InnerVentures

Tag: patriarchy

  • The Great Taboo: Patriarchy Begins At Home.

    Reposted from Womb of Light – by Bethany Webster.

    There’s a reason why it’s been really hard for us to find solutions to our current global challenges. There’s a reason why feminism, with all its gains, has made only limited sustainable momentum for women. There’s a reason why we’re seeing regressive movements and a rise in authoritarianism around the world. It’s due to a huge taboo that we haven’t been willing to face as a collective.

    We have a short window of time to make significant changes before we’re on an irreversible course of climate change, which will impact the earth and humanity in staggering and unforeseen ways. Species are dying off at an unprecedented rate. All things female or representing “femaleness” are under attack: women and our right to reproductive choice, female children, our oceans, animal species, air quality, loss of farmable agricultural land, just to name a few. The violence perpetrated by men and groups of men is being revealed to be more brazen and psychopathic than we had imagined.

    Patriarchy and the Mother Wound: An Urgent Call to Look Within

    One could say that our global situation is a projection of the devastation of our inner landscapes, mirroring something that we must urgently look at within ourselves.

    The Stigma of Victimhood

    A major hurdle to confronting our taboo is that there’s a strong bias against victims in our culture. No one wants to feel like a victim. No one wants to appear as a victim to others. The problem is that this anti-victim bias is precisely what keeps us perpetually stuck in a victimhood.

    Not wanting to be a victim keeps us stuck in victimhood.

    We all bear a mark of victimhood that we are deeply defended against acknowledging because we’ve learned to equate being victim with weakness and defend against it. There’s a deep memory of powerlessness of early childhood that we want to avoid. Our avoidance keeps us in a cycle of replicating the wound over and over again personally and collectively.

    The Family is Patriarchy’s Chief Institution

    The family is patriarchy’s chief institution, as Kate Millet said back in the 70’s. We can name all the atrocities we see out in the world, feel outraged, start initiatives, create organizations, etc. We may become “activists.” But if we haven’t grappled with how we personally have been force-fed patriarchy’s anti-life, anti-female, anti-feeling philosophy as small, helpless children, we can’t move beyond it. As a species, we may not even make it. We have to get to the root first.

    The Mother Wound is the social condition, rooted in patriarchy, which manifests on the personal, cultural, spiritual and planetary level. 

    The Mother Wound is the result of patriarchy’s damaging impact on human development, by way of the systematic oppression of women through hundreds of generations, thus crippling humanity and leading to unprecedented death and destruction on our planet.

    Do you want to learn more about the Mother Wound and how it may be impacting you? Click here to download the new ebook: What is the Mother Wound? An Essential Guide for Women.

    We Know Patriarchy is an Issue. Why Hasn’t More Been Done? 

    Patriarchy values competition, domination, maleness, and a mode of “winning at all costs.” This isn’t just a cultural atmosphere that we get a whiff of every now and then. It’s flowing through our veins and is present in our brain’s neural-circuitry. It got locked into place by the time we were 7 years old.

    Humanity is locked in survival mode, a place of reactivity, flight, flight, freeze or fawn. We are a traumatized species creating more trauma around us. 

    The beliefs, patterns and behaviors we internalized in order to survive in patriarchy are all inside us, and because our families were ground zero for this cultural transfer to take place, they got mixed with our basic human needs of love, safety and belonging. This has compromised our trajectory. Like an invisible fence, we unconsciously stay within certain confines of thinking, feeling and behaving and stay away from others, all while heading off a cliff of collective destruction.

    Childhood Trauma is Normalized

    The majority of us grew up in emotional warzones that were our childhood homes. We have to confront the emotional magnitude of how we suffered as children as a result of the passing along of patriarchal values and norms. None of us have fully escaped this. The reason we keep avoiding this is because this requires emotional resilience and openness to pain, empathy and care, the very things that patriarchy has deemed taboo. As children we were alone with our pain. It’s like a black hole we avoid but subsconsiously it’s controlling our choices and keeping us stuck. We like to think that as adults, we’ve moved beyond childhood simply because we’re older, but in reality we are stuck there emotionally.

    Being with our pain isn’t victimhood. It’s the epitome of personal responsibility and a mark of emotional maturity. 

    Moving through this pain can only happen through being with the pain, through having a loving, empathic inner witness alongside it, what I call an “Inner Mother”. This shift in consciousness is a bridge we must cross psychologically if we are to evolve as a species.

    False Narratives Keep Us in Denial: “It wasn’t that bad.”

    I’ll never forget watching helplessly as my father tormented my little brother. Any time he cried, my father would tell him to “take the pain” and sadistically not allow him to cry. Often he would come home and start hitting him for no reason. I would scream to get him to stop. When I got older, I recall hearing about how my grandfather would beat my father as young as 2 years old, sometimes throwing him against a wall, beating him almost to the point of passing out.

    Our standards for humanity are really low when progress looks like each subsequent generation is slightly less suicidal and desperate than the next.

