Unlearning Goodness: Breaking the Spell of the “Good” Child, the “Good” Person

There comes a moment, if we're lucky, when the performance of being a “good person” begins to crack.

For me, it didn’t shatter in one big moment. It fractured slowly—each time I silenced my truth to keep the peace, each time I said yes when I meant no, each time I abandoned myself to belong. Over time, I began to see the cost of the frame I had inherited. The need to be seen as good had kept me small. It had kept me silent. It had kept me in relationships, systems, and roles that no longer served who I truly am.

What I once called goodness—I now see as a survival strategy.

It’s a spell we are placed under early in life. A spell of compliance, politeness, and perfectionism. We are taught—explicitly and subtly—that goodness is the price of love. That if we are good enough, we will be safe, valued, and accepted.

But here’s the truth: the “good child” is often a child in pain.

A child who intuits that certain parts of themselves are too much.Too angry. Too sad. Too loud. Too selfish. Too wild.

And so they split from those parts. They shape-shift. They smile. They perform.

They earn love with obedience. They earn belonging with self-abandonment.

And then we grow up. But the pattern doesn’t go away.We become the “good” employee, the “good” friend, the “good” woman, the “good” leader.

And all the while, we carry a growing ache: When do I get to be real?

The Tyranny of Goodness

Good and bad. Right and wrong. These binary judgments do more than guide our behavior. They shape our identity. They teach us what is acceptable and what must be hidden. They create the illusion that some emotions, desires, and truths are “bad” and must be suppressed in order to be loved.

But what if those categories are the very source of our disconnection?

What if goodness isn’t a moral truth, but a cultural cage?

Because let’s be honest—“good” is almost always defined by the dominant system.

By patriarchy. By colonialism. By religion.

By what keeps people easy to manage.

We teach children to be “good” so they’ll behave.

We teach employees to be “good” so they won’t question.

We teach women to be “good” so they’ll stay quiet.

We teach students to be “good” so they’ll get the grade, not necessarily the truth.

In this way, the pursuit of goodness becomes a mechanism of control.

But we don’t see it as control. We call it parenting. We call it leadership.

We call it being responsible, polite, professional.

And in doing so, we unknowingly pass on the very wounds we inherited.

Niceness Isn’t Kindness

I want to speak now to the difference between niceness and kindness.

Because they are not the same.

Niceness is surface. Kindness is substance.

Niceness is about being pleasing. Kindness is about being honest.

Niceness avoids conflict. Kindness sometimes creates it, in service of truth.

Niceness is the costume goodness wears.

Kindness is what remains when you take the costume off.

But most of us were praised for being nice—not for telling the truth.

We were rewarded for self-sacrifice, not self-awareness.

We were taught to prioritize harmony over honesty, reputation over reality.

And so we perform. We keep ourselves small.

We say “it’s fine” when it’s not.

We swallow hard truths, needs, and boundaries.

We trade aliveness for approval.

The Wound Beneath the Wound

At the heart of all this is a deeper conflict—one that Gabor Maté names with such clarity:the tension between authenticity and attachment.

As children, we are biologically wired to choose attachment—because our survival depends on it.We need our caregivers. We need love, protection, belonging.

And if being authentic threatens that attachment, we will abandon authenticity in order to stay safe.

That’s not weakness. That’s intelligence. That’s survival.

But what begins as wisdom becomes a wound when it is never reexamined.

And so we carry it into adulthood—this unconscious belief that being fully ourselves will cost us love.

That’s why so many of us feel stuck. Not because we’re lazy or confused—but because we’re still trying to be good enough to be loved.

We haven’t realized that the real work of becoming ourselves is not about being good.

It’s about being whole.

A Call to Parents, Leaders, Educators

To the parents reading this:

• Your children don’t need you to teach them to be “good.”

• They need you to help them be true.

• They need to know that their anger won’t make them unlovable.

• That their sadness won’t make them a burden.

• That their joy doesn’t have to be quiet.

To the educators:

• Don’t just reward compliance.

• Create space for curiosity. For dissent. For self-expression.

• Let students know they are more than a grade, more than their performance.

• Let them know that their truth is welcome, even when it’s messy.

To the leaders:

• You don’t need to be seen as good.

• You need to be trustworthy.

• You need to be real.

• Lead with transparency, not perfection. Lead from wholeness, not image.

• Model truth-telling. Model change. Model liberation.

Because what the world needs is not more good people.

It needs whole people.

People who are willing to confront their conditioning.

People who are no longer available to betray themselves for approval.

People who are committed to dismantling the systems—internal and external—that keep us bound.

What Now?

If you are reading this and realizing that you, too, have been caught in the trap of goodness—take a breath.

You are not bad. You are not broken.

You are waking up. And that is holy work.

Begin to ask:

• Where am I still trying to be “good” instead of being real?

• What emotions or needs have I silenced to keep the peace?

• What parts of me feel unsafe to show—and when did that begin?

• What would leadership, parenting, or teaching look like if it were rooted in wholeness rather than control?

We don’t need to shame ourselves for the ways we’ve performed.

We just need to begin again.

From a deeper place. From a wilder place. From a freer place.

Because goodness is not the goal.

Freedom is.

And the more of us who choose it,

the more we dismantle the lie

that love must be earned

through performance, perfection, or pain.

Let’s write a new story.

Let’s raise children who don’t have to unlearn who they are.

Let’s lead people into liberation, not fear.

Let’s become ungovernable by anything that would make us betray ourselves.

Let us be real.

Let us be kind.

Let us be free.