=========
When I was a kid watching tons of TV, it was the 70s and 80s. Women were forcing their way into the work force in larger numbers than ever before and men were less than thrilled. I remember ads targeting these working women with statements such as "feeling guilty over not providing a nutritious meal to your family? come to KFC!" Going back with today's mindset and watching even the Brady Bunch, or Three's Company, or heck Partridge Family, and my jaw hits the floor with what was normal, accepted behavior then that today would be considered horribly sexist. Even Wonder Woman was a secretary! Watch the movie "9 to 5", and you'll see the working woman's world of the early 80s.
The point is, when I was growing up it was a radically different time than it is today, and it's very easy to forget just how much changed in the 70s and 80s. Prior to the 90s, women in general were very much an oppressed group, and black women had it the worst. I have no idea how other minorities were treated in those times, I was 15 and under so it's not like 'world news' was high on my agenda.
But the oppression, and the labels of being the weaker gender etc were very much being actively fought against rebelled against, denounced, vilified. The war ignited by Roe v Wade is a very clear shot over the traditional value bow of "female value is tied to childbearing", a reiteration of the shot fired when The Pill was introduced and suddenly western woman had reliable reproductive control for the first time ever. These are HUGE things, and it's easy to forgot the impact they had, and the issues that raised then as well as the echoes still being faced.
When a group fights for empowerment, there's a lot of shadow dancing going on. As an impressionable kid who watched a whoooooole lot of popular media TV, I was inundated with the conflicting messages. I absorbed them, and buried them in the subconscious.
As an early teen, something clicked in me. It's like my hitting puberty triggered all the identification with the female gender that before was just being absorbed and catalogued. Anyway, the first symptom was that I became rapidly angry at organized religion, but now that I look back on it I see that everything I was railing against revolved around the treatment of and messages to women about their worth as individuals as well as an entire gender. The generational shadow dance was alive and well in me, being acted out entirely unconsciously. Compulsively.
This anger later became aimed at my poor dad, who had never done a thing in his life but support and cheer me on. Unfortunately, the generational shadow had taken firm root. The clue to just how strong came as I watching the movie "Mulan", where the daughter returns home and hands her father all of the honors she's won. He drops them and hugs her, saying he'd rather have his daughter. The level of venom that erupted out of me at this scene shocked even me. It was deeply confusing and troubling for me at the time because I had NO clue where the heck this was coming from. There was nothing even remotely sourcable in my own life. I wondered if perhaps this was a past life resentment? That never felt right, but now that I'm looking at the gender shadow of the era in which I grew up, and the gender shadow that my own mom was raised with and passed on to me, it makes perfect sense. I wasn't reacting to my dad, I was reacting as an archetypal Western Woman to her idea of what masculine wanted and valued.
I often heard how, when my mom went to school, she could be a nurse, a school teacher, or a secretary. That was it. She also had to work to pay her own way through MTSU, while her brother got all his bills paid for and went to Vanderbilt. Since she herself was so angry at the unfair treatment she received growing up, she worked extra hard to make sure that my brother and I were both treated equally, given equal encouragement and support. But she had absorbed the shadow of her own generation, just as I had absorbed mine. I wonder now how many of her very serious and real physical problems are an expression of undealt with crap?
Why am I tying the undealt with shadow to physical problems? Because, as the wheels in my brain were churning through all of this, my stomache was reacting rather extremely. The further I got on this train of thought, the more violent my stomach behaved. I've always had a strong physical/emotional connection, but this was over the top! Drinking Pepto-Bismal by the cupfull, I continued following this awareness.
Eventually, I hit on the statement of a woman's worth and where it's truly sourced from. In the 70s and 80s, Western Woman was fighting very very hard to prove that she had value beyond wife and mother, beyond her ability to have children and serve men. The backlash against women who were "only" mothers is a good example of the shadow lashing out. Fortunately, that's subsided and hardly anyone blinks an eye anymore at the whole "I stay home and raise the kids" statement, unlike even just 10 years ago. Hell, most all of the girls I went to school with put their careers on hold to raise their kids. In the 90s, that was a big no-no. I'm very glad to see that changed!
But here I am, working from home, with no kids. Suddenly I'm now engaging this generational shadow surrounding concepts of self-worth and value and contribution to the home, and I'm in new territory! Crisis!!!
The result? In May, my back when out entirely. I was bed ridden for a few days. The lower back is often the area which is affected when there are issues with finance, personal power, and also creativity. Being a dunce, I didn't really piece this together. Two weeks ago, my back goes again. While not bed ridden, it was hurting solid for over a week. Laying down hurt, standing up hurt, sitting hurt. It just freaking HURT, and it wouldn't stop. It was driving me nuts, and driving me into a depression. CRISIS!!!
What these crises were doing was opening the door for me to receive the message that my acid reflux and scoliosis have been trying to tell me for decades. They had just not reached crisis points, until now.
Back to last night. The idea that I'm grappling with a generational gender shadow revolving around questions of self-worth and value sources and contribution to the family, all brought to the fore by own life at the moment, was like a huge lightbulb going off throughout my entire physical system. It also had me running for the bathroom, where I quite literally was violently ill. As I'm in there, purging the system, these words came to mind:
Ok, I can carry this consciously now.After I'd finished and brushed my teeth, I straighted up after rinsing and paused ... my back no longer hurt! I was ecstatic. I felt lighter than I have in a long time. I nearly skipped down the hall to return to bed at 4 AM. The interpretation of the issues involved is backed up with the location of the purging -- the solar plexus chakra, the seat of self-worth, self-identity, and inner authority.
I've had acid reflux since I was about 18. I've often said "It's like I've swallowed something that I just can't digest. I need to purge it, but I don't know what 'it' is!" Well, now I do! I'm really hoping that the acid reflux will subside also. *crosses fingers*
I write all this to illustrate just how deeply the tribal consciousness embeds itself, and to illustrate some of the ways that it can manifest. In me, it was quite literally physical. I have no doubt that had I not purged it from the system, I would have been looking at stomach cancer or some such in another few decades. I'm looking at the proliferation of breast and testicular cancers these days, wondering how much of that is related to unconscious, unaddressed inhereted gender issues within our society. Makes me go "hrmmmm".
The best news of all is that I can now think about things like the Church's historic attitude toward women, a subject which even just yesterday was a very touchy one for me, but not today. Today, it's almost a scholarly discussion. Granted there's still some lingering emotion, but NOTHING along the order that it was. I feel freed! I feel like I've just taken the single biggest step I've been able to manage thus far toward becoming that Lioness. It took some major digging to get this to surface, but I'm glad it did. I've learned a whole lot. I hope that by sharing it that it's got you thinking about the world you and your parents grew up in, and what disempowering or angery/fearful and even positive shadows you might right now be acting on without your knowing. Or the shadows that your children are being indoctrinated with.
- Lioness (in training)
No comments:
Post a Comment