2 Understanding Projection, Introjection, and the
Good-Guy Identity

When we aren’t able to handle certain emotions or ideas about ourselves, we might project them onto others and others might, in turn, introject what we are passing to them. This dance between projection and introjection can be very subtle and is usually quite complex. In this chapter we will learn, through the use of several examples, how the good-guy identity is formed through the process of projection and introjection, both from the perspective of the child (the introjector) and the parent (the projector). I will share a story here to give you a better idea of the various ways it might play out.

Diane’s Story

We’ll consider an overt instance of projection and introjection through the story of Diane and her father, Jackson. When he is projecting, every mistake Jackson makes will be someone else’s fault. Everything he deliberately does that comes from anger, shame, violent tendencies, or other dark parts of him will be projected onto someone else: “You made me do those things. If you just weren’t __________ I wouldn’t have to do it. You just need to stop being __________.”

Even every mistake he unconsciously makes, when pointed out, will be denied outright or blamed on someone else. This is how Jackson survives, because to him, the overwhelming feeling of shame that overcomes him in the face of wrongness is tantamount to being killed. He simply cannot see himself as having been wrong, because his sense of existence itself is attached to this identity that cannot be wrong.

Because Diane came from a womb where she was one with everything in her surroundings, and because at the deepest levels of our humanity we actually are one with each other and everything, as an infant she is likely to perceive that her environment and those who live in it with her are one and the same thing. Therefore, everything in her environment will be a mirror for her to look into to find herself. She is, at this primitive age, in a primal state of receptivity. She is receiving all that goes on in her environment as if it were an aspect of herself. This is why infants cry when parents are fighting three rooms away or why when the three-month-old learns to reach out and take that rattle in his hand, he puts it directly into his mouth. He thinks it is him, in just the same way that his thumb is him. And this is why introjection works.

Jackson unconsciously projects onto Diane all of the things that he cannot tolerate in himself, and Diane introjects this projection as identity. As he projects wrongness, she will begin to identify as wrong. Some who identify in this way will later acknowledge that they feel wrong for having been born—that is how strong these kinds of identifications are. Introjection means that Diane incorporates into her identity the things that Jackson projects onto her. She believes these things to be her.

Being his scapegoat in this way means that Diane gets to stay; she is not abandoned. Therefore, taking on her father’s guilt now has been rewarded, which means to Diane that it is a good thing to do. She must be good in order to compensate for Jackson’s badness, compensating for that feeling of unworthiness she has introjected. She will make all manner of excuses for her father’s behavior, even lying, if need be, to protect him from having to feel ashamed. And she will always try to be very, very good so that she will never upset her father and make him blame her for his behavior. If she is blamed, it comes with deep feelings of guilt and shame, and since Diane has also introjected her father’s fear of those feelings, they frighten her supremely. So she must be good to avoid them.

Jackson likes his daughter’s role, of course, because it means that he has raised someone who likes him, loves him, and removes him from all responsibility for his bad behaviors, thoughts and feelings. As an added bonus, Diane makes him look like a very good parent because she is always taking care of others. She doesn’t seem to mind it much, because as long as she takes on responsibility for her father, she gets to be close to him—and that makes her feel like she belongs, which, of course, is a primal need. Transferring that on to the world will mean that she comes to believe the only way she can be close to others is to take care of them. Now she is emotionally responsible, if not physically responsible, for everyone she knows.

This dance works really well as it gets reinforced over the years, with Diane taking on more and more responsibility for others and Jackson getting to do whatever he wants without feeling shame or having to consider how he impacts others. She gets to feel like she belongs, like she has a life mission, and like her job here is very, very important.

Diane begins to negotiate her way in the world by caring for, sacrificing for, and being good to others. In grammar school she appears to her teachers to be very mature for her age, always doing the right thing, offering kindness and insight to her peers, and generally being the ideal student. Her friends in high school all come to her with their burdens, and she takes them on emotionally as if they were her own. She worries and talks and gives advice, and she does all that she can to “be there” for her friends. Then she graduates, quite successfully, because it is good to be successful and bad to be unsuccessful, and she goes on to college.

The same thing happens in college, only now she begins to notice that the people that she is attracted to as potential partners all just want to dump their troubles on her. They are constantly in crisis and she constantly has to deal with some drama or another in their lives. Then they meet someone else and they move on. So, then, again quite successfully, she graduates from college and starts her career.

