Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Unleashing Our Self :: Disconnection, Shame, and thinking it is us

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My own relationship with my Self has been a rocky one most of my life.  From a very young age I received and internalized the messages of how my body was not mine, how I was to be seen and not heard, how I took up too much space, how I was too smart, how I wasn’t good enough at this or that or anything.  I had feelings of shame for even existing as far back as I can remember.  These messages came from many places, family of course, but as I grew older and started reading teen magazines and Cosmopolitan, watching movies, really listening to music, the message became very clear that my sole purpose on this earth was to look pretty and to get a boy or man and that in order to do that I had to look and be a certain way.

And of course I didn’t measure up to the standard idea of beauty – my thighs were too big, my hair too mousy; I was too short; I wore glasses.  My clothes were hand-me-downs or homemade and never in style.  I would never fit that Ideal and so I would likely never catch a boy or man.  In addition, I was smart, and, well, we all know that smart girls can never ever be pretty.

Since my worth, according to media, according to popular (i.e. patriarchal) culture, was measured by whether I could get a boy/man, I was clearly worthless.

This didn’t get much better as I grew older.  In college I spent the first three years or so proving how very stupid (and therefore how very pretty) I was. There were periods of self harm that included drugs and drinking and hitting myself, usually my legs, so hard that I would bruise.

All of this I hid from others for the most part.  All of this I had to hide because it was only more proof of how flawed I was because I couldn’t “handle” life and very clearly didn’t have my shit together.

Eventually I did meet my now husband and our love story is one for another day.  But my not measuring up didn’t stop with falling in love with, and more importantly being loved by, this man.  I had my career, then an electrical engineer, where I was constantly pushing myself beyond my limits by working 50, 60, and even 70 hour weeks to prove I was as good as The Boys and trying to find the balance of my femininity and my power.  And then when I had my first child things became even worse.

Now I had to juggle career and motherhood and I could not fail at either. And failure, by the way, basically looked a lot like being human.  I kept up a persona and mask that everything was Fine when the truth was I was suicidal and on the brink of a complete mental collapse.  I hated myself, and blamed myself as obviously lacking, because I couldn’t do it all and my career, marriage and motherhood were all flailing.

I was never ever enough on the one hand and I was way too much on the other and no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I could never “win”.  I could not feel, now matter how much I did, that I deserved any of the success that came my way. If someone tried to compliment me on some thing or another I would come back with a list of all the things that were wrong or imperfect or all the ways I fucked this or that thing up.

And boundaries… what were those?  I wouldn’t dare set a boundary for fear of being considered rude or a bitch or selfish or not committed to my work.

And at my core, I didn’t like myself.  In fact, I really hated myself.  I truly did not believe I was worthy of being loved.  I did not believe that I was lovable.  I didn’t respect myself.  I was ashamed of who I was, how I looked, and almost everything I did.

There are many things that contributed to the shifting of my relationship with myself.  There was therapy, and then my pregnancy with my daughter and then her birth and life.  There was leaving engineering and going to graduate school to study psychology.  There was mindfulness and yoga and writing the words breathe or love or gentle on my arm.  There were a million books.  There were friendships that saved me.  There was my husband.  And there was more than all of this.

One of the things that finally helped make it click for me though, was the realization that it – all that self hatred and loathing, all those feelings of not measuring up or taking up too much space or needing to prove I deserved to even exist – wasn’t my fault.

None of it was my fault.

It was the realization that our culture purposefully trains and conditions us to think we are undeserving and unworthy of love as we are and so we must keep striving and proving and fixing ourselves.  That if we have boundaries we are cold and uncaring and will alone.  That we must bend and mold ourselves ways of being to always please others and make sure they are comfortable.

When I started to dig into the ways the system was truly and actually stacked against me – against all women, and definitely some more than others – light bulbs started to go off in my head.

Our culture doesn’t want us to have healthy or loving or connected relationships with other women – because when we do come together and rise up the status quo is going to be destroyed.

And more than that, our culture doesn’t want us to have any type of healthy relationship with our Self – with our body, our mind, our spirit or our soul.

It wants us living outside our body while also being focused on changing it, on starving it, on torturing it, on hating it.

