You Can Take the Girl Out of the Village — But What If the Village Was Never the Problem?

Close your eyes.

Give her time to come.

Allow an image to emerge, without forcing it.

Who comes?

Perhaps a woman who migrated generations ago, lived with a disability, or knew poverty and exclusion.

Perhaps a woman treated as a man’s possession, whose body, labour and life were controlled.

Perhaps a woman labelled “crazy”, excluded by her family or community, whose voice was dismissed.

Perhaps a simple woman from the village. A chłopka. A servant. Someone whose work went unrecognised, whose dignity was denied.

Perhaps your mother, grandmother, aunt, or a great-grandmother you never knew.

You do not have to know her story. Just be curious about whoever appears.

Look at her.

Consider the life she lived, the work she did, what she carried, and what she was never given.

And if you can, tell her:

I see you.

I see what you did.

Your work had value.

You are worthy of respect.

You belong.

Stay with her for a moment.

You do not have to change her, rescue her, or send her away. Just allow her to belong.

Notice what happens when you no longer have to

reject her in order to become the woman you are.

The Proverb Beneath the Exercise

There is a saying that goes: You can take the girl out of the village, but you cannot take the village out of the girl.

It is often used to suggest that we may leave our origins behind, but they remain part of us. Depending on who says it, it can sound affectionate, dismissive, or even shaming—as if the village is something a woman must spend her whole life trying to escape.

But perhaps the more interesting question is not whether the village stays with her.

Perhaps it is: why has she been taught to believe that she must leave every part of herself behind in order to belong somewhere else?

Family Loyalty: Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy

Many of us build an identity in opposition to the people we came from.

• I will not be like my mother.

• I will not live like them.

• I will not become what they were.

That determination can be necessary. It can give us direction, ambition, and the separation required to survive. But the family therapist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy developed a concept that explains why this survival tactic leaves an emotional tax: invisible loyalties. These are the unspoken bonds, obligations, and generational scorecards that shape our relationships.

We usually think of loyalty as staying close or continuing traditions. But loyalty can take an inverted, complicated form. When we work relentlessly to become the exact opposite of our origins, our lives are still completely dictated by them. We escape the physical circumstances, but remain psychologically organised around what we are escaping.

The question shifts from "Am I successful?" to: Am I choosing my life because it is right for me, or am I still running away from the life I don’t want?

2. Differentiation: Murray Bowen

The family systems theorist Murray Bowen developed a framework for a healthier path: differentiation of self. In accessible terms, differentiation is the capacity to remain emotionally connected to your family while developing your own distinct values, identity, and direction.

Differentiation is not about agreeing with your parents, excusing harmful behaviour, or remaining in contact with people who hurt you. It simply means that your identity no longer depends on either copying them or doing the exact opposite of everything they did.

True differentiation allows you to look back and say:

• My mother lived her life in a particular way. I can understand her circumstances without repeating them.

• My father had his limitations. I can acknowledge them without making my entire identity a reaction against him.

You can be different without needing to make them wrong in every respect. Freedom is not the opposite of belonging. Freedom becomes possible when belonging no longer threatens who you are.

Shame, Class, and the Internalised Gaze

The issue here stretches beyond immediate family dynamics; it is deeply intertwined with the social meanings, hierarchies, and values attached to our origins. This is where the word chłopka—the historical Polish term for a peasant woman—carries such a distinct, heavy dimension.

A village woman is frequently associated with simplicity, limited education, poverty, or a lack of sophistication. These are structural social circumstances, but society easily weaponizes them into harsh judgments about a person’s inherent worth.

Consequently, we don’t merely strive for a different life; we unconsciously learn to feel ashamed of the people whose lives resemble the one we are trying to leave behind. We find ourselves policing our own accents, looking down on manual work, or feeling a relentless pressure to prove we are more educated and sophisticated—fundamentally proving that we are not like them.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explored this through the concept of habitus—how social class becomes deeply embodied in our tastes, posture, and language. Bourdieu showed that class lives in our instincts and our sense of what spaces "belong" to us. Without realizing it, we begin to judge ourselves through the exact same dominant cultural standards that devalue our origins.

This leaves us with a powerful, diagnostic question:

What if the part of myself I have spent my life trying to conquer is not a personal defect, but a piece of my history I have simply learned to look at with contempt?

This is not about romanticising poverty or pretending that historical hardships were secretly good. It is about learning to separate the immense difficulties our ancestors experienced from the fundamental value of the people they were. We can honor their dignity without minimizing their suffering.

Rejection or Integration

There is a difference between rejecting where we come from and integrating it.

Rejection sounds like:

• I must become nothing like them.

• I must prove that I am different.

• I cannot allow myself to carry anything that reminds me of where I came from.

Integration sounds like:

• I can acknowledge what I received and what I lacked.

• I can recognise their humanity without denying the harm they caused.

• I can choose a different life without treating my origins as shameful.

The therapeutic exercise at the beginning of this article fits right here. Instead of telling women to forgive/ cut their parents or reconnect with their families, it invites them to look again at someone they may have learned to see through the lens of structural shame.

Who was this woman beyond the circumstances of her life?

What work did she do?

What did she carry?

What opportunities were unavailable to her?

What might her life have looked like if she had received support, education, freedom, or recognition?

And can you acknowledge her worth without having to become her?

That last question matters. The aim is not to take on the suffering of previous generations, or to make their lives meaningful by sacrificing your own. It is to stop treating their limitations as evidence of your own inadequacy.

A Different Way Forward

You can spend your life trying not to be the people you came from. But you do not become free simply by becoming different. You become freer when your life is no longer organised around proving that you are not them.

You can acknowledge the woman who came before you. You can see her limitations, her suffering, her mistakes, and her humanity. You can recognise the value of her work without pretending her life was what you would have chosen.

And then you can move forward—not backwards into her life, and not away from her in shame, but towards your own life, with a fuller understanding of where you came from.

Perhaps the question is not whether you can take the village out of the girl.

Perhaps it is whether the girl can stop believing that she must leave every part of herself behind in order to belong somewhere else.

Reflective Questions

• What part of your origins have you spent years trying to disown?

• Who are the women in your family whose work, endurance, or humanity has been overlooked?

• What do you fear you would become if you stopped rejecting them?

• What might become possible if you could acknowledge your origins without letting them define or diminish you?

Gosia Miernik

Bibliography

• Boszormenyi-Nagy, I. and Spark, G.M. (1984) Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel. (Original work published 1973).

• Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  visited online: https://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/bourdieu1.pdf

• Kerr, M.E. and Bowen, M. (1988) Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Note: The core concepts, meditation, and structure of this piece are my original work, with editing and formatting assistance provided by AI.