Good Inside with Dr. Becky - Belle Burden: The Burden of Being the "Good Girl"

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Belle Burden was, by her own account, the good girl. Quiet, compliant, the kid who wrote her own book report and did her homework on Friday afternoons. Then one night in the second week of the 2020 lockdown, a stranger left a voicemail: your husband is having an affair with my wife. By 6 a.m. her 20-year marriage was over, and the life she thought she could count on stopped making sense. In her memoir of the event and its aftermath, Strangers, Belle traces how she got to this place - and how she found her way back. They get into the stuff we all carry: why "being good" can quietly cost you yourself, how kids notice far more than we give them credit for, and why it's never too late to tell them the truth. Dr. Becky wrote up her thoughts on how to get the "good girl" tendency out of your own emotional driver seat. * Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible: Girl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn more LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside Pampers Easy Ups: Start your potty training journey with Peppa Pig Pampers Easy Ups Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Raise your hand if you were the good girl. Me. I mean, you're the kid who stayed in line. You were pretty compliant. You were easy, right? I mean, you might have been favorite child. But in today's podcast, I come across a question that I had never considered in this exactly before.

What if being good is a burden? And what if the burden of being good doesn't really show up until we're a lot older? We're adults, and maybe it shows up in an especially intense way once we're a parent. Today's guest is Bell Burden. Interestingly, Bell was nicknamed. Bell, the good burden. So we are talking about exactly that. Bell Burden wrote a memoir called Strangers about the sudden unraveling of her long marriage

during the early days of the pandemic. As I read Bell's story, I kept thinking, okay, this book is about a marriage, kind of. it's about so many other things that we think about all the time, especially as women, how we can be very good. But maybe that's more about our ability to notice other people's needs and take care of them and our simultaneous ability to completely ignore and distance ourselves from the things we need for ourselves. So today, Belle and I are talking about what happens when the life you built around being Good.

Stop's protecting you. I'm Dr. Becky. This is good inside. Belle, when did it start to feel like your life was kind of something you no longer recognized? And for listeners who haven't yet read strangers, can you take us into the moment when it just feel like things were falling apart? So it was March of 2020, the second week of COVID lockdown. I think we all remember that time and how scary it was and how unpredictable. We did not know whether we were going to get a vaccine, how long school was going to be out.

And my husband and I moved to Martha's Vineyard with our two daughters. We had an isolated place. It felt like it was going to be safe. And it really felt that way for about a week. We were cooking and taking walks. He was chopping wood and making fires. And one night after dinner, I was. mopping the floor and I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. I let it go to

voicemail and then I played it and it was a man saying I'm trying to reach Bell. I'm sorry to tell you this but your husband is having an affair with my wife. And I felt a full-bodied shock. I think this is the moment where my life became unrecognizable. I thought I was very happily married. I thought We were very devoted to each other. I was very much in love with my husband. And that night, he really tried to explain it. He apologized. He said it didn't mean anything.

But at 6 a.m. the next day, he came into our bedroom with a bag fully packed and said that he thought he was happy, but he wasn't. He thought he wanted our life, but he didn't. And he wanted a divorce. He did not want any custody of our kids and that he was leaving. And he walked out and he left the island and really became someone I didn't know anymore. And my life became completely unrecognizable to me, including my future, which I had really thought would look a certain way and be a certain way. And then all of a sudden it was going to be something completely different.

Like 12, I'm just trying, like 6 p.m. voicemail, 6 a.m. departure. Or is this like a 12-hour kind of thing? It's, you know, it's still hard to know. I don't know if maybe it was more planned in his head, but for me, it felt like a 12-hour turnaround. And I didn't sleep that night. He did sleep, but I didn't sleep. And, you know, it's possible that he felt caught. And so that prompted him to want to get out. We were facing being in a house together and doing therapy on Zoom, I thought, to try and work through this and figure. out if we could stay married. But he was not going to do that. I did not get a minute of therapy. I'm trying to think about there's this phrase, I think a lot about a child development, like just called violation of expectations, right? We have a lot of feelings and intense reactions in our body to anything that's a violation of expectations. And there's the pain. But in some ways, a violation of expectation is like a surprise you never saw coming, which is almost separate