    I recall how terrifying it was as a little girl, to long to hold my mother for comfort, but instead I sensed her emotional desperation and had no choice but to endure her focus on me as a kind of surrogate mother to the motherless child within her. I disassociated, thought about suicide at 11 years old, and withdrew into spirituality as a cocoon from the pain of emotional neglect. I found out later that my mother had been threatening suicide to my brother when he was a teen. A big secret in her family was that her mother was drunk for much of her childhood and threatened to commit suicide to her as well.

    Our everyday problems are constantly showing us symptoms of the deeper wounds that are potential entry points for insight and healing.

    These may sound like extreme examples to some, but my family looked like a perfect family from the outside. Up until college, I idealized my family and was in complete denial of any pain I went through. What I learned is that the everyday surface problems that we experience are “cover stories” for the real story beneath. We are in deep denial of the old narrative running in the background. We don’t have to go “digging” in our past, it’s all present just beneath the surface.

    The Taboo of the Mother Wound

    The great taboo is that Patriarchy is a traumatizing culture and we all suffer from the Mother Wound to some degree as a result. We’ve been traumatized personally in our families, in the culture at large, spiritually through a sense of being subject to a judgmental male god, and on planetary level by feeling disconnected from the earth.

    We are at an existential crisis point in which our survival depends on integrating the female/mother aspect of humanity we’ve been denying. 

    This unresolved trauma we experienced privately at home was doubly reinforced by our experiences with education, the state, media, entertainment, religion, etc. The Mother Wound is the “center of the wheel of suffering” that impacts every area of our lives, from our relationships, to careers, to parenting, to relationships to our bodies and more. Admitting this is not being a victim or powerless; it’s a sign of intelligence and hope for our species. The most potent access points to healing is looking at how the Mother Wound shows up in our personal lives. When enough of us doing this our culture can be transformed. As we heal, we evolve and humanity moves forward.

    White Male Privilege and Spiritual Bypassing

    Our collective denial is so strong that most doctors, many therapists, and scores of spiritual teachers and coaches, are active purveyors of this great denial of childhood trauma. It’s as though there’s an overlay that blinds us to it and also blinds us to the reality that we’re blind to it.

    I was watching a talk recently between Gabor Mate and Adyashanti, two authors I admire. Towards the end of the talk, the topics of trauma and spiritual bypassing were finally broached. Both agreed that trauma is extremely prevalent in their students and how in recent years dozens of highly regarded spiritual teachers were exposed for sexual assault and improprieties. Adyashanti said “You should not expect your spiritual teacher to be an expert on trauma.” My question is why not? If the vast majority of your students and followers suffer from some form of trauma (as they mentioned) then why not make your teachings and resources inclusive of that?

    True integrity demands that every spiritual teacher or leader of any kind be experts on their own trauma at the very least. And they should consider themselves to be ongoing students of trauma, deepening their understanding of how it affects human potential. One can’t have grounded spirituality without acknowledging how trauma shapes us and blocks us from knowing our true nature.

    Any legitimate form of activism, spirituality or healing should always go hand in hand with an understanding that our personal trauma is always playing a role in how we show up. 

    Without this acknowledgement, our initiatives and movements will continue to be superficial, unsustainable, prone to conflict or unethical. In other words, some virulent thread of patriarchy will always remain and our efforts will be deeply limited.

    We need to be experts on how we were traumatized in our families and how it impacts our lives. This should no longer be a taboo. We need to make healing the Mother Wound a badge of honor and integrity. This isn’t blame, it’s generational responsibility. Patriarchy, and the trauma it creates, has blinded us to the depth and complexity of ourselves and each other. It’s time to raise the standard.

    At another point in the talk, Gabor expressed surprise that Adyashanti’s zen teacher was not some great man, but rather, an active mother of 5 children. I found it interesting that there was a marked lack of curiosity about her life or how she reached such heights of wisdom; no curiosity about how the fact of her being a mother may have factored into her spiritual advancement.

    Through objectification and commodification of female human life, we are a shadow of our collective potential and now a menace to life on earth. 

    Racism, homophobia, and sexism appear more rampant and escalated than ever. Our “othering” of certain humans based on race or sex is an echo of how we learned to “other” the traumatized child within us. It all emanates from there.

    Women are Closer to the Truth (and the Pain) 

    Through my teaching and coaching women, I’ve seen that working through your own Mother Wound begins to inoculate you from feeling like a victim and replicating those early wounds with others. The sense of victimhood greatly diminishes as it’s no longer a default setting running in the background. With the foggy glaze of denial dissolving around your own vision, you are better able to see reality as it is and able to be more honest with yourself.

    You are likely to feel more empowered and at choice in situations where you may have felt trapped in reactivity in the past.

    You feel more like an adult and less like a victimized child. Thus, you elevate the people and spaces around you by simply being who you are, unapologetically and undefensively. Part of our collective healing is supporting one another on this path.

