In Untamed, speaker, author, and activist Glennon Doyle explores how she freed herself from the strictures of society and embraced her true identity by rejecting the expectations and limitations society imposes on women. Her book is an intimate memoir—telling her personal story of addiction and rehab, falling in love with a woman, leaving her marriage, and rebuilding her family—and a call to action. Doyle wants her readers to use her story as a framework to examine their lives and deconstruct societal expectations, thereby liberating themselves from the metaphorical captivity that limits their potential.
For much of her life, Glennon Doyle has felt like a wild animal in captivity—conditioned not to feel, think, or trust herself. To be free from this captivity, Doyle had to learn how to break society’s rules, upend cultural expectations, and rebuild her life based on her emotion, intuition, and imagination.
Doyle’s inspiration for the book came when she took a trip to the zoo with her family. She observed a majestic female cheetah tamed by her keepers and trained to chase a stuffed animal around her pen. Doyle identified with the cheetah: She’d been held in “captivity,” trained by society to chase the “stuffed animals” of domesticity and conformity rather than pursue her instincts and intuition.
Considering the parallels between the cheetah’s experience and her own, Doyle realized that captivity is the universal experience of women—their primal instincts have been intentionally suppressed and devalued by society. To regain their freedom, she says, women must rediscover the wildness within them.
Comparisons Between Doyle’s “Wildness” and the Wild Woman Archetype
Doyle’s discussion of women’s inherent “wildness” and their need to return to their primal state is not necessarily new—Jungian analyst and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estés claims these concepts are as old as civilization. Estés explores the historical and cultural background of these ideas in The Women Who Run With Wolves.
Estés analyzes myths and fairy tales to reveal common themes and characters that serve as mythological archetypes in stories throughout the human experience. In these stories, the “wild woman” is a commonly-explored figure who resists civilization and lives in touch with nature and her soul. She often lives on the fringes of society, is not bound by its rules, and speaks the truth. Estés says that reading about these figures can help women recognize these qualities in themselves and remember their primal nature.
As a child, Doyle was creative, impulsive, and intuitive. As she entered adolescence, however, Doyle started receiving and internalizing damaging cultural messages about what women should be: pleasing and agreeable, self-sacrificing, and attractive to men—all while repressing their emotions and desires and deferring to others’ opinions.
Doyle abandoned her unconstrained childhood self to conform to these expectations and began bottling up her emotions, distrusting her intuition, and dismissing her imagination—this messaging took away her freedom and put her in the cage of society's expectations.
Why Social Messaging Disproportionately Affects Girls
Doyle describes how she was susceptible to the messages of her culture and internalized them at an early age. One of the reasons Doyle was so affected by this messaging is that humans place a high value on social acceptance and are therefore constantly observing the behaviors of others to guide their behavior.
In Influence, Robert Cialdini describes “The Social Proof Principle,” which states that when people are unsure of how to behave, they base their behavior on the behaviors of others in the group. Social proofs can be a way to cope with insecurity and pursue social acceptance.
Adolescent girls can be particularly susceptible to social proofs because they are more sensitive to rejection or social disapproval than boys. As a result, manufactured social proofs—social proofs deliberately created to manipulate behavior—disproportionately affect girls. A pervasive example of manufactured social proofs are the messages in advertising that aim to convince girls that they are not good enough. These kinds of manufactured social proofs can have long-lasting negative consequences, including anxiety, depression, and insecurity—all of which Doyle has struggled with throughout her life.
After her experience with the cheetah helped her reflect on her life in captivity, Doyle identified the "pathways" that had allowed her to break free and live a wild, undomesticated life. Doyle introduces four pathways to help you rediscover your wildness.
As we explore these pathways, we’ll also tell Doyle’s life story in parallel, revealing how she’s traveled these pathways in her own life and navigated her way toward the vibrant, liberated life she lives now.
Women’s Liberation: From the ‘60s to Today
Doyle’s pathways to freedom shares many similarities with the ideas that developed during the women’s rights movement in the 1960s and 70s. Betty Friedan was a feminist leader during this period focused on women’s liberation.
In the early 60s, Friedan experienced a sense of dissatisfaction and purposelessness as a homemaker raising children—an experience similar to Doyle’s captivity. She realized many women shared her experiences of being confined to the home and feeling unfulfilled, so she sought to find ways to liberate women like herself. Friedan realized acknowledging their shared experiences was an important first step toward progress and action. She therefore wrote The Feminine Mystique, which explored this shared female experience and exposed the cultural forces that kept women oppressed. In her book, Friedan suggests concrete courses of action, such as rethinking what it means to be a woman and breaking free of social restrictions by pursuing educational and career opportunities.
Friedan’s ideas about liberation are more focused on direct actions women can take toward liberation, while Doyle focuses more on examining and reinventing your mindset. Still, both Friedan and Doyle agree that rethinking what it means to be a woman is necessary to make progress and pursue fulfillment.
Doyle’s captivity—like most women’s—started as a young girl. As a child, Doyle was very emotional. As Doyle entered young adulthood, she received the message from society and the people in her life that strong emotions were undesirable—she was supposed to be agreeable and well-behaved. Unable to express her emotions or cope with the heartache, pain, anxiety, and depression she experienced as a young woman, Doyle self-medicated with food, drugs, and alcohol.
Further-Reaching Effects of Numbing Your Emotions
In attempting to numb her negative emotions, Doyle numbed all of her emotions—which likely made her ability to cope with negative emotions even worse. In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown explains why numbing your negative emotions often can backfire in this way.
Brown says that your ability to recall positive experiences helps you build resilience—you can get through negative situations by remembering that they won’t last, and you can have happy times. However, when you numb all your emotions to avoid the negative ones, you block yourself from experiencing positive emotions—limiting your ability to draw on positive emotional experiences in times of crisis.
When she became pregnant with her first child, Doyle entered rehab. In rehab, she began to feel her emotions again and realized that she could experience them all, even the painful ones, and survive. (Shortform note: In giving up her coping mechanisms, Doyle was able to clearly see her resilience—a common, and uplifting, experience for people in addiction recovery. In We Are The Luckiest, Laura McKowen writes that she feels lucky to have struggled with addiction because recovery allowed her to know what she was capable of.)
She realized that she could use painful emotions to grow and evolve—to become truly alive. Doyle defines being “alive” as constantly evolving into a more authentic and fully-formed version of yourself. She believes your emotions will provide all the instructions you need to guide you on your journey—and the most challenging emotions are often the most instructive.
(Shortform note: Doyle says that negative emotions can be the most instructive, but in Positivity, author Barbara Fredrickson argues that good emotions do a much better job at broadening your mind and teaching you important truths. Positive emotions raise dopamine levels in your brain—prompting creativity and openness to new experiences. Embrace all your emotions, good and bad, for a well-rounded learning experience.)
Now we’ll consider how to embrace your emotions in your daily life so that you can fully immerse yourself in this mindset. Doyle encourages two practices:.
Practical Steps for Allowing and Embracing Your Emotions
Doyle advocates embracing emotion, but she doesn’t specify how you might go about doing this. In Welcoming the Unwelcome, Pema Chödrön describes a helpful sequence to follow when you experience difficult emotions.
Investigate the emotions within you: Identifying each one will help you acknowledge each emotion and learn how it affects you.
Embrace the emotions by showing affection and openness to them: Greet each one with affection (for example, “hello, sadness” or “hello, loneliness”). By not expressing fear towards your emotions, you can understand them better and learn not to avoid them.
Interrupt the story that you might be telling about these emotions: Reflect on how you have treated them in the past and identify the narratives you have created about them. Then, create new narratives about your feelings.
Stay with the emotions: Tell yourself that you will stay with your emotions for longer than you might be comfortable with. Being willing to stay with difficult emotions will help you learn not to run away from them.
Use emotions to connect with others: Think about and empathize with others who may be having the same feelings.
Doyle’s second pathway towards freedom is embracing your intuition, or being guided by a deep sense of inner truth.
Doyle observes that women are conditioned to please and seek approval from others—as a result, they don’t often trust their instincts and search externally for advice and validation. She wanted to find a way to connect with herself deeply to make decisions that were based on her inner wisdom and intuition rather than the opinions of outside sources.
Having landed on the right practice, Doyle no longer feels she has to consult others for advice or validation. Her intuition frees her from being controlled by society’s expectations and empowers her to make her own choices. When making a difficult decision, you can use Doyle’s method for tapping into your intuition:
This practice will get you in touch with your intuition, allowing you to make your own choices, confident that your decisions come from a place of strength and inner knowledge.
