Inner Healing for the Contemporary Woman

Let’s talk about the deep wounds of the feminine psyche -without a negative tone.

We all have been through struggles – female and male – and our healing process can and should be integrated, balanced, and focus on us as a whole being.

All of us have been raised in a male-dominated society; this isn’t always a bad thing.

Yet, we tend to measure our psychology, happiness, health, and success on male patterns and excavations.

There’s been no map nor chart for us.

Spend some time exploring this.

In some of my training, this had to be in the early 2000s, I was in a woman studies class and our exercise was to have one person in the middle of the room, in a fetal position. We each had a blanket. The exercise was to say something that was said to us as a child, that hurt us deeply, and as we did, we had to cover the person with the blanket. During that time we had to also incorporate a word that signified women in some way that was used as an insult or profanity. We also had to think of the ratio of insults that were male-focused vs female, and there was at least a 10:1 ratio where most insults were glaringly signifying female qualities, body parts, or perceived attributes.

Then, we took turns saying something we needed to hear as a child or adult, from our parents and taking a blanket off of the person.

When they emerged they said it felt isolating and sad to hear the words and feel deeply entrenched under the blankets. When they heard the positive words though, it made them cry.

They were not alone.

We all ended up with teary eyes. 

It was a moving experience not easily captured in this writing.

Out of all of my training, that was one of the most moving. It immobilized me for days.

We all want to have success, love, health, and happiness.

The map of that often is male-centric. 

Do you remember (if you are old enough, through your own life experiences) that in the industrial revolution, women dressed as men and went into the factories? Or in the ’80s they dressed in “dress suits” to mirror men and climb the same ladders but still often felt unfulfilled?

Women also had to juggle so much more. So we were living a male-centric life as women.

Psychology was mostly developed by men, for problems that men encountered and in the way men thought solutions should unfold.

Medicine had and still has a more male bent to it. 

In order to succeed, we had to make a split with our mothers.

Here is the interesting thing.

Many women will say that their mothers were or are covertly narcissistic.

Many will say that their fathers were emotionally distant and hard-working.

This may be true. I won’t deny that these dynamics did not emerge.

They might have evolved because their mothers were struggling in this male-dominated world, where women were seen as weak, vulnerable, and not as capable. 

Men are celebrated for being hard-worker while women are seen as selfish. 

There are so many double standards.

There’s always a transitional moment for a woman though; you see it when she creates art, gathers with friends, or works on self-healing.

Her truth, be it from maternal or paternal struggles, needs to emerge.

I am not sure about you, but growing up I had more male mentors in the workplace or male-conditioned females–meaning, women who were taught to play by the rules the men created.

I feel that there is a place for both male and female energy in our lives.

Yet, in order to come full circle to deconstructing our male-focused success be it love or family or prestige, we need to look at our own journey and reconnect to our mothers symbolically (even if you had a toxic mother, I mean mothers as in women before us) and disconnect to the father energy that has been a guiding light we haven’t noticed that lit the way for us.

While we can appreciate this light from our fathers and all the men before them, I think it’s important to be confident enough to take a break from them and reconnect to the female experience. 

What if we’ve been climbing ladders of health and wealth only to realize we’ve placed our ladders on the wrong walls?

I’m not asking you to dethrone the kings but rather to place the crowns back on the queens and really look at their body, mind, and spirit.

I think that as we heal the feminine wounds and honor the women before us, the women who were looking at their transitions from menstruation to menopause as sacred and beautiful, only then can we heal as a woman.

We can’t just take fragments of ourselves, and say “I’ll heal this trauma and that betrayal” anymore. It is a bandaid.

We need the spiritual surgery of healing the core of who we are. 

Who we are is not fragmented but a flowing stream of hormonal exploration that is second nature to transitions and birthing creativity and soul-centered intimacy in a way that men simply can’t experience.

As a prompt perhaps, map out your journey as you’ve experienced it and then begin to look at the women you’ve known, even the ones you’ve had turmoil with, and try to explore what they might have endured and experienced that made you who you are today; in the positive.

You are a contemporary woman who has been so molded by a men’s world that in order to heal I think that reconnecting to the women of our past is incredibly important and weaving those female-powered lives into our own.