    Both Men and Women Have Anti-Female Feelings

    We have to confront our anti-female feelings. We learned “anti-femaleness” through the cognitive dissonance of early childhood, in which our mothers were the most important, significant person in our lives. Yet, they were also the most denigrated, disempowered and disrespected in our own homes and in every aspect of the world.

    Ultimately, both men and women are suffering from a form of self-abandonment that occurred early in life, a splitting off from feelings, empathy, care, process, depth, presence; things that “Mother” represented and was defiled for.

    All kinds of dysfunction, pain and trauma flowed from there, for all of us, to varying degrees. These are the very qualities we have to birth in ourselves to move beyond patriarchy.

    Reckoning With the Taboo of the Mother Wound

    Reckoning with this great taboo is the ground zero for creating a new earth, a new era for humanity. Healing the Mother Wound widens the gap between stimulus and response so that we’re less often in a state of reactivity and fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Through that widened space, more human potential can be realized and solutions to our most pressing global problems can be found.

    Here’s a sample of what we recover through healing the Mother Wound: 

    1. Resensitize Yourself to Life: 

    Life gets re-animated. Instead of seeing things through a lens of deadening labels and an overlay of trauma, we can more easily perceive the visceral beauty, depth and the preciousness of life all around us.

    2. Integrate Instead of Compartmentalize: 

    We are more able to see life as an integrated whole and our self-awareness increases. We see connections more than differences. The differences feel less threatening. We are more open to feedback.

    3. Redefine Triggers as Opportunities: 

    Our reactivity is a teacher showing us what is next for us to heal from our past. Each trigger is an opportunity to make new choices that we couldn’t as kids.

    4. Reclaim Embodied Ways of Knowing:

    Felt experience becomes a source of wisdom and information. We act on our own self-knowledge and learn to trust it. Reclaiming ourselves as the authority of our experience. Learning to trust our observations and intuitions.

    5. Anoint Being Over Doing: 

    Trusting our need for rest, silence, for space, for time without feeling like something terrible is going to happen unless we’re productive.

    6. De-Objectify the World Around You: 

    As we become emotionally available for the traumatized child within us, we become emotionally available for other people, we feel empathy more deeply, we feel more connected to non-human species and the earth itself.

    7. Value the Vulnerable: 

    As we get in touch with the scope and magnitude of how much we suffered emotionally as children, we see value in things like grief, sadness, disappointment, welcoming them rather than judging or shaming ourselves for them. We look forward to the renewal and regeneration they offer and the clarity that always follows in their wake.

    Do you want to learn more about the Mother Wound and how it may be impacting you? Click here to download What is the Mother Wound? An Essential Guide for Women.

    Questions for Reflection: Patriarchy as a Culture of Trauma that begins in our childhood homes

    • How did patriarchy play out in your family of origin?
    • How were patriarchal values transmitted and reinforced?
    • What was that like for you emotionally?
    • How did you adapt or cope with that environment?
    • What challenges do you have in your current life that are rooted in those early experiences?
    • What are some ways you can be present to that child within you?
    • What resources or support do you need in our daily life to make this happen?

    Healing the Mother Wound is not a quick, glamorous or easy path. But it is the authentic path to inter-generational healing and transformation that we must undertake. Through this work, we create a better world for ourselves, our families, our children, and the earth.

    I invite you to join me to learn more:

    If you want to join a group of women focused on emerging from patriarchy, check out Emergence Now. If you want to dive deeper into your own personal healing work, check out the Mother Wound Online Course. If you have any questions reach out to my team at support@motherwound.com. Thank you for being here!

    Copyright 2019 Bethany Webster. All Rights Reserved.

     

  • What’s Going On With Men – by Bethany Webster (Womboflight.com)

    What’s going on with men?

    With this massive wave of brave women coming forward with disclosures of sexual harassment across many industries, many of us, men and women alike, are grappling with the sobering reality of rampant misogyny. As a culture, we’re left to ask questions like, why do so many men have the impulse to disrespect, hate or violate women? Where does that really come from? And how do we stop it? 

    As an internationally recognized expert on the mother wound in women, I’m often asked to speak about the mother wound in men. At this time of mass disclosures about sexual assault, I wanted to write a piece exploring how the mother wound is the missing link in our understanding of misogyny. In this essay, I’ll examine how boys develop in the modern world, the unprocessed anger below the surface of the lives of men, the role of privilege and the inner work that both men and women can undertake to transform our situation.

    Oxford dictionary defines misogyny as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”  To understand misogyny we have to explore the first relationship a man ever has with a woman; with his mother.

    For both girls and boys, the relationships with our mothers are one of the most significant relationship in our lives. It’s impossible to overstate just how foundational this relationship is and how it impacts our wellbeing well into our adulthood. In the first weeks and months of our lives, mother is food, mother is world, mother is body, and mother is self. For both women and men, the mother wound itself is a product of patriarchy, of living in a culture with domination of women at its core.