Practical Steps for Successfully Accessing Your Intuition
It’s important to note that various practices can be useful in accessing your intuition—if Doyle’s process of connecting to a deeper sense of self feels a bit too ambiguous for you to replicate, you might try incorporating more concrete steps into your practice. In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield shares his approach to accessing intuition—similar to Doyle’s practice in some ways, but with several more relatable practices.
Canfield’s first recommendation is that you prepare your mind and body for meditation by sitting comfortably and practicing relaxation techniques such as deep breathing. He then recommends that you find a focal point and repeat a single word or phrase (such as “relax” or “I am love”). Repetition can clear your mind and help you focus. Doyle’s practice doesn’t emphasize meditation preparation practices as Canfield does—combining these practices with Doyle’s suggestion to sit in a darkened space may help you get into the deep, reflective mindset required for “sinking into” your inner self.
Canfield says that the next step is to shift into a mode in which you are more receptive to messages and intuition. This receptive mode is similar to Doyle’s deep meditative state in which she receives messages from her inner self, but has one significant difference: Rather than asking you to seek an inner voice, Canfield suggests you pay attention to your emotions and physical sensations. These tangible signals can tell you what your intuition is trying to say.
Doyle’s newfound connection with her emotions and intuition laid the groundwork for her to fully, freely embrace her imagination when her life took an unexpected turn. While on a book tour, Doyle met and unexpectedly fell in love with soccer star Abby Wambach. She describes her experience meeting Abby as love at first sight. When Abby walked into the room, Doyle saw her future path emerging—although she had never met Abby, Doyle could clearly imagine a future as Abby’s partner.
(Shortform note: Studies have shown that the endorphins released when you fall in love—like when Doyle saw Abby—can increase imagination and creativity. However, you don’t have to fall in love to similarly increase your capacity for imagination. Try opening yourself up to new endorphin-releasing experiences, such as traveling to a new place or trying your hand at art.)
Since her life with Abby didn’t follow the script society had written for her, Doyle had to write her own script, imagining the life she wanted and then making that a reality.
From her experience of discovering happiness once she flipped the script, Doyle realized how important it is for women to rewrite their scripts—using their imaginations as a guide to direct their lives. Doyle suggests the following steps for rewriting your script:
Exploring the Steps of Rewriting Your Script
Each step to rewriting your script is important and worth exploring in more depth. Doyle has expanded on the process in multiple podcasts, interviews, and speeches—here, we’ll explore her discussion of each step:
Expressing your discontent is a useful starting point because articulating what you are unhappy about and what needs to change challenges the idea that you should always be happy and grateful.
Asking yourself what you want is important because what you want often gets hidden beneath the expectations that others have for you.
Creating a clear picture of your desired future is a powerful technique because you may have never visualized the most beautiful version of your life—and therefore may not even be aware of what you really want.
Sharing your ideas with others can help you feel seen and acknowledged—which can further inspire you to take action.
You’re now ready to examine areas of your life where emotion, intuition, and imagination are suppressed. By deconstructing those areas, you can let these powerful aspects of yourself shine. Deconstruction requires dismantling old beliefs and practices that you have inherited from your culture, giving you a clean slate upon which to reconstruct a new life that better reflects your current values and goals. (Shortform note: Deconstructing your beliefs not only allows you to create a new life that’s more aligned with your values but also allows you to more easily engage in change and creativity. In Think Again, Adam Grant says that the crucial ability to rethink your beliefs allows you to develop new solutions and ideas for breaking free of old mindsets.)
In this section, we'll explore how Doyle deconstructed her beliefs and practices about marriage, motherhood, and family in creating her new life with Abby.
Doyle learned from her conditioning that the best way a woman can love the people in her life and her community is to selflessly serve others and put her desires last. She tried to be a dutiful wife, a selfless mother, and maintain a traditional family structure.
(Shortform note: You may not be ready—or willing—to completely reject this aspect of your selfless nature. In that case, you might take a slightly different approach: cultivating a balance between selflessness and self-care. By balancing your selflessness with rejuvenating self-care practices, you can both honor your needs and fuel yourself for the emotional work of caring for the people in your life.)
Marriage: Doyle deconstructed her beliefs about what it meant to be in an intimate relationship. She abandoned the idea that she must be pleasing and performative—instead forming a new belief that she deserves pleasure in her intimate relationships. (Shortform note: While many women feel obligated to put their partner's needs before their own, rethinking these beliefs can lead to more fulfilling sexual experiences. One way to become more aware of your desires is to check in with yourself before being intimate with another person. A self-check-in can help you assess what you want and can help you express your desires.)
Parenthood: Doyle deconstructed her beliefs about what it meant to be a parent. She wanted to model happiness and fulfillment for them rather than self-sacrifice. (Shortform note: Many authors and researchers agree that seeing happy adults provides important benefits for children. In Modelling Happiness, Reen Rose says that when children see adults being curious, pursuing new ideas, and engaging in enjoyable activities, they witness both what it looks like to be happy and learn skills (such as resiliency, bravery, and confidence). These skills will help children to pursue their happiness as they mature.)
Family Structure: She deconstructed her beliefs about family structure. She realized that family structure can diverge from a nuclear family and still provide love, support, and stability. (Shortform note: Doyle’s assumption that the nuclear family should be maintained at all costs likely comes from societal messaging that this family structure is “best”—but studies show that many believe that any family that provides love, protection, and support is "best." A larger societal trend towards accepting a wide range of family arrangements mirrors Doyle’s experiences. Research shows that an increasing percentage of the American population accepts and supports non-traditional family structures.)
Doyle deconstructed her ideas about religion on her path out of captivity. After a negative experience at a conservative church, she decided that she no longer wanted to be part of a faith tradition that forced her to check her critical thinking and intuition at the door or defer to the judgment of powerful men.
Women and Religious Deconstruction
During her early church experience, Doyle saw how her viewpoints were easily ignored and disregarded by powerful men. Many women have spoken out against injustice in their congregations after having similar experiences.
Two notable women who have written extensively about religious deconstruction are authors Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts) and Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday) point out how patriarchal power structures within the church discourage open dialogue and debate and promote conservative political ideologies. Their work explores the difficulty of leaving a faith community and the bravery required to deconstruct your faith—especially as doing so requires women to let go of a central support system.
Doyle wanted to become more involved in the racial justice movement. She realized the first step was to educate herself about racism and explore her relationship with this issue. She learned about police brutality, the preschool-to-prison pipeline, and other issues facing the African American community. She began to see racism as a deep-rooted issue that poisons American society on all levels.
(Shortform note: Doyle may not have been aware of racism’s pervasiveness because much of it didn't fit her idea of “real” racism. In How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi notes two kinds of racism: overt and covert. Overt racism involves acts of aggression or violence—likely what Doyle was raised to believe was “real” racism. Through educating herself, she learned that covert racism—which involves institutionalized racist policies and practices throughout society—is “real” racism, too.)
Doyle realized that because she had grown up in a racist environment, racism also existed within her. She deconstructed her internalized beliefs by listening to the experiences of people of color and by being honest about her relationship with racism. (Shortform note: Doyle doesn’t mention which authors she read as she was becoming educated about these issues. If you’re looking for a place to get started, there are many reading lists online, such as this one put together by Ibram X. Kendi.)
The four pathways we have discussed helped free Doyle from captivity. As these four paths converged, they empowered Doyle to reconstruct her life to reflect her truest self in four ways:
Doyle now lives according to her wildness—her primal self who had been there all along, waiting to be free. She has made a promise never again to abandon herself. She will practice self-love and always trust her instincts, and she calls on her readers to once again become wild women.
Doyle’s Continued Commitment to Her Pathways
Doyle continues to embrace the pathways we have explored in this guide—she’s found concrete ways to live into each:
She has a post-it note on her mirror that reminds her to “feel it all” and embrace her emotions.
She continues to be guided by her intuition as she engages in activism through Together Rising and raises money for causes close to her heart.
Doyle lives the life she imagined for herself with Abby. Together they co-host the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, in which they are honest about their daily struggles and how they try to support each other on their respective journeys.
In Untamed, speaker, author, and activist Glennon Doyle explores how she freed herself from the strictures of society and embraced her true identity by rejecting the expectations and limitations society imposes on women. Her book is an intimate memoir—telling her personal story of addiction and rehab, falling in love with a woman, leaving her marriage, and rebuilding her family—and a call to action. Doyle wants her readers to use her story as a framework to examine their lives and deconstruct societal expectations, thereby liberating themselves from the metaphorical captivity that limits their potential.
