Women right to vulnerability

        

As a woman and as a psychotherapist I´ve been interested in women archetypes for 10 years now.

I´m not a Jungian therapist (therapists trained in Carl Jung framework) but as a Family and Couples Systemic therapist I´ve always wondered about gender and love relationships and more because being myself a divorced woman in a third world country with machismo and neomachismo still thriving.

In 2001, another systemic therapist, gave to me as a gift Thomas Moore´s “Care of the soul” book.  Since then, Jung has been a dear subject of my deepest inquiries through all Thomas Moore books,  James Hillman, father of archetypal psychology and Jean Shinoda Bolen, the psychiatrist and jungian psychotherapist who started the feminist revolution and evolution between jungians.

Now I have the blessing of leading a Jean Shinoda´s´-like “Millionth circle” group integrated with another eight women.  Together we go through concepts and theories to see how they relate to our lives, how can they fulfilled us better and deeper and how we can return that, transforming this world out of patriarchal stereotypes.

Lately we´ve been going through Shinoda´s: “Goddesses in every woman”, women archetypes in greek  mythology.  Shinoda proposes 7 main archetypes: 3 of them the virgin archetypes, another three are the vulnerable ones and she singles out an alchemical one under the figure of Aphrodite, the goddess of passion and beauty.

The three virgin Archetypes: Artemise, Athena and Hestia are “virgins” because they don´t need a man to feel whole in their psyche. Love relationships affect them almost nothing in their every day life. It doesn´t mean they are sexually virginal or opposed to having a boyfriend, lover or husband.

They just are affectively, psychologically independent and jealousy, dependence of a man, sadness or loneliness don´t really get them.

When we went through this four goddesses, the whole group was enthusiastic and cheerful identifying themselves as powerful independent women, most of them are psychotherapists themselves and have walked rough roads with battered and abused women, or as myself, some of them have been victims of different kinds of machista abuse from childhood.

But, starting with the vulnerable goddesses the averse reaction was great.  I wasn´t surprised since  I myself was disgusted with them the first (and second) time I read the book. So I gave them time to express all their cases against Hera (marriage goddess), Demeter (maternity goddess) and Persephone (the complying daughter goddess).  I let each and everyone speak their heart out.

The three goddesses were generally rejected by the eight of them even though seven of them were married at least for a good period of time, and 6 of them have had children of their own. Five of them are family and couple therapists too.

                                                           

How can we understand that married women, mothers, reject the wife and mother archetypes and so bitterly feel about the complying, submissive aspects of Persephone´s archetypes?

When you are born and raised as a girl in a patriarchal mindset you are expected to be a Persephone of course. An obedient, passive “yes-girl”, who would accommodate herself without trouble to whatever wishes her family will have for her. So two things happen:  If you are not a Persephone kind of girl, you are rejected and criticized for that.  Your own family will see you as stubborn, problematic, not-as-femenine as you should be.  They will compare you to other Persephone like girls and women in your family or school or church.  You will grow hating Persephone and forcing yourself to act and even feel and think like her at the same time in order to get some approval, some love, to belong.

But, what happens if you ARE in any measure like Persephone? (Even as a boy, because archetypes aren´t subscribed to your sex.) Well, there´s a good chance you will also grow hating yourself because in patriarchal culture most people will tramp upon your rights and needs.  Because your are naturally easy going and complying most people will assume you don´t matter at all, that you are a push over, you are weak, you are empty, you are… inferior.

And what about being a loving wife, a loving mother?  Hera´s archetype expresses itself as the woman who makes her husband the center of her life, love and and energy.  A Hera type of woman feels complete being married, being Mrs. Husband Lastname, having a man to cherish, take care of and to admire and obey.  I see a huge contradiction around Hera because on one hand its an stereotype widely and heavily endorsed in patriarchal culture: women must see themselves through the eyes of their man.  Even catholics and muslims, the two more world wide spread religions in the world (each one 1.3 billion) teach that God himself made women inferior to men in wisdom and power and because of that in every family the husband is the head and the woman the body who does her husband will as if it were her own.