On the job she is always trying to get everything done in the smoothest and most efficient way, though she definitely sees others sloughing off. She begins to get a little angry about that, realizing that she constantly has to do all of the work that they are not doing. The boss just seems to naturally expect this of her. I mean, after all, she is doing it, right? In fact, when she tries to tell the boss that others are not doing their jobs, he makes excuses for them, and just tells her that she is being too sensitive. The boss did once actually confront one of her coworkers, whom Diane knew to be doing almost nothing in his daily routine. She was sitting with the coworker when the boss started telling the coworker how mad he was at him. Diane spoke up at one point, joining the boss by telling the coworker that she has had to pick up the slack for him many times. The boss turned on Diane, as did the coworker, and she was completely made to blame for the whole mess. She doesn’t know how this conversation turned this way. But obviously, she thought, if both of them are mad at her this way, she must have done something wrong somewhere along the way, so she apologized and they both went back to doing what they had always done.

As she grows more and more into her adult life, she begins to notice that none of her friends know how to be there for her. I mean, she is there for them all of the time, right? She listens to them cry, goes over to talk to them in the middle of the night after the latest fight with their boyfriend or girlfriend, and even helps them considerably with financial issues that arise. She is there. She is the one to call. But if Diane ever cries or gets upset about something, they just tell her to get over it. Some of them have even said, “You are strong, you can handle this.” Of course she felt dismissed and hurt. They didn’t even want to take the time to listen to her whole complaint. In fact, it was not uncommon at all for them to interrupt her and start talking about themselves or their own problems. This became so common that she began to wonder what was wrong with her, always assuming the fault was her own.

Finally, Diane meets the partner of her dreams. She falls madly in love and thinks that she will burst with happiness. After a few years of marriage, however, she begins to notice the pattern that has been there all along. Her partner blames her for everything. He cannot ever admit to being wrong and somehow everything that goes wrong is all her fault. She gets mad when this happens, but he just makes fun of her, telling her that she just can’t admit that she is wrong. If she defends herself verbally, he gets mad and starts throwing things or putting his fist through walls. So she learns to keep her mouth shut. In fact, she learns to shut down. But that doesn’t stop him from blaming her for everything. Still, she loves him and she is terrified of losing him, so she does what she has to do to keep the peace.

She apologizes regularly, even for things she knows she didn’t do. It just works better that way. But she also frequently wonders what it is that she is doing wrong. She tries with all her might to please him, going out of her way to bring him wonderful little surprises and kindnesses, which he seems to take for granted, or worse, criticize. But maybe if she does it differently, he’ll be kinder about it. Maybe if she gives him more sex, less talking, more massages, less complaining, more time and money, less feeling sorry for herself—maybe then he’ll change. She just needs to keep working harder to make him happier.

Besides, she doesn’t have the time or energy for complaining; she has lots to do. She has a job where everyone is depending on her to come through for them. She has friends who need her. She now has children who need her. Her sister needs her, too, because she just got divorced again, and her mother keeps telling her how much her sister needs her. Oh, and she also has to see to the needs of her parents, right? Isn’t that what good people do?

Diane is always busy doing something for someone, and she is determined to get it done, because if she doesn’t she is going to feel really bad about herself. Every time she can’t get things done just right for someone, it feels like an enormous failure—not just a failure of what she does, but a failure of who she is. SHE is a failure if she can’t make others happy.

Not only that, but she has this enormous dragon of guilt always chasing her, breathing his noxious breath in her face every time she thinks of not doing the thing she has to do for others. It tells her that she is going to feel really, really bad if she doesn’t do it. So, regardless of how tired, sick, or disturbed she is, she gets up and does it, because it’s better than facing that dragon.

Of course, this example is not the only possibility for what a child raised by this same parent might introject as identity. These introjections also depend at least to some degree on the natural and authentic capacities of the child. For example, a sensitive child might introject as above, whereas a less sensitive but more physically oriented child might introject “badness.” Rather than caring for, sacrificing for, and excusing the behavior of others, this less sensitive child will mimic that “badness.” Regardless of the identity the child picks up, it is important to remember the authentic Self is still in there and is still active, just not consciously lived out.

