The Holy No, Pt 1: The Quiet Yes That's Erasing You

You say yes, then resent it for days. Meet the relief-then-resentment map that finds the honest thing you keep swallowing. (Holy No, Pt 1)

You said yes before she'd even finished the sentence. And for three days, you've been quietly furious about something you signed yourself up for.

 That's Good Girl Ghosting™ in its politest, covered-dish, Sunday-best form — and in Part 1 of The Holy No, Rachel shows you how to catch it. You'll get the relief-then-resentment map (the tool that finds the honest thing you keep swallowing), the two reliefs, why every no is a yes pointed somewhere else, and two bits of science that make saying no actually possible. Plus the church-parking-lot story of the first time her body made the no for her — and how that panic attack became, years later, a three-day catch and a two-line text.

 In this episode:

• The relief-then-resentment tell — how to find the honest thing you buried

• The two reliefs (the people-pleasing hit vs. the deep “finally”)

• The Holy No creates margin — your joy needs the space

• The science: self-silencing & the excitement reframe

• Your pinkie-toe step for the week

📩 Free: Are You a Good Girl Ghost? quiz → https://links.ivorey.io/widget/quiz/mmUr1eIXrBFXtkK470zc

📙 Rebel Response Mini Kit (out now) → https://rachel-harris-online.kit.com/products/the-rebel-response-mini-kit

Work with Rachel (Rebel Hour / coaching) → https://rachelharrisonline.com/work-with-me

Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: 1GYQEK8KQU86CRJS

Resources:

- Free Play: REBEL JOY Card Deck — Romanticize your life and reclaim your light — one tiny rebellion at a time. Seven print-and-keep cards, each with one brave, joyful prompt. Pick a card, set a 60-second timer, and play. Start Playing Again! https://rachel-harris-online.kit.com/72c327f4a4 

- For the exact scripts for the next time you go blank or catch yourself saying an automatic yes, grab the Rebel Response Mini Kit here: https://rachelharrisonline.com/product-details/product/the-rebel-response-mini-kit

- FREE: Are YOU a Good Girl Ghost? Free Guide: 5 Moments You're Abandoning Yourself (Without Even Realizing It) https://rachel-harris-online.kit.com/e6b737ec08

- Work with me on the Good Girl Ghost Reset — a single Rebel Hour, or the full Reset Mentorship: https://rachelharrisonline.com/work-with-me