    “The mother-child relationship can be seen as the first relationship violated by patriarchy.“ ~Adrienne Rich 

    On a personal level, the mother wound is an internalized set of limiting beliefs and patterns originating from the relationship with one’s mother. The mother wound exists on a spectrum, with healthy, supportive mother/child relationships on one end and abusive traumatic mother/child relationships on the other end. Many complex factors go into how one’s mother wound manifests and where one falls on that spectrum. For men, it comes down to the specific dynamics that played out between a boy and his mother, as well as how the father supported or thwarted that primary connection. Because patriarchy—the  principle of domination—can be embodied by either a man or a woman, the mother or father may have played the role of patriarchal parent in a boy’s life. For example, some boys may have experienced their mothers as neglectful or as domineering. Some may have experienced their mothers as victims of their fathers or their mothers as the dominant one and their father the more passive one.

    “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.”  ~ bell hooks

    As a boy grows today in the modern world, he becomes socialized by his father, by other men, and by society about what it means to be a man. The patriarchal culture of media, education and religion also perform that function. Unfortunately, it’s well-documented that this socialization of the boy involves to some degree learning to dominate others, to shut down his emotions and to devalue women. (See resources below.) This constitutes both a personal and collective trauma.

    Healing personal trauma is central to undoing the patriarchy

    Contrary to our modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures giving boys the initiatory experience of graduating into manhood through a time of physical trials, which helps them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comforts of childhood into the rigors of adulthood. In this positive context, surrounded by male elders, some kind of physical/emotional wound occurs, helping the boy contact his inner strength, confidence and sense of responsibility. Today in the modern world, most boys experience wounding but without a positive transformation. There are few official rites, few wise elders and a dearth of male role models outside the toxic status quo.

    The cultural expectation to devalue women, including his mother, sets a boy up for cognitive dissonance about what his mother represents in himself, including the ability to express his emotions, to be vulnerable, to express physical affection, etc. In this way, his mother could be seen broadly as a “lost source” to the boy, and the father, as socializer of the boy into the world of men, could be seen as “severer of the bond” with the mother, with his source.

    For white men, privilege plays a role. In addition to discouraging their emotions and encouraging domination, society gives them unearned advantages that are denied to other groups including women and people of color.  According to American sociologist, Professor Michael Kimmel, privilege is invisible to those who have it.  This leaves white men with a triple wound; an injury to their ability to process their emotions, a blindness about their privilege and a lack of empathy for those they harm. This triple wound in white men has remained relatively unconscious and has caused unspeakable suffering in the world.

    I came across this stunning 1977 quote by Adrienne Rich from her essay in the book “On Lies, Secrets and Silence” which speaks powerfully to the connection between misogyny and the mother wound in men: 

    “Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism—the longing to remain a mother’s son, to possess a woman purely for him. These infantile needs of adult men for women have been sentimentalized and romanticized long enough as “love”; it is time to recognize them as arrested development, and to re-examine the ideal preservation of “the family” within which those needs are allowed free rein to the point of violence. Because the law and the economic and social order are heavily weighted in favor of men, the infantile needs of adult males are affirmed by a machinery of power, which does not affirm or validate the needs of adult women. Institutionalized marriage and motherhood perpetuate the will of male infants as law in the adult world.”

    What’s been happening with the #metoo movement, with women telling their stories of sexual assault and outing their abusers, is that the “free rein” that men have used to dominate women in the home and in the workplace is being increasingly curtailed. Women are less willing to remain the silent projection screen onto which men can project their disowned pain with impunity. And many male witnesses are no longer willing to look the other way.

    Assault as sexualized hostility

    Sexual assault is not about sex, it’s about power. Alexandra Katehakis, a sex therapist and Clinical Director for the Center for Healthy Sex in L.A. describes it this way: “Guys who engage in this type of behavior are incredibly rageful towards females. It often harkens back to childhood abuse. For example, maybe they had mothers who were emotionally abusive or who didn’t protect them from abusive fathers. As some men get older they act out that anger towards women in the language of sex. They sexualize their emotions because they don’t know any other way of comporting themselves.”

    It is as if the inner male child is unconsciously caught between his painful longing for the “lost source” represented by his mother and his cultural conditioning to hate her as a woman. Put another way, men are caught between a natural desire for their full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable and empathic) and their desire to remain privileged and in dominator mode. The thing is that one can’t have both. To hold on to dominator mode (patriarchy) is to increasingly lose access to your humanity. And to be fully human, one has to forsake the dominator mode, and all the insidious ways it can show up in oneself. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, prestige) will ever compensate for the devastation, to whatever degree, that patriarchy has wrought on the little boy within him. No amount of power over others will ever make up for that lost part of himself. It can only be found through doing the inner work to reclaim it. 

