Category: being & becoming

What exactly is internalized misogyny? Why would you want to release it?

Let’s start with defining misogyny. According to dictionary.com misogyny is the hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women, or prejudice against women. This is the attitude toward women that is included in our patriarchal culture. Women are looked down upon. We are considered less valuable than men (25% less valuable if we are white women, even more if you are a woman of color). We are also considered to be liars, untrustworthy, conniving, manipulative.

There’s more of course. The facts that:

• Over 1 in 3 women experience at least one instance of sexual assault in their lifetime

• 1 in 4 women have experienced extreme physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner

• Each day, on average, three women are murdered by their boyfriends or husbands

all point to the reality that women are not respected or even considered to be humans, their own persons. If our culture didn’t hate women, all of those numbers above would be zero.

So then, what is internalized misogyny?

This is what happens to women when we grow up in a culture that hates us. We learn to hate other women, to not trust them, to judge them. We learn to listen to those in “authority”, to quiet our own voices, to disregard the wisdom of our own body. We internalize and learn to believe the messages we are given about women in our culture, about ourselves and other women.

I believe that what we learn, we can unlearn. Even if we have been in this training for thirty, forty, fifty years, we can undo it and learn to connect to our Self, our embodied wisdom and to other women in true friendship and sisterhood.

It isn’t easy. It takes time and energy and a willingness to see our own mistakes and ways we have put and held down other women.

It requires an openness to seeing all the ways we were lied to, to admitting how we were duped.

It’s messy work. It is a lot of looking within and looking outside and trying to figure if you can reconcile the two.

It’s uncomfortable work. There is grief and rage. There are tears and the need to scream (I encourage you do so).

It is intense work. Shame will show it’s ugly head. You will want to stop. You will wish you had never opened this particular Pandora’s box, or bitten of Eve’s apple. (Note how women gaining knowledge, about themselves or otherwise is bad, evil, to be avoided.)

And it is beautiful work. It is the work of coming home. To your body. To your soul. To your Self.

It is the work of finally feeling comfortable in your own skin.

It is the work of having no fucks to give any more.

It is the work of being at peace with who you are. Forgiving yourself for what you didn’t know before. Embracing your own new ways of being and doing in the world.

Our internalized misogyny runs deep. It has been trained and bred into us for millennium. It was taught to us by our mothers, who were taught by their mothers, and they by theirs.  This is the mother wound that has been passed down through the generations.

It will continue to be passed down until we stop it. Until we each become aware of our internalized misogyny. Until we each admit to to the ways we have been complicit and passed it down to our daughters and nieces. Until we make amends where we can and moving forward do different.

As we heal ourselves, we heal the world.  I believe this with every fiber of my being.

xoxo

I talk more about internalized misogyny in this video below. It’s just over 20 minutes long, so go ahead and make yourself a cup of tea or pour a glass of wine and settle in.

(If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right here.)

This blog post and video are part of a series to introduce my 12-month circle Wild Woman Within :: (Re)Connecting to our forgotten knowing. You can learn more about the circle and request an application right here.

Want to see the other posts in this series? Here’s a list:

Disconnection from Self

What we lose when we stand in our power

Stripping to our bones

Reconnection to our Self (and what the Self is)

Healing the mother wounds

Releasing internalized misogyny (this post)

Healing into wholeness

Ritual vs. Habit

Guidelines for being

Living intentionally and consciously

When we talk about our “mother wounds” we are talking about the wounding that has been passed down for generations, mother to daughter, while living in a patriarchal culture. These wounds are all the ways mothers have tried to keep their daughters “safe” in a culture and world that doesn’t value them and considers them to be property.

This wounding didn’t start with our relationship with our own mother. It began millennium ago when we shifted from egalitarian cultures to patriarchal ones. As women became oppressed, we looked desperately for ways to survive. The meant “falling in line” and “playing the game.” It meant honing and utilizing our “feminine wiles and charms.” It meant silencing our Self, playing small and meek, and doing as we were told.

The consequences of not playing by the rules set by the dominant and oppressive culture were dire. They could be physical torture, the rape and torture of our daughters or our self, or even death.

It makes sense that the women who came before us played by the rules and did everything in their power, including abuse and oppression, to keep their daughters safe and alive.

This training and fear has been passed down, genetically. Epigenetics, while an emerging science, has already shown us how the effects of trauma are passed down through our DNA. One of the side effects or symptoms of trauma is anxiety. Anxiety had already been shown to run in families. And the reality is that the symptoms are compounded, as we have the marker in our DNA we each also are raised in homes with anxious mothers (and often anxious fathers). Nurture and nature coming together in a way that will most certainly keep us playing small and worried about anything and everything. Including harm coming to ourselves or our children.

It’s not a coincidence that “helicopter parenting” is on the rise. I believe we have compounded trauma to thank for this.