My Substack Page, Goodbye, Good Girl: https://joyfulrebel.substack.com/

Are YOU A Joyful Rebel? https://rachelharrisonline.com/joyful-rebel

Transcript

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About a month ago, a group of friends and I were planning a get together, but the spot that we were originally eyeing started to seem a little pricey. You know how group chat deflates when you've got all these exciting plans and then it might not happen? The whole, well, I guess we can just try again next month type energy. Well, that's what was happening. And someone suggested, man, if only we had a pool, we could hang out there. Before the thought even registered, I was out my back door with my phone, videoing my backyard, saying, Well, I don't have a pool, but I have this wonderfully whimsical splash pad. We can hang here. Instant relief. Everybody lit right back up again. We were excited. We were gonna make this happen. I felt like a hero. I was the yes. And that's when the question started. Well, what should we eat? No, I love hosting. I love being in the heart of a party. And I love me some food. Your girl's from New Orleans. So I said, I've got it. I came up with a menu of homemade beignets, mimosas, cinnamon rolls, fruit, and some protein in there too. Perfect. Then, so what time? Here's where it got sticky. The brunch was on a Sunday, and everyone seemed to have a different service time they were planning to go. Show-up time started ping-ponging from 10 to noon to 11 to 2. At one point, brunch started sounding a lot more like early dinner, but for every single suggestion, my reply stayed the same. Sure, that works, y'all can come anytime. And for the most part, I meant it. But over the next week, my own brunch at my own house went from something that I'd been genuinely excited about to something I just wanted to have over. Days before it even happened, I was already thinking, I can't wait for Monday. See, I've been accommodating every single person except me, and except my own family, who last time I checked, also lived in the house. And that right there is the whole thing that I want to show you today. This is part one of a little series that I'm calling the Holy Know. Welcome back to the Joyful Rebel. I'm Rachel Harris, your official joy coach, and here's what I believe with my whole body. Learning to own your voice and say the honest thing doesn't have to be hard or heavy. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be scary, and it doesn't have to blow up your relationships. In fact, reclaiming your holy no and your sacred yes, that's you getting your life back. But here's what took me years to learn. And as you just saw, I sometimes still forget. That automatic, generous, we could do it here, yes, hadn't been pure kindness. Some of it was, and some of it was disappearing. It was good girl ghosting in its most polite, covered dish, sneaky Sunday best form. Nobody trapped me into an all-day event at my own house. I did that. With a smile and one no worries at a time. I kept handing over my day, my own house, over and over again and calling it hospitality. We've been taught that a good woman keeps the peace. She's easygoing, kind, and thoughtful. And then somewhere along the way, all of that quietly came to mean swallow the honest thing, soften it, edit, be accommodating, always put yourself last. So that's what we do for years, until one day someone asks us, what do you actually think? And you realize you're not totally sure anymore. You're Julia Roberts and Runaway Bride, not knowing how she likes her eggs. That's not a character flaw. That's data. You've swallowed the honest thing so many times that you lost the thread of it, but your body kept the receipts. Every stinking one of them. And this is how you find the honest thing that you buried. You follow the relief, then resentment. The relief, you say yes, and there's a flash of relief that the awkwardness is over, you're the hero, and then an hour later, or a day later, sometimes a few minutes later, the slow burn, the resentment. That two-part combo is a treasure map. The relief is the old pattern, working exactly the way that it was trained to. The resentment, that's the honest thing, knocking to get out. Now, here's something that I only figured out recently, watching myself in that whole splash pad mess. There's actually two kinds of relief. The first relief is the one that I felt when everyone lit back up again, when I was the hero. It feels amazing. It feels like being seen, but it's the people-pleasing hit. It's the sugar high of giving the yes. And it's usually you disappearing dressed up as generosity. It's being seen for the