from the pain. And I'm thinking about the violation of expectation around who he is about your marriage. And I guess this is my question to you. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that, but sometimes when an intense violation of expectation happens, we look around and we're like, is that even a, is that even a coffee mug? Like, is that, is the sky? Like, everything feels like it's in question almost. Um, yes. It really felt that way. And, If you put COVID on top of that and how surreal and like the twilight zone that felt, if you put the violation of expectation on top of that and on top of feeling vulnerable and scared, it did feel that way. Every, as you said, every object, every meal, every task that used to be routine suddenly became something just, I looked at everything.

with completely different eyes, that it felt that destabilizing. Something I'm thinking about, I'll say it out loud is yes to what you're saying, and the way I think about people is we operate in parts, and we all have multiple parts of ourselves. And one of the things that is kind of different

between all of us is how much separation or almost like knowledge of the other parts the other parts have, right? Where like the most extreme version of this is multiple personality disorder. part has no idea. That's very extreme. But we lose the fact that that can, you know, happen in a lot of our lives. I'm one version of myself at work and another job comes and like, wow, why can I be capable or, right? And so sometimes I just want to put it out there. And I, you know,

I've worked with so many people whose partners have had affairs. And yes, that kind of question, what did I miss? And what were the flags? And that's a worthwhile exploration because that can help us empower ourselves going forward. And the other thing I want to say is there are some people who are, the separation of those parts is so extreme. And somebody's like that compartmentalization is so well practiced that what you saw was what you were getting. It's just you didn't, you maybe just never had access to this other part that suddenly showed up after you heard that voicemail, you know?

And I'm not saying that's true for you, but that, yeah, that can be a part of it too. I actually think that is true for me. I think that is true about my ex. I think that he's a compartmentalizer, and I think that it actually makes me feel a little bit better because I do think there were different versions of him, maybe coexisting. And the virgin that showed up that morning looking like his affect was completely different, that was another part of him that I may not have seen ever or in a long time. Yeah, if I, again, I know very little and clearly there's.

There's much more that happened than you just shared in your book. But I think about a situation that that has happened with some of the people I've seen in practice where it's like you find out about it. And when you bring it up, it's kind of actually the first moment in your marriage that that partner has to confront both parts at the same time. And then maybe you get the part of husband, no, okay, I'm good. And then kind of the next morning that other part takes over. And it's like I'm gone. you know, and maybe that was the first moment 12 hours before that you kind of met that other version of your husband or you saw a flicker of it. Or maybe he for the first time was in a house with both versions of himself, right?

Exactly. Exactly. I have the chills. I think, yeah, 100%. And that makes you want to flee. You know, I can see that. Right. Then all of a sudden it feels like a choice instead of a multiplicity, which part I'm going to have to choose. Right? Yeah. Exactly. When hard things happen, I think we go into fault mode a lot. Like, whose fault is this? Is it your fault? Is it my fault? Sometimes I think, I don't know, fault is useful. It's like a way of learning. But yeah, how did fault come into play? Oh, it's his fault. It's my fault. And where is that now? It's a really important question because I think I was so conscious of that in writing the book that I did not want to write a book that was all about,

placing blame at his feet. But I do think, you know, and people say to me and have said to me in the past that the end of a marriage is 50-50, it takes two to tango, it's always two sides. And that can be true. I'm a child of two divorces, and that was certainly true in both of those cases. But I think it's hard to say that when the departing partner doesn't share at any point that they're unhappy, right? So there's no opportunity for me, for him to say to me, I don't like how you do this.

