Belle Burden's "Strangers"—Avoidance Is Expensive

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]We're going to discuss the delusion, the good girl mindset that is the central theme of bell burden strangers and what you can learn from that experience. If anyone who isn't privileged with generational wealth wrote a book like this, number one, nobody would read it and number two, that person would be extremely ridiculed in no way that book will hit the number one New York Times bestseller list. That's why the disclaimer is that unless you have generational privilege and elite class to back you up, you should not try what Bell Burden did. Male-centered women lose money. People who are not good at capitalism will always be disrespected and leveraged, exploited by those who know how to play the game well. Marriage and relationships are never about love and connection. It is 100% a business contract that you cannot simply reap or just break. If you have a job you don't like, you have a boss you don't like, you have a client you don't like, you can end that contract. But a relationship with a man that is beyond a simple financial contract. Most women want to get married and have children because they do not understand the downsides, the tradeoff of putting themselves in a vulnerable position in a society where the laws do not want you to win at all. Capitalism does not care about justice, your feelings, what's right and wrong, morality, nor who worked harder, who sacrificed more.

[00:01:26]Instead of feeling empowered by Bella Burden's book and her story, you have to understand what that will look like if you were to do the same naive, delusional, self-sabotaging actions that she took in that relationship. This woman's saving grace was her privilege and privilege only.

[00:01:45]There are plenty of women who are excellent writers, who have creativity and the drive and ambition as well. But the majority of those women end up buried in anonymity. Never ever think that you can have the same outcomes as Burden because you had a toxic ex or you're about to leave some man right now who you see as the parallel counterpart to Belduren's husband. She is not just a wealthy woman. She has generational wealth and she's a descendant of one of the most influential and wealthy families in US history. She is a Vanderbilt. The very definition of privilege is that you can afford to make mistakes. The majority of you will get upset if I tell you you can afford this mistake in your situation. I am not putting you down. I'm telling you that you will regret this decision and will unnecessarily suffer in ways that you do not need to be suffering. Not to mention, if you have children or plan to have children, all that generational trauma, you are going to be the one causing it. It took me about a day and a half to finish reading Bel Burton's book. And the whole process was interesting. However, it felt like major rage bait. A woman with that much privilege, being Harvard educated, and being a lawyer, we expect more discernment and awareness of systemic hierarchy and oppression. But this woman clearly did not understand her own oppression and does not understand her oppression. Even at the end of her book, there's not one place in the book where she acknowledges systemic hierarchy as the problem. She does not acknowledge or there's no mention of the patriarchy.

[00:03:17]The whole story is treated as such where she ended up with the wrong guy. She made mistakes. There's nowhere that describes the whole problem as a systemic issue. She acknowledges her privilege passingly a few times but nowhere near understanding her privilege to stay unaware. When you strip Burden of all her privileges as a woman who comes from a certain legacy with the trust funds, she had two trust funds.

[00:03:45]She is just like every other woman being the naive good girl, never developing herself, never finding her personhood, never understanding what it means to be oppressed as a woman in this society and falling for all the love bombing, manipulation, the typical blueprint.

[00:04:01]engaged in 3 months, which is a crazy timeline getting married to this man very quickly where it is telling of a toxic relationship. These two people do not know each other. The man doesn't care about knowing her cuz he sees her as a business opportunity to grow his net worth and career. She doesn't know him at all because she's giving away all her cards, being transparent, wanting to share. Whereas he after bathing her through the love bombing and the chasing, he does not share anything that will give away his long-term strategy of 20 years. Most people think that a bad guy is somebody who raises their boys, is violent, shows all the signs of being a bad guy. Real bad guys are white collar, brilliantly strategic people who make you believe that they're on your side, even admires you, loves you, gives you all the validation with the sole purpose of taking advantage of you. That was exactly the whole scope of their relationship. So, let's go into the details of understanding the husband and the red flag. From very early on, this man was walking red flags. The descriptions that Belle Burden gives of what she noticed when she started dating him. He had no furniture in his house.

[00:05:21]That is a telltale sign of somebody who is cold and does not need emotional connection with people. Think about what a home symbolizes for us. It is our safe space. It's where we connect with others. It's where we express our personality. People who only see their home as a place where they park themselves overnight, don't decorate, don't have anything that's indicative of who they are. There's no expression.

[00:05:46]These are extremely emotionally blocked people. And these types of people cannot they do not have real relationships.

