Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Patriarchal Wounds

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We live in a culture that hates women. We grew up in this culture. We were raised in this culture.

As were our mothers.

And their mothers.

And their mothers.

And so on, back a few thousand years.

And since we are all still alive, what this means is that a long, long, long, LONG time ago, our female ancestors figured out how to survive. How to play the game. How to act the part. And in doing so, they bought not only their survival, but their daughters’ survival too.

And.

This playing the game and acting the part and all the rest of figuring out how to survive had its costs.

It meant disconnecting. From their own bodies. From ancient traditions and rituals and ways of being and knowing. From other women. And even from their own mothers and daughters.

This disconnection brought survival, yes. And it meant our ancient mothers taught and trained their own daughters how to survive. How to disconnect. How to play the game and act the part.

And all this disconnection also meant a severing from the Self. From embodiment. From innate wisdom and knowing.

And this severing and disconnection was wounding. To the psyche and the body and the spirit. To relationships with self and others. And to society and culture and humankind.

These wounds are often called the “Mother Wounds.” I kinda hate that term. I find it to be a distraction. Because while the wounding is partially passed down mother to daughter, the Truth is, that this wounding is passed down by our patriarchal culture. It is passed down by men and women, by fathers and mothers, by the media, by the systems that are meant to keep us in our place and compliant and complicit and obedient.

So, I call these wounds Patriarchal Wounds. Because, that’s what they are. And our mothers and their mothers and their mothers and so on back a few thousand years all had them too.

Some of these wounds were and are physical scars from mutilation or abuse or rape. Some of these wounds were and are psychological from being gaslighted and demeaned and devalued and labeled as less than (human). Some of these wounds are spiritual as religions washed away the goddesses and their stories and rewrote spiritual history so that male gods gave birth to the earth.

All of us have these wounds. And we have internalized the messages that come with this wounding.

That women are evil and can’t be trusted.

That we aren’t good enough at anything.

That we are way too much and take up too much space and air and thought.

That we have no value or worth and make not positive contributions to this world.

And while all these messages have burrowed into our skin and muscle and sinew and being… and while they did the same with our mothers and their mothers and their mothers back a few thousand years… and while at times it seems a losing battle to fight this culture and its hatred of women…

Fight we must.

Resist we must.

Disrupt we must.

Unravel and dislodge and destroy and create new, we must.

Because our daughters deserve better.

Because our nieces deserve better.

Because our sons and nephews and brothers and husbands deserve better.

Because WE deserve better.

xoxo

I am offering a six month circle of unearthing, unraveling, exploring, examining, disrupting, dislodging, destroying and creating new. Nine months of looking at these wounds and how they have been passed down and how we can apply salve and heal them. So we can do and be different than our mothers and their mothers and their mothers back a few thousand years. So our daughters and nieces and sons and nephews don’t need to heal as much. So we can stop the passing down of these wounds. So we can connect – to our daughters, our mothers, our Self.

If you’d like to learn more and request an application go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/unleashingourself/ Space is limited to 9 women (CIS, Transgender and AFAB non-binary all welcome). I’d love for you to join us.

xoxo

More on consent

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Here’s a thing… Like most (all) people I wear many hats and have many roles and many ways of being in this life of mine.  And at the base of it all, I am a woman living in a patriarchal culture.

What that means, is like all other women, I have experienced sexual and physical assault, rape, been stalked, cat-called, and gaslighted.  It means that I too have internalized the stories of how women don’t matter, aren’t good enough at anything, always take up too much space, and are worthless.  How we know nothing, and especially know nothing about our own bodies (and therefore shouldn’t have rights to them).

I didn’t ask for any of these things.

Not when I went to that party.

Not when I wore that short skirt. 

Not when I flirted with that person at the bar. 

Not when I drank so much I almost passed out.

Not when I had the audacity to enter into a male-dominated career and profession.

Not when I walked down that street to class. 

Not when I laid there as still and silent as possible and left my body. 

Not when I screamed and fought.

Not when I made a scene. 

Not when I melted into the background.

Not when I took that class or chose that major. 

Not when I sat in that seat on the bus.

Not when I wore those boots. 

Not when I danced that way. 

Not when I initially said yes and changed my mind.

Not when I met with that professor.

Not when I invited him into my home.

Not when I was born with female genitalia. 

Not when I was pregnant.

Not when I was struggling to become pregnant again.

Not when I was writhing on the floor in pain.  

Not when I asked for help.

Not ever.

Not once.

