Book Club Guide

Discussion questions for Healthy Self-Regard.

If your reading group has picked this book, thank you. Here are the questions I would bring if I were sitting in your circle. Use the ones that fit. Skip the ones that don’t. Add your own.

A note on group safety, since this is a book that opens hard places: agree before you begin that anything shared in the group stays in the group, and that nobody has to answer any question. Pass is a complete answer. The book lives at the edge of memoir territory and some of these questions will land harder for some readers than for others. Hold each other gently.

Part I — The Cost of Disappearing

1. What is the first scene in your own life that the dinner-party opening reminded you of?
2. Of the four “masquerading as” patterns — chronic agreement, exhaustion masquerading as love, resentment masquerading as commitment, performance masquerading as character — which one cost you the most this past year?
3. Sage writes that you were not born easy, you were trained. Who first trained you? What did the training look like?
4. Where in your life is resentment trying to tell you something you have not been listening to?

Part II — The Pattern

1. Walk through the Good Woman Contract’s eight clauses out loud together. Which clauses are most active in your life right now, and with whom?
2. What is one yes you said this week that you wish you had given ten more seconds to think about?
3. What does the unpaid emotional management job look like in your daily life? Who is the scanning for?
4. If you have ever kept a quiet ledger on someone you love, what did you most want them to do that you never asked for?

Part III — Healthy Self-Regard

1. Sage names eight things healthy self-regard is NOT (selfishness, narcissism, cruelty, indifference, self-care as marketed, abandoning people, hardness). Which fear about becoming the wrong thing has held you back the most?
2. What would you do this week if you weren’t afraid of being called selfish?
3. What do you actually want — out loud, in this circle, naming three things — without negotiating with yourself first?
4. If you could repair one relationship damaged by your old pattern, which would it be? What would the conversation actually sound like?

Part IV — Living Differently

1. If you have children in your life: what have they watched you do that you would not want them to learn?
2. What relationship in your life is honest enough to survive you showing up as yourself? Which is not?
3. What small daily practice are you willing to commit to between now and the next time the group meets?
4. By the end of the book, has the question who would you be if you stopped performing? moved at all for you?

One closing question for everyone

If you could write your own one-sentence epilogue to your reading of this book — what would it say?

If your group would like Sage to drop in on a Zoom session for the last meeting, email contact@authorsagemorrison.com with your dates. She does this when she can.