It wants us disconnected from our mind and so keeps us distracted with all the menial ways we “fail” and don’t measure up, be it the clothes we wear, the home we live in, the way our children act.  It wants us constantly striving and striving and striving, never being satisfied with anything we have, because if we feel satisfied with ourselves, with our life, we might actually take the time to stop, and breathe, and look around and see how fucked the entire system actually is – and then, and then, we might actually also have the time and energy to do something about it.

It wants us believing in a spirituality that doesn’t feed us, that oppresses us, that doesn’t allow space for women.

It wants us cut off from our soul, from our core, from our very being.

By keeping us disconnected, disembodied, and cut off from our Self, our culture, and those in power in our culture, is able to keep us distracted, compliant and complicit. By keeping us severed from our Self, it is able to continue oppressing us and in turn have us passing this oppression down through the generations.

To all of this I say:

No More.

Not on my watch.

You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.

And

I am connected to my Self.

I have compassion for my Self.

I honor and love and cherish my Self.

I invite you to join me in the resistance to our culture.  To the gas lighting. To the shaming. To the stories and lies of how we aren’t enough and are too much and aren’t lovable and need to be “fixed.”

I invite you to sing and shout and whisper and scream and roar with me:

No More.

Not on my watch.

You are my sister, my comrade, not my competition.

And to

Connect with your Whole Self – body, mind, spirit and soul.

To have compassion for your Self, your stumbles along the way.

To honor and love and cherish your Self, as the beautifully profound and amazing being you are.

I invite you to join me in this rebellion of connection, of wholeness, of love and in so doing burning down a culture that dare to hold us down.

I talk even more about how our culture encourages us to disconnect from our Self in this 20-minute video below.  I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the third in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves.  We begin April  1.  If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

You can find first essay & video in this series right over here and the second one right over here.

 

Spring flowers, ancestors and origin stories

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Each year at my first siting of the crocus rising up from the winter-turning-to-spring ground, I remember my grandmother. Her yard had crocus planted in the flower beds and I remember that each spring when those flowers came up, she noted them with a wistful smile on her face. I don’t know what memories those flowers brought forward for her, she never shared that with me and in my youthful ignorance I never thought to ask. But now, and for as long as I can remember, whenever I see them popping up, I think of her.

Thoughts of her lead me to thoughts of her daughter, my mother. And I miss her more in the spring than I do most other times of year. Tulips were my mothers flowers and so when I see them I think of her.

And then there is the bearded iris and the roses that also bring these women into my mind and being and so spring is always all about them, much as the month of December is for different reasons.

But the flowers… I know why they remind me of them, but I don’t know they chose those flowers. I don’t know why both my grandmothers loved roses so. I don’t know why my maternal grandmother fawned over her iris in the way she did. I don’t know why my mother never planted a flower in her life and yet had plants and flowers that were about her in all the many ways.

I have a Christmas Cactus that blooms whenever it seems to feel like it. It was my mother’s plant and I remember if from my own childhood in the very pot (and probably the same dirt) it is still in today. The cactus has blossomed around my daughter’s birthday in April, the day of my baby shower for my son and then the same year the week of his birth (these events being about a month apart). The cactus bloomed immediately after each of my miscarriages. It has bloomed around my birthday and at the time of my grad school graduation. There doesn’t seem to be rhyme nor reason to it’s blooming and even though I am not a very woo-woo person, I tend to believe that the blooming of this plant is my mother saying hello in her own way.

My maternal grandmother loved her garden and my mother avoided gardening and I have a bit of a black thumb though I do try and then my daughter, of she is all about the plants and can’t wait for a house with a yard so we can grow All The Things. I see in her the creativity and naturalness of my grandmother, but not the harshness and I am hopeful she, my daughter, is able to stay soft in all the right ways.

My grandmother taught me that family is everything, and that they are our roots. And even with this, I consider how little she ever really shared about her family and how little I actually know about people either of my maternal grandparents came from. And while I could dig into genealogy that’s just not where I am right now in my life and knowing dates and names isn’t really what I care about anyhow. I want the stories. I want the hows and whys and feelings. I want the details that live in my body but don’t have words to have structure and be concrete instead of nebulous.