[00:05:53]Belduren's ex-husband had a best friend who self unalived and that affected him greatly. Now, there are a lot of things that we don't know about this man, and I'm not so sure that this man's best friend was just a plain best friend. The way he fixated on this best friend seemed beyond regular friendship. It seemed like a form of addiction, something much more than just a friend that he really resonated with, including the fact that he seemed to not have that kind of relationship with anybody else in his life, including Belurton. Adding to that, he didn't like decoration. He hated wallpaper, anything colorful, pendulum lights. That's specifically how Belden describes how her ex-husband used to be. He started out that way and he consistently stayed that way throughout the marriage, which meant that she couldn't decorate the house however she wanted. Male centering, needing to adjust to the husband. And the husband did not come from that much privilege.

[00:06:55]She had a significant advantage in terms of the trust fund she had the money as well as the positioning in the social hierarchy. The good girl does not understand power. She was never taught the importance of power and how to wield power. Many old money type of families did not have to fight for that money and the privilege for a really long time. So they failed to teach their younger generations the same mindset that it took to acquire that wealth. That's why generational wealth disappears very quickly. You look at Belle Burden and her decision making in finances. She blew her two trust funds to buy the houses that she wanted to live in with her family and made her husband the joint owner. A house will not appreciate the same way that the investments will grow in a trust fund. She turned the trust funds into expenses and added her husband's name to that. Which means that any capital growth on those homes, half of it will go to her husband. This was after she went against her lawyer's advice to keep the prenup that they always use, which indicated that if there should be a divorce, any assets accumulated before the union will be kept and earned assets during the union needed to be divided equally. She went against that course by her ex. All he did was emotionally manipulate her and pressure her, dangling the marriage and having very little timeline until the wedding. They literally had like a week or so. With the time pressure, she did what her ex-husband wanted her to do, which was to agree to the terms that anything you bring into the marriage is yours. Each individual keep their own.

[00:08:37]and anything made within the marriage was to be kept by each individual's earning. Meaning there would be no asset division if there were to be a divorce.

[00:08:47]As a woman who wanted children, who thought children were definitely in the cars, this is a very naive, I'm just going to say it, stupid decision. She did that because she wanted to control the outcome. She wanted this wedding.

[00:09:01]She was sucked into the whirlwind romance. He was feeding all her delusions and she bought it. And in order to secure the delusion, to not burst that bubble, she did what he wanted her to do. This is the fatal delusion of the good girl mindset. And to be frank, nobody can talk a woman out of that. When a woman is so committed to the good girl mindset, no one can convince a person out of that. Not even the lawyer who has been doing the same prenup and giving similar kind of legal advice with estate planning for other members of her family too. a lawyer who is part of the family's business. She did this and then she didn't want to tell anybody. She didn't want to tell her brother that she changed the prenup terms. She didn't want to tell her mother or her stepmother who are key players in her life. And why would she do this? Because she was in a vulnerable position. Her father had just passed away. She was feeling a lot of the unprocessed father wounds. A lot of childhood issues. Most people do not grow out of their childhood problems.

[00:09:59]They stay immature. They only look at controlling the outcome and having the gain. They do not think about the tradeoff consequences and the losses.

[00:10:08]That is a child mindset. When people don't work through their emotional issues from childhood, even as adults, they see themselves as a child of their parents and they make childlike decisions. They do not upgrade their identity as a fully grown adult, which requires developing a sense of self. And Belden did not develop her sense of self. She later talks about working as a single woman, making decisions as a single woman, having the friends of her kids come over and being able to use the house however they want. She calls those experience as awakening to understanding how much she was socially adjusting to her husband. Somebody who doesn't have a personhood cannot hold boundaries because you don't know your own boundaries because you won't know what that is. Bel Burton arrives at the conclusion that most women discover at a younger age when they're working independent women. Healing is loving your work and winning. That is the way to heal. Healing is progressing. That's when she starts to feel better. That's how she starts to heal the trauma from being left. A 20-year marriage during quarantine, during a global pandemic, not even a conversation, no reasoning, nothing. She finds out that the husband has been cheating on her and then the next moment he's gone. He tells her that this isn't what he wanted. 20 years. 20 years. No explanation. She felt degraded there, but she still couldn't understand whether she was making things up, whether she shouldn't feel so bad. She had an imaginary version of her husband and that confused her because the imaginary version of her husband wouldn't do such a thing. She interpreted how he felt in that relationship and as the father based on how she felt in that relationship and as a mother. People who are stuck in their child selves don't have a strong sense of self personhood and are still stuck in their childhood wounds project. They think that other people must be having the experiences that they're having.

[00:12:08]They also think that other people who have much more privilege than them in society, who also understand how to play the game well and are playing the game well, think the same way about love and connection, relationship and family the same way they do. People who understand power treat everything like a business relationship. When you do, you do not look at the upside consequences of what you will get to enjoy. You look at the downside, the tradeoff, and the losses.

