Elise Loehnen was chief content officer of Goop. In 2019, she 'hyperventilated for a month'.

The following is an excerpt from On Our Best Behaviour: The Price Women Pay to be Good by Elise Loehnen, a probing analysis of history and contemporary culture that explains how women have internalised the patriarchy, and how they unwittingly reinforce it.

In late 2019, I hyperventilated for an entire month. 

I could not take a deep, complete breath without yawning because, ironically, my lungs were over-saturated with oxygen. Hyperventilation is a classic mix-up between the body and the brain that I had been experiencing on and off since I was in my twenties. 

The first time it happened, I went to the emergency room thinking I had hours to live before I asphyxiated and that I needed to be intubated, stat. The doctor advised me it was all in my head and sent me home with a pat on the back and a Xanax prescription. This recent spell was different. I couldn't nap it away. Cutting out caffeine offered no relief. I struggled and suffered, yawning and sighing through meetings, interviews, and meals. 

It's a strange experience—to appear to the world as calm and sedate, sleepy really, while contending inside with consuming anxiety. I felt a bit like a duck, paddling frantically beneath the surface, while appearing to glide with little effort on top.

Watch: Elise Loehnen's tips for living a balanced life. Post continues after video.

I sat in my therapist's office that month, in exhausted tears. 

"I feel like I can't breathe," I said. 

"I know," he answered.

"It's like I'm suffocating, like I've been buried alive."

"Where is it in your body?"

"It feels," I said, "as if something is sitting on my chest and no matter what I do I can't get it off."

"That sounds really scary."

We sat, quietly. 

"I'm just so tired. I don't understand. I try to do it all right, to be perfect, to be everything for everyone." I paused to breathe before rushing out, "Why isn't that enough to give me some space? What more can I do to push this thing away?" I stopped, then asked: "Do you know what it is?"

"I don't," he offered. "But I understand why you feel urgency to figure it out."

"Is it the weight of my unreasonable expectations?" I asked.  

"Am I putting too much pressure on myself? Neither of those statements feel true to me, but you know me well."

He looked at me. "I think you are trying to live up to some sort of saintly ideal, yes. But I think it's deeper, that if you feel like you're good enough, you'll be safe from judgment, loved."

This observation hit, right in my clenched heart. 

"So, what is sitting on my chest exactly?" I asked. 

"Whatever tells you that you're not."

After our session, I sat in my car, head resting on the steering wheel. I could feel something primal and angry, something rebellious and pissed, break free. I was trying to be good. I had always been trying to be good. I ran myself ragged; cared dutifully for my family, friends, and colleagues; punished my body so that it stayed a certain size; kept my temper in check. What would happen if I just... stopped? I didn't know the answer, but in my parked car that day, I resolved to find out. I planted a tiny seed, an inquiry that became the germ of this book—its unfurling would cost me a lot, but it would give me back my life.

I wish I could report that this revelation in my therapist's office was enough to break the spell, to unlabor my breathing, to provide relief. Sadly, admitting that I felt pinned down by something didn't disappear the phantom in the way that flipping on the lights when one of my kids sees a strange shadow at bedtime dissipates the threat. But acknowledging the specter’s heft and weight did give shape to my investigation: Where did this beast come from, how did it get its power, and why was I so willing to submit? I began to trawl through history to locate the early murmurs of when goodness and acceptability were conjoined for women—and I revisited my own childhood to trace when this programming had first caught me in its maw.

I've always liked asking questions. I was a precocious and curious child, probably a little annoying in my insistence to understand: Why? Why? Why? Fortunately for me, my mother used the library as a babysitter. I always had my face in a book. I looked for answers in novels, history, science—anywhere they might be hiding. And on the long drive to and from town every day (we lived in the woods up a valley outside of Missoula, Montana), my parents played NPR's All Things Considered, so I listened as masterful radio journalists like Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, and Susan Stamberg used their questions to make the world more comprehensible. Now I realize I was trying to impose logic on a society that felt chaotic to me: I could sense an underlying structure, a code of behavior, a way life is supposed to be done. I needed to discern this map's contours—  the boundaries of acceptance, belonging, and goodness—so I could pick the right path, one that might ensure my own safety, success, and survival.