So yes, our mother’s do literally pass on this wounding, both in our genetics and in the ways they have tried to keep us “safe.” Add to this the way women and mothers are utterly unsupported in our culture and it is no wonder the women who are supposed to love us most in this world, who are supposed to be our protectors at all costs, are the ones who are causing us the most harm, intentionally or not.

In addition to all of these factors that contribute to our “mother wounds” there is also the reality that our culture pits us (women) against each other, and this include mothers and daughters. We live in a culture where women look at other women as direct competition for all available resources (partners, jobs, attention from others, even food, clothing and shelter). When we look at other women, including our daughters or our mothers, as competition, it is no wonder that the mother-daughter relationship is filled with strife and conflict and deep wounding.

When we look into our own wounding, as we heal our own hurts and shift our ways of being in this world, we also develop empathy for our mothers (and their mothers, and their mothers, and so on up our family trees). We are also able to heal their wounds and the wounding our own daughters inherited.

Healing of the mother wounds is intricate work. It requires us to have compassion, for our mothers and for ourselves. It requires us to see our own imperfections and flaws and how we have participated in inflicting our own “mother wounds” on our daughters and the world. It requires forgiveness, of ourselves and the women who came before us. And it requires an openness to do and be different in the world, to stop the wounding and to intentionally and humbly participate in the healing.

One of my own greatest challenges is seeing and then working to unravel, heal and stop passing on the wounding I have inflicted on my daughter. Seeing and acknowledging my own failings, the ways I have internalized misogyny and our patriarchal training, has opened me to being more compassionate and forgiving to my own mother. Also seeing the ways women, and mothers specifically, are unsupported in our culture helped me to see the many ways my own mother was unsupported and trying so desperately to do it all while also holding onto to some semblance of her own Self.

The web is tightly woven, yet it can be unraveled. As we focus and pick away at and heal one part of our wounding, other parts become looser too. We shift our focus here and there in an eternal cycle of going deeper and deeper into the layers. These layers are millennium deep. We cannot heal completely within a week, a month or even a year. Yet the more we are able to explore and heal these wounds, the freer we are in the world, the more comfortable we become in our own skin, and the less wounding we perpetuate out into the world.

xoxo

I talk more about mother wounds and healing them in this video below. It’s just over 20 minutes long, so go ahead and make yourself a cup of tea or pour a glass of wine and settle in.

(If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right here.)

This blog post and video are part of a series to introduce my 12-month circle Wild Woman Within :: (Re)Connecting to our forgotten knowing. You can learn more about the circle and request an application right here.

Want to see the other posts in this series? Here’s a list:

Disconnection from Self

What we lose when we stand in our power

Stripping to our bones

Reconnection to our Self (and what the Self is)

Healing the mother wounds (this post)

Releasing internalized misogyny

Healing into wholeness

Ritual vs. Habit

Guidelines for being

Living intentionally and consciously

What the heck do I mean when I talk about “reconnecting to our Self”? What is the Self? Why would one want to (re)connect with it/him/her?

The Self is the essence of who we are. It is not our stories of too much or not enough. It is not filled with shame.

It is us. You. Me. At our core. Beyond the hurts of this life and past generations.

It is not our Ego. It is beyond our Ego and yet the Ego is part of our Self. Our Self is our Shadow and Light, our feminine and masculine, our unconscious and consciousness, our body, mind, spirit and soul. It is the whole of who we are, what makes me, me; what makes you, you.

Our Self is who we are once we have stripped ourselves down to our bones.

We spend the first half of our lives disconnected from our Self. We are fully in our Ego in childhood, young adulthood and on  into our thirties. During this first part of our life we concentrate on all the external manifestations of our Ego – home, career, our place in the world, differentiating from parents and other authority figures. When we come to our late thirties and forties, when our ego is pretty much completely developed, we move on to the next phase of life: the re-integration of all we have separated from during the first half of our life; we learn to connect to our shadow, our inner wild woman (or man), the parts of us we have ignored or stuffed down.

We live in a culture that encourages this cycle – for us to spend the first half of our life disconnecting from our body, our mind, our spirit, our soul and then spend the entire second half of our life learning to reconnect to this lost part of us.

It seems after thirty to forty years most of us start to have a yearning for something more that what we have been told is important. We begin to question everything we have be taught, we start to rebuke the expectations and “shoulds” our families and culture has foisted upon us. A few have this yearning at a younger age. Some may seem to develop this yearning for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the struggles of daily survival.  (If you are focused on figuring out how you are both making rent and feed the kids this month it is challenging to say the least to focus on “personal growth.”)

So, it could be said that the desire to connect with our Self is part of our developmental process. Or at least, as people living in a patriarchal culture. And if we are more honest, it is for people who have the privilege of having the time and energy to focus on this “next stage.”