We all have origin stories, we all have people we come from, and some of us may know some things about some of those people and some of us may know a lot of things about a lot of those people and some of us may know little to nothing about any of those people. At least, if we are talking about conscious knowing, about verbal knowing, about the knowing as it relates to stories and dates and facts.

And even when we don’t know the stories or the who the people were or the dates or any of the facts, our bodies do. These people who lived before us, live within in. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in the color of our eyes or the shape of our chin or the width of our hips. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in the “illogical” anxiety and the “unreasonable” depression and “hysterical” responses we have to seemingly innocuous things. They are there in our DNA and show themselves in our resilience, and willingness to keep trying, and our strength to carry on despite or in spite of or because of it all.

These people who came before us are part of our origins, whether we know, consciously, the details of them or not.

And while these people who came before, who we may have known or may not have, who we may have known parts and pieces and aspects of but never the whole story of them, while they are a part of us and our story, they are also not our whole story.

They are a piece of our origin stories. But not the whole part. And while they contribute to who we are and how we may be in the world, we do not need to allow them to define us or to create our narrative about our life for us.

For years I compared myself to my maternal grandmother, my being and my life itself. The fact is that the egg that made me was created within her womb as the woman who would later gave birth to me formed and came into being. And so there is a tie to this woman who gave birth to my mother, who create 50% of what would become me, that I have that is beyond words and time and is all biology and physics.

But my tie to her was greater than that in ways that I can’t explain with words because they are feelings that are so strong there are no words for them. And because of this tie I wanted my life to be the life I made up that was hers. And I tried to measure up to this fantasy I had created in my head, that couldn’t possibly be real because all the facts of my own lived experience told something different. But sometimes in order to survive we push facts and reality aside so our brains can stay unschismed.

And so for years I tried to live up to a fantasy and then finally, in time I realized what the fantasy was – not real – and slowly began to let it go and started to have compassion for myself and for these women who came before me and shaped me in so many ways.

This compassion, this is the thing I hope to pass on my daughter. My hope is always that her own origin story will be something of fire and ocean and vast forests and deep knowing and so much self loving that her heart sometimes bursts.

Because as I have more compassion for me and for them I am able to make the changes and shifts in my own ways of being. To make choices because of conscious knowing instead of following a cycle because that is what one may do.

All of this and more is why each spring I offer a circle on our female lineage, on our ancestors, known and unknown. So we can bring into knowing ourselves, so we can each write our own origin stories, so we can find compassion, so we can come together in community and see we are not so alone.

We will begin on April one and there are still a few spaces available. If this sounds like your own next steps in your journey of self actualization and liberation you can find more details and request an application here.

I’d be both honored and thrilled if you chose to join us.

xoox

Unleashing Our Self :: The loss of sisterhood

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We’re connected, as women. It’s like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there’s trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we’re just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don’t help each other, who will?

~Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper

I hear over and over, and also know from my own lived experience, that there is a longing within us as women to find Our People, our community.  I know that at various points in my life I had that inner circle of women who I knew had my back and I had theirs, and then at other points in my life I longed for that inner circle, feeling the empty space within me that it would fill.

Now, I need to point out, there are  inner circles and there are Inner Circles, and one is a true community of love and support and is a quiet (or not quiet) form of rebellion and the other is a Mean Girl dynamic that buys into and promotes our culture.

I would love to tell you that in my younger years I had this amazing community of love and support.  And, in truth, with certain women, I did. And also in truth, I was very much a part of Mean Girl culture and tearing other (young) women down.

In my mid-20s life it was all about competition.  Who was cuter, who was smarter, who had the better boyfriend, car, cat, clothes.  And there was definitely a stepping on top of and shoving down that happened.

I am not proud of this part of my past, this part of me. And yet, this is part of me, of who I was and a part of what makes me who I am today.

Here’s a thing though, we are conditioned in our culture to be Mean Girls and if we aren’t part of the actual Mean Girl Inner Circle, boy howdy, we’d best do all we can to be.

This is patriarchy.  This is misogyny.  This is also ablism and racism and homophobia and xenophobia and and and and… because if you are different, in any way, from the leader of the Mean Girl Pack, you are a target.

