418. Undoing Your "Goodness" Programming: A Conversation with Elise Loehnen
UnF*ck Your Brain: Feminist Self-Help for Everyone
Kara Loewentheil
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Ever feel like you’re constantly trying to be the perfect friend, partner, coworker, or mom? That pressure to live up to everyone else’s expectations is a trap—and it’s keeping you stuck in self-sacrifice and people-pleasing.
In this episode, I’m chatting with Elise Loehnen, author of On Our Best Behavior, about how we can stop chasing the impossible standard of “goodness” and start embracing our whole, authentic selves. We break down how society programs women to seek external approval—and why that’s keeping us disconnected from our real power. If you’re ready to stop living a performance and start showing up as your true self, let's go.
Get full show notes, transcript, and more information here: https://schoolofnewfeministthought.com/418
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to unfuck your brain. |
| 0:08.3 | I'm your host, Cara Lowentile, master-certified coach, and founder of the School of New |
| 0:13.3 | Feminist Thub. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life |
| 0:20.0 | on your own terms, one that you're |
| 0:22.0 | truly excited to live. Let's go. |
| 0:27.6 | Hello, Elise. Welcome back to unfuck your brain. Thanks for having me. So for those of you |
| 0:35.3 | listening, Elise is Elise Lunin, who is the author of The New York Times bestseller. |
| 0:39.7 | On our best behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. |
| 0:43.7 | And if you have not heard our original interview, go back to 319, episode 319 and listen to that. |
| 0:49.9 | And I'm excited for this conversation today because before we started this, we were both having a like, okay, how do we get it together to be a human today conversation? |
| 0:58.2 | Which, number one, just important for you all to know that the people you listen to and follow also human. |
| 1:02.9 | We are not superhuman. We don't have it all figured out. |
| 1:05.7 | We have days where we're just like, what am I doing? Should I run away and live in the woods? What's happening? |
| 1:10.4 | But your book and your workbook is so much about how to kind of grapple with the experience of being |
| 1:17.2 | a woman in this world and how to move towards a way of experiencing that that is more like integrated |
| 1:25.5 | and connected to oneself, I think. I can take the privilege of describing your |
| 1:29.8 | work to you. So you have this new workbook coming out called choosing wholeness over goodness. |
| 1:34.5 | So I'd love to hear what led you to want to write a workbook in the first place. |
| 1:38.8 | Yeah. No, it's an important question. And I think it's something that you understand. understand in many ways I feel like you are |
| 1:46.1 | the coaching compliment to our work obviously is close cousins maybe sisters or drinking from |
| 1:53.9 | the same fountain and physicians healing ourselves I think which is what makes the work so potent because it's an ongoing |
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