Yes it is hard and messy work. It is the work that must be done for us to free ourselves and our brothers and sisters from the oppressive culture we live in. As we are able to self reflect, to connect to our voice, and frankly to stop giving any fucks about what others think of us or whether or not we have “caught up” with the Jones, we are also able to see the many injustices in the world. Including the ones we ourselves have contributed to.

With this self-awareness we can start to do different. Be different. We can speak out against racism, misogyny, bigotry, and oppression and to demand the systems change. We may not in mid-life have the same fervor of those in their twenties, but what we don’t have in youthful energy we can make up for in wisdom, in being conscious, mindful and intentional, with our ability to look forward and back while also being firmly rooted in the present.

The more connected to our Self we become, the less “right” we feel compelled to be. Which translates to being able to learn, to admit our wrongs, to make amends where possible and appropriate and to do our level best to be more mindful and aware of our words and deeds in the future.

I believe this “re-connection” with our Self starts with coming back into our body. Feeling her. Noticing her whispers and sensations. Listening to her stories and wisdom. We are told from such a young age how our body is not our own, how it is not enough, how it is too fat or thin, curvy or flat. We are taught to torture her by withholding food or overexerting ourselves in the name of burning calories. We are told to use her as collateral for love and conditional respect. We learn quickly to leave her during the first beating or rape. We feel betrayed by her, even though we are the ones who have done the betraying.

So, we begin with our breath. And noticing. And soon we can sense emotions as they bubble within before they boil over. Then we learn to feel her, all her gurgles and aches and tingles. We learn to sit in discomfort, not rushing to fix or medicate. We start to listen, truly listen and then hear and next honor the wisdom that she holds in her fibers.

Our body, mind, spirit and soul are all deeply connected. I believe we truly cannot connect to our spirit or soul until we learn to feel comfortable in our own skin, in our body, and to be able to listen to her without effort. To trust her and her knowing.

Reconnecting to our Self is coming home again. Home to our body. Home to our innate knowing. Home to our soul. Home to who we are meant and want to be in this world.

Are you ready to come home to you?

xoxo

I talk more about this idea of what the Self is and reconnecting to it in this video below. It’s just over 20 minutes long, so go ahead and make yourself a cup of tea or pour a glass of wine and settle in.

(If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right here.)

This blog post and video are part of a series to introduce my 12-month circle Wild Woman Within :: (Re)Connecting to our forgotten knowing. You can learn more about the circle and request an application right here.

Want to see the other posts in this series? Here’s a list:

Disconnection from Self

What we lose when we stand in our power

Stripping to our bones

Reconnection with our Self (this post)

Healing our mother wounds

Releasing internalized misogyny

Healing into wholeness

Ritual vs. Habit

Guidelines for being

Living intentionally and consciously

We have a tendency as humans to soak in the stories others have for us. The expectations of our families. The long lists of how we should act, look, be. These stories are told to us over and over and at some point we start to believe they are actually our stories. We make decisions about our lives heavily influenced by these stories that live in our unconscious, in our blood, in our bones.

We strive to do better, become more. We look to the future and outside and around for what our life should be like. We go-go-go. We soak in the stories and expectations more and more. And like a hamster on a wheel, we just keep going and going and going, long after we are tired and weary.

What happens when we let go of these stories? When we get quiet and listen? When we connect to our gut, our intuition, our own innate wisdom?

What happens when we connect to who we are? When we strip down to our bones? Taking off the masks and protective layers. Taking off everything that has been handed down to get to who we were when we were born.

Stripping to our bones is uncomfortable. It is terrifying. It means letting go of what we have allowed to define us most of our lives. It means stepping into the unknown – our Self. It means connecting fully to our body, mind and spirit. It means learning to trust our Self.

This is not easy work. It is challenging and messy and requires us to look deep within. It moves us from a place of looking to others for answers to a place of our own knowing. This is not “fun” work or glamorous. You won’t get an award for this work from the outside world and in fact the outside world may fight you every step of the way. And once you begin this work there is almost no going back.

And yet, I believe this work is worth it. It is worth the time and energy. It is worth the tears and screams. It is worth the grief and anger and every other difficult emotion that arises.

Moving from a place of reaction, a place of doing things because that is how they have always been done, of doing things to please others at any cost, to a place of conscious and mindful intention, a place of our own deep knowing and wanting, allows us to have more authentic and honest relationships with others and with our Self. As we dig into this work we begin to walk more confidently in the world, to feel more at home in our own skin. To know, deep in our bones, that our voice, that we matter.

What would you do to feel good in your own skin? What would you give up to connect to you?

I talk more about this idea of stripping down to our bones in this video below. It’s about seventeen minutes long, so go ahead and get yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine and settle in.

(If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right here.)