[00:12:37]Bel Burden did not do that. Not one minute in her life. And she thought withdrawing her trust. Buying these homes and putting her husband's name when she already agreed to a prenup that they both signed would mean that that money when funneled into the home with his name on it will no longer be hers when a divorce should take place. Now, while she was having three kids and raising them as a stay-at-home mom, her husband was making millions of dollars and she was naive. Did not even look at the finances. What did I say last week about women who have the good girl mindset are very poor decision makers in business. They have low business acumen and low financial literacy. That's bell burden. Privilege can't save you there.

[00:13:24]Her husband had all the reflex. He was delinquent as a teen. He led the fast engagement. He pursued her. He really love bombed her and did a hot and cold to try to get her to be interested in him and chase after him. In the end, she wanted them so badly that she was willing to look over everything and even change her prenup. The whole time he was incrementally winning while she was losing. And that's how he start to build power in the beginning which translated to millions of dollars a year in his earnings towards the end of their relationship which she was not entitled to based on the prenup. Another sign that a man hates you is shitty gifts.

[00:14:03]Belurn mentions that his gifts were always crappy. He hates you. That is a reflection of how he feels about you.

[00:14:10]So, those of you who are still trying to make excuses for some man in your life that he's just traumatized or he doesn't know the value of something or whatever, he hates you. He's showing you. And now, Bill Burton can see, oh, that was a sign of how he feels about me. That was reflected in the gifts. Avoidance is very expensive. A woman with money but low social elegance is going to experience a lot of losses and humiliation. Belle burdens red flags from the get-go. She is the exact template of the type of woman who would fall into this situation. Socially awkward, shy. She talks about how somebody commented on her writing when she was in university. She was taking a class and writing. She wrote something probably wasn't too bad. Some man made a negative comment that she was a bad writer. She decided not to be a writer after that. Was a random man. So then she went into law and then ended up meeting her husband. Imagine if she had pursued her pathway from the get-go.

[00:15:08]Where would she be now? That was the process of her developing her personhood and then she gave up. A lot of women do this. This is a good girl mindset. You have to learn from these stories rather than looking at somebody like the author and say, "Wow, she's really negative judgment." I can guarantee you the majority of you are doing this right now. Someone makes a comment and you decide it's not for you or that you're not good at it. The majority of you are only looking at the upside of something and you cannot foresee the consequences.

[00:15:37]You're not making decisions with your adult brain. You are being a child in the dynamic and in the decision-m. In the book, it sounds like she's surrounded by a lot of wonderful women.

[00:15:46]But when you really look at it from the perspective of systemic oppression, she doesn't have great relationships. She has a bunch of women around her who are all very similar to her. coping in the patriarchy, male- centering, servicing males, adjusting to them socially and disregarding their worth. That's her circle. So then the advice she gets is going to reflect on that. When you look at the overall problem, the core foundation of Bella Burden's trauma is patriarchy. It's her simply not being a white man with privilege, blind to systemic oppression and how it works.

[00:16:21]Blind to what she can and cannot do and what others, especially men, can do to her. She hasn't begun to process all of that. She still sounds naive in the book. She continues to protect her ex-husband's decision, still wanting to understand that he was acting as a hurt man. Everybody is hurt. She's hurt. I'm hurt. You're hurt. Every single person who commits a crime, they're hurt, too.

[00:16:48]People who do good, they're also hurt.

[00:16:50]You cannot be born into this system, this society, and not be traumatized.

[00:16:55]That's not even an explanation. When something so obvious is posed as an explanation. It's actually an excuse.

[00:17:03]The women around her, even her, Catholic, organized religion, all very patriarchal. These people are simply coping in the patriarchy. even her stepmother who is a family therapist.