I'm not happy about this. I feel, you know, suffocated or whatever it was going to be. And to give us a moment, not that I could have fixed things, but to give us a moment to work on it. I think it's hard to place fault at my feet when I wasn't given an opportunity to work on it. So that's how I sit with fault. That said, what helped me and what made things shift for me. And you can see me do it in the book too, which felt like a separate process of doing it, is to look at myself in terms of the decisions that I made during the marriage, 20 years of

marriage, or before the marriage. And think about how that redirected my life, what I was giving up, how I was turning away from my true instincts, how I might have been burying my ambitions, financial choices that I made. And when I started, to look at that because I wasn't getting any answers from him. Like I've just, the investigation of him was going nowhere. It was like trying to get blood from a stone. So when I shifted to me and really started looking at decisions that, again, not for fault, but that landed me where I was, how did I get to this place that I'm in? Once I started going through that inquiry, and my stepmother uses this trick of shifting the spotlight on a stage from him to me.

Once I did that, I really think it unlocked me and really like made me able to like kind of literally shift to looking forward, right, rather than looking behind. And I think what you're saying is that's why I think fault and blame are unhelpful frameworks because if it's my fault, I can't look at it anyway. I'm just shrouded in shame if it's your fault. Okay, I'm angry, no learning. But you're saying shifting the spotlight is all more curious. What's going on?

Like what can I put pieces together just to understand the drawing a little better? So what did you put together? I think there are a few different like buckets. But I think I thought a lot about being a track, meeting my husband and husband. We were both at law firms, and I met him two years after my father died. And my father died very suddenly at 54 and left a mess of a financial situation. And I think part of my financial story with my husband was looking for some kind of protection. And he said to me, I'm going to take care of you.

And that in that moment felt really romantic. It felt very wonderful. I think I would have fallen in love with him anyway. I was madly in love with him. But my father dying suddenly and dealing with all that financial stuff, I think put me more at risk of just handing over my financial life in a way that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise. and my ex-husband was very good with finances. He wasn't unethical. He was very honest.

But I really put my head in the sand and did not have a lot of visibility or understanding of where our assets sat and whose name was on what. So I think that was part of it. I think I thought a lot. And this started pretty quickly thinking about this, about the legacy of infidelity. and my family on my maternal line. Both my mother and my grandmother were with partners for decades that were unfaithful in a serial way. And I thought I had stopped that pattern

by marrying someone who was so like just very private, not a public figure, very calm, very mild-mannered, seemingly very loyal. And there I was. having repeated this pattern in a way that was sort of even more explosive because my grandmother's husband and my mother's boyfriend of a few decades, always wanted to come back. My husband didn't want to come back. So I thought, how have I ended up in this place?

Like, now we're at three generations. And this is going to happen to my kids, specifically my daughters? And I really wrestled with that. And where I came down on it was that I had watched both of them, both very formidable women in their own fields. The way they managed it was to stay totally quiet about it and to not talk about it and to not explain it to me, not even mention it, not talk to their friends. The most important thing was actually sort of cleaning it up and protecting the man in the, in the, story. And where I ended up was, I think that's really part of the problem. And when people don't talk about things, I think they get sort of in your bones and in your DNA and have a greater chance

of being repeated. I do not have a background in psychology or anything like that. So you may disagree with me, but it felt like that kind of pattern in my family. And then that kind of dovetailed with this thing inside me that I still can't fully explain, which is that from the first week, I didn't, I couldn't bear to lie about what was happening. He had wanted me to say that it was amicable, and I just couldn't do that. So where that all, that's sort of the thread

that led me to starting to talk about this, both, you know, in verbal conversations, but also in writing. You know that time in summer, when it's about 4 p.m., you've been with your kids all day, you're drained because you're driving them everywhere, you've made snacks 15 times, and honestly, you want something around them that just feels like yours. Now, this is the part that gets a little serious, but stay with me.