The More Subtle Workings
of Projection and Introjection

While the previous example shows obvious projections, they actually often work very subtly. Parents commonly have no clue that they are projecting onto children, because the whole issue of projection is based in unconsciousness. Even what we are not conscious of still has active energy that wishes to go somewhere and do something. Just because we have repressed it out of conscious awareness doesn’t mean that it is not still very active in our lives. It may pop up in little actions and words that others recognize as hateful, mean-spirited, jealous, angry, vindictive, or, on the flip side, these actions can seem happier and more alive than we actually feel.

Rather than manifesting as behavior or actions, repressed material may be projected as silent, insistent pressure on the recipient. Projection works through such things as subtle body language, looks, facial expressions, and that oh-so-subtle but powerful auric-like energy that surrounds each of us. It is this subtle energy that is most powerful as projection, because it cannot really be seen in the behavior and words of the sender, and it can therefore be easily interpreted to belong solely to the receiver of the projection. Since preverbal children are typically highly intuitive, it is easy for them to pick up the unresolved material floating around in someone’s energy. Since preverbal children are also looking for identification, it is very easy for them to simply take in this material and assume it belongs to them.

Whether projection is obvious, as in the case of Jackson and Diane, or more hidden, introjection of these kinds of parental projections can lead to a lifetime of actions, reactions, and relationships that are simply a repeat of the parent-child pattern. In the case of the good-guy identity, the person who identifies with goodness sacrifices authenticity while bearing the burden of everyone else’s emotions, problems, and issues.

Reinforcing the Good-Guy Identity: Case Studies

As we have gathered so far, identity is a survival strategy that we assume very early in life in response to the projections of primary caregivers. Scapegoating the good-guy child is one of the primary methods of projection by which the child’s early identification process is shaped. By scapegoating, what we mean first is that the child must sacrifice something. With regard to identity this means the child sacrifices Self for an identity that works to support the family trance mentioned by Firman and Gila earlier. Second, the child is being required to take on shadow material for others. Shadow material is unconscious material. In the case of the good-guy identity, what is generally projected is dark stuff, stuff that other family members don’t want to own, emotions they don’t want to have to deal with, and responsibilities they don’t want to have to take care of. The rest of this chapter will help us understand what scapegoating in a family system looks like, from both the parents’ and the child’s perspectives, and how this process shapes the good-guy identity. There are several possible scenarios of parental projection that can scapegoat a child. Over the years of clinical practice I could see clearly how this can happen as several similar case histories began to merge into one picture. Below are some examples of these composite pictures that help us understand.

The first of these is the case in which the child is unwanted and is therefore entirely ignored—as in emotionally abandoned. The child is not noticed at all, until and unless the child acts so outrageously (which is usually only some mild form of misbehavior or some urgent need such as illness) that the parent has to get involved either to punish the child or save face in front of the parent’s peers. This child is never surprised at the punishment, for he has introjected a belief that he deserves it. The child has somehow betrayed the parent by being born—therefore, punishment is a natural outcome of being alive. In order to avoid punishment and still somehow stay at least marginally connected to this family, he must become invisible. His main challenge then is to learn to be invisible. This child will grow up believing that the worst thing he can do is show up.

A second case scenario is the one in which the parent demonstrates an almost incestuous closeness with the child’s identity, all the while starving the authentic Self in the child of anything at all that would encourage it to be and grow. This child is often emotionally disabled by the closeness to the parent, for the parent’s projected need for the child’s closeness has taken over every aspect of the child’s consciousness. The child then has no access to her own emotions. As an adult who is becoming more conscious, she may look back and wonder how she was able to miss so much of what was really going on between parent and child. The child suffers the illusion that she is very close to the parent and demonstrates this by literally staying physically close to the parent, desiring only to please the parent. Under it all she senses that to displease the parent is to lose the parent. At certain points this child, as an adult, may become aware that she feels smothered by the parent, but the minute she starts thinking that, she simultaneously develops a primal fear that to become conscious of that means death. What this child is really carrying is all of the parent’s old unresolved needs for belonging so that the parent never has to become aware of them. In this kind of system we often see a long generational history of exactly this kind of enmeshment, projection, and introjection.