When I became an adult, I took jobs writing and editing, positions where I was paid to pursue my interests, to parse how systems work and why we do what we do. I've interviewed hundreds of deep thinkers and cultural influencers—doctors, scientists, theologians, therapists, activists, politicians, historians, healers, actors, poets, and journalists—about what it means to be human. In the past decade, I've spoken to Bryan Stevenson, the death row defense attorney who argues that we are better than the worst thing we've done, that no one deserves to be someone else's executioner.

I've spent time with Laura Lynne Jackson, a famous psychic medium whose ability to channel the dead suggests we are part of a much larger energetic story—that we don't vanish but endure, that we are here in "Earth School" to learn, evolve, and grow. I've chatted with legendary historian Mary Beard about the silencing of women in literature throughout history; physician Gabor Maté about how in intergenerational trauma drives addiction; U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy on the epidemic of loneliness; historian Isabel Wilkerson about our unseen but pervasive racial caste system; marriage therapists John and Julie Gottman about why some couples are destined  to divorce; and many, many more authors, philosophers, artists, and academics. If someone can offer an insight or clue into the human condition, I'll collect it, add it to my web.

As I've reflected on these conversations, I've come to realize that, on some level, everyone is saying the same thing: We all struggle to be known, to express the truest, most tender parts of ourselves, to feel safe enough to bring our gifts to bear. We wonder: Who am I? What do I want and need? How do I find my purpose and serve? Our greatest imperatives are to belong, to love and be loved in return. Yet life gets in the way. Sometimes interference comes from tangible constraints that are outside our control— traumatic childhoods, systemic injustice, natural disasters—but more frequently, the barriers that keep us from full expression of our potential are intangible. These are whisperings of self-doubt, limiting beliefs, or social constructs of roles and responsibilities: What's appropriate for each of us to want, and to do? These gossamer threads tie us up or pull us along like marionettes. They are the long tails of cultural programming, a legacy that clings to us as we move throughout the world.

Listen to No Filter where Elise Loehnen shares more of life to Mia Freedman. Post continues below.

The late visionary anthropologist Ashley Montagu talks about humans as having "first nature" and "second nature." Our first nature is who we are, at our root and most whole: our unique genetic design and natural instincts. Our second nature, according to Montagu, is the way society informs this biology and how it shapes our beliefs about who we are. As he explains: 

The forms of behavior that characterize us as human beings are determined by the socialization process we undergo, the cultural conditioning in which we are molded, the customs by which we are all made. And there’s the rub, for we are the most educable of all the creatures on this earth... Everything we come to be, to know, and to do as human beings we have to learn from other human beings. Indeed, educability is our species' trait. And that is why to be human is to be in danger, for we can easily be taught many wrong and unsound things.

When I first encountered this quote, it left a pit in my stomach.  

I had spent my early life leaning into this "species trait" of educability, trying to understand who I was according to who I'd been told I should be—and how a girl who wanted to belong should behave.

But in the past decade I approached all the conversations I had with our culture's thought leaders with a subconscious agenda: I wanted all those thinkers, healers, and guides to help me unwind and reverse-engineer this education. I wanted to know how to replace it with something truer. Many of those conversations helped. But they also revealed to me that we are all stuck in a web. Every one of us is conditioned and caught in a system that we cannot see—but its effects are suffocating and deadening. We are so used to functioning in this structure that it’s only when we attempt to break free that we can feel just how tightly we've been restrained. It became my journey to understand these fibers and their hold, to feel out their dimensions and complexities. In this process, I realized all is not lost: Once you discern the web and its perverted construction, you can begin clipping strands one by one, letting falsehoods about who we are blow away.

Image: Supplied.

On Our Best Behaviour: The Price Women Pay to be Good by Elise Loehnen (Bloomsbury, $34.99) is out now.

Feature Image: Supplied.

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