That's often a moment when a lot of parents reach for a glass of wine. And this is not a referendum on wine, but so many parents I know tell me I don't even want to have it. I don't like the way it makes me feel in the moment or the next day. But I think what the real need is, is that we are looking for something. adult. We're looking to hold something that tells us, I am not just a caregiver setting up a slip and slide and making my 19th meal of the day. And honestly, that's one of my favorite reasons for Element. See, you can use Element as your adult summer drink. It can be just yours, not for the kids. And then it's 4 p.m. And what you might be looking for isn't necessarily

alcohol. You might be looking for something that just reminds you of you, that you're you're an adult, you're not only a caregiver, and you're allowed to have something of your own. Plus the fact that it's healthy, no sugar, and actually hydrates you is going to take you through the rest of the day and help you stay calmer while it still meets that need. You can check out Element at drinkelement.com slash good inside. That's drinklmn'tt.com slash good inside. I want to go back to Bell the Good because there's no topic, I think, that I like talking about as much as this concept of the good girl, which by the way, I was too. Such a good girl, so many years of unwiring what that really meant, because I think it's one of those words and terms that what's really going on underneath is a lot more complicated than good would assume on the surface.

So what did that mean, Bell the Good, when your brother said that? Like, yeah, give me the stuff underneath. I think part of me came out that way. I was always very quiet. I did not speak until I was three, but then I spoke in full sentences. I was always an observer, always sort of hiding a bit. I was in a family with very strong personalities. and some tempers, nothing physically violent, but a lot of tempers.

And in that, and I would say that my mother, my father, my brother, my stepmother was not like that, but she was kind of managing everybody else. So in that, I think I became, like, I was just going to be the good girl and follow the role so that the Apple cart didn't get upset even more than it was. I'm sure you've talked about this. But when I was reading your book, I'm thinking about Bell the Good. Okay? And I know you're like, Becky, you and everyone.

I just couldn't help being like, are you kidding me? Her name is Bell the good burden? The good burden? Like the burden of being good? Like, did someone make that up? I know. They did not. Yes.

Like, tell me about that. It's like so both poetic and it feels like AI wrote it because it's so obvious, you know? Right. It's really true. My name is quite, it fits into all of this a bit too closely. But it is a family name. Flo Bell is my real name. But yes, and burden is obviously a family name.

But just the good burden, like the burden of being the favorite child, the burden of being so good, the burden of being so contained. And I have come to think the good girl, because I was one. No longer, Belle. No longer. No longer. Good. Good.

Good. That being a good girl really just means I have learned to pay attention outside, into my environment, and I am an expert at noticing what every person wants at the exclusion of ever gazing in. and wondering what I might want for myself because I have learned that attachment and closeness and worth and therefore peace comes from becoming so expert at other people that my own needs is actually the greatest threat. Like it becomes a threat. And then all of a sudden the term good girl doesn't sound so great at all when you describe it that way. Yep. It's true. It's true. It's a dangerous proposition. Oh, okay. I want to turn to some of the

parenting moments here because I'm reading your book. I'm hearing your story and so many of your interviews. I kept thinking, okay, so here you are ultimate violation of expectations. You went from, oh my goodness, my goodness, my goodness, we're going to work through it without 24 hours. Oh my goodness, I don't have a husband. He's gone. He doesn't want custody of my children. I mean, I don't even know how the body can process both those things. And still, life doesn't say, Belle, we're going to give you a pause button. Okay, we're going to just give you a pause button. You, you, you, need a couple months to process this. Just your kids are taken care of like, you're making waffles or you're dealing with homework. I mean, there's like things. And so tell me a little bit about

you. Processing feels like the wrong word. Just living through that while I think the day-to-day demands of parenting are still very much alive. Are you talking to your kids? Are you not? Like, what's going on? So first I would say that I did get more time. than people normally do because of COVID. So we were on an island where I did not have to go to school pickup. I did not have to go to meetings. I did not have to show up at a social event and pretend like everything was fine. I could spend, and I did spend hours walking, miles walking, and I would weep as I walked.