In a third case scenario the parent needs the child to think, walk, act, talk, and feel just like the parent. The parent wants a mini-me. The brainwashing that covertly takes place here consists of two steps: (1) the child is noticed, as in given eye contact and some form of mild approval, for following the parental agenda, and (2) the parent either shows no consciousness whatsoever of the child’s authenticity, or that authenticity is outright rejected or punished. If the child actually accepts the mini-me identity, then the parent and child will be enmeshed. They will call it closeness, but actually the child has had to give up his authenticity for this so-called closeness—so the authentic child is never really known at all. In the case where the child is actually so different from the parent as to not be able to accommodate the parent’s wishes for a mini-me, the child may grow up feeling as if he is guilty, bad, and shameful because he has not been what his parent wanted him to be. At best this relationship will be a push-pull dynamic where the parent is always trying to get the child to change, and the child will feel guilty at times and try to comply but subtly or overtly rebel at other times. Either way he will carry a deep-seated shame and will not likely know why.

In a fourth case scenario the child is literally blamed for all of the parent’s mistakes. This child is told that when the parent has a temper tantrum or makes other poor decisions, it is the child’s fault, as in: “If you hadn’t done __________ , I wouldn’t have had to __________ ,” as we saw described in Diane’s story. She may either feel tremendous guilt and responsibility, or she will feel a deep-seated shame that will either manifest in devastatingly poor self-esteem or the need to outright rebel against the parent. If the rebellion doesn’t become yet another identity, (which would be a bad-guy identity or something very different from the good-guy identity), it can be the healthier of these two options.

In the fifth case scenario the child is made to feel responsible for the parent’s emotional, psychological, or physical well-being. Perhaps one or both of the parents are sick or addicted to substances. There could also be a scenario in which the parents cannot or will not play an appropriate parent role, so the child feels like he must fix them and take care of the family. Or the child may be left in charge of house cleaning, cooking, babysitting, etc., on a daily basis for such a length of time that being the responsible one becomes identity. This child will be empowered with superhero capacities to do things that a normal child would not even know how to do, and so there will be some affirming identification with this superhero theme. But there may also be an underlying guilt that says that IF he doesn’t do the things that parents seem to need him to do, THEN the whole world will fall apart and it will be all his fault. He grows up thinking this way about all kinds of life scenarios, and he gets involved only with people who need him to take care of them.

In the sixth case scenario the child is raised by parents who believe very strongly in right and wrong, good and bad. They appear in every way to be good parents to the child who is attended to, disciplined, and loved. But one or both of the parents have a secret. Perhaps they are actually frequently, but privately, quarrelling, so there is coldness in the air quite often. Perhaps one or both of them is having an affair. Perhaps there is some kind of financial secret, or one of them is involved in something that is ethically questionable. The child grows up consciously feeling that she’s had a good childhood and been lucky to have good parents. But on a subliminal level the child is picking up on the tension around the secret. As children often do, this child picks up the fact that something is wrong, but instead of thinking something is wrong with the parents, she believes that it must be her. She must correct the wrong in order to make that dark feeling go away. Since the tension around the secret lingers over a long period of time, this response becomes habitual to the point that the child begins to believe that dark feeling is her—that something is wrong with her. Therefore, she begins to strive to be very good, even perfect, in order to make this dark feeling go away. In this way the child slowly learns to take ownership of other people’s stuff in order to be good enough to fix it.

The seventh case scenario is one in which, as above, the parents believe very strongly in right and wrong. In this case, however, their need to create a totally morally correct family life will impact the child, sometimes severely. The parents in this case are so morally correct that they forget the sensitivities and needs for belonging, which are primal to the budding consciousness of a child. The child is berated and punished for the slightest infractions. An innately sensitive child will commonly strive to be very good, so that he won’t get in trouble with the morally correct parent. He also feels a great deal of shame around the slightest misdeed, and he worries that the parent(s) will dislike or disapprove fairly constantly. Of course over time this becomes an identity; he will learn how to please others by being good so that they will approve and not leave or abandon him. He lives his life now running from a terrible feeling of guilt.

The final scenario is found in the case of abuse—be it physical, emotional, mental, verbal, or sexual. In any of these cases the child becomes the whipping boy or girl for all of the parents’ unresolved issues. Abuse teaches a child that she both deserves this abuse and that if she were just good enough she would stop being abused. Of course, this can be mind-boggling, since the child did not cause the abuse. She may try and try to figure out how to make it stop, only to be abused yet again. Having to live in this way means that she will identify with this idea that if she could just find and push the right magical button, by becoming a better person, she could make it stop. This dynamic develops such strong energy that it becomes a part of every relationship thereafter, until she finally figures out that she was never abused because she deserved it. Rather she was abused because abuse was her parent’s way of projecting his or her issues onto her.

