Why is she staying with him? Why’d you go back to him? These are two questions that get asked a lot. No More Ugly Girls is an exploration of someone sticking with the pain they know. Of someone feeling they only deserve what they get.

So these questions were often on my mind. How can we stop judging and focus on people healing.

The first step is not to ask questions. But to show people how to put their pain down.

And it is more complicated than “just put it down.”

We all have scripts we follow.  Perhaps we can call them protocols.  They are in our subconscious mind. Created for efficiency.  When that happen, I did this and so I should say and do it any time I’m faced with a situation.

They can be adaptive or maladaptive. The maladaptive ones get the job done, but in a negative way. 

For example, a person could stay thin by eating healthy. However, some people stay thin by smoking.  It gets the job done, but in a harmful way.

How do you access those scripts? By therapy. For me, I do it by writing.  Writing puts your thoughts down on paper, even those subconscious thoughts. By meditating. 

Anything we can do to monitor our thoughts will help. Identify the harmful ones and listen to the positive ones.

Why does she stay with him? Because childhood trauma taught her to accept what she gets and to repeat the cycles of abuse of childhood. And this has become an automatic habit caused by her thoughts.