So I think people talk about walking through pain. I think I literally did because I had that room to really feel every inch of it. I'm not sure I was making sense of it or making significant progress, but I definitely felt it, all of it. Whereas when my father died, I think I went right back to work or I was in law school. I went right back to like being studious and all that stuff and didn't really process. a lot of it. At the same time, yes, I had a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old, and they, I talked to a therapist about what to tell them, and the therapist advised to actually wait until the pandemic

became less scary. And of course, it didn't. So there was a month where I thought I was pretending everything was fine and their dad was in New York working, but I was not eating. I was, my face was swollen. And my older daughter had read a text on my iPad before I turned off notifications. So she knew already. And I think would have noticed anyway. And she went into caretaker mode of starting to cook and feed me. My younger one did not know.

So she was kind of operating as she normally would have. but I think my older daughter really stepped in and parented her too. Yeah. So I walked through the motions of it. I went to the grocery store. I cooked sometimes. My daughter cooked more. I made sure they got on Zoom school.

But I was doing a really terrible job of it. I was... I mean, please, you are surviving. I just want to get to that advice and the therapist, and this is not about lambasting some advice. I just, at all. there are no there are no right answers

for awful situations that they're just that's not a thing so but I think this was the wrong advice but go ahead yeah yeah I think I think the interesting thing to tie some of it together is kids are expert

perceivers they're always better than we are because their survival depends on us so if you think about like a baby animal in the forest and then you think about the big stronger parent animal

that because the adult animal can survive more independently. They can be a little less hypervigilant to threats in the forest. It's this is not actually psychological. It's just evolution. Where any younger child is inherently more helpless. So it's interesting, they actually have to be more hypervigilant for their survival because they have to know, wait, could that be a threat? I don't know, but it could. I better go act as if it is because I'd be less likely to defend myself. So they're actually better at perceiving things, right? What do we do as humans, especially kids who don't have the language we do? What do you do as a kid when you notice something off, just off? This is so weird. I hear the word grandma cancer all the

time. Grandma, I don't know. That's just, right? Or, oh, I noticed my mom in bed a lot. Or every time my mom says, dad's in the city, it just, I feel like it feels a little tone different than two years ago. And she said, So I'm noticing all that. What do I do? Because then everything else in my environment is telling me everything's normal. Normal. Normal as a, you know, whatever day at the park. I have to compartmentalize. I have to self-doubt. Self-doubt becomes a very adaptive coping strategy for kids when the things they notice aren't confirmed because it's very uncomfortable. It would be like, I think something's going on. No one's saying it. So the only answer to get back, to homeostasis is, I must not be that good at perceiving my environment. It's like gaslighting yourself or something. Yeah, it's actually, I must not. Other people must know better than I do. People must be better at perceiving the things I perceive with my eyes than I do because clearly nothing's going around. So going on. So I can't, I guess like not trusting myself is something I should just hold with me as I get older because I kind of keep messing this up. So interesting. It's really

makes so much sense. Curious if you could speak a little bit. Just like where you are now. Like this happened. You survived it. You walked through the pain. You wrote about it. You've been on a tour about it. You've had lots of things happen since you released the book. I mean, yeah, just tell me a little about what's going on for you now. For me, I think what happened, which was to have all of these structures fall apart and like sort of be stripped down to this emotional core was actually, and I listened to your podcast with Maya Shankar. Is that how you pronounce her, yes, which was so great. And I think she said it beautifully that these moments of change are really opportunities

because when I got stripped down to that core, it was actually when I was able to write again, which is something I thought I was going to do at 18. took a 30-year, you know, diversion into law from. And to, and putting the book aside and the unexpected reception of it, it is such a miracle to me that I'm writing again and that I can have a life as a writer. And I don't think I ever would have gotten there if I had stayed where I was in my marriage. I also think that I kind of became a more relaxed and easygoing person, because I think when you're gripping so tight to everything being good in your family

and perhaps things looking a certain way, when all of that is blown up, I feel like I just became more relaxed with my kids and, in my life with friends. I can tolerate mess and chaos and all of that a lot more. And I think I have deeper and more real friendships. So I never would have chosen this. I wanted an intact family more than anything. And I loved my husband so much. But out of that pain and shock and and difficult, really difficult few years, all of this came. And I think it's a different life. I think it's a more interesting life and a more fun life and probably closer to my true nature. And I love when, I've had a lot of young people read the book like Young 20s. And some of them have said that it makes

them feel hopeful that even if things don't go according to plan, that there can be this other life on the other side. And I love that. Yeah. Yeah. And where's Bell the Good now? How's she doing? Where is she? So Bell the Good. She's still there. She's still there. She's still compliant, I think, to a certain degree and any task that's assigned to her she will do. But I think I'm more conscious of how that restricted me. So I'm trying to let that go. And I'm actually going to be thinking a lot about what you said about the, how you framed the good girl paradigm as maybe being a real negative.