    A man can find this “lost source,” not in the form of physical women, but in the form of exploring what it means to reclaim what the mother or the feminine represents within him, such as the feeling function, the world of emotions, the experience of deep connection within himself and a sense of authentic belonging with others. However, in order to access these vital capacities that have been in shadow, men first have to engage with the child within who is angry that there has been little payoff for forsaking these vital aspects of himself. 

    It’s easier to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or the “father substitute” out there in the world. Male privilege permits men a blindness to their mother and father wounds while the world burns. However, it takes courage to retract those projections and process the anger about the inner patriarch, the archetype of the cruel, unfeeling father, that granted him access to the world of men at the massive cost of disconnection from his true self, the innocent boy who came into this world capable of expressing empathy, emotionality, and vulnerability. The anger belongs with the patriarchal father (personal and/or collective), the “severer of the bond,” who betrayed the boy, who socialized him to give up a vital part of himself to be accepted in this world as a man. The anger also belongs with the mother who was unable to protect him from this patriarchal wound or who may have inflicted it herself. (See my article here about how patriarchy passes through the mother.) When men can direct their anger there, to where it truly belongs, things will really begin to shift.

    “Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected rage on a mother who was unable to protect him.” 
    ~ Gabor Maté

    At its core, for men and women alike, the task of healing the mother wound is ultimately the same: to de-couple one’s inner and outer life from the lamination of “mother,” so that one’s full potential can be fully accessed and actualized.

    In his book “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, author and Jungian analyst, James Hollis brilliantly encapsulates it this way:

    “When we remember that patriarchy is a cultural contrivance, an invention to compensate for powerlessness, we realize that men, contrary to widespread opinions, are more often the more dependent sex. The Marlboro man, the rugged individualist, is most ambushed by his inner feminine, for he is most in denial. Whenever a man is obliged to be a good boy, or conversely he feels he must be a bad boy, or a wild man, he is still compensating for the power of the mother complex. 

    I do not say it is a man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent; that he is merely human. What is his responsibility is to recognize how deeply any child needs positive mothering and how much the pattern of that need sets his psychic life in motion and continues to operate beneath the surface. He may pretend to adult empowerment, hold the reigns of government or the purse, but the lines of stress reach deep down into his relationship with his mother. Men must grasp and accept this fact, and then take responsibility for it, or they will continue to play out infantile patterns forever.”

    Healing the mother wound for men involves removing their projected rage off of women and processing it towards its true target… with patriarchy itself and to the very specific traumatic events of their childhood in which that played out. 

    To do this deep inner work, it’s crucial that men get support from other men who have already done a significant amount of work on this journey themselves, including professional support from male therapists skilled in this area.

    Broadly speaking, men’s inner and outer work involves:

    1. Processing the anger about the parent (mother and/or father) who betrayed him by making him give up vital parts of himself in order to be considered a man in this world. Grieving about what that has cost him.
    2. Being honest about his life. Acknowledging his secrets and and taking responsibility for his actions.
    3. Finding that lost inner source within him and working to re-claim it. Connecting with the child within him.
    4. Feeling genuine remorse about the ways that he has harmed other people and the earth by acting out his pain in unconscious ways, both personally and collectively, while taking empathic actions on a consistent basis.
    5. Finding community with other conscious men who are on this path of reclamation and reconciliation.

    In the long-term, men must commit to the long-term inner work. And in the short-term, men need to experience real consequences for their actions.

    Shawn Vestal explains that it’s not for a lack of training that men sexually assault in the workplace. “It’s not about what men don’t know. It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account.” In other words, until men have sufficient integrity to not sexually assault, real consequences must come into play at work and in relationships that halt the toxic behavior. Basically men need a global intervention, a resounding, societal “no” to wake up to the realities they’ve been oblivious to.

    To support this process, as women we have to say no in every way possible to the raging boy within the men in our lives, be they friends, colleagues, brothers or husbands. Back to Rich’s quote, women have to withdraw from the ways that we have over-functioned or mothered men. We have to “withdraw the breast, the lullaby and the constant attention associated by the infant with the mother.” That way, men can feel the full magnitude of their predicament, which is the beginning of lasting, meaningful change.

    Only by men feeling the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to do for them, will they experience sufficient motivation to finally step in and fill that gap from within themselves, which includes increasingly: 

    • Taking responsibility for their emotions, feeling them and processing them. Getting support.
    • Having sex as a way to connect, not a way to feel powerful
    • Soothing the little boy within him when he’s triggered
    • Differentiating between the pain of the past from what’s happening in the present
    • Becoming aware of his projections and seeing the women in their lives as people, not as objects
    • Centering and amplifying the voices of those who are marginalized, while listening and learning from them

    As women we must keep using our voices and speaking out about male abuse of power every chance we get and amplify the voices of other women who are enduring male abuse, particularly the voices of women of color and indigenous women.

