What Happens to Your Nervous System When You’re a Survivor
I’ve been a Survivor fan for as long as I can remember, and Parvati Shallow has always been my player. Charming, strategic, whip-smart; she redefined what it meant to be a powerful woman on that island. So, when she announced her memoir Nice Girls Don’t Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power, I preordered it on the spot. Flash forward to the day it finally arrived, and I tore into it like a hidden immunity idol clue. But what I found between the pages was far more than a reality TV tell-all—it was a raw, honest, and soul-shaking account of survival.Parvati lays it all bare in this book. From childhood trauma to relationship heartbreak, from public scrutiny to spiritual reckoning.
For me, some of the most poignant sections were when she talked about her fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. These weren’t just survival tactics she used in her personal life—they became cornerstones of her gameplay on Survivor. And they worked. Until, heartbreakingly, they didn’t.
Reading about how these finely-tuned survival strategies (her ability to charm, disarm, and maneuver) were later weaponized against her in final tribal councils or public perception was painful. Parvati had built a brilliant system for survival, for success, for connection. And yet, that very system was misunderstood as manipulation or inauthenticity. As a fan, it was frustrating. As a therapist, it was devastatingly familiar.
In my practice, I see this all the time. Clients whose nervous systems are in a constant state of high alert. Their responses—whether they show up as anger, anxiety, shutdown, or people-pleasing—are too often labeled as dysfunction. But these are the exact tools that helped them survive. Like Parvati, they adapted with incredible intelligence and creativity. And like Parvati, they’re often punished for the very things that once kept them safe.
What I admire most about this book is how Parvati doesn’t just tell us what happened—she shows us what healing looks like. She names her nervous system, learns to work with it, and ultimately reclaims her power in a way that feels deeply embodied. As she writes: “When I stopped trying to be the perfect good girl, I finally met myself.”
Nice Girls Don’t Win is not just a memoir—it’s a call to all of us who’ve ever used our survival skills to get through life. It’s a reminder that those instincts are not weaknesses—they’re wisdom.
