Category: patriarchal wounding

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Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

You cannot let go of anything if you cannot notice you are holding it.  ~Neale Donald Walsch

Letting go helps us live in a more peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. It allows others to be responsible for themselves and for us to take our hands off situations that do not belong to us. This frees us from unnecessary stress. ~Melody Beattie

We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle. ~Marilyn Monroe

Last week I shared with you where these stories of being too much and not enough and the shame we carry originates.  Not a one of us were born with these stories, and yet they seep into our skin, bones, and sinew and impact the ways we are in the world and with ourselves.

Here’s a thing though: we don’t have to hold onto these narratives.  We don’t have to allow the shame to continue coursing through our being.  We can do the work of release, renewal, and reclamation – over time, with patience, practice, and self-compassion. It is work that is done in layers, over and over throughout our lifetimes.  It is work that is perhaps never actually done, and yet the more we are able to move through the process the more we are able to move ourselves from a space of living only to survive and into a place of living to thrive.

As I mentioned last week, naming the narratives is a vital first step in this work.  Until we name those stories that spin through our heads, and consider where they came from, we can never move into the work.  After we name the narratives and realize they are not our own but were given to us by our families and culture, we can move into the space of release.

Release does not happen over night.  It does not happen simply  because we think it or wish it.  It requires intention, ritual, practice.  It requires patience, self-compassion, and time. It requires a deep, visceral understanding that these stories are not yours to carry.

A truth is we can know, logically, in our minds that these stories are not ours; that they are not actually true; that they have little to actually do with us, individually and everything to do with us collectively.  However, knowing in our minds is not the same as deeply knowing in our bodies, in our core being.

To move from a mind knowing to a body knowing means… you guessed it… coming home into our bodies, finding where those stories live in our muscles and cells, and inviting them to leave, allowing for an openness to be where these stories once lived.

Coming into our bodies and releasing these stories that affect us in so many ways, is challenging work.  It is uncomfortable in the beginning.  And yet the shifts that come from this work can be amazing.

When we intentionally do the work of acknowledging those stories that do nothing more than cause us harm, we are able to begin to move into new ways of being with ourselves and others. This new way of being takes time to integrate into our bodies, minds, and spirit.  It requires space for shifting which means that we need to learn to tolerate that sense of openness, that may mistakenly feel like emptiness, so our new ways of being can take root and grow.  (More on this next week.  Stay tuned.)

I talk about these ideas in the 9-minute video below.

This essay is the second of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

Links to other essays in this series:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame (this essay)

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving 

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

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The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

You cannot heal what you will not unveil.

~Sanjo Jendayi

You will be too much for some people.  Those are not your people.

~Unknown

The most important day is the day you decide you’re good enough for you. It’s the day you set yourself free.

~Brittany Josephina

Let’s talk about our stories of how we are too much; how we are not enough; and all the shame we carry within our bodies.  Super fun topics, right?

Here’s a thing about these narratives we carry in our minds and bodies and spirits need to be named.  They need to be brought out of the dark shadows they live in and into the light.

Naming these narratives we all carry is powerful.  It actually helps us to claim power over these stories instead of allowing them to run rampant in our unconscious and impact the ways we connect (or don’t connect) with others and with ourselves.

Naming these narratives, admitting that we each carry them in our minds and bodies and beings, is only the first step however.  Once we have named them we need to find intentional ways to release them from our systems; to create space for our own incubation and transformation (and learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, because believe me, transformation is very rarely, if ever, comfortable) and to reclaim those parts of ourselves that we hidden, stuffed down, and or ignored: our own strengths, power, and daring.

Before we can move into this process however, I believe it helps to understand where these stories may come from, how they get under our skin and into our being.

I believe these narratives come to us from two different types of trauma.

The first is inter-generational trauma.  I define inter-generational trauma as the trauma that is passed down to us by our family of origin through their words and actions.  It is a lived experience trauma and we all experience it to varying degrees starting when we are very young.  It is passed down in the ways we are told what we “can” or “can’t” do, how we “should” or “shouldn’t” act. It is passed down in the language used in our families and the ways we are told we are wrong, told we can’t trust our own inner wisdom, told we don’t know what we are talking about (even if we are actually an expert in the particular topic).