    As women we must stop:

    • Catering to their illusions that come from an ignorance of their own privilege
    • Staying quiet to avoid conflict
    • Internalizing their projections from their disowned pain
    • Minimizing our feelings in their presence
    • Accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve
    • Giving our power away in the form of emotional caretaking
    • Giving time and energy to men who refuse to do their inner work

    The truth is that women are very limited in how they can help men in their healing. We can hold space but we can’t do the work for them. It is their journey and they have to want it for themselves. In the meantime, let’s expand our awareness of our value outside the male gaze, prioritize our own inner work, and heal our own childhood wounds. Let’s hold strong boundaries with those who are not doing their inner work and spend more time with those who are. True sisterhood is a crucial source of nourishment for these times.

    Harnessing our anger as fuel for wise action

    The more we contact the truth of our worth as women, the more rage we will feel about the devastation toxic masculinity has caused. Our anger is an essential tool in this time, to sharpen our refusal to be compliant with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves, and for white women, a refusal to be patriarchal to others, and specifically facing how we have facilitated the oppression of men and women of color.

    “One oppresses what one fears.” ~ James Hollis

    Healing from patriarchy requires that every privileged group actively confront their ignorance and cultivate sincere empathy for how their privilege has caused harm to others.

    Allowing oneself be emotionally affected by the depths of horrors that have been perpetrated by our privilege is a necessary but often avoided step in creating real equality between people. Just as white women need to endure the experience of feeling genuinely horrified about the ways in which we have, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitated white supremacy onto people of color, white men have to do the same about how their ignorance, afforded by privilege, has collectively caused an unspeakable amount of pain in the world to women, people of color and the planet itself.

    “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ~ James Baldwin

    May this ever-rising tide of female anger be followed by a commensurate wave of brave men willing to explore their inner terrain, to embrace the abandoned boy within and to process the legitimate anger and grief about what patriarchy has stolen from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change.  May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace this raw, necessary discomfort as the medicine they need to heal their personal and collective mother wound. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

    © Bethany Webster 2018

  • What’s Going on With Men? The Mother Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny

    What’s Going on With Men? The Mother Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny

    by BethanyWebster

     “The Bewildered Pursuit” by Andrew Salgado

    What’s going on with men?

    With this massive wave of brave women coming forward with disclosures of sexual harassment across many industries, many of us, men and women alike, are grappling with the sobering reality of rampant misogyny. As a culture, we’re left to ask questions like, why do so many men have the impulse to disrespect, hate or violate women? Where does that really come from? And how do we stop it? 

    As an internationally recognized expert on the mother wound in women, I’m often asked to speak about the mother wound in men. At this time of mass disclosures about sexual assault, I wanted to write a piece exploring how the mother wound is the missing link in our understanding of misogyny. In this essay, I’ll examine how boys develop in the modern world, the unprocessed anger below the surface of the lives of men, the role of privilege and the inner work that both men and women can undertake to transform our situation.

    Oxford dictionary defines misogyny as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”  To understand misogyny we have to explore the first relationship a man ever has with a woman; with his mother.

    For both girls and boys, the relationships with our mothers are one of the most significant relationship in our lives. It’s impossible to overstate just how foundational this relationship is and how it impacts our wellbeing well into our adulthood. In the first weeks and months of our lives, mother is food, mother is world, mother is body, and mother is self. For both women and men, the mother wound itself is a product of patriarchy, of living in a culture with domination of women at its core.

    “The mother-child relationship can be seen as the first relationship violated by patriarchy.“ ~Adrienne Rich 

    On a personal level, the mother wound is an internalized set of limiting beliefs and patterns originating from the relationship with one’s mother. The mother wound exists on a spectrum, with healthy, supportive mother/child relationships on one end and abusive traumatic mother/child relationships on the other end. Many complex factors go into how one’s mother wound manifests and where one falls on that spectrum. For men, it comes down to the specific dynamics that played out between a boy and his mother, as well as how the father supported or thwarted that primary connection. Because patriarchy—the  principle of domination—can be embodied by either a man or a woman, the mother or father may have played the role of patriarchal parent in a boy’s life. For example, some boys may have experienced their mothers as neglectful or as domineering. Some may have experienced their mothers as victims of their fathers or their mothers as the dominant one and their father the more passive one.

    “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.”  ~ bell hooks

    As a boy grows today in the modern world, he becomes socialized by his father, by other men, and by society about what it means to be a man. The patriarchal culture of media, education and religion also perform that function. Unfortunately, it’s well-documented that this socialization of the boy involves to some degree learning to dominate others, to shut down his emotions and to devalue women.  This constitutes both a personal and collective trauma.

    Healing personal trauma is central to undoing the patriarchy

    Contrary to our modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures giving boys the initiatory experience of graduating into manhood through a time of physical trials, which helps them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comforts of childhood into the rigors of adulthood. In this positive context, surrounded by male elders, some kind of physical/emotional wound occurs, helping the boy contact his inner strength, confidence and sense of responsibility. Today in the modern world, most boys experience wounding but without a positive transformation. There are few official rites, few wise elders and a dearth of male role models outside the toxic status quo.

