About the Book
You have spent your life being the dependable one. The easy one. The one who never makes a fuss. You assumed that was what being a good person costs. It is not.
Healthy Self-Regard is for the woman who has been good at being everyone else. It is the field guide I wish someone had handed me at twenty-five, and at thirty-five, and at forty. It names what self-abandonment actually looks like — chronic agreement, exhaustion masquerading as love, resentment masquerading as commitment, performance masquerading as character — and then it gives you the practices to interrupt those patterns one yes at a time.
This is not a book about narcissists. It is not a book about boundaries in the abstract. It is not therapy in a paperback. It is a direct, lived-experience guide back to yourself — written by a woman who has paid tuition with her life for every page of it, and who refuses to dress up the truth in pretty language.
Across sixteen chapters and four parts, you will find the eight clauses of the Good Woman Contract you signed before you could read; the four parts of the unpaid full-time job your nervous system has been working since you were a girl; the actual scripts for the first honest no you will ever say; and the only chapter in any book on this shelf that takes seriously the work of repairing the damage your performance caused to the people you love.
If you have been called too nice your whole life, this book is the permission slip nobody ever gave you. The promise is not that you will become someone new. The promise is that you will stop performing the one you are.
Why I Wrote This
Because the books on this shelf will tell you what is wrong with the people in your life and leave you sitting there with the diagnosis. I needed a book that would also tell me what was wrong with what I was doing, in language a tired woman could hear, without making me feel small. I could not find that book. So I wrote it.