It is passed down in the ways we are silenced by our families, in the ways we experience from our primary caretakers that we require too much of their time or energy, that we are too loud, too opinionated, too fat, too thin, too quiet, too sexual, too studious, we take up too much space, we are simply too much.

It is passed down in the ways we are told we aren’t (good) enough by those who are supposed to love us unconditionally.  It is passed down in the ways we are encouraged to compete, how we are reminded that our sibling/friend/neighbor/enemy/person we have never met is better at this thing or that thing (or all things) than us.  It is passed down in the ways we are corrected (often “for our own good”).  It passed down in the overt and subliminal messages we receive that our best efforts are never good enough.

All of these messages are passed down to us both unintentionally and intentionally by our caregivers.  Likely all these messages were also passed down to them as they were passed down to our grandparents by their parents, and so on up our family tree.

These messages are most damaging because they come from the people we rely on for our very survival.  These messages impact the ways we are able to form attachment bonds with not only our caregivers, but in later life with our intimate partners and close friends.

These messages are then solidified through what I call Cultural Relational Trauma (CRT).  CRT is the trauma we experience living in our current patriarchal, white supremacist, misogynist, ablist, hetero and CIS gender-normative, capitalist culture.  It is in the ways we other people not like ourselves.  It appears in the media, in our homes, in our schools, in our places of worship.

It also shows up in the ways we judge ourselves.  If we do not meet the “standard” or “normal” or “expected” ways of being in this world, due to our gender, the color of our skin, the ways our body functions, whether we have “enough” financial resources, etc, we internalize the message that there is something wrong with us.  We internalize the message that we are not good enough.  That we are too much in some ways.  And the shame of who we are, how we exist, burrows deep into our bones.

Essentially, if we are not a white, CIS-gendered, hetero-sexual, able-bodied, wealthy male who has a strong dose of toxic masculinity running in our being, well… then we are certainly considered by our culture to be “not normal” and thereby not good enough and to take up too much space.  Furthermore, we also receive the message of how we should feel shame for not meeting these “normative standards.”

I want to quickly clarify that something being normal does not make it right or just.  Racism and misogyny are normal in our current culture.  Neither is right or just.  

We receive these messages from our families and the messages are compounded by the outside world.  It is no wonder how we have internalized these narratives.  Culturally speaking, this is intentional.  What I mean by that is the status quo requires us to buy into the messages of how we aren’t enough, how we are too much, and how we should feel shame, so it can keep on keeping on.  If those narratives weren’t running through our minds, bodies, and being 24/7, can you imagine the world we would live in?  I am highly doubtful it would be in the authoritarian oppressive world we currently have.

I talk more about these ideas in the 11 minute video below:

This essay is the first of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

To view the other essays and videos in this series, go to the links below:

The impacts of inter-generational & cultural relational traumas (this essay)

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, & Re-evolving 

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

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Wants, Needs, & Unraveling Cultural Relational Trauma

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime. ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. ~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Time has always been an anxiety producer for me.  I wrote a bit about that over on IG a while ago. Being on time, having enough time, spending quality time… all those things can send me into a bit of a tailspin of not enough, not enough, not enough.

Because a truth for me is, and for many I know, there simply aren’t enough hours in a day.  There is always So Much To Do.  There is always so much I Want To Do.  There is always so much I Need To Do.  There used to always be so much that Others Expected Me To Do but I left that list on the side of the road a long while ago.

Anyhow, all I need and want to do in any given day, never seems to fit into the 24 hours I have that particular day.

This has been leading me to consider what is truly important to me, what do I actually want to do and be doing with the time that I do have.

I’ve been slowly working through Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map workbook to figure out what it is I do want, how I want to feel, in my work, in my life, where are my wants and needs and how am I meeting them and how am I not and how could I meet them more often and perhaps even better?

What is it that lights me up?, as Danielle asks.

It is one thing to know what I don’t want, what I want less of, what I don’t need or desire.  I can find my clear no very easily. It is the finding the yes that can be a challenge for me.