Glennon Doyle is a public speaker, author, and activist. She is known for her three bestselling books—Untamed, Carry On, Warrior, and Love Warrior. The main themes of her work are parenting, spirituality, empowering women, rejecting patriarchy and oppression, feminism, and sexuality.
All of Doyle’s books are memoirs, based primarily on experiences from her personal life. Carry On, Warrior, published in 2013, explores her life as a mother of young children and features some of her most popular blog posts. Love Warrior, published in 2016, is a memoir about her marriage and her husband’s infidelity.
In addition to writing, Doyle is a popular motivational speaker and hosts a weekly podcast called “We Can Do Hard Things” in which she discusses empowerment and interviews influential authors and celebrities. She is also the founder of Together Rising, a non-profit focused on causes relating to women and families in crisis.
Doyle also has a large following on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. She is culturally and politically influential because of her connection with her fanbase and her ability to communicate with her audience.
Connect with Glennon Doyle:
Publisher: The Dial Press, New York 2020
Doyle also published a supplemental book to Untamed in 2021 entitled Untamed: The Journal, which contains guided exercises and reflection questions that help readers apply the principles of Untamed to their lives.
Untamed came out in early 2020 and achieved extreme popularity during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. For many, quarantine felt like a type of cage in which they felt trapped, physically and mentally. Doyle’s message of captivity and freedom resonated with many readers, especially women, who felt trapped in traditional gender roles as they were forced to take on more household duties and childcare during the pandemic.
Untamed, like many memoirs, offers snapshots of events from Doyle’s life organized around a main theme, with the aim of sharing her experiences and communicating essential realizations about how to live as a woman. This combination of personal experience and self-help inspiration is present in many books of the genre, such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert is good friends with Doyle; they have inspired each other’s work.
Although Untamed shares many similarities with more traditional memoirs such as Eat, Pray, Love, Doyle mentions in an interview that she wanted Untamed to “feel wild” and not be similar to any other memoir or self-help book. She said she wrote the book in a burst of creative inspiration and wants the reader to feel swept away by its propulsive energy. As a result, Untamed exists in its own category as a combination of memoir, self-help, and expressive artistic statement.
Untamed rose to #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list in 2020 and has sold over two million copies since its publication. Doyle’s celebrity was a factor in the book’s impact—many people were interested in her romantic life, divorce, and re-marriage to a woman. They were eager to dive into the details via her book.
The popularity of Doyle and the book's success prompted J.J. Abrams to purchase the production rights to Untamed. A television series based on the book (starring Sarah Paulson as Glennon Doyle) is in development.
This book appeals to many because of its honesty and readability. In online reviews, readers say that they feel connected to Doyle’s narrative and honesty and see their experiences mirrored in Doyle’s life.
Doyle also has a casual writing style, often using a funny, irreverent, and engaging tone that makes her experiences relatable. Many of her fans read the book several times because they found it so insightful and entertaining.
However, some reviewers took issue with Doyle’s overall tone in the book, which they felt was somewhat self-congratulatory. Others didn’t like the structure and felt the book read like a series of disconnected blog posts. Many also expected a more straightforward memoir of Doyle’s relationship with her wife and didn’t like the non-linear way she presented her story.
The chapters of Untamed are similar to a blog post format: a personal narrative or reflection, a realization inspired by this reflection, and words of wisdom that you can apply to your life.
Doyle’s chapters have these qualities and contain extended metaphors to explain her ideas, lessons, and themes. The extended metaphors help connect the reader to the book's themes by providing a central image. For example, Doyle begins Untamed by sharing a life experience (seeing a cheetah) and uses this image as a way of explaining an idea (women oppressed by society’s messages) to teach a lesson (women must break free of their cages).
This book has three parts, each divided into short chapters. The first part introduces Doyle’s concept of captivity and her argument for escaping. The second part introduces her central themes—reexamining her life, being free from society’s expectations, and finding pathways to liberate herself. The third part of the book explores these themes through personal experiences. Many of these experiences involve her intimate relationships and her interactions with her children.
Doyle doesn't tell her story in chronological order, instead visiting a new theme or personal experience in every chapter. This particular organization can make it difficult to connect her experiences directly to the central themes she introduces in the first section.
Our guide focuses on what Doyle identifies as the four pathways that free you from a state of metaphorical captivity. We connect each pathway with Doyle’s journey and explore how she has deconstructed her prior beliefs and rebuilt a new life on her terms.
Doyle's central concepts that we’ll see in this guide—feminism, empowerment, and reconstructing your life—are well-explored by other thinkers. We've therefore extended her ideas with complementary actionables, different perspectives, and supporting research.
Do you ever feel that there is a more authentic, primal self within you waiting to be free? Author, public speaker, and activist Glennon Doyle has felt this way, too. She used to feel like a wild animal in captivity—conditioned not to feel, think, or trust herself until she learned how to break society’s rules, upend cultural expectations, and rebuild her life.
Doyle’s inspiration for the book came when she took a trip to the zoo with her family. She observed a majestic female cheetah tamed by her keepers and trained to chase a stuffed animal around her pen. Doyle identified with the cheetah because she also felt that she had been held in “captivity.” She’d learned to chase the “stuffed animals” of domesticity and conformity rather than pursue her instincts and intuition. Society had conditioned her to deny her true, undomesticated self.
As Doyle made this connection, she saw the cheetah looking out past the fences of her enclosure—remembering her wildness.
Considering the parallels between the cheetah’s experience and her own, Doyle realized that captivity is the universal experience of women. Like this female cheetah, women have been made captive—their primal instincts intentionally suppressed and devalued by society.
Comparisons Between Doyle’s Cheetah and the Wild Woman Archetype
Doyle uses her cheetah metaphor to explore how women lose connection to the primal version of themselves when they become conditioned by the expectations of their society. Doyle’s discussion of women’s inherent “wildness” and their need to return to their primal state is not necessarily new—.Jungian analyst and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estés claims these concepts are as old as civilization. Estés explores the historical and cultural background of these ideas in The Women Who Run With Wolves.
Estés analyzes myths and fairy tales to reveal common themes and characters that serve as mythological archetypes in stories throughout the human experience. In these stories, the “wild woman” is a commonly-explored figure who resists civilization and lives in touch with nature and her soul. She often lives on the fringes of society, is not bound by its rules, and speaks the truth. Estés says that reading about these figures can help women recognize these qualities in themselves and remember their primal nature.
As a child, Doyle was creative, sensitive, imaginative, and intuitive. As she reached adolescence, however, Doyle started receiving and internalizing damaging cultural messages about what a woman should be: pleasing and agreeable, self-sacrificing, attractive to men, able to repress her emotions and desires, and deferential to others’ opinions.
Doyle abandoned her unconstrained childhood self to conform to these expectations and began bottling up her emotions, distrusting her intuition, and dismissing her imagination—this messaging took away her freedom and put her in the cage of society's expectations.
As a result, she constantly sought approval from others and suffered from low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. These societal expectations so completely consumed her that she was domesticated and lived in a state of captivity by age ten. (Shortform note: Doyle’s experience aligns with research that indicates that age 10 is when children start to internalize the gendered expectations that society communicates to them.)
Why Social Messaging Disproportionately Affects Girls
Doyle describes how she was susceptible to the messages of her culture and internalized them at an early age. One of the reasons Doyle was so affected by this messaging is that humans place a high value on social acceptance and are therefore constantly observing the behaviors of others to guide their behavior.
In Influence, Robert Cialdini describes “The Social Proof Principle,” which states that when people are unsure of how to behave, they base their behavior on the behaviors of others in the group. Social proofs can be a way to cope with insecurity and pursue social acceptance.
Adolescent girls can be particularly susceptible to social proofs because they are more sensitive to rejection or social disapproval than boys. As a result, manufactured social proofs—social proofs deliberately created to manipulate behavior—disproportionately affect girls. A pervasive example of manufactured social proofs are the messages in advertising that aim to convince girls that they are not good enough. These kinds of manufactured social proofs can have long-lasting negative consequences, including anxiety, depression, and insecurity—all of which Doyle has struggled with throughout her life.
After her experience with the cheetah helped her reflect on her life, Doyle identified the "pathways" that had allowed her to escape captivity. To regain their freedom, she says, women must rediscover the wildness within them.
Doyle argues that you must embrace the qualities taken away or diminished during captivity to live in your primal state. By understanding what was taken away during captivity, you can recognize and unlearn your social conditioning. Doyle introduces four pathways to help you identify and recover these lost capacities and instincts.