I never gave consent to any of these experiences.  I never gave consent to the messages and stories of my worth and value to burrow into my skin and muscle and core.  I never gave consent when I was in preschool or elementary school or junior high or high school or college or graduate school.  I never gave consent because to give consent we have to be informed, we have to know we have a choice, we have the option say no or yes or maybe and to change our minds as many times as we fucking feel like it.

Like all women I learned at a very early age that my body is not my own.  My mind is not my own.  My spirit is something that can be trampled and disregarded.  Like all women I learned what I had to to survive.  Like many women, I am still unraveling it all and finding my own ways to peace and rage and using my voice.  Like most women I am a work in progress in connecting to and trusting my body, my instincts, my intuition.

Because we live in a world where we are told not to trust our own bodies and knowing.  That our “spidey sense” is illogical and should be ignored.

Because we live in a world that tells us we can’t take up space. Our bodies are to be small.  Our voices small.  Our impact in the world, small.

Because we live in a world that pits women against each other as competition.

And.

Because I am fucking done with this bullshit.

Because I will fight with every breath I have to dislodge these stories from my own body and to help you dislodge them from yours.

Because I will use every breath I have to prevent these stories from burrowing into my daughter’s skin.

Because the Truth is I have a birthright to my body.  I have a right to saying no or yes.

And you do too.

xoxo

 

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Patriarchal wounds and boundaries (and why I won’t use the term “Mother Wound”)

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patriarchal-wounds-and-boundariesBoundaries and our ancestors and patriarchal wounds.  These things are so intertwined.

At some point in our human history, we, especially us women, lost sight of our boundaries.  We lost sight of the separation between us and others.  We lost sight of our needs and wants.  We lost sight of us.

I believe there was a time in our history when we were deeply connected to our Self.  A time when we lived in an egalitarian culture.  Then something happened or likely many things happened and over time patriarchy arose and with it came all the wounding: shame, misogyny, no longer defending our boundaries, or speaking up or out, or breaking any rules,  for fear of torture or death. (Anthropology seems to back me up in this.)

We, women, did what we needed to survive.  We still do.  We play the game, we follow the rules as best we can, until we just can’t any longer. Some of us never reach that breaking point.  Many of us do.

Our mothers did the same.  And our grandmothers.  And our great-grandmothers.  And so on back through our womanline for a few thousand years.

These women who came before us, they wanted us to survive too.  They loved us, their daughters.  They were terrified for us being in the world they brought us into.

So they trained us.  They taught us to obey. To be deceitful so we can get our own needs met, and in this deceit we learned to not trust our sisters (or mothers or grandmothers).  To play by the rules while still finding ways to hold onto our Self or to let go of our Self completely.  They taught us how to survive in a culture that didn’t consider us fully human, that considered us property, that saw nothing wrong with raping, beating or murdering us.

The ways they taught us to survive equated to playing small, to being silent, to being obedient and docile and doing as we were told.  It equated to not speaking up or out.  It equated to serving others, particularly men, with little to no regard to our own exhaustion or needs.

This training, this wounding, is often called the mother wound.  I’ve used that term, as recently as a couple months ago, and although I’ve used it, it has always bothered me.

It bothers me because it places the blame of our wounding, seemingly, on the surface, on our mothers.  On all mothers.

Because we as mothers don’t already carry enough of the responsibility of the ills of the world.  Hello Eve and Pandora, just to name two.

The truth is, this wounding isn’t from our mothers.  Our mothers, all our ancestral mothers, wanted us to survive. They loved us so deeply and wholly. And they were terrified for us.

How do I know?

Because I am terrified for my own daughter and the world I am sending her off into.  And this world I’m sending her into is much tamer and gentler than the world our ancestors, including our own mothers, sent their daughters, including us, off into.

So I have an issue with the term mother wound. Because these wounds we carry, aren’t really about our mothers.  They are about trying to survive in a culture that hates women.

All women.  Yes, some women more than others, absolutely.  Yes, the color of our skin and our socio-economic status and how high our education goes all play a part.  And whether we’re married or mothers or how many fathers we have for our children and what color skin our partners have and and and…. Intersectionality is vital in the work of unraveling all of this.

And.

All women are hated in our culture.  Matters of degree make little difference when we look at the statistics on rape or interpersonal violence or murder by boyfriends or husbands.  Those numbers cross all skin colors and classes and education levels.

This is not to say that we don’t carry wounds from our actual lived experiences with our mothers.  Of course we do.  We feel betrayed by them for trying to break us so we could live.  Our pain and wounds of our lived experiences with our mothers are valid.  And need to be processed and healed.

And.

While we need to heal our own micro-lived-experience-wounding, we need to remember the macro of the issue at hand.

It is our misogynist, patriarchal culture that is at fault.