On the other hand, women are forced to go against themselves by their husbands, they are humiliated as Hera was by unfaithful Zeus and of course many many of them are deprived in essential human rights, battered, raped, tortured and even murdered by their own “heads”.

                                          

         

So we women are raised to be men property and when we become that… we are punished sometimes to death for being that.  A woman who is naturally, archetypally, drawn to be complying and worshiping of her husband will not be cherished for that, is more likely she will be abused for it and even so, nowadays, critiqued by other women, even her therapist (I agree with James Hillman that psychotherapy is sadly and dangerously subscribed to capitalist patriarchal narcissistic culture and endorses it, oblivious of it.) and instructed to go against her nature and deep wishes because they are naturally or essentially wrong.  As Jean Shinoda says, in patriarchal mind set, even in mental health areas, there can only be one and only one way to be a normal woman.

Lets end with Demeters… I think it maybe more obvious that we mother-women who are protectors  of children, and are devoted to their wellbeing, although we are venerated by society and supposed to have maternal instinct we also fall into this contradictory category, because we are also heavily burdened with unrealistic cultural expectations as mothers, we are expected to be mothers and only mothers and only have motherly feelings and thoughts…as a therapist is an every day conversation with clients the symptoms that arise because of the suppression of everything that is not motherly-like in marketing and or modern psychology.

But this has yet another aspect of abuse in our westernized world culture: women who really want to devote themselves to the care of their children pay a very high price. If they are married they fall under their husbands good will to provide for them being economically dependant and if that husband chooses to abandon them they are left with their children, moneyless and jobless and even critiqued or ostracized by everybody else for not devoting herself to a job and saving money instead of “just raising” her children.

It was my experience working with battered women for years at a government institution that women victims of abuse don´t leave their husbands because they couldn´t be able to care for their children without a roof over their heads or means to provide them with food and education, etc… because they were “just” devoted to be housewives and mothers… The staff of the institution and of the Public Ministry, even doctors, psychologists and social workers, re-victimized them calling 

them names in phrases like these: “No wonder she is a battered woman, if she doesn´t leave him, she deserves what she gets, por pendeja”.

This is no original paper, I know I just gather and integrate what makes sense to me, to my alumni and consultants, so I know is not an original idea to say that patriarchalism oppresses the feminine principle and therefore, vulnerability, passivity, gratuity… In patriarchalism, the worshiping of profit, advantage and money is absolutized and therefore, caring for the vulnerable (children, elderly, disabled, migrants, etc) and working for inclusion is disparaged, denigrated.  Even more so if it is expected to be a duty among women, a despised duty.

To play, to have a conversation, to make a home, to pay a visit to the ill, to knit something or to scrap family memories, to spend time getting to know your neighbors and building a community, to pray, to read and share your readings, to write a poem or a love letter… to cry and hold the crier without a hurry… All these are becoming privileges of the rich, since life is becoming a struggle for survival for the vast majority of the world population, and of course, women who do this pay an immense toll as I wrote above, lack of recognition, economically dependence and the pressure to go against themselves because nowadays women, to have power and freedom, have to become patriarchal, male-ish, and despise vulnerability, emotional dependence, worshiping of a husband or of a family, devotion to their children or flexible adaptability to others needs.  Vulnerability builds true bonds in relationships of every kind, without it we just connect but we do not bond and hence the loneliness crisis worldwide is obvious now. Women now are proud and applauded to make statements like this: “I only need a man for two things; for sex and dancing, everything I can do on my own”… it´s not bad that women can be independent and that we all must have the right to choice however we want to live without harming others, but, the “I -don´t -need -bonds- I´m- totally -self -sufficient “ patriarchal statements like, for me, is totally linked to depression being the number one disability cause world wide since 2017.   After all, our homo sapiens brains evolved to be social, for bonding and for thriving being part (therefore dependent of) a community.  

If being vulnerable and taking care of vulnerability means nowadays to be economically dependent or even being in risk, to have lower status and not to be approved by the “mental health” system, it means that women (or men) naturally driven to this way of living life pay a huge price and therefore are pushed to live against themselves developing symptoms of various kinds like depression, anxiety, alcoholism, somatization, etc.

These lines were meant to give another voice and vote to the right we all have to need other people to be healthy and happy.