The Patriachial Trance of Unworthiness

As a child, I loved to play dress-up with my younger brother Joe. I still have a photograph of the two of us standing side by side circa mid-1970s in front of our fireplace in our childhood home in Michigan. I am dressed in my father’s red blazer and tie, grinning wildly with my arm slung over my brother’s shoulder and my chest puffed out with pride. My brother’s eyes are squinting in merriment as he stands beside me looking his most alluring in my mother’s gauzy, dusty-blue negligee while he teeters precariously on a pair of her high-heeled shoes. We are approximately five and six years old.

On one Sunday afternoon shortly after this photo was taken, I bounded down the stairs dressed in a similar fashion to impress my parents and their friends using the last stair as my platform: “One day when I grow up I’ll be The President of The United States of America!,” I declared to the cocktail-wielding guests.

As a little girl, I believed I could be anything. I was confident, creative, embodied, and fully self-expressed.

My brother sat playing on the floor in front of me in his jaunty yellow construction hat playing with his trucks. As the room hushed momentarily in volume, some murmured remarks followed: “Isn’t she precious!” But it was my brother who ultimately and innocently broke the devastating news. “You can’t be President, silly! You’re a girl!”

Although I was still very young, this moment is etched in time as the first of many messages that would ultimately cast a cumulative spell regarding my sense of self-worth.

Until then, the many messages that had tried to relegate me to my place in the world as a girl had never before permeated my psyche, but on this day, for whatever reason, those words made their mark, puncturing me with a first painful cut.

I didn’t scoff in response to my brother’s comment, nor did it yet spark what would later develop as a quick-tempered resolve to show them all how wrong they were. Instead, upon learning that there had never been a female president, I went quiet.

It was as if the fact that I didn’t know this made me into a silly little fool, further proving the ineptness of my sex. It was one of my first powerful experiences of dissociation from an uncomfortable reality in which I felt I had no power, and, even worse, was unworthy of having any.

As soon as this fact settled within me, it grew until I became enraged at the sheer injustice of it. The hot sting of shame began to settle within me, cutting as I encountered other places, books, professions, fashions, clubs, and sports where females were relegated to certain roles, omitted from stories, or barred from entering or participating due to what I came to believe as the lowly status of my gender.

I understood, then, that the world was different for me and my people—but the most shocking thing of all was that no one around me seemed the least bit phased by the news.

Sitting between my siblings and parents in a pew each Sunday, I would often feel my skin crawl and my face grow hot with shame as the priest read passages and stories from the Bible.

This holy book seemed to sanction and seal my permanent and pitiful station as a daughter of Eve, the first woman who it seemed had single-handedly caused the downfall of humanity by eating an apple from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden thereby cementing the fate of myself and my sisters as permanently wanton, sinful, and in need of constant guidance and oversight.

I understood these teachings as having come from“the word of God” himself, and in many religions, I would learn that only priests or men were worthy of communing with God.

It wasn’t until I was in my late 30s that I would learn that historically, there had once been a reference to God’s other half and that societies had once revered the “Goddess.” We never knew about the Goddess Archetype in school, or anywhere else. The feminine face of the divine was hidden from us, as was the overreaching patriarchal system of oppression and male supremacy that causes undue harm, forcing girls and boys to conform to gender roles that do incalculable damage by projecting that to be feminine is to be weak, and that to be female is to be inferior and incomplete.

As I went from childhood to pubescent adolescence, they intensified as my developing body brought new input sources and hyper-awareness. The pressure to conform to impossible beauty standards was compounded by the sudden sexualization of my body from the outside world. My outer appearance seemed to dictate whether I would one day be married and have children, and this was somehow mysteriously linked to any future happiness I might hope to expect. This immersed me in a persistent and unconscious obsession with my appearance and pitted me in competition with other girls my age as I vied for position and rank, equating my value through outside consensus and allowing others to determine my worth through their judgment of me.

This growing pressure left me feeling trapped, alone, and terminally insufficient. I was caught in the impossible double-bind of too much, or not enough. Still, without the language or knowledge to make sense of what I was experiencing, I opted for the strategy of being what they wanted: pretty, pleasing, and polite- unknowingly taking my role in the generational cycle that has been passed down for centuries that keep women small and voiceless. 