These are just a few of the possible cases in which a child may develop a good-guy identity, but in all of these cases, parents set the tone for the rest of the family regarding how to treat the good guy. Of course the multiple relationships within a given family are complex and interwoven in intricate ways that would have to be pulled apart thread by thread for us to fully understand how members of a family react and interact with each other. All we need know for our purposes here, however, is that if the parent scapegoats the good guy, then other family members are likely to do the same. Therefore, if, as in the first case scenario, the parent needs the child to sacrifice visibility, thereby becoming invisible for the parent, then other family members are also likely to make that child invisible. If the child is kept very close to the parent, that child will be seen by other children as the parents’ favorite, the one who needs the parent the most, or the one who can’t do anything without the parent. In these ways, then, the identity is reinforced by several people at once, creating many mirrors for the child to look into and see in themself the very same thing.

Of course, in the above cases the scenarios may be mixed together in some variations of a theme. But the bottom line is that the good guy is being required to carry, for the parent, the parent’s unresolved issues, so that he begins to identify with these issues at such an early age that it seems as if the identity is personality. The authentic self is sacrificed entirely and lost to conscious awareness, and the good guy lives only in the identity that continues to carry other people’s unresolved issues—even, in some cases, into death.

The Parents’ Perspective

Again, it is important to note that we are not parent-blaming here. In these cases and many more, the parent has brought painful and difficult issues of their own to the parenting dynamic. Without knowing it, the parents, through the lack of vision created by their own identity issues, fold their children into these issues in a way that seems to relieve the parents of them. Commonly, when parents realize they have been projecting, and they learn the impact that has had on the child, they are very willing to take back these projections and work on their own issues. Unfortunately, it is all too common that by that time the child has already spent years in an identity that comes from the parent’s projections. As stated earlier, as we as a collective evolve into more and more authentic parenting, that problem may be resolved. That said, the following is a brief overview of two of the above scenarios showing what might be going on in a parent’s psychology with regard to projection.

If I am the parent in the previous example in which the child is unwanted and therefore essentially abandoned (by being forced into invisibility as his only form of survival), I never really have to deal with the fact that there is a child there who needs me. I am very likely to have some unresolved issues about intimacy and abandonment of my own that now can be made invisible to me right along with my child. Therefore, I don’t have to take any emotional risks to be as vulnerable as that child appears to be. My child is just not really there, neither are my vulnerabilities.

In the case where I need my child to look, talk, walk, act, think, and feel just like me, I have unresolved and deep-seated self-esteem issues, which the child will fix by being a little mini-me. As long as the child is a mini-me, I don’t have to think about my own issues; I just need to keep working with the child’s image in the world so that the mini-me can be liked and applauded by the world. As long as she looks good, I look good—because she’s just like me. But if she looks bad, woe be unto her, for that means that she is messing with my self-image. Therefore, my job is to make sure she always looks good to the world so I don’t have to deal with my own self-esteem issues.

The bottom line with regard to parental projection is that these parents are unconsciously looking for a place to leave their own unresolved issues so that they do not have to deal with them directly.

Origin of the Psychology of Scapegoating

The idea of the scapegoat originated very early in humanity’s history when sacrifices were made to gods who were then supposed to grant immunity from difficulties that might come to others who had not so sacrificed. A fatted calf worked for celebrations—the gods (or god/God) had been good to the citizens, and so they gave a gift of a fatted calf to the gods in thanksgiving. A lamb was often used as a sacrifice that included a prayer for future blessings or the prevention of potential harm. But for the removal of sins, the scapegoat was chosen. Sins, of course, had to be removed, for the gods were not happy with sins—which, of course, meant that the gods would turn against the evildoers with all kinds of punishment, including illness, death, failed crops, becalmed ships, lost wars, etc. So a goat was selected from the flock to be placed on the altar to the gods. Sometimes all of the sins of a community or family were written on a ribbon, which was tied around the goat’s neck, and after a ritual, the goat was sent off into the woods or wilderness to fend for himself—thus carrying the sins far away. Other sacrifices required that the scapegoat’s life was to be given up for the sins of the community.

