She was, by every external measure, free. She had chosen her work, her husband, her city. Nobody had forced her into anything, and she was living inside a set of rules so complete that she could not find the edge of them.
I kept meeting versions of her.
We talk about women’s freedom mostly in terms of access. Can she work, earn, lead, leave, choose. In much of the world those answers have changed enormously in two generations. But access describes what a woman is permitted to do. It says very little about what she believes she is allowed to do.
Be a good daughter. Keep the peace. Don’t disappoint your family. Be grateful. Don’t be selfish. Don’t be difficult. Marry at the right age. Be ambitious, but not at your family’s expense. Speak up, but not so loudly that anyone becomes uncomfortable.
Nobody has to enforce these anymore.
Much of my field is organized around a single question: “What happened to you?” It is the right question, and it changed how we understand trauma. But over the years I found myself asking a second one – quieter and much harder to answer: “What has this woman learned to do to herself in order to stay loved?”
Because not every wound announces itself as violence. Sometimes it looks like obedience.
Psychology has partial language for this. In the early 1990s, Dana Crowley Jack, working with depressed women, described a pattern she called “self-silencing.” It is the habit of suppressing your own thoughts, needs and anger to keep a relationship intact. She built a scale to measure it. In the decades since, higher self-silencing scores have been linked repeatedly to depression, and the association tends to run stronger in women.
What interests me is what the scale cannot capture. Outside the clinic, most of these behaviors are not symptoms; they are compliments: a woman who puts everyone else first is selfless, a woman who rarely disagrees is easygoing, a woman who stays in an unhappy marriage because leaving would devastate her mother is loyal, or a woman who is carrying the overwhelming majority of her household’s emotional labor is simply a good mother.
We have confused goodness with compliance, and we have done it so thoroughly that the confusion now passes for a value.
A “good woman” does not make things difficult. She understands. She accommodates. She forgives. She keeps the family together. She knows when to let something go. Almost none of these describe her character. They describe her effect on other people’s comfort. We built an entire moral category for women out of how little friction they generate and then told them it was a virtue.
The question is never whether a woman is generous. It is whether she believes she could be otherwise.
Obedience is hardest to see when it feels like your own idea.
I started paying attention to one word. “I should be grateful.” “Other people have it worse.” “My family means well.” “Maybe I’m asking for too much.” “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Behind each should is a rule, and behind the rule is usually something she is afraid of losing – approval, belonging, her place in the family, her sense of herself as a decent person.
“’Should’ according to whom?” I would ask.
Often she could not say. The expectation had been repeated for long enough that it had stopped sounding like an expectation and started sounding like her.
The instructions are also contradictory in ways that make compliance impossible. Build a career; don’t neglect the children. Be financially independent; don’t make him feel unnecessary. Have standards; don’t be demanding. Be confident; don’t be intimidating. Age naturally; don’t look old.
We expanded the menu without removing the penalties for ordering wrong. Two women can make opposite choices and both be found guilty. The woman who prioritizes her career neglects her family. The woman who leaves it wastes her potential. The unmarried woman is asked when she plans to settle down. The woman who wants out of her marriage did not try hard enough.
The choices change. The scrutiny does not.
Eventually the enforcement moves inside. She stops needing anyone to tell her what she should do, because she can predict the verdict herself. And she starts running a small calculation many times a day. Do I say what I think or keep the peace? Do I disappoint them or disappoint myself? Do I trust what I feel or do what a good woman would do?
Most of the women I have worked with learned early which answer gets rewarded.
Then we treat the results as personal failings. We ask why she cannot set boundaries, why she stayed so long, why she feels guilty resting, why she will not negotiate her salary, why she feels responsible for everyone’s mood. These are reasonable questions. They are also incomplete, because they locate the whole problem inside a woman who was trained by everyone around her.
If approval has always followed agreement, disagreement does not feel like liberation. It feels dangerous.
None of this is an argument against family, marriage, motherhood, faith or tradition. Women choose these things and build real lives inside them. And the answer is not to hand out a new prescription. Telling every woman to prioritize her career is no more freeing than telling her to prioritize her marriage. Both still supply the correct answer.
Freedom has to include the possibility that a woman chooses a life you would not choose for her. She may give herself to motherhood or build the company. She may marry at 22, stay single or change her mind about a life she already chose. What matters is whether the choice is hers.
Which brings me to the cost we rarely name.
A woman can hold every legal right available to her and still organize her entire life around not disappointing anyone.
Her parents will be disappointed. Her partner may be. People will call her selfish, difficult, ungrateful, cold. For a woman who learned that being good means being agreeable, that reaction arrives as evidence that she has done something wrong.
It is not evidence of anything.
A woman can be good and still disappoint you. She can love you and say no. She can be devoted to her family and unwilling to disappear inside it.
When women start examining these rules, they do not become colder. In my experience they become more deliberate. They start separating guilt from wrongdoing, which turn out to be different things. They stop treating anger as a character flaw and start reading it as information. They notice when resentment is pointing at an agreement they never actually made.
Devotion says: I choose this. Obedience says: I am not allowed to choose otherwise. From the outside, the two can look identical for years.
We have spent generations admiring women for how much they can carry, without asking what it costs to carry it quietly.
The myth was never that women should be good. It was the description we attached to the word.
A society that believes women are free has to be able to tolerate women choosing things it does not like.
The opposite of obedience is not rebellion. It is agency.
Hiba Balfaqih has a Ph.D. in psychology from Arizona State University and a master of science degree in psychology from the University of Phoenix with an academic focus on how culture and religion shape human behavior. She is the founder of The School of MindHacking and The Smash Room. She works globally with high-achieving women on personal transformation, identity and belief systems. She is based in Dubai and Miami.