costume, not for your true self. But then there's the second relief, and that one hits completely different. It lives on the far side of the honest thing. Getting to that second relief, though, often comes with some awkwardness and discomfort because no and yes are linked. There's no such thing as a free floating no. Every no is a yes pointed somewhere else. When I said yes to pushing that brunch into an all-day thing, I was saying no to my family Sunday. When you say yes to joining the third committee, you're likely saying no to your own family dinner table. It might not feel like the choice that you're making, but it's a choice getting made for you, usually by whoever's asking the loudest or looks the most disappointed. So here's a line that I want you to write on a post-it note. Put it on your laptop, your mirror, somewhere you're gonna see it. The holy no creates margin and the spark, your joy, your aliveness, the dreams you keep saying you'll get to later, the spark needs the space. Every yes that you didn't mean is taking up room where your joy could go. So, right off the bat, let me give you the action and the fact, the Tylenol and the vitamin, the instant relief and the mindset shift. The next time that that slow burn shows up, stop reading it as proof that you're ungrateful or wrong or just need to suck it up. Read it as information, frustration, overwhelm, stress, resentment. They're not character flaws. They're flags. Flags your body is waving to get your attention. And now the deeper truth: your voice, your honest opinion, isn't a luxury. There's actual real research on this. A psychologist named Dana Crowley Jack spent years studying women who chronically silence themselves. And she found that it doesn't just make you frustrated. That swallowed voice is actually linked to depression. Your nice that swallows your real answer was never free. Your voice is load-bearing. Take it out from under your life, and something real starts to sag. And my fellow midlife sisters, we understand the weight and the importance of the sag. So here's a second science nugget that I find extremely interesting, because it's the actual key to being able to say the thing. There's a Harvard researcher named Alison Wood Brooks, and she studies what happens in our bodies right before something that scares us: a speech, a hard conversation, a no. Now, for most of us, when we feel our heart pound and our stomach flip, we do the obvious thing. We try to force ourselves to calm down. And her research found something wild. Telling yourself to just calm down rarely works because your body's already revved up and you can't just like slam on those brakes that fast. But you know what does work? Reappraisal. You take that exact same racing heart and you rename it. When you feel that flutter in your belly and name it anxiety, believing your body is warning you that whatever's about to happen is gonna blow up or be embarrassing, instead of doing that, you say out loud, because she found saying it out loud actually matters. I'm excited. Because here's the secret anxiety and excitement are almost identical in the body. Same pounding heart, same buzz. The only difference is a story you tell yourself about it. So when you go to say you're holy no, and you feel your whole body start to light up, that's not a warning. That's aliveness. That's you about to do a brave thing. Grab hold of that, find that feeling in your body, and rename it. Not I'm terrified, but I'm alive and I'm about to sound like me. I want to take you back now to the very first time my body made the no for me, because I sure wasn't going to be doing it myself. I was 26, brand new to Houston, brand new mom, two babies under the age of two. And about two months into the move, I joined Mops, mothers of preschoolers, at my local church, because I was lonely and I wanted friends, and I wanted a place that my kids could start making friends to, even at 18 months old. And the very first email I got from them, before I even attended a single meeting, I learned that they had a need on the leadership team, a spot that apparently had sat empty for months with nobody stepping forward. So I did what I always did. I heard myself say, I'll do it. I didn't even fully know what I was signing up for, just that they had a need and I wanted to fill it. I wanted to be the hero. And I figured maybe that'd be a great way to make friends even sooner. Turns out the role was being in charge of the sweet ladies who would worked the nursery and the daycare during our meetings. I was told this job would be a piece of cake. They handed me a list of the age groups, a list of the workers, and said, pair them up.