This blog post and video are part of a series to introduce my 12-month circle Wild Woman Within :: (Re)Connecting to our forgotten knowing. You can learn more about the circle and request an application right here.

Want to see the other posts in this series? Here’s a list:

Disconnection from Self

What we lose when we stand in our power

Stripping to our bones (this post)

Reconnection with our Self

Healing our mother wounds

Releasing internalized misogyny

Healing into wholeness

Ritual vs. Habit

Guidelines for being

Living intentionally and consciously

I write and talk a lot about what it is to stand in our power, to connect to and use our voice, to be firm and proud  in who we are. I write about connecting to our Self, our body, our soul and learning to listen to and honor our own innate wisdom and intuition. I believe that when we do these things, we can move mountains and part oceans. When we do these things, we will change the world and create a life for all people to be free and feel loved, honored and respected.

I have also written about the cost of standing in our power, stepping into our light. One cost is that we can’t turn back, once we know we can’t unknow and so we are driven to do different. We are no longer able to use the excuses of the past or hold onto the stories that yes tied us down, and also in someways, they kept us safe. We can’t unsee the new perspectives we have. I’ll be honest, this can be frustrating. There are times in daily life when I wish I wasn’t as self-aware as I am. Life would be less complicated. I wouldn’t think through every action and could just do without thinking of the short or longer term consequences. I wouldn’t see the ways I have failed my family or myself or my community and I wouldn’t feel the need to make the repairs that are necessary because of these failings. I wouldn’t know, and because I wouldn’t know, I wouldn’t and couldn’t care.

Most days, most of the time, I don’t want to turn back though. I like that I am creating a different life for my daughter and son and our little family than the lives my husband and I had growing up. I like that I’m connecting to our community and creating change in real and sustainable ways. I like that I can see when I fail and can go make the repairs that are necessary, so my relationships can be healthier and more authentic than they had been in the past. Most days I see all this self-awareness and my ability to stand in my power and my light as good things. Most days.

There are costs beyond the inability to turn back time and un-know and un-see though. Real costs that break my heart. These costs are the people I have lost in my journey to my Self, in my quest to finding and standing in my light, to connecting to my strength and power. They are significant people. People who I love (as in still love, it is not past tense), people who I respected (this is intentionally past tense) and people who mattered or even still matter to me. They are people who for their own reasons could not tolerate me finding my voice and using it. They are people who couldn’t bear what I had to say to them about hurts they had caused. They are people who had a significant role even in me learning to step into my light and power in the first place, people who encouraged it and taught it. People who were important and significant parts of my journey.

These are people who gave me an out, each time, before they rejected me. They offered for me to step out of my light, to let go of my power, to silence myself. They offered to give me the chance to step back and become small again. They offered to stay in my life if I did these things, and continued to do these things.

In a way, I had a choice. I could have chosen these people who I love so dearly over my own truth, over my own authenticity, over my own integrity and feelings of self-worth. I could have, in theory. In reality though, I had gone too far down that path, I was too deep in my own knowing and being. And so, in a greater way, I didn’t have a choice. Because I couldn’t stop being the person I had become, the person I really always had been.  I couldn’t shrink back down. I couldn’t remain silent or ashamed any longer.

This breaks my heart.

While my heart breaks over the people I have lost over the years, my heart heals and mends with the love and friendships I have gained. The more I have stood in my own light, spoken my truth, listened to my intuition, the more I have connected with others who do the same. These new people do not replace the ones I’ve lost. And they are important and give me the space to be fully and apologetically me.

There are losses in this work. There are people who won’t be able to tolerate you becoming big, strong, powerful. There are people who will try their damnedest to keep you small, silent, obedient. There are people who will break your heart in this journey, people you thought would always be by your side.

There are also gains in this work. The biggest being comfortable in your own skin and proud of who you are. While you do this, you will also find your people. The people who are doing their work, who are stepping up, who are allowing themselves to be seen. You will gain community, true community, that will support you and push you and stretch you in ways you never dreamed possible.

And together with your new community you will heal the wounds of your own past and the wounds of you larger communities. You will become the change you want to see in the world.

xoxo

I talk more about what we lose and gain as we embrace our who we truly are more in this video below. It’s about twenty minutes long, so go ahead and get yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine and settle in.

(If you enjoyed this, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right here.)

This blog post and video are part of a series to introduce my 12-month circle Wild Woman Within :: (Re)Connecting to our forgotten knowing. You can learn more about the circle and request an application right here.

Want to see the other posts in this series? Here’s a list:

Disconnection from Self

What we lose when we stand in our power (this post)

Stripping to our bones

Reconnection with our Self

Healing our Mother Wounds

Releasing internalized misogyny

Healing into wholeness

Ritual vs. Habit

Guidelines for being

Living intentionally and consciously