Yes, our mothers are responsible for their actions. Yes, many of them did not do their own inner work so that they would not pass on this wounding and instead taught us healthy ways to survive and still feel comfortable in our own skin.  Yes, they screwed up.  Yes, they are human.

And by placing the blame fully on our mothers and our womanline, by putting them at the center of our wounding, we are continuing to be complicit and compliant to the misogynist patriarchal culture that created the environment for this wounding to even occur.

So I’ve decided to stop using the term mother-wound. Because it’s not entirely accurate. It’s misdirecting.  It only feeds our internalized misogyny instead of helping us dislodging it from our bodies and being.

This is actually part of my own boundary work.  Making the distinctions between what is mine and what is someone else’s and what is culture.  Unraveling the stories and training that my ancestors have passed down through word or action or DNA (or all three).  Learning to listen to my own body and knowing and getting to the root of something when it doesn’t feel right or feels off or doesn’t sit well with me.

This is part of connecting to our intuition yes, and it is also part of connecting to our boundaries.  Of acknowledging when something, particularly a commonly used or “known” something, doesn’t feel right to us. Of saying no when that not right feeling comes up. Of doing different so not to pass on something that doesn’t feel right to us in the first place and only causes more wounding and damage.

Boundaries are more than telling someone you aren’t going to let them take advantage of you again. Boundaries are about more than our relationships with other people (though, in truth, a lot of how our boundary work plays out is in our relationships with others).

Boundaries are also about saying No More to a culture that hates us.

Boundaries are about saying No More to passing on the training and wounding of our culture.

Boundaries are about knowing our Self, so wholly and deeply that we don’t question when something doesn’t sit right if that off feeling is valid or not and instead we dig into the why so we can understand ourselves better and then do different in the world.

Boundaries, I believe, are at the base of our ancestral healing of our patriarchal wounds.  As we learn more and more about our own boundaries, we heal the pain of our ancestors who weren’t allowed to have their own boundaries due to risk of torture or death.

As we lay claim to our bodies, to our minds, to our spirits, we are defining the distinctions between our own Self and the Self of others.  We can know intuitively and immediately when someone is projecting their “stuff”on us as opposed to some critique of our behavior having merit.

Boundaries are how we connect to our Whole Self.  Because without boundaries, we cannot define who we actually are.

As we do our own boundary work we learn that boundaries are not rigid nor are they static.  They are flexible and have an ebb and flow depending on the people, places, time and events that are invoking them. We may have a more rigid boundary with one person than with another.  We may need more physical space from some people than others.  And even these boundaries may shift depending on what all is happening in our lives, sometimes needing firmer boundaries with those we generally are pretty easy and loose with.

Even with this being true, that boundaries are more of a fluid thing than not, we must be able to sense these boundaries in the first place.

And, you can probably guess, I deeply believe we learn to sense our boundaries by deeply connecting to and embracing our bodies. By inhabiting them.  Feeling them.  Knowing on a visceral and deep level what exactly embodiment means.

So we can feel our boundaries and know immediately when they have been breached. And honor and defend them, as we deserve to be honored and defended.

It is deep work and messy work and there is much unraveling and untangling and dismantling that must happen.

And it is so deeply and truly and wholly freeing.

Our boundary work is all a part of becoming our own version of the Unleashed Woman. It is another layer in taking off the leash that was put on us at birth by our culture.  It is another layer of coming home to our Self.

And isn’t it time to do that? To come home to our Self? To take off this patriarchal leash? To become our own Unleashed Woman?

xoxo

 

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Consent, complicity & rebellion (the complexity of consent part 3)

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The topic of consent has shown up over and over for me recently: in Isabel Abbott and Bronwyn Petry’s  course The Body Contains Multitudes; observing All Souls Day; in my work with my own therapist; in my ancestral work unraveling what the women and men who lived before me passed down to me and what is me and mine; in my constant work of dislodging and dismantling my own patriarchal training and doing all I can to not pass this training on to my own daughter (and failing, and doing better than my own mother did… sometimes progress is terribly incremental).

Consent.  The complexity of it.  How there is so much in our lives that we don’t consent to.  How so much lives in our own bodies that we never consented to–not only what we didn’t consent to in regard to our own lived experience, but also what our ancestors passed down to us, what lives in our cellular memory and our very DNA.

And while there is so much that lives within our bodies that we did not consent to, it is still ours to manage or heal or dislodge or unravel.  We have a responsibility to it, to ourselves, to understand all these parts and where they live and what messages they may have for us that are helpful and what messages they give us that are harmful.

We have a responsibility to untangle the web of stories and training and wounding and strengths that we did not ask for and are within us all the same.