As we explore these pathways, we’ll tell Doyle’s life story in parallel, revealing how she’s traveled these pathways in her own life and navigated her way toward the vibrant, liberated life she lives now.
Women’s Liberation: From the ‘60s to Today
Doyle’s pathways to freedom share many similarities with the ideas that developed during the women’s rights movement in the 1960s and 70s. Betty Friedan was a feminist leader during this period focused on women’s liberation.
In the early 60s, Friedan experienced a sense of dissatisfaction and purposelessness as a homemaker raising children—an experience similar to Doyle’s captivity. She realized many women shared her experiences of being confined to the home and feeling unfulfilled, so she sought to find ways to liberate women like herself.
Friedan realized acknowledging their shared experiences was an important first step toward progress and action. She therefore wrote The Feminine Mystique, which explored this shared female experience and exposed the cultural forces that kept women oppressed. In her book, Friedan suggests concrete courses of action, such as rethinking what it means to be a woman and breaking free of social restrictions by pursuing educational and career opportunities.
Friedan’s ideas about liberation are more focused on direct actions women can take toward liberation, while Doyle focuses more on examining and reinventing your mindset. Still, both Friedan and Doyle agree that rethinking what it means to be a woman is necessary to make progress and pursue fulfillment.
Doyle received messages from society that told her what to be—pleasing and agreeable, self-sacrificing, attractive to men, able to repress emotions and desires, and deferential to the opinions of others. In this exercise, you can reflect on your experiences and compare them with Doyle’s.
What kinds of social conditioning did you experience as a child? How were these messages communicated to you?
How have these messages affected you? How have you changed yourself in order to fit into other people’s ideas of who you should be? (Example: You felt pressure to achieve academically—as a result, you went from being a relatively carefree child to an anxious teenager who feared failure.)
In the previous chapter, we discussed Doyle's argument that women live in "captivity"—an existence constrained by the expectations of society. Acknowledging your captivity is the first step to opening yourself up to the four pathways that can lead you towards freedom—in this chapter, we'll explore the first of these pathways: embracing your emotion.
(Shortform note: While embracing your emotions can be an access point for freedom, it’s important to note that too much focus on your emotions can be oppressive because it can cause you to become self-absorbed. Self-absorption can trap you in an echo chamber where you believe that only your thoughts and ideas matter. This mindset prevents you from being empathetic toward others and makes you needy and demanding in personal relationships. It’s important to be self-aware and self-critical as you explore your emotions to keep it a largely positive experience.)
Doyle asserts that you are taught by society not to feel anything, to avoid emotion and pain at all costs. Numbing yourself keeps you in captivity, but you can evolve and challenge the status quo when you break free of this conditioning. Embracing emotion is thus a pathway to breaking free and living a more engaged and purposeful life.
(Shortform note: You might be surprised by Doyle’s claim that society teaches women to suppress their emotions because there’s a cultural perception that women have more freedom than men to express their feelings. However, Doyle’s argument emphasizes that women are often limited to expressing socially acceptable emotions such as happiness, kindness, or concern, while suppressing their darker, more complex emotions.)
This chapter will explore Doyle’s experiences with addiction, rehab, and sobriety—and how they taught her the critical link between embracing emotion and fully living. We’ll then discuss how embracing emotion makes you more powerful by developing your sense of empathy so that you can help your community and the world.
As discussed in the previous chapter, Doyle's captivity started as a young girl. She, like most women, grew up being told the “right” way to be. In this section, we'll explore the messages she received and how those messages altered the course of her life.
As a child, Doyle was very emotional. All of her feelings were at surface level, and she was very comfortable and in tune with all of her emotions, good and bad.
As Doyle entered young adulthood, she received the message that strong emotions were undesirable. She learned from society that she was supposed to be agreeable and well-behaved. Based on these received messages, she concluded that needed to repress her strong emotions—so as not to irritate or displease the people around her and to fit in with society’s expectations of her. (Shortform note: While Doyle notes that she hid her emotions so as not to be a burden to the people in her life, you may not relate to this reasoning. However, with some reflection, you may find that you hide your strong emotions for reasons she doesn’t touch on. For example, you may not want to show vulnerability, or you may always want to present yourself positively.)
Because she wanted to conform and be accepted, Doyle felt that she had to repress her emotions. She felt she must constantly put up a false front to accommodate those around her and follow the directives of society. Maintaining a false front caused her to become anxious and isolated from friends and family and made it impossible for her to be happy. Unfortunately, since she had also received the social message that she was always supposed to be happy, this inability to be happy made her even worse—like a failure.
Why Suppressing Your Authentic Self Causes Pain
Doyle says that she was so interested in being pleasing and agreeable that she suppressed her true emotions and identity—which she found to be a painful and isolating experience. Shame and vulnerability expert Brené Brown explains why suppressing your identity is so painful in Braving the Wilderness.
Brown has found that trying to be pleasing and agreeable can actually be a barrier to feeling accepted because it forces you to hide your true, authentic self for fear of being rejected for who you really are. The anticipation of this rejection causes you to feel isolated and fearful—this is the pain of suppressing your identity.
To combat this experience of isolation and pain, Brown recommends you show people who you are: Commit to being vulnerable with others and expressing your true feelings and beliefs. When you do this, the people you interact with will often respond positively, and you can feel accepted and connected rather than isolated.
Unable to express her emotions or cope with the heartache, pain, anxiety, and depression she experienced as a young woman, Doyle self-medicated with food, drugs, and alcohol. These behaviors destroyed her life and relationships, but she thought she was victorious because she had successfully numbed herself to all feelings, especially pain.
Further-Reaching Effects of Numbing Your Emotions
In attempting to numb her negative emotions, Doyle numbed all of her emotions—which likely made her ability to cope with negative emotions even worse. In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown explains why numbing your negative emotions often can backfire in this way.
Brown says that your ability to recall positive experiences helps you build resilience—you can get through negative situations by remembering that they won’t last, and you can have happy times. However, when you numb all your emotions to avoid the negative ones, you block yourself from experiencing positive emotions—limiting your ability to draw on positive emotional experiences in times of crisis.
Doyle decided to enter rehab in her mid-twenties when she became unexpectedly pregnant with her first child. Doyle knew she loved her unborn baby and wanted to be the mother that her son deserved—this led her to begin her path to recovery, and she entered a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.
Doyle thought her addiction was her problem—but in the program, she learned that the real problem was how she was unsuccessfully coping with her difficult emotions and mental health issues. Her addictions were simply avoidance techniques that numbed the pain.
Overcoming Avoidance Behaviors
Avoidance is a common method for coping with difficult emotions or situations, but it ultimately increases anxiety, as you may know from experience. When you avoid negative emotions for an extended period, they become unmanageable because you haven’t developed the skills to deal with them. Learn to tolerate negative thoughts and feelings by finding ways to diffuse triggering emotions and situations.
It can also be helpful to examine your emotions in a professional therapy setting where you can identify your negative coping behaviors and create personalized goals. Forms of therapy that can be helpful for those struggling with anxiety include cognitive behavioral therapy, family therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy.
Doyle's determination to feel it all without fear was crucial for her recovery. As she became sober, she felt all of her emotions without anything to numb the pain, but she realized that feeling these emotions did not destroy her. (Shortform note: In giving up her coping mechanisms, Doyle was able to clearly see her resilience—a common, and uplifting, experience for people in addiction recovery. In We Are The Luckiest, Laura McKowen writes that she feels lucky to have struggled with addiction because recovery allowed her to know what she was capable of.)
A woman Doyle met at her AA group encouraged her and helped her realize that it’s not wrong to experience painful emotions; happiness is not the goal of life. Rather, embracing all of your emotions should be your objective. The realization that she should feel negative emotions was a revelation for Doyle: It contradicted long-held beliefs that she was always supposed to feel happy and that feeling negative emotions meant something was wrong with her.
Falling Into the Happiness Trap
Like Doyle, you may feel weighed down by the expectation that you are always supposed to feel happy. Research suggests that there’s a reason that you feel burdened by this expectation—you’re not wired to feel happy all the time.
In The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris explains that humans are actually wired for survival—detecting and avoiding threats, prioritizing group acceptance, and constantly seeking to improve their circumstances. Happiness is not our natural state. When you try to be happy all the time, you engage in a constant fight against your evolutionary inclinations. The futility of this endeavor creates a “happiness trap”: Your quest for happiness makes you more unhappy in the long term.