Finding the yes is the vulnerable thing.  Finding the yes is revealing.  Finding the yes, the want, the need, the desire… that is when we put who we really are out there and on the line.

That is when we own who we are.

And that can be terrifying in so many ways.

Noes are less vulnerable.  Noes don’t reveal a whole lot.  They set a line, yes.  They create a boundary, absolutely. They often close doors, of course. And those are such important things to be able to do, to be able to find and honor within ourselves.

And.

When we start to look at those wants, those cravings, those needs… Well we are opening ourselves up to be told no – by others, by our culture, by the stories that whisper and scream inside our heads, by life itself.

Which then leaves us in the wanting or needing… and then what?

Well, I don’t honestly know, because I’m still at the stage of even acknowledging what my wants and needs are!

Here’s a thing: We have all been raised in a culture that tells us wanting is a sin and needing is a sign of weakness.  And none of us dare to be sinners or weak.

This is part of Cultural Relational Trauma.  It is part of what harms our psyches, what traumatizes us, what leaves us in a space of loneliness and disconnection from our Self and other humans.

This is our socialization.  Our training.  Our conditioning.  It seeps into our minds and bodies and being.

It is not such an easy thing to shake. Because even when we know in our logic mind that these stories are all a bunch of crap, those messages have been ingrained and internalized.  They have their own neuro-pathways in our brains, and they live in our own cellular and body systems memory.  It takes intentional, mindful, and relatively consistent work to undo the training, to create new neuro-pathways that say “It is human to want; it is acceptable to want; wanting is part of living; needing is part of being reminded we are alive; asking for our wants and needs is part of our surviving and thriving.”

It doesn’t happen overnight.  It takes time.  It takes mind work and body work.  It is simple and complex.  As one ingrained and internalized story is unraveled another will pop up. There will be days we are too tired, there will be days we are impatient, there will be days we simply don’t wanna.

And.

There will be days where we look back and say, “Wow.  That story doesn’t have the same grip it used to.” or “Holy heck I just used my words and asked for what I needed and I received it.” or “Woohoo I just allowed someone to care for me.”

This is the ebb and flow of this work. 

It takes three to ten times more “positive” messaging to create a relatively permanent (knowing these are never truly permanent) neuro-pathway in comparison to what it takes to create a “negative thought” neuro-pathway.

Three to ten times.  Three to ten times more effort, more intention, more practice.

So.

Yes it takes work.

Yes it takes intentional time and energy.

And to have our wants and needs met, to begin to feel safe and at home in our bodies, to begin to thrive in our lives instead of only surviving… isn’t that worth the time and energy?

Aren’t you worth it?  (Let me answer that for you, YES YOU ARE.)

May we all connect to our wants and needs, acknowledge them, embrace them, ask for them, and have them met. 

…

Originally published on January 14, 2018 as a weekly newsletter and revised for publication here.  Did you enjoy reading this?  If so, I invite you to sign up to receive my weekly love letters right here.

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The importance of processing ancestral trauma and dislodging internalized misogyny

Internalized misogyny does not refer outright to a belief in the inferiority of women. It refers to the byproducts of this societal view that cause women to shame, doubt, and undervalue themselves and others of their gender. It shows up even in the most feminist and socially conscious of us. And it’s insidious.

~Suzannah Weiss, 7 Sneaky Ways Internalized Misogyny Manifests in Our Everyday Lives (Bustle, December 18, 2015)

So just why is it important to process the ancestral trauma that lives within us and to put focus on dislodging our internalized misogyny?

Because we, as women, will never find freedom or equality if we don’t.

Sounds kinda dramatic, doesn’t it?  Yet, it is true.

All women have varying degrees of internalized misogyny.  It is impossible to not have it.  When we are raised in a culture (and in families) that constantly tell us how we are inferior, how we are mere objects, how we don’t matter, how we are stupid, worthless, and not fully human, how we should feel shame about our anatomy and body shape, the only possible outcome is for those messages to find their ways into our psyches, into our bodies, into our very being.

These messages not only impact how we think of ourselves, it also deeply influences the way we look at and treat other women.

