An instant New York Times bestseller! A groundbreaking exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins—ancient ideas of morality that still control and distort women’s lives today—revealing how trust in our natural instincts can return us to a more balanced, peaceful, and spiritually complete way to live.

Want to know if the sins live in you?

In Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, Loehnen partners with Courtney Smith, a renowned Enneagram expert and coach, to share tools they have learned from visionary healers, thinkers, coaches, and therapists (Diana Chapman & Jim Dethmer of Conscious Leadership Group, Gay & Katie Hendricks, Harriet Lerner, Byron Katie, James Gordon, Francis Weller, Phil Stutz, and so many more) that prompt readers to dig into the stories they tell themselves. These tools guide us to peel back the layers of cultural programming that prevent us from expressing our full potential. The paradigm-shifting process Loehnen and Smith teach on the pages of this workbook reveals the answers to the questions that tug at our souls: Who am I? What do I want? What’s standing in my way?

What if women finally found freedom—because we gave it to ourselves? In On Our Best Behavior, Elise Loehnen brilliantly reframes our toxic cultural programming and helps us to see that what we thought were our sins are actually our greatest virtues. This book is the gift we have all been waiting for.

LORI GOTTLIEB

New York Times bestselling author of MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE

On Our Best Behavior is a stunning, big, and bold encyclopedia of how to live—the first post-pandemic book to take our latest measurements and provide something fresh to comfort, embolden, enlighten, and enrich who we are today. Elise Loehnen is never instructive but always right. The book never flags; each section has a takeaway for how to live wiser and an anecdote to help you feel less alone. On Our Best Behavior is nothing short of a tangible necessity in our new intangible world.”

LISA TADDEO

#1 New York Times bestselling author of THREE WOMEN

With equal parts wit, wisdom, erudition, and warmth, author Elise Loehnen guides us on a journey through history, culture, and our own psychologies to not just investigate the limiting effects of patriarchal thinking in women’s lives, but to free them. Pleasure, connection, trust, and joy—all these and more await the reader lucky enough to spend time in conversation with Loehnen’s truly remarkable mind. Half historical docent, half big sister with a hot cup of tea, read this author and change your life.

TERRENCE REAL

New York Times bestselling author of US

In On Our Best Behavior—a raw cri de coeur, penetrating social analysis, and revealing personal reflection—Elise Loehnen deftly deconstructs one of the central ideological buttresses of patriarchal society: the shaming of women for having human desires, strengths, capacities, and strivings of body, mind, and soul. Doing so, she provides a guide to liberation and a return to the authentic feminine self.”

GABOR MATÉ, MD

New York Times bestselling author of THE MYTH OF NORMAL

Reading On Our Best Behavior with your Book Club?

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Elise co-authored True and False Magic with legendary psychiatrist Phil Stutz, co-author of The Tools and Coming Alive, and the subject of the Netflix documentary, Stutz.

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Want to know if the sins live in you?

Reading On Our Best Behavior with your Book Club?

Elise co-authored True and False Magic with legendary psychiatrist Phil Stutz, co-author of The Tools and Coming Alive, and the subject of the Netflix documentary, Stutz.

Pulling the Thread with Elise Loehnen