Self-help author Kasey Edwards’ realisation about her own life led to crisis

Kasey Edwards was in her twenties when events from her earlier years began to catch up with her in the most profound way.

She felt exhausted and was constantly looking outside of herself for approval.

Edwards, now 48, had no choice but to face what had happened to her. The result of this work is Goodbye Good Girl, Hello Me, out now.

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Edwards told 9honey she wrote her previous book, Raising Girls Who Like Themselves after she started looking at the “beliefs and issues that we were raised with through a different lens”, hoping this could equip her to prevent her daughters from experiencing the self-doubt she lived with.

“I could see more clearly the beliefs that are instilled in us as kids,” she says.

“So even if you haven’t had a traumatic childhood, just being bullied at school or having someone who policed your weight or just looking at social media, we’re constantly told that we’re not enough and that we should be trying to measure up to these impossible standards.

“When does that become our self-talk and how do we stop that? Can we ever?”

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Edwards was in her twenties when she found herself questioning if she’d left it too late to change her own trajectory.

She found herself telling her therapist she had “low self-esteem” and figured she was “stuck with it for life”.

“We’re constantly told that we’re not enough and that we should be trying to measure up to these impossible standards.”

“She challenged me on that and said, ‘No, your self-esteem is what you believe about you in this moment.'”

Her therapist reminded her about “brain plasticity” and how she could actually rewire her brain to adopt different beliefs about herself.

“It’s not easy but it can be done, and for me the process was first of all actually identifying all those beliefs, the good-girl beliefs that I thought were true and essential for me to survive in the world.”

That meant revisiting the trauma that had triggered those beliefs.

“I went to see a psychologist when I was in my late twenties and basically that’s because I completely fell apart and my memories from my childhood started surfacing,” she says.

She realised these experience had shaped her into the insecure people-pleaser she was in her twenties.

“One of the good-girl beliefs is that we have to give more love than we receive. We have to earn love and we see that in all the fairy tales.

“I deserve more than that, and that’s when I came up with my new belief about what I deserved in love, which was that I deserve to be loved by someone who values my time, my hopes and my dreams as much as I value theirs. And if I can’t find that person then that’s OK because I’m already enough.”

Edwards met her husband when she was 30, and her wish for her daughters and every girl and woman is that they, too, find someone who loves them as much as they love themselves.

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And it’s never too late to find this, she explains, citing friends who have divorced and re-partnered with “much nicer guys”.

“We have absolutely been conned,” she says.

“You look at relationship books, almost all of them sold to women. I can’t even think of a relationship book that is targeted to men.

“The message over and over again is, ‘Work harder, try harder, if there’s a problem, it’s on you’. What we also know from the research is that divorced women are happier than married women.”

She speculates this is achieved by leaving unhealthy marriages and “reparenting yourself”, which is the process she completed in her twenties.

This involves remembering and acknowledging past trauma and, most importantly, going no contact with perpetrators and their enablers.

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”We go back to that moment or, you know, a series of moments,” Edwards explains.

“For me, I learnt that I had to be skinny to be worthy and that moment for me was when my grandmother used to put me on the scales and then shake her head in dismay at my weight gain.

“The idea is once you identify that you go back as an adult and you say, ‘What could I tell little Casey that I know now that I could not possibly have known then?’ And what I could tell myself is that a number on a scale is not a solid foundation for a happy relationship.”

As Edwards started to speak up about her past trauma to family members, she was met with mixed reactions.

“There are lots of people in my family who don’t believe me and I don’t have relationships with them anymore because really, as a survivor, there are no three words more important in the whole world than ‘I believe you’.

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“But sometimes you’re just not going to get that and that doesn’t make it true and I don’t need them to heal.”

She has also let go of any ‘people-pleaser’ behaviour, realising it didn’t achieve what she wanted it to, which was love and acceptance.

“I am really close with some members of my family and I see all the time and I love them, and my friends, and it’s about nurturing and prioritising the relationships that fill your bucket.

“The relationships with people who love you just the way you are and you love them just the way they are.”

Purchase your copy of Goodbye Good Girl, Hello Me here.