The so called “Mommy Wars”?  That was (and is) all about internalized misogyny.

Every time we comment or judge the way another woman does something, that she isn’t doing it “right” or “good enough” or that she is taking “too much” time or space – that is all internalized misogyny.

When we judge the way a woman dresses.  How she wears her hair.  Whether or not she’s wearing make up.

When we judge a woman based on whether or not she has children (or even wants children).  When we judge a woman who has children about whether or not she works outside the home.

Internalized misogyny.

Anytime we look at other women and judge them as not enough, as too much; every time we don’t believe another woman’s personal lived experience; each time we criticize and ridicule women for the choices they have made about their own damn lives…

All internalized misogyny.

(Note: criticism and ridicule are very different from critique.  Critique is loving and encourages growth.  Criticism and ridicule is spiteful or hateful and encourages shame).

Our internalized misogyny goes further than this too.  It shows up in the ways we insist on competing with other women, the ways we feel there are not enough resources for all of us, the ways we fight over men, jobs, minutia and technicalities.

It shows up in the ways we insist upon enacting revenge upon other women when we feel we have been harmed.

It shows up in a million different big and small ways, every day.

It lives in our consciousness and our unconscious minds.

It is a by-product of not only our ancestral trauma, but also our inter-generational and cultural relational trauma.

It is a part of us, whether we like it or not.

One of the ways we see our internalized misogyny is Mean Girl™ behavior.  Think back to middle school and the “cool kids” and how the “cool girls” treated everyone else.

They were bullies.

Here’s a thing though, this behavior doesn’t stop at middle school.

I see this type of behavior happening all over social media, perpetrated by ADULT WOMEN who are leaders in the feminist movement.

Yes, I have witnessed bona fide feminists, women who fight for social justice, who insist on being treating as equals and tearing down the status quo, who have been doing this work for decades, using the exact tools of the status quo of domination, authoritarianism, shaming, and othering.

(And then witnessed their followers, who seem more like sychophants, cheering them on!)

This is why we need to focus on our internalized misogyny.  Because tearing down other women will never get us to where we need to be.  It will never bring us the world we want for ourselves, our daughters and nieces, our granddaughters and grandnieces.  Or our sons and nephews for that matter.

Our internalized misogyny is deeply rooted in our ancestral trauma.  It lives in our blood and muscles and cellular make up.  It is in our very DNA.

For women of European descent, consider how it must have been to be a woman living in the time of the “Witch Trials” and watching your own mother or daughter or best friend being raped, tortured, and burned alive in front of you and others in the town square?

For women who are descendants of slaves, imagine the pain of having your children torn from you and sold at auction.  Imagine witnessing beatings at the hands of other (white) women, or worse when the slave masters would insist the slaves beat each other.

We can find examples from across the globe and across history of this kind of brutality inflicted upon women – mostly for simply being women – that women were witness to.

Being witness to that type of horror has its impact; it is traumatizing.  What our ancestors witnessed and experienced still lives today in our DNA.  And it shows up in the ways we don’t trust other women, the ways we criticize them, the ways we try to dominate and oppress them.

It shows up in the cautionary tales we tell our daughters about what to wear or how to act or the stories about those types of women.

In many ways our internalized misogyny was originally a survival mechanism.  It helped to keep us alive, it helped to keep our daughters alive.

But the tools aren’t useful or helpful anymore.  And in order for true social change to occur, we need to start with change within.

This is why I believe as part of our own liberation we need to explore and process our ancestral, inter-generational, and cultural relational traumas and become curious and aware of our internalized misogyny so we can begin to dislodge it, do different, and stop passing it on.

This is why for the past three years, every spring, I offer this intimate online circle centered around our ancestral trauma and internalized misogyny.

Because this is one more piece to the puzzle that will help bring about our liberation.  Is is a vital piece that will help insure we do not simply use the tools of the patriarchy against other women so we ourselves can be reap the benefit.

We are all in this together.  And until all of us are free, none of us are free.

…

If you’d like to learn more about the upcoming spring circle,  Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny that begins April 1, you can click here.