By avoiding pain, Doyle had stopped progressing and had limited her potential. She became stronger when she faced these painful emotions and didn't look away. She realized that she could use painful emotions to grow and evolve—to become truly alive. Doyle defines being “alive” as constantly evolving into a more authentic and fully-formed version of yourself. She believes your emotions will provide all the instructions you need to guide you on your journey—and the most challenging emotions are often the most instructive.
(Shortform note: Doyle’s post-rehab growth is a common experience—many people experience positive psychological change, which experts call Post-Traumatic Growth, after a hardship or trauma. This phenomenon occurs because enduring a life-altering event can suddenly force you to consider your relationships, who you are, and your place in the world.)
Doyle names three instructive difficult emotions:
How Positive Emotions Can Be Instructive
Doyle says that negative emotions can be the most instructive, but in Positivity, author Barbara Fredrickson argues that good emotions do a much better job at broadening your mind and teaching you important truths.
Fredrickson says that positive emotions don’t just make you feel good. They can widen your sense of possibility, change your perspectives, and lead to new thoughts and actions. She explains that even small experiences with positive emotions can prompt these effects by increasing dopamine levels in your brain. This increase leads to creativity and openness to new experiences. On the other hand, negative emotions lower your dopamine levels. While negative emotions might be useful for assessing your purpose, letting go of your old habits, and identifying core beliefs, Fredrickson says that they limit the ways you can engage in new thoughts and actions.
Fredrickson suggests that you learn to engage more actively with positive emotions by adhering to the 3-1 ratio: For every one negative emotion you feel, engage with three positive emotions. This ratio will allow you to focus more intentionally on dopamine-boosting positive emotions and what they have to teach you.
We have discussed Doyle’s assertion that strong emotions can teach us a lot about ourselves, but what can emotions teach us about engaging with the larger world? Doyle argues that strong emotions can help you engage with the world and become more involved in activism— when you fully embrace the raw power of emotions, you can do anything.
(Shortform note: Doyle says that you should harness the raw power of your emotions for activism—but even with strong emotions on your side, you may feel that you lack the opportunity or ability to help. Experts say that feeling strong emotions about an issue is productive only if you also feel a sense of self-efficacy (the belief that you have the ability and opportunity to act. If you feel emotions without self-efficacy, you may experience reluctance towards activism or feel frustrated. To increase your sense of self-efficacy, be realistic about your goals for activism and identify small, achievable steps you can take toward engagement.)
Doyle says that you should find ways of becoming involved in the causes that touch your heart most deeply. If you want to become involved in a cause but aren't sure where to devote your time and resources, Doyle suggests reflecting on recent current events or looking into an issue that has affected your community. If you feel emotionally drawn to a particular cause or issue, it is an indication that you should become more active in that issue.
Doyle uses her own experience as an example: In 2016, Doyle felt heartbroken when she learned about the treatment of immigrants and refugees in US detention centers, so she started a grassroots campaign to reunite families at the US/Mexico border. She raised $2 million in the first 48 hours of the campaign and $4.6 million within a few weeks. Doyle’s emotions not only inspired her towards action but also inspired others to contribute and become involved.
The Power of Getting Inspired by Anger
Doyle discusses her call to action in the context of heartbreak about family separation at US detention centers—but it seems she was also driven by intense anger. This is important to think about, because—as other thinkers explore—anger can be a powerful tool for driving activism.
In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly explores how emotions, specifically anger and rage, are powerful forces in freeing women from personal and political oppression and inspiring them to activism. Feeling anger can help women identify injustice (recall that anger reveals your core beliefs about the world) and encourages them to override their social conditioning, which dictates that they must be quiet and obedient.
Chemaly acknowledges that knee-jerk reactions and impulsive responses to anger are not necessarily productive. Instead, reflect and plan how to use the anger you feel—as Doyle did when she designed her fundraising campaign. To meaningfully reflect on and use your anger, write down exactly what makes you angry, research the issue, and connect with others who are involved in causes addressing the issue.
In the previous sections we have seen how embracing your emotions is a productive mindset that allows you to evolve as a person and pursue activism. Now we’ll consider how to embrace your emotions in your daily life so that you can fully immerse yourself in this mindset. Doyle encourages two practices:
1) Do not avoid, distract, or numb yourself from strong emotions. Approach these feelings with excitement and curiosity.
2) Stay with your feelings, and allow them to teach you something new. Embracing emotions enables you to feel more deeply and experience life more fully. Feeling everything is part of being fully human.
Practical Steps for Allowing and Embracing Your Emotions
Doyle advocates for embracing emotion, but she doesn’t specify how you might go about doing this. In Welcoming the Unwelcome, Pema Chödrön describes a helpful sequence to follow when you experience difficult emotions.
Investigate the emotions within you—reflect on your emotions in a private, quiet space. Try to identify and investigate each emotion you are feeling. Identifying each one will help you acknowledge each emotion and learn how it affects you.
Embrace the emotions by showing affection and openness to them—as you reflect on your emotions, greet each one with affection (for example, “Hello, sadness,” or, “Hello, loneliness”). By not expressing fear towards your emotions, you can understand them better and learn not to avoid them.
Interrupt the story that you might be telling about these emotions—once you greet and welcome your emotions, you can reflect on how you have treated them in the past and identify the narratives you have created about them. Identifying your old ways of thinking will allow you to create new narratives about your feelings.
Stay with the emotions and continue feeling kindness towards them—tell yourself that you will stay with your emotions for longer than you might be comfortable with. Being willing to stay with difficult emotions will help you learn not to run away from your feelings.
Use emotions to connect with the suffering of others—as you stay with your emotions, think about others who may be having the same feelings. Being in touch with your emotions can help you cultivate your ability to empathize.
Doyle says that you can learn a lot from anger—such as where your boundaries are or what your core beliefs are—if you approach it with curiosity. In this exercise, you’ll reflect on an angry experience with curiosity to see what you can learn.
Describe the last time you felt angry at someone.
Reflect on why you felt this anger—how were your boundaries or core beliefs challenged?
How did you react to this anger?
If you had approached your anger with curiosity, how might you have reacted differently, and what do you think you might have learned?
Doyle says that identifying the issues and causes you care most about can be a method for directing your activism. Let’s look at some questions that can help guide you toward action.
Think of the many issues that are facing our world today. Make a list and choose one issue to focus on.
What emotions do you feel when you think about this issue? How do these emotions inspire you to become more involved?
What step can you take today to be more involved in these causes?
We have learned how embracing emotion and not fearing pain can free you from the limitations of your social conditioning. Now, we’ll explore Doyle’s second pathway towards freedom: embracing your intuition.
Embracing your intuition involves being guided by a deep sense of inner truth. When you deeply understand yourself, you can make confident decisions. In this section, we will learn about Doyle’s experiences doubting her intuition, what happened when she finally embraced it, and how she developed a method for tapping into her inner knowledge. We will then explore how you can embrace intuition in your everyday life.
Doyle observes that women are conditioned to please and seek approval from others—as a result, they don’t often trust their instincts and search externally for advice and validation. Doyle realized this during a crisis in her marriage.
After she became pregnant with her first child, Doyle married the father of her baby, Craig Melton. Several years into their marriage, Craig admitted to having multiple affairs with other women. Doyle had to decide if she wanted to stay in the marriage, and she looked to outside sources for advice. She asked friends, read books, and even consulted Google, but no one could answer her question.
Doyle realized no one else shared her life experiences, and therefore she had to make this decision by herself. She had to find a way to connect with herself deeply to make decisions based on her inner wisdom and intuition rather than others’ opinions.
The Damage of Low Self-Confidence in the Workplace
Doyle discusses women’s lack of confidence in the context of their personal lives, but this issue extends much further—many women also experience the negative effects of low self-confidence in the workplace. In The Confidence Code, authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman point out how a woman’s lack of confidence at work and the deferential behaviors they display can result in lower pay, fewer opportunities for advancement, and feelings of inadequacy. Their inclination to distrust their instincts and look to others for validation inhibits their ability to take the sort of confident action that would earn respect and rewards in the workplace.
They suggest that women increase their confidence in the workplace by focusing less on deferential behaviors, such as perfectionism and people-pleasing, and more on action and risk-taking. They advocate the “fail fast” approach: taking action on several of your own ideas, expecting some of them to fail. Getting used to taking action—and learning not to fear failure—makes women self-reliant and less deferential.
Even though Doyle realized that she had to make decisions about her marriage that were aligned with her deepest self, she didn’t know how to access this self. Then she received a card from a friend that encouraged her to become quiet and listen to her inner knowledge. After receiving this message, Doyle felt inspired to take time for reflection in a quiet space.
