a starting point rather than a destination.

But it came.

And 0% on the Permission-Seeker is, for me, the number that says most clearly: something real has changed.

This is what deprogramming actually looks like.

Not a dramatic transformation. Not a before-and-after.

A 15% Pleaser after decades at 100%. A 0% Permission-Seeker after years of needing everyone’s approval before I could move. A Challenger that is finally running at full power without a Pleaser sitting on her chest. A Rescuer who is learning, slowly and with genuine effort, to trust other people with their own lives. A Gatekeeper who is starting to ask whether the walls are still necessary.

It’s not finished.

It’s probably never finished.

But the spider chart tells my story.

And I’m proud of what it shows.

Want to find out which Good Girl Roles are most active in your life right now? The Good Girl Roles Assessment is free, takes 15 to 20 minutes, and gives you instant personalised results across all 16 roles.

Take the assessment here - goodgirlroles.scoreapp.com

Big love,

Mx