What is interesting for me to look back on and dissect a bit, is that I was only a Mean Girl during a very specific period in my 20s.  Prior to that, I was relatively oblivious to Mean Girl culture.  Many people talk about their horrible experiences in middle school, but I had great experiences.  I wasn’t one of the “popular kids” but I had my good friends and we had fun and I never felt any need to be a part of any other group.  This was also true of my experience in high school and even early college.

But something clicked in my brain as I approached my early-mid 20s that I needed to be at the top of the heap.  I can’t tell you what it was or if there was a specific event that triggered this, but it did happen.  And it lasted a couple years and then mostly stopped until my daughter was born.

I’ve written before about how the birth of my daughter was a huge turning point in my life.  This is true in so, so, SO many positive ways.  But it is also true that it brought about the Mommy War Syndrome in me and I was constantly comparing myself to other moms and comparing them to me and each other.  I had a constant running dialogue in my head of how this mom wasn’t doing enough here and that mom was failing there and this other mom should never have been allowed to have children and so on and on and on.

From the other side of this, I could tell you this had everything to do with my own insecurity as a new mother, my own feelings of failing, and my need to feel like I was at least doing better than HER (whoever that “her” was on any given day).

And sure, that was probably part of it.

But here’s another thing: I was feeling insecure and like I was failing at motherhood because we live in a culture that sets mothers up to fucking fail.

Yes, I have a husband who has always been very involved with the upbringing of both our kids and who never once expected me to Do It All nor has he ever said “oh, this is your job because you’re the mom.” But he is one person, one voice (and yes one important voice, but only one voice nonetheless) against a cacophony of voices about how mothers should be, how working mothers should be, how working mothers are failing their children, how mothers who stay home are failing society and their children, how if I only had my shit together I could actually Do It All and don’t I dare “expect” my husband to do anything.

So.  Lack of support of mothers in our culture definitely played its role.  Which includes lack of affordable childcare, lack of decent healthcare, and a lack of true communities.

The culture we live in wants us in-fighting.  It wants us to be looking at other women and judging the ever-loving hell out of them.  It wants to be pointing out all the ways they all do it wrong, all they ways they are all failures.  It wants us climbing on top of each other to be the cutest, the smartest, the best mama, the best worker, the best wife, the best housekeeper, the best crafter, the best, the best, the best.

And if we aren’t the best, well, clearly we just aren’t trying hard enough.

Here’s yet another thing, though: If all we are doing is looking at other women as some sort of measuring stick of our own value and worth, we will never come together in community.

This is intentional.  This is by design.

There is a reason many of us are longing or have longed to find Our People.

Because our culture isolates us.  It tells us resources (men, food, money, prestige) are limited.  It tells us there is not at all enough to go around and if she gets some, then you certainly won’t.

To which I call bullshit.

Resources are not actually limited. There really is enough love, enough success, even enough food and shelter, to go around.

It is not true that if Jane succeeds then Sue can’t.  It is not true that one person’s version of success has to even look like another’s.  It is not true that we have to constantly be clawing at each other so we can each “get ours.”

Our culture wants us separate.  Those in power know that we as women come together  in true sisterhood, as true comrades in arms, that shit is going to burn the fuck down.

And because of this, our culture encourages us to compete with other women, to distrust them, to consider them less than so we can be “enough.”

Here’s some good news though: we actually don’t have to follow the conditioning and training of our culture.  We can say No thank you and No more and Not on my watch. We can dig into the stories we have about women, others and ourselves, dislodge them, and come together in community.  In true community, where we are all comrades, locking arms, supporting each other, lovingly pushing each other outside of our comfort zones, and doing the work to create a better world for the generations to come.

I talk even more about the complexity and intricacy of mother-daughter relationships in this 20-minute video below.  I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the second in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves.  We begin April  1.  If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

If you’d like to read the first essay and watch the first video in the series, you can click right over here and to read and watch the third you can click right here.

My grandmother

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But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin. ~ Mitch Albom, For One More Day

The last few days I have been going through a bin of pieces of my grandmother’s life from before she married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother. There are a lot of old photographs of a a lot of people I don’t recognize. And of course there are a lot of images of my grandmother as a child and then a young woman.

