You Are Not Who They Told You to Be

On love, witness, and what happens when women finally see each other clearly

It’s gone midnight, and I’ve just spent the last few hours doing something that felt, if I’m honest, like an act of love.

Let me explain.

At the end of every Rise Above cohort (both the public and corporate versions), we do something called the Sovereign Mirror. It’s a structured exercise where the women pour their words over each other - what they see, what they admire, what they want the other person to know they carry.

The words come in from everywhere: a Google Form, written letters, live Zoom sessions, and celebration calls. They come in messy and raw and real, in the way that only words spoken between women who have truly witnessed each other can be.

Tonight I sat down and collated it all. Every quote. Every voice. Every moment, someone said, you remind me of freedom, or " You are a 10, or I borrowed some of your strength last week, and I want you to know that.

I turned it into individual documents (one for each woman), so that every single person in this cohort has a record of what she carries. Something she can return to on the days she forgets. Because we forget. That’s the whole point of the Sovereign Mirror. We always remember the bad stuff. Which is why we need the good stuff written down and held somewhere we can find it.

Sitting with all of those words, I kept thinking about something.

At university, they teach aspiring psychologists about unconditional positive regard. Carl Rogers. The idea that a therapist holds a non-judgmental, accepting space for their client and values the person regardless of what they say or do. It is a cornerstone of person-centred practice. It is taught as the gold standard.

And it is important. I am not arguing with Carl Rogers at midnight.

But here is what they did not tell me. What I have learned - not from a textbook, but from years of doing this work, from sitting with women in their most undefended moments, from writing Good Girl Deprogramming, building Rise Above and watching what happens when you put the right women in a room together and hold it carefully enough.

They did not mention love.

Not the soft, fluffy, greeting-card version. The real kind. The kind that says, I see you (not who you think you should be, not who they told you to be), I see who you actually are, and it is extraordinary, and I will keep telling you until you can hold it yourself.

That is what I do. That is what this work is. It is love for self - mine first, the messy, still-in-progress, recovering Good Girl version of me that knows what it is to shrink and to start taking up space again. It is love for my clients. And it is holding the space for them, sometimes for months, sometimes longer, until they begin to love themselves enough to stop waiting for permission.

The Sovereign Mirror is not a nice exercise at the end of a programme. It is the whole point. It is what happens when a group of women has been held carefully enough and long enough that they can finally see each other clearly, and, more importantly, begin to see themselves.

Tonight I read words like:

"My mother said: you've changed. I shut the door and did a dance."

“You do not know how lovely you are. You are the first one to see the beauty in everyone else.”

“You are a phenomenal force to be reckoned with.”

And: “I feel, for the first time in my life, a sense of self-worth that I did not have before.“

That is not unconditional positive regard.

That is love. Doing what love does. Changing people from the inside out.

They should probably update the curriculum.

I can’t wait to send all these documents out to the group in the morning. They are gorgeous.

You are not who they told you to be. You are what they could not contain.

If this landed somewhere in you, I want you to know there is a space for exactly this kind of work - and it opens officially on Monday, 20th April. But because you’re on my Substack, you can sneak in a day early.

The Good Girl Deprogramming Community is where women come to be witnessed, to do the work, and to remember who they actually are. No performance required. No shrinking to fit. Just you, exactly as you are, held by women who get it.

We’re starting with a 12-week read-along of Good Girl Deprogramming, where we come together and discuss what each chapter has brought up for us - exactly how I wrote the book to be read.

Come and join us: michelleminnikin.com/work-with-michelle/community

We would love to have you.

Mx