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Dr. Jennifer Reed is a Columbia and UCLA trained board certified psychiatrist, an assistant professor at the

University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Guilt Free, reclaiming your life from unreasonable

expectations. Her work focuses on women's mental health, perfectionism, and the emotional

weights so many women quietly carry every day.

She's here today with us to talk about guilt, where it comes from, why it feels so hard to escape,

and how we stop making every decision from a place of obligation instead of actually listening to ourselves.

Hi, Jennifer.

Hi, Kelly. Thanks for having me. Of course.

I was telling you before the podcast, I feel like this conversation is one that I have with my

friends on a regular basis where no matter how hard we're trying in life or how many things we're

juggling, there is just something that you always feel like you're dropping the ball on. And that can really be

this heavy weight that we're constantly carrying around. So I know that you work with a lot of

high functioning, self-aware women. Why do you think so many of us feel like we're failing?

Yeah, you know, the more that I talk about this subject, frankly, the angrier I get that we have

to deal with this as women, because I really think of it now as sort of a guilt. It's a tax on our joy.

It's a tax on our pleasure. This idea that if I do something really well at work, I'm taxed with

guilt because maybe I didn't take

care of something at home or I skipped a workout or I wasn't dressed the right way or all these

different ways that we sort of are taxed with this guilt. And so I sort of set out to figure that out

because it was coming up in all of my conversations with friends. And with my sister, who's like one of my

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