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Cool.

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So I threw my whole heart, my whole self into it. I took what they implied would be an hour-long project, and I spent two full afternoons on it, learning about the women and thoughtfully assigning the rooms. I felt so good when I turned it in. Total gold star moment. It immediately went sideways because unbeknownst to me, everyone had a certain age group that they preferred, an opinion on where they should work and who they should work with, and a reason that my plan didn't work. And there I was, 26 years old, a world-class, semi-professional people pleaser, surrounded by women at least 10 years older than me, drowning, mountains of extra work, trying so hard to make everyone happy, trying so hard to be good. And then came the morning, about a month or so later, when it all came due. A comedy of errors. Half the workers called out sick because of the flu. Rooms were uncovered. The church decided to combine a few groups into one big room. And since I was in charge of the workers, of course I stayed back to help with the kids. In a room I had never once been in before. I'd only been at the church itself for about three months at that point. And every single person was looking to me for the answers. Where are the outlets? Where are the cups? Where's the goldfish? Where's the art stuff? And oh, oh the noise. A room full of mixed-age kids in a brand new space, all wanting to explore and shout hello to each other at ear-piercing pitches that seemed to bounce off the walls. Everything was going wrong at once. And standing smack dab in the middle of it all was me. Having the first true panic attack of my life. Tunnel vision, noise going wonky. I turned to another woman from the team who had stayed back and I said, I gotta go. I'll be back. And I went to my car. My kids stayed in the room with them. I went to my car and I sat there, shaking, genuinely wondering what was happening to me, because I never felt like this before. I breathed or I tried to breathe. I cried, I shook, and after a few minutes of my body screaming so loud that I couldn't ignore it a second longer, I called the pastor from my phone, right there in the parking lot, and I said the most honest words that I'd said in months. I can't do this. That was my holy no, but look at what it cost me. My body had to physically shut me down. A full-blown panic attack in a church parking lot, just to get me to say a no that I could not make myself say out loud. Now hold that story right up next to my silly splash pad brunch. Because the contrast is the whole reason why I can smile telling the story. This time, there was no parking lot. There was no panic attack. This time, about three days out, I just caught it. I finally texted the women back and I said, here's the time that works for me. Come at 11, we'll officially call it noon and stay around until two. Folks are able to linger as long as you want, but my family gets their house back around that time. And the relief that I felt in that moment, that was the second relief, the real one. It wasn't, whew, everyone's happy with me. It was pride and confidence, and it was a deep inner alignment. A voice inside me saying, Finally, do you hear the growth in that? That first time, it took a full body shutdown for me to hear my own no, to listen to my body and what it needed this time. A three-day catch and a two-line text. The panic attack became a pause. The disappearing became a finally. And that, that's exactly what I teach the women who come to me for coaching. That's what we practice. Not becoming hard or selfish, but hearing yourself a little sooner, a little kinder every single time. Now, I know what the real fear is because I lived inside it for decades. The fear is if I say the no, it's going to cost me the relationship. She'll be hurt. They'll think I've changed, that I'm difficult. It'll blow everything up. So let me hand you the two things that finally set me free from that fear. The first, a boundary isn't the opposite of love. It's the shape love takes when it plans to last. And here's the part the good girl code skips right over. The most loving person in history was not infinitely available. Jesus withdrew from crowds who still needed things. He slept through the storm. He axed for space in the garden. He let the rich young ruler walk away. Love didn't heal every single person before dinner. Love had a bedtime. So if perfect love, if Jesus kept boundaries, then your boundary isn't a character flaw. You need to pray away. The martyr burns out and calls it holiness. The holy no stays in the room for the long haul. And that, sweet sister, is the more loving option. It's just not the one that we were trained to pick. And the second thing, when you hold your no, you make room for someone else to stand up. Think about my brunch. Because I jumped in so fast with we can do it here. Nobody else in the chat ever got the chance to offer their yes. My quick yes didn't just cost me. It quietly robbed the room of everyone else's. Sometimes the most generous thing that you can do is leave one beat of silence and let someone else's yes rise up to fill it. And one more, because I think so many of us need permission for this one specifically. Sometimes the yes that you need to take back is a yes that you truly meant. You said it, you meant it, and it was good for a season. And then life shifted, and it just doesn't fit anymore. That is not you being flaky. That is not you breaking a promise. A sacred yes is allowed to become a holy no when the season changes. We go deeper on that in part three, but hear it right now. You are allowed to outgrow a yes. This is the very first move I make with almost every woman I work with. Before we ever practice saying a hard thing out loud, we go find the honest thing her body's been flagging for years. That map, the relief than resentment tell, is the doorway into the holy no. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. That's the fun part. So here's your joy nugget. Your true voice was never rude. It's the most freeing sound in the world. And there's a second relief waiting on the far side of every honest word. Not the sugar high of being the yes, but the deep finally of being yourself. You don't have to earn your voice back. It's already yours. You just get to stop giving it away. So here's your pinky toe step. And notice, no hard conversations are gonna be required yet. Just catch one relief then resentment this week. One. Notice the yes. Notice the flash of relief. And when the slow burn shows up a day later, instead of scolding yourself, get curious. What was the honest thing I swallowed there? You don't have to say it to a single soul. Just name it to yourself. And honestly, noticing is the first act of joyful rebellion. And here's your rebel minute. The next time a sure, no problem goes flying out of your mouth, pause for one single beat and ask, did I mean that? Or did I just perform it? And here are your permission slips. Not because you need them, but because you already have them. You're allowed to read resentment as information instead of evidence that you're ungrateful. You're allowed to have a boundary and still be a deeply loving woman. You're allowed to leave a beat of silence and let someone else step up. You're allowed to let a yes expire when the season changes. You're allowed to believe your voice is load-bearing. That something real depends on you finally saying the honest thing. Now, finding the honest thing is part one. Next time in part two, I'm handing you the actual words. The holy no script bank. How to say the short, kind, guilt-free no out loud. One breath truer than feels comfortable, without the whole paragraph of overexplaining tacked onto the end. And in part three, we deal with the guilt that tends to show up after, and the sacred yes that every single no is quietly protecting. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so part two lands right in your feed. Before you go, just a quick, joyful invitation. If today name something in you, your next step is small and free. Come take the Are You a Good Girl Ghost quiz. It's right on my website and I'll have it linked in the show notes. Two minutes, a bit of fun, maybe a little ouch, but I promise I'll leave you with some goodness at the end. And if you want the exact in the moment words for when your brain does go blank and yes escapes before you can catch it, that's all in part two. But you can also grab my rebel response mini kit that's out today. I'll drop a link for that below as well. And if you ever want to go find your true voice with me, that's what a rebel hour or personal and group coaching is for. No rush, no pressure, just an open door whenever you're ready. But for now, go find your honest thing. Catch one relief than resentment, and name the honest thing that you swallowed. That's the whole practice for this week. One breath truer. I'll meet you back here.