Our bodies store it all. The pain and pleasures of our own lived experiences.  The memories that our mind doesn’t want us to remember.  The longing for freedom and truth and justice and love that our spirit cries for.  The trauma and oppression of our ancestors.  Thousands of years of gaslighting from our culture.

All of it. Our bodies hold it all.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past all this.  Sometimes the experiences and memories and longing are too much and we need to move out of our body, out of our being, out of our Self in order to escape the chaos and dissonance and get through our days.

That’s okay. We each need to do what we need to do to get by.

And.

Sometimes, we do need to connect to it all.  To hear the stories.  To know the truths.  To sense the injustices of our own lived experiences and those of the people who came before us.  To believe that we aren’t just making it all up, it isn’t all in our heads, it is, in fact and truth, very, very real.

This connection doesn’t have to look or feel or be big.  It doesn’t need to happen all at once.  We don’t need to dive in so deep that the weight of  it all crushes us.

We can move into this work of connecting to our bodies, slowly, quietly, peacefully.  We can get curious and quiet and give space for our bodies to tell us what they need to.  We can listen.

This is the work of re-membering our body.

Of putting all our fragmented pieces back together.

Of coming home into our Self.

Of becoming our own Unleashed Woman.

This is the work of reclaiming our bodies.  Or, perhaps really, claiming them for the first time.  Taking ownership of them.

This is the work of being able to say wholly, fully, confidently:  No or Yes or Maybe or No then Yes then No again.

This is the work of acknowledging all the ways we never gave consent.  We never gave permission.  We never consciously or in any informed way agreed to the disconnection, the dismembering, the disowning of our own Self – of our physical and corporeal and flesh and blood body.

And neither did our ancestors.

Lack of consent is part of how our patriarchal culture works.  Those in power don’t need to ask, and those without power don’t get to say no.

This is as true today as it was 100, 1000, 2000 years ago.

We, you and I, never gave consent for trauma to live in our bodies the way it does.  We never consented to the disease or disorders.  We never consented to our DNA being altered by the trauma and oppression our ancestors experienced.

We did not consent to the anxiety. The depression.

We did not and do not consent to the constant messages of how we are not enough, how we are too much.

We did not consent to the shame that is instilled in our psyches and being from birth.  From before birth.

We did not consent to having our boundaries disregarded, ignored, torn away from us, over and over and over again.

We did not consent to being told that we have no value, no worth.

We did not consent to the disconnection from our Self or our sisters or our community.

We did not consent to the gaslighting or torture or murder both we and our ancestors have experienced.

We did not consent to having all this patriarchal training living within us, burrowing so deeply into our blood and bones and being.

We did not consent to unconsciously and unintentionally passing on this training.

We did not consent to being complicit in this culture that hates women.

We did not consent because we were not informed.

We were not told we had a choice.

We were not told there was, there is, a choice.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we have to follow the rules.  That we must play small.  That we should strive to achieve that never ending To Do list.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that to rest is to be lazy, weak, proves our worthlessness.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we deserve all the pain we endure.  Because Eve. Because Pandora. Because all the “evils” of the world are our fault.

Psst… I wanna tell you something…

THEY FUCKING LIED.

xoxo

We do have a choice.

We have the choice to say No more.

We have the choice to say, No, that isn’t correct.

We have the choice to use our voices.  To access our power.  To demonstrate our strength.

We have the choice to stop following the rules, to stop passing on the rules, to stop being complicit in a culture that wants us gone.

We have the choice to do and be different. For ourselves. For our daughters and nieces. For our sisters. For our mothers. For all our grandmothers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our cells and being.

And not only do we have a choice, we have a responsibility.

Now that we are aware of this training, now that we are unraveling all the ways we have been lied to, tied down, leashed, we have a responsibility to continue in this unraveling, in finding our truth, in taking off this leash that has choked and silenced us for generations.

We have a responsibility to do and be different. For our Self. For our daughters and sons and nieces and nephews. For our mothers and fathers.  For all our grandmothers and grandfathers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our blood and bones and being.

 We have a responsibility to break the rules.  To defy this sick normal. To tear it all down, burn it to the ground, and build new.

New. Different. Creating a time and place where all of us are free and equal. Where we no longer feel shame. Where we embrace our sisters. Where we find deep connection with our Whole Self, with our community, with our world.

This responsibility can feel heavy.  It can sometimes feel like a burden.  We may sometimes want to put it down and wish we were not aware of the oppression, the hatred, the inequality.

That’s okay.

Even Jesus had moments of doubt.

And.

We can do this. Together.  In community. With each other.