Did you miss the educational essay and video series I wrote introducing the ideas and concepts we’ll be exploring and examining in the spring circle?  If so, you can find them at the links below:

Defining Ancestral, Inter-generational, & Cultural Relational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual & Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny (this essay)

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

Below are three essays I wrote prior to the 2017 offering of this circle.

Unleashing Our Self :: Mothers, daughters, and generations of trauma

Unleashing Our Self :: The loss of sisterhood

Unleashing Our Self :: Disconnection, shame, & thinking it is us

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Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.

~Diana Peterfreund, Across a Star-Swept Sea

When we look at cycles of trauma, it is important to remember that often there may not have been a choice to not pass the pain forward.  Talking about trauma at all is a relatively new development in our human (western) history, and in the early days of recognizing and trying to find ways to process trauma, we only looked at the trauma soldiers experienced and lived with.

It has only been in the last forty to fifty years that we began to acknowledge the trauma that comes with abuse and assault.  And it has only been about twenty to thirty years that we began to recognize the impacts things like poverty, being witness to abuse, or living in a family where one or more members had addictions issue has on us.

Add to this that the somatic (body-centered) trauma therapies are also a relatively new thing. It wasn’t until 1997 that Levine’s first book Waking the Tiger introduced the wider public to the ways that trauma lives inside our bodies and how we humans prevent ourselves from processing it.  That was only twenty years ago.

The amount of research and acknowledgment around trauma just within my own lifetime (46 years) is amazing.  We have come so far since the early 1970s, and I believe we likely still have a long way to go.  And I also believe we are getting there.

I share all that to remind us that we couldn’t know what we didn’t know.  I don’t  know how many times I have heard clients say “I wish I would have started this work earlier/years ago/when I was much younger.”  But the truth is that this work, body-centered trauma processing work, is a very new phenomena and likely you actually could not have started this work earlier, because it didn’t exist.

And yet.  While it is not our fault that information was not available before it was available, it is our responsibility now to do the work to create change, within ourselves, within our families, and in our greater communities and world.

Breaking cycles of abuse is something that has only been talked about for the last fifty or so years.  And then it was only spoken of quietly.  Greater social conversations didn’t begin to happen until the 1980s, in part thanks to Alice Miller and her body of work.  We didn’t even consider that beating children would or could have long term, life-long, impacts on them. And it wasn’t until the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACEs) which was initiated in 1995 but then not really talked about until twenty years later, that we knew those impacts were beyond psychological and spilled into our actual physical health.

And even so, I know my maternal grandfather talked about his abusive step-mother and how he swore he would never treat his child the way she treated him (now I have no idea if he actually kept this promise to himself, but evidence says he probably did).

So, even though the greater social conversation was not there, I do believe we have within us the “moral” (for lack of a better word) compass to know abuse, domination, authoritarianism, and othering are not right, okay, or humane (or for that matter actually human).

We are in the infancy of truly understanding how the traumatic experiences of our ancestors are passed down to future generations.  We are in the infancy of learning how to examine and process these traumas – especially the ones we don’t actually know about. There is still so much that is unknown, and frankly there is so much that cannot be known for several more decades as studies continue to watch families move through more and more generations.

And.

Even with this being true, I believe we all know deep within ourselves that the past impacts us.  Historical past, ancestral past, and our own lived experience past.  We may not have all the data and research to back this up (yet), and still we know.

And this is where our own responsibility comes in.  It is not our fault what was done to us or our ancestors.  It is absolutely our responsibility to make the change within ourselves so that change out in the world can occur, so we can end the cycles of abuse, oppression, and domination.

So we can all find our ways to freedom.

So we can all be a part of creating a world where all of us are free.

I believe part of that work is for us to look at our ancestral, historical, and personal pasts and to unearth what we have internalized; to examine it; to unlearn what we know is not right or just; and to create space for change and doing different for ourselves and for the world moving into our futures.

I talk more about all of this in the 10-minute video below:

This essay is the fourth and final in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, historical and cultural relational trauma and internalized misogyny.  I hope you found the series helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring circle I facilitate: Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny. We begin April 1.  You can learn more here.

To read the other essays in the series, go to the links below

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas 

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future (this essay)

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.