This is exactly how it works in the psychology and dynamics of a family system. The scapegoated child carries parental issues—or those things the parents find to be unacceptable and they wish to remain unaware of—far away from the parent, by introjecting those issues as identity. If the projected issues are ever noted, they will be noted as belonging to the scapegoated child, not to the parent. Meanwhile, the child’s Self may either die, becoming completely oblivious to its urges, or the child will live so distant from the Self they have no recognition of it.

Why Me?

But why me? Why not some of my other siblings? Why do only certain individuals in a family system carry the good-guy identity? Anecdotally, I have found that most of the people who live out the good-guy identity were selected for this role because they have a natural gift for empathy—the natural capacity to feel other people’s feelings.

But surely we are not saying that parents consciously pick a child to sacrifice their lives for the parents. No, we are not saying that. These things happen in the subtle, cloudy ranges of unconscious interaction between parent and child, and mostly long before the child is verbal. You might say that these are bargains made under the table of consciousness. The parent unconsciously notices that this child is more empathetic, and they unconsciously note that this child may therefore be able to carry things the parent can’t seem to handle, in which case the parent unconsciously projects these things onto the child to carry. The child unconsciously accepts the projection as a way of staying close to the parent he so desperately needs.

How do we unconsciously notice things? Well, we do it all the time. Think of that guy or gal you dated that you instantly knew was not for you, but you dated them anyway. Your knowledge of that fact just sort of hovered around the edges of your awareness. But years later when you can look back, you always knew he or she wasn’t right for you. Or what about that time you married someone you thought you loved, only to later realize that you never did, and you only married him because everyone else you knew was getting married and he just happened to be there at the time. We can place knowledge in the unconscious any time we want. It is not uncommon for parents who have projected issues like this onto a child to, years later and in an attempt to heal, admit that they knew this child “had a big heart” or “was going to be a kind person.” Children who are not naturally empathetic are just not likely to pick up the burden of other people’s feelings and carry them around as if they were their own. So parents unconsciously pick the child who is most likely to carry the unconscious projection. Of course, it is also possible for a child to choose “badness” as his identification. But that is a whole other book. For now, we are focusing on those who identify with goodness.

Goodness as People-Pleasing
and Avoidance of Shame

Again, we must be clear that by clarifying the good-guy identity we are not trying to talk people out of being genuinely kind, caring, and giving. But an identification with goodness is not genuine, kind, caring, or giving. Goodness is all too often a game we play with people-pleasing, for it is the people who have taught us to be good—according to their standards. When a mother or father praises a five-year-old for cooking dinner and taking care of younger siblings all day while mom or dad are unavailable, they are teaching that child that it is good to sacrifice self for others, that it is okay to take on larger-than-life tasks. It teaches her that it is the child’s responsibility to take care of everyone she knows. This will become that child’s definition of goodness. When children are taught not to express anger because anger is bad, they are being taught that only certain feelings are good enough to be expressed. These children are likely then to identify as people who never get mad—to their own detriment. When a child is taught that her things are not really her things, she begins to believe that having no boundaries is a good thing. If she identifies with that kind of goodness, she will live a life slowly being taken by others.

The definition of goodness held by the good guy is often very skewed by the time he becomes an adult. For example, I have literally seen both women and men stay in a marriage that was hellish in its misery simply because they believed it was bad to get a divorce. They had done other “bad” things in their lives, even cheated on their spouses, but that was okay, because how else would they survive this horrible marriage? But divorce? No. Why? Because somewhere along the way they had incorporated a value projected onto them by parents, teachers, churches, and society in general that said that divorce was a terrible failure that had everything to do with their worth as a person. When I explored this in therapy with these folks, what we often discovered was that divorcing would mean that they were bad and could, thereafter, never again call themselves good people.

These distortions of reality keep us burdened by and tied to a life of repetition where all we ever do is the one thing—goodness—or what we perceive it to be. The one who plays the good-guy role for the family makes things look good for family members and the family in general by being the quintessential definition of goodness. This goodness is a blindfold for both the good guy and for the family members whose projections she has introjected. The projector does not have to look to his own thoughts, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and choices to solve life’s problems; he just has to project onto the child who plays the good-guy role. And the one who plays the good-guy role does not have to look at her own pain to see how the feelings of abandonment, misjudgment, and lack of belonging have hurt—all she needs to do is be good. This dance of mutual benefit—acted out by most of the relationships in the good guy’s adult life—keeps the dance going and the music playing like a broken record.

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