Together.  Always.

days-ending-in-y-2Now, let’s go smash this shit to bits.

xoxo

The text of this essay originally appeared my weekly love letter on November 5, 2016 and has been slightly edited and modified to appear here.  If you enjoyed reading this, and would like to read more like it, you can sign up to receive my love letter right over here.

Isabel Abbott and I have locked arms and joined minds and are offering a six month circle unearthing, exploring, dislodging and embracing our consent and boundaries.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly register, click right here.

The complexity of consent Part 2

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consent-part-2Last week I wrote about how sometimes consent is a tricky thing, how sometimes our mind will give consent to something, like a surgery, but our body won’t (and really can’t). How sometimes our logic needs to override our body because our mind actually does know better (for example that a surgery could actually save our lives.

The point being that sometimes the giving or not giving of consent isn’t always a straight forward thing.

And, while that is true, it is also true that more often than not, the giving or not giving of consent is very straight forward.

Like the not giving consent for sexual abuse and assault or physical and psychological abuse and torture.

The not giving consent for mundane and yet traumatic things like car accidents or cancer or any disease or illness.

The not giving consent for other people to break our hearts, or betray our trust, or dishonor us in any of the big or small ways.

The not giving consent for our children becoming ill, our parents dying too young, our best friends suffering in any way.

There are million things in our lives that we do not give consent to.  Some of them extraordinary and some mundane.

All these noes that we may or may not have given voice live within us.  In our minds, yes, and also in our bodies.

Every time our consent is disregarded, our bodies know.  They react.  They store the data.

The data of emotions and pain and the color of the walls and slow motion detail right before impact.

This data lives in our shoulders and necks and jaws.  In our chests and hips and underneath our scapula.

This data lives in our intestines and stomach and womb.

This data lives in our blood and bones and muscles and sinew.

The raw non-verbal emotions, the howls and screams and wails, all vibrate within our being. And not only does the disregard of our own consent, from our lived experience, live within our body and being, that of our ancestors does too.

This includes the gaslighting that women have experienced for thousands of years.

This includes the impact of rape and abuse. It includes not having control or sovereignty over our own bodies or lives.

Yes, there a million mundane ways in which our consent is disregarded. Yes, this all lives within us. And the trauma and impact of these mundane, ordinary things, like car accidents, can be quickly and easily dislodged from our bodies.

It is the millions of ways in which our consent is disregarded that are not mundane, though in our culture considered ordinary and almost unremarkable, like rape or abuse or gaslighting, that takes time and patience and focused intention to dislodge and dislodging is made even more complex by living in a culture that continually and constantly traumatizes us.

It may take a lifetime to dislodge some trauma, some violations of our consent.  There are some things that we will only learn to live with, as we also continue to chisel away at the layers.  The hope always being that the more we dislodge, the more we chisel away, the less the next generation will need to do.

In truth, the trauma of being women living in a patriarchal culture makes it almost impossible to completely heal our bodies and minds and spirits.

And.

As we continue to do the work of unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging these traumas we also learn to resist and to prevent more trauma from impacting us as deeply.

We learn resilience.

We learn that no matter what, we will not only survive, in many ways we will also thrive.

We learn that our NOes matter.  We learn to honor them and defend them and demand respect for them.

We learn that our boundaries matter.  We learn how to notice them and feel them and know them.  We learn how to honor and respect them.  We learn how to demand others honor and respect them too.

This is not easy work.  It is messy.  It can be dark.  It can at times feel like we are sinking into a deep abyss.

And, as we build our resilience, we learn that this messiness, this darkness, this sinking into the abyss will pass.

We learn hope. We learn to breathe.  We learn to rest and nourish and replenish.

We learn to wield our consent.  To state that we matter. Our Noes and Yeses and Maybes matter.  Our boundaries matter.  Our voice matters. Our essence and being and life matters.

We learn that as we chisel away at our own trauma, we are also chiseling away at a culture that insists on oppressing us.  As we learn to wield our consent, to declare that we matter, we chisel away at the stories our culture has fed us since birth, since our mothers births, since our grandmothers births.  As we learn resilience, we rip away at leash our misogynist, racist, patriarchal culture has put on us.

As we learn, we begin to do different.  And in our doing different, we take back our bodies, our consent, our autonomy, our lives. And in this taking back, we begin to crumble the bricks of a culture that tries to tell us our bodies and lives are not our own.

And this is how we will tear it all down and how, in the end, we will win.

xoxo

Did you enjoy this?  If so, then I invite you to sign up for my weekly love letter right over here.

Isabel Abbott and I have locked arms and joined minds and are offering a six month circle unearthing, exploring, dislodging and embracing our consent and boundaries.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly register, click right here.