Inside, I felt like a pressure cooker without a release valve. I imagine a silent implosion as my psyche finally gave way to fracturing in parallel with my tragic but useful habit of self-abandonment. In abandoning my body, I was also disconnecting from my inner GPS, my true North, and my way-finding device.

Like death by a thousand tiny papercuts, each message made its mark, making my body less and less inhabitable.

By the time most girls have reached adolescence, they have disassociated from the pain of hundreds and thousands of microaggressions. We no longer respond to "external stimuli" because we have learned that to go numb, is to survive. To separate is to escape from our bodies. So, we "go across" - up into our heads, and instead of living from the body’s innate wisdom, the place that contains our access to our feminine power through intuition, instinct, emotion, and inner knowing, we instead hyper masculinize ourselves in a world of doing, logic, and pragmatism leaving us in a trance of unworthiness- compliant and compromised.

I am reminded of one of my favorite cartoons from Warner Brothers as I was growing up called Tom and Jerry. Tom is a big tomcat, always trying to get the little mouse, Jerry. But the little mouse always outsmarts him, and in most episodes, always has the upper hand making Tom the butt of the jokes. In one episode, Tom has been put into a hypnotic trance and is sleepwalking. At the same time, Jerry the mouse takes advantage of his compromised state, putting things in his path to bridge the gaps between one place to another, making him step from heights, only to save him at the last minute from falling to his demise; and yet nothing seems to wake Tom, no matter what.

At some point, I could see the parallel, that boys were treated as one species and girls another, each with their own rules for roles. Like in the cartoon, everything was positioned in such a way that the girls were like Tom—sleepwalking in a trance, unaware that everything was set up to keep them compromised, compliant, and asleep. And in case it’s not apparent, patriarchy is Jerry, silently sabotaging women yet simultaneously placing them on pedestals, making sure to save them when they fall. A man is always there to save an entranced woman—a father, a husband, a priest, or a male god.

As a young child, there was a period when I lived my life in total alignment with the truth of who I was. I knew I was unique and valuable for who I was, and I believed in myself wholeheartedly. I was fully embodied, and intoxicated by the possibility that I could be anything I desired, without limitation. I was not defined by my gender, or limited by nature. I could feel the world and its paradoxical answers through my body, and in its stillness, I knew that I, too, was divine.

That child still exists and calls out to be heard and remembered. But as I grew into an adult woman with all of my strivings and achieving, I never stopped long enough to listen to what she wanted from me, and I had never allowed myself to feel the grief that comes from realizing that it wasn’t my fault. As a little girl, I did my best to survive. I had been consumed with lies that kept me hustling for my worth and busking for crumbs of love, believing I could one day find the person or thing that could fill the void inside me. 

The body knows the way and shows us a beautiful way when we have strayed too far from home. Mine became as sick as the secrets I believed I was hiding about my inadequacies and shortcomings. For years I had been hiding my flaws while holding it all together for everyone, and in doing so, I was resisting the very thing that would continue persisting until I let it fall apart.

And so, I let it fall apart; I stopped hiding behind masks of perfection and having it all handled, and in doing so, I was allowed to experience myself from a different perspective as I descended into a dark night of the soul where I discovered my humanity, and an imperfect me, who was perfectly capable, worthy and beautiful, just the way she was. There was nothing for me to numb, hide, or prove. In the mess of my humanity, I was divine, flaws and all.

The body is our gateway to liberation, and when we women allow things to fall apart that is not working, what we come to see is that the world does not work in the way that it’s meant to until we are full of ourselves, and by full of ourselves, I suggest attending to our needs and attuning to ourselves as the first step to tapping into the source of our endless well of being. By re-sourcing ourselves first, we become a resource for others, able to give not from our lack, but from our overflow.

It’s time for women to reinhabit themselves, love themselves, and remember the truth of who we are as powerful, sovereign feminine beings who are this world's way-showers.

In my mind's eye, I still see the little girl I was, dressed in her father’s jacket and proclaiming her vision to be President. Over the years, I revisit to remind her that she does not need to clothe herself in the masculine to find her power. Her way will flow to her and through her as she remains fully rooted in her body, knowing that she is worthy, precisely as she is. She is sovereignly embodied, and whether another soul ever votes for her, she presides over her own life. She is more than enough, and she is never too much.