    The cultural expectation to devalue women, including his mother, sets a boy up for cognitive dissonance about what his mother represents in himself, including the ability to express his emotions, to be vulnerable, to express physical affection, etc. In this way, his mother could be seen broadly as a “lost source” to the boy, and the father, as socializer of the boy into the world of men, could be seen as “severer of the bond” with the mother, with his source.

    For white men, privilege plays a role. In addition to discouraging their emotions and encouraging domination, society gives them unearned advantages that are denied to other groups including women and people of color.  According to American sociologist, Professor Michael Kimmel, privilege is invisible to those who have it.  This leaves white men with a triple wound; an injury to their ability to process their emotions, a blindness about their privilege and a lack of empathy for those they harm. This triple wound in white men has remained relatively unconscious and has caused unspeakable suffering in the world.

    I came across this stunning 1977 quote by Adrienne Rich from her essay in the book “On Lies, Secrets and Silence” which speaks powerfully to the connection between misogyny and the mother wound in men: 

    “Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism—the longing to remain a mother’s son, to possess a woman purely for him. These infantile needs of adult men for women have been sentimentalized and romanticized long enough as “love”; it is time to recognize them as arrested development, and to re-examine the ideal preservation of “the family” within which those needs are allowed free rein to the point of violence. Because the law and the economic and social order are heavily weighted in favor of men, the infantile needs of adult males are affirmed by a machinery of power, which does not affirm or validate the needs of adult women. Institutionalized marriage and motherhood perpetuate the will of male infants as law in the adult world.”

    What’s been happening with the #metoo movement, with women telling their stories of sexual assault and outing their abusers, is that the “free rein” that men have used to dominate women in the home and in the workplace is being increasingly curtailed. Women are less willing to remain the silent projection screen onto which men can project their disowned pain with impunity. And many male witnesses are no longer willing to look the other way.

    Assault as sexualized hostility

    Sexual assault is not about sex, it’s about power. Alexandra Katehakis, a sex therapist and Clinical Director for the Center for Healthy Sex in L.A. describes it this way: “Guys who engage in this type of behavior are incredibly rageful towards females. It often harkens back to childhood abuse. For example, maybe they had mothers who were emotionally abusive or who didn’t protect them from abusive fathers. As some men get older they act out that anger towards women in the language of sex. They sexualize their emotions because they don’t know any other way of comporting themselves.”

    It is as if the inner male child is unconsciously caught between his painful longing for the “lost source” represented by his mother and his cultural conditioning to hate her as a woman. Put another way, men are caught between a natural desire for their full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable and empathic) and their desire to remain privileged and in dominator mode. The thing is that one can’t have both. To hold on to dominator mode (patriarchy) is to increasingly lose access to your humanity. And to be fully human, one has to forsake the dominator mode, and all the insidious ways it can show up in oneself. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, prestige) will ever compensate for the devastation, to whatever degree, that patriarchy has wrought on the little boy within him. No amount of power over others will ever make up for that lost part of himself. It can only be found through doing the inner work to reclaim it. 

    A man can find this “lost source,” not in the form of physical women, but in the form of exploring what it means to reclaim what the mother or the feminine represents within him, such as the feeling function, the world of emotions, the experience of deep connection within himself and a sense of authentic belonging with others. However, in order to access these vital capacities that have been in shadow, men first have to engage with the child within who is angry that there has been little payoff for forsaking these vital aspects of himself. 
     
    It’s easier to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or the “father substitute” out there in the world. Male privilege permits men a blindness to their mother and father wounds while the world burns. However, it takes courage to retract those projections and process the anger about the inner patriarch, the archetype of the cruel, unfeeling father, that granted him access to the world of men at the massive cost of disconnection from his true self, the innocent boy who came into this world capable of expressing empathy, emotionality, and vulnerability. The anger belongs with the patriarchal father (personal and/or collective), the “severer of the bond,” who betrayed the boy, who socialized him to give up a vital part of himself to be accepted in this world as a man. The anger also belongs with the mother who was unable to protect him from this patriarchal wound or who may have inflicted it herself. (See my article here about how patriarchy passes through the mother.) When men can direct their anger there, to where it truly belongs, things will really begin to shift.

    “Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected rage on a mother who was unable to protect him.” 
    ~ Gabor Maté

    At its core, for men and women alike, the task of healing the mother wound is ultimately the same: to de-couple one’s inner and outer life from the lamination of “mother,” so that one’s full potential can be fully accessed and actualized.

    In his book “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, author and Jungian analyst, James Hollis brilliantly encapsulates it this way:

    “When we remember that patriarchy is a cultural contrivance, an invention to compensate for powerlessness, we realize that men, contrary to widespread opinions, are more often the more dependent sex. The Marlboro man, the rugged individualist, is most ambushed by his inner feminine, for he is most in denial. Whenever a man is obliged to be a good boy, or conversely he feels he must be a bad boy, or a wild man, he is still compensating for the power of the mother complex. 

