ancestral trauma

Connecting Individual & Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

I also wrote these essay to give more detail about the circle and our work together:

The importance of processing ancestral trauma & dislodging internalized misogyny

More About Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

The importance of processing ancestral trauma and dislodging internalized misogyny

March 20, 2018 By gwynn

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 Individual & Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

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

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

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

Unleashing Our Self :: The loss of sisterhood

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

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

March 15, 2018 By gwynn

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 Individual and Collective Traumas

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

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting Individual & Collective Traumas

March 8, 2018 By gwynn

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].

~Dori Laub, Listening to Trauma

Collective trauma is something that a community experiences together. It is the ways events like the hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters impact the communities that are affected by them and how those communities collectively respond to the event.

Collective trauma can also be seen when we look at racism, misogyny, homo-phobia, xenophobia, able-ism, etc. We see collective trauma in the survivors of genocides and in refugees of extremely authoritarian regimes. The peoples those “otherings” are directed at also experience a collective trauma.

These are traumas that, if you aren’t a part of that community, you don’t experience and may even have trouble understanding. They are also traumas that intersect and many of us are members of multiple “collectives” who experience othering, oppression, and hatred.

A community that experiences a collective trauma is made up of individuals, who each experience and internalize the traumatic event (or attitudes) in their unique ways. How we as an individual may respond to a collective traumatic event is also dependent on our own personal trauma history, our resilience (or lack of), and how our personal and prior collective trauma histories impacted us. How each individual responds to the event also reflects and influences how the collective as a whole responds.

The individual and the collective are intertwined, one really can’t exist without the other.

(To clarify the use the of the word “event” – that word truly only speaks to actual one time things – like hurricanes – and not to the traumatic impact of cultural hierarchies or attitudes or otherings. Unfortunately, I don’t quite have a word for that – so, I’m calling the trauma of cultural hierarchies an “event” even though it is perpetual and most certainly not a one time thing.)

If we look at misogyny (and really all aspects of our patriarchal culture) as a collective trauma, we can begin to have another way into understanding not only how it impacts each of us individually, but also how it perpetuates and insinuates itself within our culture. We can begin to see how misogyny is a key component in what I call Cultural Relational Trauma – how it others women and isolates us from each other and from ourselves. We can see how misogyny impacts all our relationships, with women, men, and non-binary persons. We can see how we collectively perpetuate it through silence, jealousy, and competition.

As women, we have collectively and individually, consciously and unconsciously, bought into the stories of how we are not enough, how we are too much, how we are bad, stupid, untrustworthy, incompetent, frail, fragile, and my all time favorite: evil.

We can see the double-bind our culture, and we ourselves, put us in when we consider sexuality, spirituality, motherhood, womanhood.

We can see how these stories and attitudes have actually caused not only individual traumas (because women are just property after all and can be beaten, raped, used and abused at the whim of their male intimate partner), but have also traumatized us as a collective, leaving us in a place of actually not trusting or believing other women, how we think about what women can and can’t do in the workforce, how we judge other mothers, how we accuse other women of “playing the victim” or the martyr.

We other each other. Even when in almost every way we are the same, and most especially when we have any obvious differences (like the color of our skin, socio-economic status, perceived sexuality, intelligence, education, etc).

And when we other each other, we are buying into, being complicit in and compliant to, and perpetuating our misogynist culture.

Our othering of other women, is how our internalized misogyny shows itself.

Our voices running through our minds about how we are too much or not enough is how our internalized misogyny shows itself.

Our shame, that we carry and that weighs down every fiber of our being, is how our internalized misogyny shows itself.

These are all traumas. These are both the cause and the effect of the trauma. Internalized misogyny is its own trauma that we perpetuate within ourselves and out in our collectives.

I am a firm believer in systems theory. I believe we are all a part of multiple systems, from the micro system of our actual body to our families, to our communities, and further out into the world. When one of us is traumatized, we all feel the ripple effect. This is not only a lateral ripple reaching out to others living in the here and now, this ripple spirals, reach out into the now and also back to our ancestors and forward to the persons yet to come.

The traumas of our ancestors had and continue to have their own ripple effects and collective and internalized misogyny is one of them.

I talk more about all of this in the 12-minute video here. ‘

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

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

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas (this essay)

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

March 1, 2018 By gwynn

We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.

~Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas

Sympathy is only meted out if you follow all of
society’s rules for how a victim is supposed to behave.

~Nenia Campbell, Cease and Desist

We live in a patriarchal culture. The way this culture, our culture, presents itself is one of domination, authoritarianism, and oppression. There is a hierarchy in our culture with able-bodied, CIS, heterosexual, socio-economically abundant men at the top of the hierarchy. Women, are always below men in this hierarchy. White women below white men, black women below black men, Latina women below Latino men, etc.

Men first, then women. There is a hierarchy for women only too, based again on color of skin, able-bodied-ness, sexual orientation and presentation, socio-economic (and marital) status.

It is import to note the hierarchy, and the hierarchy within the hierarchy.

This is the way our culture presents itself.

It is also the way our culture keeps us in line, on our leashes so to speak.

Our culture clearly defines our place in the world for us, and if we dare to step out of that well defined box, well, there are repercussions.

Historically speaking, the repercussions have meant torture, rape, and death.

Depending on the home, these same repercussions may be in effect to this day.

Going back to the hierarchy, it is clear that women are less than men. We are not considered equal. We are below.

This “less-than-ness” has been around for a very long time. It is how patriarchy took hold in the first place – by convincing society in general that women should be subservient, that we are not competent, that we are not to be trusted, that we are evil.

Once these stories became rooted in general society, they insinuated their ways into our homes and families. Once there, they seeped right in our minds, our bodies, our very essence and being.

The perpetuation of misogyny, the hatred of women, is dependent upon these stories. It is dependent upon not only society in general believing that women are inferior; it is also wholly dependent on how we, as women, view other women and ourselves as inferior.

When we begin to consider how our literal survival (as in to continue breathing and having a heartbeat) was dependent on, in the beginning, us not speaking up and out against these stories, and then through the course of time us wholly believing and internalizing these stories, we can see how we became isolated from other women and from our own female self (this is also true for men, however, I am speaking directly to and for women at the moment).

Other writers and coaches call this passing down of the inferiority of women the “mother-wound”. I actually refuse to use that term because I believe it perpetuates the idea that women are responsible for our own oppression and continues to put the mother at the center of the cause of all the ills of the world and our own personal ills. I believe the term itself, “mother-wound,” to be complicit and compliant to our misogynist patriarchal culture.

I have called this a “patriarchal” wound in the past. That name is still relevant and fitting, as it is a wound, or more to the point, a part of the trauma, we as women experience living in our current culture.

And.

I am finding that term to even be a bit sterile and to not take into account, at least not blatantly, the reality that this wounding and trauma has been going on, and being passed down, for hundreds and thousands of years.

I believe we need to remember the context for why we (women) began to believe these stories of our own, and other women’s, inferiority. We need to look at the consequences of what it meant not to believe them for our ancestors. We need to consider how the trauma of watching our mothers and daughters being tortured and murdered impacted us then and still impacts us today.

We need to look at the ancestral trauma that lives within us and how it presents itself as internalized misogyny and disrupts our relationships with other women and with ourselves.

I talk more about all of this in the 12-minute video below

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

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

Connecting the Dots (this essay)

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny