大象传媒

Who were you before the world told you who to be? Studies suggest that between the ages of ten to twelve, children start to internalise social conditioning to fit others’ expectations of them.

New York Times bestselling author, Glennon Doyle, believes we need to stop pleasing others and start living. She spoke to Woman's Hour about her new book Untamed and shared some advice on how we can all become our true selves...

“We’re born with these wild, individual selves and then we start to just give up who we are so that we can fit into families, to a friendship, to religions, to communities,” says Glennon. “We learn pretty early that we can have who we are, or we can have belonging, but we often have to give up one or the other.

“That process of social programming is kind of like a 'taming'. We lose our wild selves, and then we have to reverse the process so we can reclaim some of who we are or were before the world told us who to be.”

“The last thing I ever want to do for women is to add anything to their list [of jobs]. I don’t think there’s any self-improvement that needs to happen. All of that betterment, all of that self-improvement is just more outer busyness to keep us distracted from returning to ourselves.

“I had this idea planted inside me of what a 'perfect family' looks like. The models put in front of me, very young and forever, were that I would marry a man and then I would have a few children and that I would have this perfect little family.

“That happens often, we have this idea planted in us of what the perfect woman, perfect life, perfect family, perfect marriage looks like. So we spend our whole life chasing that idea, instead of looking inside ourselves and creating a life that matches who we are on the inside.”

“If you need any proof that we are living in an extremely patriarchal culture, look at the words we use to describe the epitome of womanhood. What we’re all trying to avoid as women is being selfish, and what we’re all trying to aim for is being selfless. I just think that’s a horrible goal for a human being, to try to be without a self. It’s just another way of requiring women to disappear in their lives.

“So what I hope for women is that they reject that idea that we are to be selfless and instead embrace the idea that maybe the goal for women is to be so detoxed from all of the misogyny in the air that we are full of nothing but ourselves.”

“My son was having friends over and I peeked my head into the room and I said “Is anybody hungry?” All of the boys, all at once without taking their eyes off the TV screen said 'yes'. But... each girl took their eyes off the TV and started looking at each other's faces. They were looking at their friends’ faces to see if they themselves were hungry.

“Little boys are trained in every moment of uncertainty to look inside themselves for their own desire. Little girls are trained in moments of uncertainty to look outside themselves for permission, for approval and for consensus. A 10-year-old who has to look outside herself to find out how she feels becomes an adult woman who has no idea what she wants or what she feels.

“What I really think is we have this voice inside of us that has always known who we are and that will always know and always tell us what the next right thing is for us.

“Just stopping chasing other people’s expectations and ideals, turning off all the voices outside of ourselves and just practicing going inward instead of outward. Feeling around for what we really want instead of what someone else told us to want. What we really feel instead of what we think we should feel. Because we’re trained to not cause outer conflict, so we don’t rock the boat. But there’s a price to that which is that we slowly die inside.”

“I don’t think we become [our true selves] unless we really sit and face all of those things inside of ourselves that we keep ourselves too busy in the outside world to face. The things that need to be healed, the real deep desires we have, the discontent we have, the potential we have, all the cracks we have in our relationships.

“This time in lockdown, whether we chose it or not, is forcing people to look at that stuff. It’s like we’re those snow globes - we keep ourselves shaken up so we don’t have to see the truth in the centre, and this time really feels to me like it’s a forced settling of the snow globe. I think a lot of people are looking right in the eyes things they may never have looked at. That might cause some real transformation as we come out of this.”

You can hear more from Glennon Doyle on this episode of Woman’s Hour on 大象传媒 Sounds. You can follow us on and too.