[00:17:15]First of all, she married Belle's father when he was a single dad with two kids and she played the role of a good stepmother which meant that she was looking after babysitting a man's needs and his children's needs. So that already is a servant pray. And many of you come at me and say, "Well, it's called love." No, it's not because ultimately it is a business. So then you have to look at profit and loss. You continue to hear what she says and while we don't know much about her relationship with Belle's father who passed away quite early in the book, she's coming from a very patriarchal lens to interpret situations. So when Belle is betrayed by her husband and she reaches out to her stepmother Susan for advice, everything she tells her is teaching her how to cope with the emotions, but not telling her anything about why this may be happening and why a man who is obviously very good at capitalism because he was already making millions. Even if people didn't know that he was making that much money, it was quite clear to see from outside. He couldn't hide the fact that he was doing very well. She obviously doesn't understand patriarchy because she reaches out to that man who cruy left his wife of 20 years to be reasonable and this enrages him even more. When someone sees you as lower down in the hierarchy, when a man sees you as less than, you cannot tell him what to do. He will do whatever it takes to crush you once you anger him. When you have good girl women around you, they'll ruin life for you. They'll give you advice, influence you to take action that goes against systemic hierarchy because their advice is coming from not understanding oppression and will also give you advice to just emotionally regulate and cope instead of looking up ways of actually coming out with some wins in that scenario. Instead of learning to understand the oppressor from the lens of the oppressor, the prey will continuously evaluate the oppressor from their own perspective. A memoir is very subjective. The person's lack of awareness and awareness will come through on how they're writing. The book does have to be diplomatic because otherwise having an ex-husband who is that well established and powerful will be detrimental and it probably wouldn't have gotten published in the first place. It is very clear that even the publishers are afraid of this man. She claims to have a lot of good people around her and objectively this isn't true at all because you see how she goes out and meets people and surprise surprise the systemic oppression that she did not see until the point of being humiliated to the max starts to unveil itself and now she cannot ignore it.

[00:19:53]Avoidance is very expensive. Once she starts talking about how her husband left her, people are not sympathetic to her. Most people will do their best to protect those who are high up in the hierarchy. the oppressor, the man, no matter what he did, there are plenty of people, men and women in her social circle in that wealthy environment who did not see much wrong with her husband's doings, who also made excuses for him and saw her as the problem for a talking about b what did you do that he want to do that to you? The issue with most oppressed people is that they think they're an exception somehow. They think that they have beat the system by aligning with somebody in power or because they have a lot of leverages already. Maybe they have some money or even they have some power in the social hierarchy. They think somehow they are an exception. You are not an exception at all. Those of you who have much less privilege and bell burden, you think you're an exception. You are absolutely not an exception. And only naive people will wait until they are bulldozered.

[00:20:53]Sometimes the point of no return to realize that they're not an exception.

[00:20:57]And even then, I've seen people who continuously justify why they're an exception and what is a silver lining in all this, not able to accept the humiliation as humiliation. People have different levels of humiliation they'll tolerate and that corresponds to the depth of their delusions. Bel Burden was surrounded by enemies. She probably still is because it didn't really sound like she became more self-aware. She just learned to cope through the pain and find a way to survive. She wrote this book now and this book can help her financially. And because you were written by a privileged woman, this book will be turned into a movie starring Gwyneth Paltro. This isn't her redemption, is a way for her to monetize her trauma because she doesn't have anything else. She lived 20 years as a servant to her husband, bearing children, raising those kids, and actually not earning anything at all, not being entitled to any of his growth.

[00:21:53]and millions and millions of dollars in earnings per year. She is simply writing on her elite white woman privilege. But if that's not you, don't try. You can afford not to, and you cannot afford to see yourself as an exception, nor stay in the delusion. Don't say I didn't warn you. Now, many of you might think that the husband his career must have ended.

[00:22:14]You don't understand misogyny as the foundation of male privilege. Plenty of people still think that she was in the wrong and how dare she write this book.

[00:22:22]Her husband is an excellent capitalist.

[00:22:24]Patriarchal people and misogynist men and women alike, they all protect him and they are happy to give him more opportunities. In fact, a man who was able to trick a Vanderbilt to giving away her trust fund and being a servant to him for 20 years while losing nothing from his end by not giving her anything that he earned while she raised his children bearing his name. That man will be celebrated in the business world.

[00:22:49]Plenty of people will want his business skills for their business. For Belle, this book and the movie are her lifeline. If you advertise to the whole world that you're so naive that you fell into this kind of destructive relationship for 20 years where freely give away your power, no one's going to hire you ever for any project, nor see you as someone capable of making good business decisions. You can overcome the good girl mindset because of a divorce.

[00:23:15]You have to now put in the work to become independent. And Belle has just started. She just started finding her style. She just started decorating her apartment. She's only in the beginning stages of developing her personhood.

[00:23:27]This is the first time she'll be really managing her finances. She's a beginner at 50some years old. The person who was throwing away her privilege and power.

[00:23:35]The person who focused so much on intact family, the patriarchal mindset, being male centering, being surrounded by male-entering women, listening to their advice. still a pleaser, still seeking validation. She needs to undo 57 years of good girl programming. That is not going to happen overnight. In terms of generational trauma, she worries about that in the book. It seems quite evident that her oldest son was already displaying her ex-husband's avoidance at 17 years old. By teen years, children are already programmed based on the condition who their parents were before they arrived to the stage. The Bell Burden tragedy will return because she's luxury coping. Her tragedy is to be continued until she deconstructs her racist, misogynistic, and elitist mindset.