As she sat in stillness, Doyle developed a way of accessing her intuition: She “sank into” a different version of herself. This deeper version of herself existed on a different level from the self she presented to the world; it was wise, grounded, and full of insight. She felt more focused and aware of her deepest convictions when accessing this deeper self.
She also experienced a deep connection with the spiritual core of her being, where she felt a sense of certainty flowing inside of her and a sense of connection to a divine presence.
When she posed a question to this different version of herself, she felt a gentle push toward the right decision and believed that this was her intuition guiding her.
Different Perspectives on Intuitive Decision Making
Many agree with Doyle in her claim that relying on your intuition is a great way to make healthy, empowered decisions. In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown encourages intuitive decision-making and adds that sometimes your intuition goes beyond telling you the right thing to do to tell you when you don’t have enough information to make a decision.
On the other hand, some authors advocate approaches to decision-making that don’t depend solely on intuition—suggesting that incorporating more concrete practices can improve your intuitive sense. For example, in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that you take time to use deliberate thinking in combination with intuitive thinking. Deliberate thinking involves gathering facts and acknowledging what you don’t know before making a decision. Carefully thinking through a problem in this way can help you avoid blind spots and biases—laying the groundwork for quick and accurate intuitive decision-making when the time is right.
The practice of tapping into her intuition empowered Doyle to make decisions that aligned with her inner self. She no longer felt she had to consult others for advice or validation. Her intuition freed her from being controlled by society’s expectations and empowered her to make her own choices.
When making a difficult decision, you can use Doyle’s method for tapping into your intuition:
This practice will get you in touch with your intuition, allowing you to make your own choices, confident that your decisions come from a place of strength and inner knowledge. (Shortform note: Doyle’s practice of self-reflection relies on individual empowerment, but this may not be the best approach for everyone. Like many people, you may want to feel supported by a community as you seek truth and pursue wisdom. There are many ways you can find this community support—for example, you can get involved with a faith community, join a meditation group, or talk with a therapist or spiritual counselor.)
Practical Steps for Successfully Accessing Your Intuition
It’s important to note that there are a variety of practices that can be useful in accessing your intuition—if Doyle’s process of connecting to a deeper sense of self feels a bit too ambiguous for you to replicate, you might try incorporating more concrete steps into your practice. In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield shares his approach to accessing intuition—an approach that is similar to Doyle’s practice in some ways but includes some more relatable practices.
Canfield’s first recommendation is that you prepare your mind and body for meditation by sitting comfortably and practicing relaxation techniques such as deep breathing. Canfield then recommends that you find a focal point (such as a lighted candle) and repeat a single word or phrase, such as “relax” or “I am love.” Repetition can clear your mind and help you focus.
Beyond asking you to sit in a quiet, dark space, Doyle doesn’t emphasize meditation preparation practices as much as Canfield does. However, you might find that combining her suggestions with Canfield’s practical advice more effectively gets you into the deep, reflective headspace required for “sinking into” your inner self as Doyle does.
Canfield’s next step is to shift into a mode in which you are more receptive to messages and intuition. For Doyle, this receptive mode is a headspace in which she receives messages as a gentle nudge from her inner voice. You may initially find it difficult to get in touch with this nebulous “inner voice”—fortunately, Canfield points out, there are many ways that you can receive messages from your intuition. He suggests focusing on something more tangible: the emotions and physical sensations you feel as you meditate. You can think of these sensations as surface-level messages from your intuition. For example, you pose a question during a meditation session and feel anxiety and tension throughout your body. Your intuition could be telling you that that decision is not the way to go.
Canfield’s practice includes a final step that Doyle doesn’t explore: Make an effort to come out of a state of meditation slowly. This gives you time to visualize how you might apply the wisdom you have gained. On the other hand, Doyle’s approach is more oriented towards an immediate return to your everyday activities, confident in your newfound wisdom.
Doyle developed an approach to self-reflection that involves connecting to a deeper version of herself and asking this inner self for guidance. In this exercise, you can reflect on Doyle’s methods and consider how you might incorporate her practices into your moments of self-reflection.
What kind of self-reflection methods have you used in the past (for example, journaling, prayer, meditation)?
What about Doyle’s approach appeals to you? How do you think you might incorporate it into your life?
What do you think this approach might teach you?
You now know how to embrace your emotions and how to access your inner wisdom. These abilities give you the tools you need to pursue the next pathway: embracing your imagination. Doyle explains that your imagination can help you visualize a life beyond captivity, change your life, and change the world.
Doyle had learned to embrace her emotions as she dealt with her addiction to alcohol and learned to embrace her intuition as she dealt with her husband’s infidelity. Her newfound connection with her emotions and intuition laid the groundwork for her to fully, freely embrace her imagination when her life took an unexpected turn.
In 2016 Doyle wrote a book (Love Warrior) that celebrated her decision to reconcile with her husband. While she was on a book tour for this memoir, Doyle met and unexpectedly fell in love with soccer star Abby Wambach.
She describes her experience meeting Abby as love at first sight. When Abby walked into the room, Doyle saw her future path emerging—although she had never met Abby, Doyle could clearly imagine a future as Abby’s partner. (Shortform note: Studies have shown that the endorphins released when you fall in love can increase imagination and creativity—it’s possible that this is why seeing Abby sparked Doyle’s imagination so intensely. However, falling in love isn’t the only way for you to similarly increase your capacity for imagination. Open yourself up to new endorphin-releasing experiences, such as traveling to a new place or trying your hand at art.)
Doyle knew that she had to embrace these new emotions, tap into her intuition, and live into her imagination. She realized that this meant she had to divorce her husband. She worried about the consequences of this decision: She was unsure how her children, her husband, and the public would respond to her divorce and her coming out. Despite her worries, Doyle knew that she had to follow the path her imagination had shown her to create a new life for herself. (Shortform note: Doyle was relieved when the public response to her coming out was largely positive.)
Since her life with Abby didn’t follow the script society had written for her, Doyle had to write her own script. She imagined the life she wanted—one that aligned with who she wanted to be—and then made that a reality. (Shortform note: Doyle’s experiences show how powerful imagination can be—it can change your life. Part of imagination’s power comes from the way it affects your brain: Studies have shown that your imagination can fool your brain into thinking that what you imagine is already a reality. In other words, vividly imagining a life change makes the change easier—because your brain is already on board.)
Imagining and living into the “right” script for her life was a group project: Doyle and Abby shared their dreams and desires and put together a shared vision for their future. They decided to get married and discussed their decision with friends and family. Her husband supported her decision, and her fans were happy for her. Doyle’s decision initially saddened her children, but they came to accept the divorce and love Abby.
(Shortform note: As you think about how to make your imagined life a reality, take a cue from Doyle and lean on those around you for support. Experts suggest that lifestyle changes are easier when you share your successes and setbacks with others—their celebrations when things go right and support when things go wrong can make the process feel less overwhelming or lonely.)
From her experience of discovering happiness once she flipped the script, Doyle realized how important it is for women to rewrite their scripts, using their imaginations as a guide to direct their lives. Doyle suggests the following steps for rewriting your script:
Further Exploring the Steps of Rewriting Your Script
Each step to rewriting your script is important and worth exploring in more depth. Doyle has expanded on the script-rewriting process in multiple podcasts, interviews, and speeches—here, we’ll explore her discussed implications of each step:
Expressing your discontent is a useful starting point because articulating what you are unhappy about and what needs to change challenges the unhealthy idea that you should always be happy and grateful.
Asking yourself what you really want is important because what you want often gets hidden beneath the expectations that others have for you.
Creating a clear picture of your desired future is a powerful technique because you may have never visualized the most beautiful version of your life—and therefore may not even be aware of what you really want. It’s also important to realize that this vision is unique to you.
Sharing your ideas with others can help you feel seen and acknowledged—which can further inspire you to take action.
Doyle asserts that when you see injustice, destruction, and violence, you instinctively understand that the world isn’t as it should be. You know this because you carry within your imagination a more beautiful vision of what the world could be.
Doyle says that you must do everything you can to make your vision of the world a reality. Those in power are interested in preserving the status quo—they constantly send messages to support this status quo and prevent you from questioning it, messages such as:
Because she received this messaging, Doyle was discouraged from reimagining her reality, learned to be complacent with the status quo, and became apathetic towards progressive causes. Captivity limited her imagination and its power.
However, once she learned to embrace her imagination, she understood its powerful ability to break through the apathy of captivity and inspire positive change.