    I do not say it is a man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent; that he is merely human. What is his responsibility is to recognize how deeply any child needs positive mothering and how much the pattern of that need sets his psychic life in motion and continues to operate beneath the surface. He may pretend to adult empowerment, hold the reigns of government or the purse, but the lines of stress reach deep down into his relationship with his mother. Men must grasp and accept this fact, and then take responsibility for it, or they will continue to play out infantile patterns forever.”

    Healing the mother wound for men involves removing their projected rage off of women and processing it towards its true target… with patriarchy itself and to the very specific traumatic events of their childhood in which that played out. 

    To do this deep inner work, it’s crucial that men get support from other men who have already done a significant amount of work on this journey themselves, including professional support from male therapists skilled in this area.

    Broadly speaking, men’s inner and outer work involves:

    1. Processing the anger about the parent (mother and/or father) who betrayed him by making him give up vital parts of himself in order to be considered a man in this world. Grieving about what that has cost him.
    2. Being honest about his life. Acknowledging his secrets and taking responsibility for his actions.
    3. Finding that lost inner source within him and working to re-claim it. Connecting with the child within him.
    4. Feeling genuine remorse about the ways that he has harmed other people and the earth by acting out his pain in unconscious ways, both personally and collectively, while taking empathic actions on a consistent basis.
    5. Finding community with other conscious men who are on this path of reclamation and reconciliation.

    In the long-term, men must commit to the long-term inner work. And in the short-term, men need to experience real consequences for their actions.

    Shawn Vestal explains that it’s not for a lack of training that men sexually assault in the workplace. “It’s not about what men don’t know. It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account.” In other words, until men have sufficient integrity to not sexually assault, real consequences must come into play at work and in relationships that halt the toxic behavior. Basically men need a global intervention, a resounding, societal “no” to wake up to the realities they’ve been oblivious to.

    To support this process, as women we have to say no in every way possible to the raging boy within the men in our lives, be they friends, colleagues, brothers or husbands. Back to Rich’s quote, women have to withdraw from the ways that we have over-functioned or mothered men. We have to “withdraw the breast, the lullaby and the constant attention associated by the infant with the mother.” That way, men can feel the full magnitude of their predicament, which is the beginning of lasting, meaningful change.

    Only by men feeling the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to do for them, will they experience sufficient motivation to finally step in and fill that gap from within themselves, which includes increasingly: 

    • Taking responsibility for their emotions, feeling them and processing them. Getting support.
    • Having sex as a way to connect, not a way to feel powerful
    • Soothing the little boy within him when he’s triggered
    • Differentiating between the pain of the past from what’s happening in the present
    • Becoming aware of his projections and seeing the women in their lives as people, not as objects
    • Centering and amplifying the voices of those who are marginalized, while listening and learning from them

    As women we must keep using our voices and speaking out about male abuse of power every chance we get and amplify the voices of other women who are enduring male abuse, particularly the voices of women of color and indigenous women.

    As women we must stop:

    • Catering to their illusions that come from an ignorance of their own privilege
    • Staying quiet to avoid conflict
    • Internalizing their projections from their disowned pain
    • Minimizing our feelings in their presence
    • Accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve
    • Giving our power away in the form of emotional caretaking
    • Giving time and energy to men who refuse to do their inner work

    The truth is that women are very limited in how they can help men in their healing. We can hold space but we can’t do the work for them. It is their journey and they have to want it for themselves. In the meantime, let’s expand our awareness of our value outside the male gaze, prioritize our own inner work, and heal our own childhood wounds. Let’s hold strong boundaries with those who are not doing their inner work and spend more time with those who are. True sisterhood is a crucial source of nourishment for these times.

    Harnessing our anger as fuel for wise action

    The more we contact the truth of our worth as women, the more rage we will feel about the devastation toxic masculinity has caused. Our anger is an essential tool in this time, to sharpen our refusal to be compliant with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves, and for white women, a refusal to be patriarchal to others, and specifically facing how we have facilitated the oppression of men and women of color.

    “One oppresses what one fears.” ~ James Hollis

    Healing from patriarchy requires that every privileged group actively confront their ignorance and cultivate sincere empathy for how their privilege has caused harm to others.

    Allowing oneself be emotionally affected by the depths of horrors that have been perpetrated by our privilege is a necessary but often avoided step in creating real equality between people. Just as white women need to endure the experience of feeling genuinely horrified about the ways in which we have, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitated white supremacy onto people of color, white men have to do the same about how their ignorance, afforded by privilege, has collectively caused an unspeakable amount of pain in the world to women, people of color and the planet itself.
    “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ~ James Baldwin

    May this ever-rising tide of female anger be followed by a commensurate wave of brave men willing to explore their inner terrain, to embrace the abandoned boy within and to process the legitimate anger and grief about what patriarchy has stolen from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change.  May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace this raw, necessary discomfort as the medicine they need to heal their personal and collective mother wound. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

    © Bethany Webster 2017