And look, you know, something I said to my eight-year-old when he was having trouble falling asleep a little while ago. But I don't know. I'm thinking about it relative what you just said. He was very worried at night. know, what if this? And he can worry about like big worldly things and what something happens to you, you know, and that's like his worry. That's his worry part, right? And I'm not going to undo the worries. Logic doesn't help with worries or at temporary sues and then makes it worse the next day.

And, you know, but I just, I said something, that part is, it's a part of you and not all of you. It kind of sounds like that's what you're saying. Yes. Yes. It's a part of me, but there are more parts of me now. And there's there's a part of me that's very, um, uh, willing to have people judge me and willing to have people, um, be shocked by me. Um, and, uh, maybe just, um, some even condemn me for what I'm doing. But I, I'm, I'm still hard, but I'm, I'm more able to tolerate that than I would have been before. Well, well, look, if we, if we go back to this idea of the idea of goodness, not true goodness, like a good inside, I think about goodness inside. But if I think about the good girl, it's almost the opposite. It's goodness comes from gazing out, getting something

outside of us, and bringing it back in. Bell, the good would probably be eviscerated with all the criticism, because if she's so dependent on something outside to define herself, it sounds like you have an increasingly developed or you're just back in touch with, something that I think was actually never missing. It was just probably blocked. A part of you that, like, how, that goodness and belief and conviction and clarity inside of you. And so all that criticism sucks. Like I've had that. It's no fun. And it's very different than that evisceration kind of feeling. That's so helpful to frame it that way. And I think that's right. I think this allowed me to get to that internal place where I can find it within me rather than trying to bring it in.

I think we all have those, that, you know, that voice that's a little bit worried about something or a little bit, you know, whether it's about finances or about your marriage. And I will just say, because it worked for me, I do think having a practice, you don't have to want to be a writer, you don't have to want to publish a book. but writing things down, I think, can be really helpful to just kind of push yourself to articulate maybe something that you're feeling that you can't quite put your finger on. I think that was really, really helpful for me when everything kind of fell apart. And I wish I'd had a practice of doing that before. I think maybe it would have helped me wake up a little bit. That was one of the most meaningful conversations I've had in a while. And I don't even just mean on this podcast. Right after we ended this recording, Bell and I were saying, geez, got to go get coffee. We've got to continue this conversation. And the other thing it left me with is something that I think you might also be wanting more of. I don't think Bell and I are the only two women on this planet who had that good girl identity when we were young and who are still in many ways trying to figure out what about.

that still works for us and what works against us. And that's kind of just step one. Okay, it kind of works against me. Now what? Okay, what do I do? And don't tell me something that's going to be 10 out of 10 hard. Here's what I want to do for you. I want to give you three things you can do today. If you have still that kind of good girl part inside you speaking really loudly or kind of driving the car most at the time. And I promise you, these are three things that for each of them, you're going to say, oh, a little uncomfortable. I think like a two out of ten, but that's totally manageable.

I'm going to type those up, and I'm going to put them as a link in my show notes. And when you click and you get them, I love your feedback. Honestly, email me, podcast at goodenside.com. Dr. Becky, you think that's a two out of ten. That's a nine out of ten.

I love being wrong. Because if I'm wrong, that helps me get it better for you the next time. So please let me know. Now let's place your feet on the ground. Me too. let's place a hand on our heart and let's remind ourselves even as I struggle on the outside even as I try to untangle being the good girl on the outside I remain good inside I remain

good inside looking forward to hearing from you