I wrote this piece on Instagram a year ago:

I’ve been looking through the rubber maid bin that contains the pieces of her life before she married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother. There are a couple pictures that have someone cut out of them and I am guessing it was her first husband. And there is this picture that reached out and stole my heart and breath. She must have been in her early 20s or maybe late teens. I’m guessing this was before she lost her son before he was born because in later pictures there is a shadow in her eyes that isn’t here. I didn’t know the woman in this photo. I only knew the woman she became decades later. After her son was born dead and she divorced her first husband and a world war raged and she had a career as a business teacher where she met my grandfather and after she married him and gave birth to her daughter who lived for 59 years. I only knew her after a lifetime. Our eyes met each other for the first time when she was 61 and had been a mother to a living daughter for 22 years. But the egg that makes up half of me was made and nurtured in her womb. We are connected by blood and tears and wombs. She made half of me, both literally and perhaps figuratively. I love her even knowing her imperfections and probably because of them. And oh how I wish I could have known this woman in this picture before the shadows and still holding within all the possibility that would become my mother and me. #liberatedlines #startingmoments #inherskin #storieswithin #awakeningourwomanline #embodied #dare #grandmothersroar #amamaslife

I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who have come before, how they shaped me, how parts of my life trajectory were begun before I was even conceived. I have been thinking about my great-grandmother, a woman I never met and don’t even know the name of, and my mother and their relationship. I wonder about my grandmother and her relationship with her mother and her own grandmother.

I grieve for the too short relationship my mother had with my daughter and my niece. I look at these girls and see the fire of my mother, her independence as well as her simply wanting to be loved. I wonder how much of this was passed through our wombs, grandmother to grand-daughter and how much is in our relationships with these women who came before us and before our own mothers.

I wonder about the spider web of connections that has been woven over the generations. How each woman was partially created inside their grandmother’s womb. How laughs and attitudes and facial expressions can be passed down without ever knowing.

And then I get to wondering about my grandmother’s womb itself. The place that my mother was created and incubated and where the egg that later became me, was first formed. A womb that carried and grew a baby boy and was the place of his death before he was able to take his first breath in this world. I wonder if there were other deaths within my grandmother’s womb. I wonder what scars and grief and pain she carried within that organ.

And so my mind wanders and wonders. I know many stories of my mother’s womb, the deaths within it and how ultimately that system was the cause of her death when the tumors first born on her ovaries spread throughout her body a second time.  And of course the stories of my own womb, the deaths within, the sickness, the wounds. What about the stories of my great-grandmother’s womb? Or my great-great-grandmother? Or the female ancestor who live 500 years ago? Or 5000? What stories did their own wombs hold? What hurts and joys and wounds and healing lived within their uniquely feminine organs?

What pieces of those stories were passed down to their daughters? Were grown in their granddaughters?

It all comes back to the stories. Our origin stories do not begin with us. And I do not believe they begin with our mothers either. Our personal origin stories begin thousands of years ago with women we never knew and likely rarely, if ever, think of.

And what does that mean?

Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe it’s somewhere in-between nothing and everything, that this in-between is where the meaning lives. Or maybe the meaning lives in the nothing and the everything and in-between, perhaps the meaning is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Of course in thinking about the women who came before, their wombs, my own womb, the ideas of oppression, patriarchy and misogyny and how they deeply impact us, over and over, across the generations, also comes to play in my mind.

I want to make sense of it all and I also know there is no sense to most of it. The women who came before me lived their lives and carried their wounds just as I do today: as best they could. Perhaps some were able to heal a bit more, passing down a bit less to the next generations and perhaps others did more wounding than healing, passing down more pain, and shame and wounds.

This I do know: they were each perfectly imperfect woman and they each live within me, not only as markers in my DNA but also as my own deep knowing and truth.

So I continue to look at these old photographs of women who in some way are related to me, if not by blood then by experience and shaping the lives and psyches of the women who are my genetic ancestors. I wonder about them and wander down this path of unraveling the stories, of healing the wounds, of dancing with the shadows and finding my own sense of peace, being and embodied knowing.

 

If you would like to explore your own relationships with your female ancestors, I have a six month circle that will begin on April 1.  You can learn more and request an application here.

Did you enjoy this essay?  It is actually a copy of a love letter I sent out last year.  If you’d like to sign up to receive future love letters, you can do that here.