One reason that these limiting messages are so pervasive in women’s lives is that they are intended to preserve the patriarchal systems most women live within. Patriarchy is a social system based on gender inequality that reinforces men's cultural, political, and moral authority and subverts women’s attempts to claim this authority. Women receive the message that they shouldn’t fight for change because doing so would challenge the status quo: a male-dominated social system.
While Doyle contends that when you see injustice, you instinctively know the world isn’t as it should be, seeing the injustice in the first place is often difficult. Patriarchy-supporting messages are so pervasive that we rarely think to question their validity, underscoring the importance of using your imagination to think outside the box.
Doyle recommends expressing your wildest dreams for your life and the world so that you can act on them. This exercise will help you identify and articulate these dreams for yourself.
Write down your five wildest dreams for your future.
Write down your five wildest dreams for the world.
What is something you can do today that will set you on a path to making these dreams a reality?
We have now explored embracing emotion, embracing intuition, and embracing your imagination. We’ve learned how these pathways can release you from a state of captivity by showing you how to live free of society’s restrictive messages. Now that you are following these pathways, you can examine areas of your life where emotion, intuition, and imagination are suppressed. By deconstructing those areas, you can let these powerful aspects of yourself shine.
Deconstruction requires dismantling old beliefs and practices inherited from your culture, giving you a clean slate upon which to reconstruct a new life that better reflects your current values and goals. (Shortform note: Deconstructing your beliefs not only allows you to create a new life that’s more aligned with your values, but also allows you to more easily engage in change and creativity. In Think Again, Adam Grant says that the crucial ability to rethink your beliefs allows you to develop new solutions and ideas for breaking free of old mindsets.)
In this chapter, we'll explore how Doyle deconstructed her beliefs and practices about marriage, motherhood, and family in creating her new life with Abby. We'll also discuss how deconstructing these areas of her life prompted her to examine her beliefs around religion and racism.
As Doyle embarked on a new relationship with Abby and began to rewrite her vision for the future, she examined the life she had been living and saw that it was limited, narrowly defined, and based on society’s expectations. Doyle’s conditioning provided the framework for her life, but she realized that her true, wild self was too dynamic and vibrant to be confined by this framework. She began reconnecting to her true self by examining the foundational beliefs informing her life and then sought to create new ideas that better matched the life she wanted for herself.
(Shortform note: Deconstructing your foundational beliefs is an essential step to living your most authentic life, but you may not feel ready for it. Experts concede that it can be a tough process—requiring you to examine your deepest self closely, let go of things you’re attached to, or confront unpleasant emotions. However, the happiness and freedom you gain from the process is well worth the struggle.)
During her life in captivity, Doyle adhered to the cultural mandates that women should be quiet, pleasing, agreeable, and self-sacrificing. She believed that the best way a woman can love the people in her life and her community is to be selfless and put her desires last. In her life, this showed up in three ways:
Pursuing a Balance: Selflessness and Self-Care
Doyle criticizes the societal expectation that women should be selfless, but you may not be ready—or willing—to completely reject this aspect of your nature. In that case, you might take a slightly different approach: cultivating a balance between selflessness and self-care.
Selflessness can help you serve others, be more empathetic, and tune into the needs of those around you. In marriage, tuning into your partner can create intimacy, and empathically connecting to the needs of children can foster their well-being. But as Doyle notes, being too selfless has many negative consequences, especially when it drives you to neglect your own needs. By balancing your selflessness with rejuvenating self-care practices, you can both honor your needs and fuel yourself for the necessary emotional work of caring for the people in your life.
There are numerous practical ways that you can bring self-care into your life: You can keep a journal, play your favorite music and dance, take a 10-minute nap, eat your favorite food, take a walk, or get a massage. You can also set aside parts of your day as sacred time just for you (for example, when you’re drinking your coffee or winding down after work). Taking this time for yourself will allow you to balance your needs with the needs of others.
Doyle's new love for Abby—and for her "true self" that emerged—forced her to question everything she believed. She realized she needed to make significant changes in three areas where she held restrictive beliefs: marriage, parenthood, and family structure.
Doyle deconstructed her beliefs about what it meant to be in an intimate relationship. In her new relationship, she experienced a sexual awakening that allowed her to tune into her desires. She abandoned the idea that she must be pleasing and performative—instead of forming a new belief that she deserves to experience pleasure in her intimate relationships.
(Shortform note: While many women think that putting their partner's needs before their own is the “right” way to be intimate, rethinking these beliefs can lead to more fulfilling intimate relationships. One way to become more aware of your desires is to check in with yourself before being intimate with another person. A self-check-in helps you assess what you want from the experience and express your desires.)
Doyle deconstructed her beliefs about what it meant to be a parent. As she pursued a new relationship with Abby, Doyle’s primary concern was for her children and for the upheaval that they would experience in their lives. She realized, however, that although the changes may be disruptive, it was important for her children to see their mother living her most authentic, fulfilled life. She wanted to model happiness and fulfillment for them rather than self-sacrifice—she decided to demonstrate how to change direction unapologetically.
(Shortform note: Many authors and researchers agree that seeing happy adults provides important benefits for children. In Modelling Happiness, Reen Rose says that when children see adults being curious, pursuing new ideas, and engaging in enjoyable activities, they witness both what it looks like to be happy and also learn skills (such as resiliency, bravery, and confidence). These skills will help children to pursue their own happiness as they mature.)
She deconstructed her beliefs about family structure. She realized that family structure can diverge from a nuclear family and still provide love, support, and stability. She rethought her assumption that she should maintain the nuclear family at all costs and discovered that a healthy family structure evolves and changes to fit the needs of each of its members.
(Shortform note: Doyle’s assumption that the nuclear family should be maintained at all costs likely comes from societal messaging that this family structure is “best”—but studies show that any family that provides love, protection, and support is "best." A larger societal trend towards accepting a wide range of family arrangements mirrors Doyle’s experiences. Research shows that an increasing percentage of the American population accepts and supports non-traditional family structures.)
In addition to deconstructing her ideas about marriage, parenthood, and family structure, Doyle also reexamined her beliefs about religion and race. She realized that she had been participating in cultural practices and belief systems that did not reflect what she believed true about herself and the world.
When Doyle was a young mom in the early 2000s, she became involved in her local church—only to find that the church was primarily focused on opposing homosexuality and abortion. When she questioned the pastor about his approach, he told her to trust the church’s teachings. After this experience, Doyle joined another church that didn’t force her to check her critical thinking and intuition at the door or defer to the judgment of powerful men.
Doyle reflected on her experience with her first church as she continued to deconstruct her ideas about religion after meeting Abby. The experience had given her a first-hand perspective of how religion can negatively impact women’s lives—she realized how important it is to deconstruct the views handed down by authority.
The Challenge of Leaving Your Congregation
During her early church experience, Doyle saw how her viewpoints were easily ignored and disregarded by powerful men. Many women have spoken out against injustice in their congregations after having similar experiences.
Two notable women who have written extensively about religious deconstruction are authors Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts) and Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday). They point out how patriarchal power structures within the church discourage open dialogue and debate and promote conservative political ideologies.
Like Doyle, Bessey and Evans both experienced leaving their congregations, deconstructing their beliefs, and finding new faith communities. Their work expands on Doyle’s ideas by exploring the difficulty of leaving a faith community and the bravery required to deconstruct your faith—especially as doing so requires letting go of a central support system for many women. The sense of isolation and alienation that comes with leaving your congregation and faith can be challenging, and you may feel that community support is necessary for your journey. If you need support, Bessey and Evans founded an online community for people actively deconstructing their faith that can help you during this difficult transition.
Today, Doyle believes that following Jesus’s teachings should not involve taking a hardline stance on political issues. (Shortform note: This stance mirrors the views of many people who have left their congregations, citing disagreement with their church’s views on homosexuality.)
Doyle rejects the idea that the church is a necessary intermediary between individual believers and the divine. Instead, she believes that she has personal access to God and doesn’t require an intermediary or interpreter. As a result, she no longer views organized religion as necessary for loving God or each other.
(Shortform note: Doyle’s conclusions align with recent studies that have found an increasing lack of confidence in organized religion. Many people no longer see organized religion as a necessary part of their faith journey and instead have developed a more personal approach to spirituality. Doyle has also chosen this path and is currently not affiliated with any religious organization, and instead explores her spirituality by practicing meditation (as discussed in the previous section).
In addition to rethinking her relationship with organized religion, Doyle also rethought her perspectives on race and civil rights.
