This interview discusses how society and unreasonable self-imposed expectations can cause guilt in women and includes a digestible, step-by-step process to address it.
Many women are weighed down by feelings of guilt and the impossible standards imposed upon them. These feelings are just what Dr. Jennifer Reid unpacks in her new book, “Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations.” I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Reid about her career path to psychiatry and how her vast experience with patients has culminated in her own therapeutic framework.
Dr. Reid originally began her residency in internal medicine–drawn to women’s health and endocrinology–but was eventually swayed to psychiatry: “I just really loved the patient stories and the sort of creativity involved in psychiatry. I had some peers that rotated through medicine that were in the psychiatry residency, and sort of fell in love with the idea of it. So I switched over my second year and ever since have not looked back.”
Now running her own private practice and working as a clinical assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Reid has loved the flexibility of practicing psychiatry in a variety of settings including county clinics, academia, and a cancer center. She also hosts her own podcast and Substack “A Mind of Her Own” where she covers a variety of mental health issues women face every day. But the real inspiration for her book started during a turbulent time: the COVID pandemic. Dr. Reid recalls how merging her roles as a mother and physician in quarantine really amplified feelings of guilt: “My kids were home and I just was feeling constantly guilty. I wasn’t doing things right. I wasn’t seeing enough patients. I wasn’t doing enough to keep my kids going with their classroom activities online.” These constant feelings of self doubt and doing “enough” were a common thread among many of her patients, but in women especially.
In her book, Dr. Reid identifies four key expectations that are imposed on women: caretaking, “hyperaccountability”–especially for others’ emotional experiences, striving for perfection, and needing to “have it all” without breaking a sweat. With these expectations in mind, she provides a digestible, step-by-step process for addressing them. She calls this framework “SPEAK:” Show up, Pay attention to your thoughts and emotions, Examine the evidence, [take] Action, and Keep going. She emphasizes this last step of taking action, encouraging practice and repetition over time to keep feelings of guilt at bay.
Another therapeutic tool is what Dr. Reid calls the “Guilt Equation.” Simply, it’s “expectations minus our perceived reality.” In many women, there is a gap between the two. The equation allows women to question whether their self-imposed expectations are reasonable to reach, and whether they are overlooking how much they are already doing well. She says, “I think we as women in particular, and certainly we as women in healthcare, are always saying, ‘I could be better, I could be doing more,’ but I wanted to make sure we were actually paying attention to what we were already doing because we’re doing a lot.”
Dr. Reid ends with her best piece of advice to women experiencing guilt: “We are not alone in this. We are not each individually creating this guilt for ourselves. We are existing in a culture, in a society that’s really putting a lot of these expectations on us. And the more we work together to identify them and start making changes, I really think we can sort of reshape how we’re able to show up and how people are allowing us to really step into our own engagement and agency and confidence, which I’m really excited about.”
For fellow psychiatrists, Dr. Reid hopes her book outlines a clear process for addressing feelings of guilt and lofty expectations in their own patients. She also shares a therapeutic tool called the “Guilt Equation Inventory” that is in process of getting validated. She encourages those interested in using it to reach out to her for more information on how to incorporate this helpful tool into their practice.
Jennifer Reid, MD is a psychiatrist, the creator and host of The Reflective Mind Podcast, and writes at A Mind of Her Own on Substack. Her first book, Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life From Unreasonable Expectations, was published January 27, 2026. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and two sons.