After the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the demonstrations that followed, Doyle was inspired to talk about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s with her family. Her younger daughter asked if their family would have joined in the marches and demonstrations for civil rights if they had been alive in the 60s. Before Doyle could answer, her older daughter responded that they wouldn’t have—because they weren’t participating in the civil rights demonstrations occurring in the present day.
Doyle realized her daughter was right. Although she believed deeply in the cause of civil rights, she was not personally taking any concrete action, such as demonstrating for change or speaking out in solidarity with those fighting for racial justice. It wasn’t enough to profess support for racial equality; she had to become personally involved.
Avoiding “Slacktivism” and Taking Real-World Action
Although there are many similarities between the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s and the civil rights demonstrations of today, the influence of social media is one major difference. The new ability to passively participate in social causes online can sometimes lead to what some call “slacktivism”—expressing interest or support (liking a page, sharing, retweeting information) without taking on much personal risk.
Doyle and her daughters may have thought they were actively supporting civil rights because it is easy to passively engage with causes online and express support without publicly demonstrating. However, they realized that professing your support isn’t enough because change comes from connecting with others and taking action. One way to make the leap from engaging online to engaging offline is to meet in person with others who support the cause you’re interested in. Meeting with other activists helps you establish personal, real-world connections that can encourage you to take concrete, meaningful action.
Doyle believed that the first step to becoming more meaningfully involved in this cause was to educate herself about racism and explore her relationship with it. She learned about police brutality, the preschool-to-prison pipeline, and other issues the African American community faces. She began to see racism as a deep-rooted issue that poisons American society on all levels. (Shortform note: Doyle doesn’t mention which books or authors she read as she was becoming educated about these issues. If you’re looking for a place to get started, there are many reading lists online, such as this one put together by Ibram X. Kendi, anti-racism expert and author of How to Be an Anti-Racist.)
Doyle realized that racism had surrounded her throughout her life. As a child, she watched police shows that depicted African Americans as criminals and heard racist jokes and comments—yet she never saw this as “wrong” and didn’t speak up. After educating herself, she realized that these racist jokes and negative depictions of African Americans in the media were expressions of American racism, unacknowledged by white people and yet pervasive.
(Shortform note: Doyle may not have recognized what she saw as racism because what she saw didn't fit her idea of “real” racism. In How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi explains that there are two kinds of racism: overt and covert. Overt racism involves acts of aggression or violence between individuals—likely what Doyle was raised to believe was “real” racism. She didn’t realize at the time that covert racism is “real” racism too. Covert racism involves institutionalized racist policies and practices throughout society. Doyle’s experience watching police shows exemplifies how covert racism can be communicated and normalized through the media—so that many can’t even see racism even when it’s right in front of them.)
As she became aware of the pervasiveness of racism, Doyle felt inspired to lead discussions and raise awareness about the issue. She was criticized and called racist for assuming she had a right to take a leadership role in the movement, however. Some felt it was important for white women to take a step back and let people of color who were already leading the movement take center stage.
She realized that when others called her racist, they were right—her assumption of a leadership role represented racist beliefs inside of her. But she still believed it was important to be brave and show up to conversations about race—even though her prejudices would be on display. She concluded that it’s better to take a risk and speak out on this issue than be silent and complicit in the racial status quo.
Consciously Avoiding White Defensiveness
Doyle willingly admits to the racism within her so that she can participate in productive discussions. Doyle isn’t defensive or over-sensitive as she comes to this conclusion—an unusual reaction, according to Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility). DiAngelo claims that it is more common for white people to become highly defensive when confronted with their racism.
This is an unfortunate reaction—white defensiveness in conversations about race can effectively shut down communication, and it wrongly refocuses everyone’s attention on the defensive white person rather than the needs of the African American community. To combat this tendency towards defensiveness, DiAngelo says, white people should not view the accusation of racism as a personal, moral failing but rather as a result of their ongoing complicity in the racial status quo. Realizing society's role in creating racist beliefs can clarify that racism is not so much a personal accusation as a social responsibility that needs collective attention.
DiAngelo also agrees with Doyle that it is better to be criticized than to be silent. He emphasizes that white people should acknowledge their complicity while still being open to discussion. In practical terms, this looks like white people staying out of leadership roles in conversations about race, instead listening attentively to those who have suffered and developing a better understanding of what is actually needed of them.
Doyle achieved freedom from her captivity by systematically deconstructing her beliefs and assumptions. In this exercise, you will reflect upon the beliefs you’ve adopted and how they’ve changed over time—and you’ll identify which beliefs may need deconstructing.
Choose one of the following topics: gender roles, parenting, religion, or race. What were you taught to believe about this topic?
How have these beliefs changed over time? What caused this change?
What beliefs do you have today that need to be deconstructed or reexamined?
The four pathways we have discussed helped free Doyle from captivity. As these four paths converged, they empowered Doyle to reconstruct her life to reflect her truest self in four ways:
Doyle now lives according to her wildness—her primal self. This primal self was the person who had been there all along, waiting to be free. She has made a promise never again to abandon herself. She will practice self-love and always trust her instincts.
Doyle’s Continued Commitment to Her Pathways
Doyle stays true to herself as she continues to follow the pathways we have explored in this guide—she’s found concrete ways to live into each:
She has a post-it note on her mirror that reminds her to “feel it all” and embrace her emotions.
She continues to be guided by her intuition as she engages in activism through Together Rising and raises money for causes close to her heart.
Doyle lives the life she imagined for herself with Abby. Together they co-host the We Can Do Hard Things podcast in which they are honest about their daily struggles and how they try to support each other on their respective journeys to construct their truest lives.
Doyle’s experiences have taught her a great deal about how to rebuild life on her terms, and she calls her readers to do the same. She asserts that the world needs more wild women, and suggests four ways you can begin rebuilding your life to align with your truest self.
1) Let go of your old assumptions, beliefs, worldviews, and social conditioning. Be committed to holding on to nothing but the truth. Start a journal to reflect on how your ideas about gender, sexuality, family life, religion, and race have been influenced by society’s messaging.
(Shortform note: Committing to letting go of old beliefs and writing about your social conditioning can be overwhelming if you try to tackle too many beliefs at once—focus on just a few of these beliefs at a time. In Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins provides a useful process for addressing just a few damaging beliefs at a time. He suggests writing down all of your beliefs and then identifying the ones that have had significant negative impacts on your life. Robbins says that you then choose just two of these negative beliefs—and focus on thoroughly deconstructing each one. You can revisit this lexercise as needed until you deconstruct each negative belief on the list.)
2) Be willing to lose the things in your life that are good enough. When you create a more beautiful vision of your life, you should never compromise that vision by tolerating the things that are just “good enough.”
(Shortform note: There’s some debate around the value of “good enough” things. While Doyle encourages you to reject “good enough,” other authors argue that you should embrace it. In Good Enough, Kate Bowler suggests that the expectation that your life should be in a state of constant pursuit of “the best” is an unrealistic goal—and this commitment to only the best can make it harder for you to handle setbacks or disappointment. Bowler says that you should instead embrace the “good enough” life. This means striving for what is possible today, while acknowledging that there may be setbacks in the future that you may not be able to control.)
3) Be willing to disappoint people who don’t understand your new priorities or see your vision. Trying to please others will compromise your reconstruction.
(Shortform note: Being willing to disappoint people often involves getting rid of people-pleasing tendencies—which can be stressful for you and trigger unpleasant reactions in others. In The Disease to Please, Harriet Braiker suggests focusing on being considerate of others—that is, listening to them attentively and considering their views—while sticking to your vision and asserting your perspectives. This balance helps the people in your life not feel alienated from you and come to terms with their potential disappointment about your decisions.)
4) Write new messages to yourself about what you believe and who you are as a person. These new messages can be expressed in a journal or carried deep within you. Revise these messages as needed on an ongoing basis for the rest of your life.
(Shortform note: In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield says that you should begin the process of writing new messages to yourself by writing down the things that make you happy. Reflecting on what you write down is a great way to better understand who you are and what defines you as a person. The combination of a positive focus and a deeper understanding of yourself can empower you to create optimistic messages for the future.)
Doyle recommends that you write new messages about who you are and what you believe. In this exercise, you can identify the things you value most about yourself, your core beliefs, and the promises you can make to yourself going forward.
What do you like about yourself? How can you honor these qualities and treat yourself with respect?
What are your strongest beliefs? What are your core values?
What are some changes you need to make in your life? What are some promises that you can make to yourself?
Now, combine all of your ideas to write a new message to yourself. Use the following structure: “I am a _. I believe in __. I promise never again to _. Going forward, I promise I will __.”