As the days get shorter, the harvest is eaten, and I prepare to settle in for the long winter nap, I begin to reflect on my inner life. Deep within the shadows of my own psyche I begin to dig.
It’s not always easy digging. I’m reminded of going through my grandmother’s totes after her death. She was a bit of a hoarder having come of age during the Great Depression. We found long forgotten treasures such as jewelry or pure silver dollars. We also found a lot of trash like single shoe laces and broken Happy Meal toys. Probably most profound, my mother and I found our grief again. But we felt better after the items in the totes were sorted and that space in the garage was cleared out. It is much like this with my own shadow work.
When I notice my mind is feeling cluttered, chaotic, disorganized or exhausted for no good reason, I know it’s time to clean out some part of my psyche once again. This fall, I happened to find a lost passion and talent for writing (treasure!) and an old pattern of giving my power away to men (trash). I’m in the process of sorting that out now.
In order to project power on to someone else, we first must bury it deep inside ourselves. That’s what I learned to do as a young girl. When an older male in my trusted inner circle of life groomed and molested me, I was trained that I could have good things happen only if I gave into what good things he wanted to happen. He would offer things like, “I’ll tell you a story if you touch me.” That evolved into, “if you’re a good girl, I’ll let you touch me.” I was programmed to believe that giving my power, choice and voice over to a man (which to me he was even if he was only 10 or 11 at the time) was my privilege, a treat, in fact.
To compound this experience, I had a grandmother who was raised to give her power over to the men in her family. That was the only way to stay safe. Women back then had no rights of their own that would allow them to survive much less thrive without a man. So she hoped and prayed that a good man would choose her, and if not, she was out of luck. Bleak training for a young girl on a farm during the depression. My grandmother, like many other grandmothers, passed down this belief to the psyche of the next generations. Her greatest dream for me was that I would find a good man, and that she would have taught me how to hold on to him.
My grandmother took care of a whole neighborhood full of kids, and so it turned out that she trained me to make my abuser a snack and drink while he played outside. Giving my power away to a man as a way to survive solidified in my unconscious. Of course as I grew older, I became quite the rebel, freedom-loving feminist. I cast aside the notion that I should have to serve any man, and I began to live for myself.
Or so I thought. Unfortunately, we cannot cast aside what has already been cast in our own shadow. I didn’t know it, but I was destined to give my power away. I just wouldn’t become conscious of it until my 43rd fall season on earth when I committed to myself and my partner that I would DO something to figure out all this mysterious suffering I was experiencing.
I could write a whole book about all of the men I tried to give my power away to and failed, but for now, I want to illustrate it in terms of the intense insight I had just last week. You see, in September of 2018 I willingly sold or gave away my property and all of my belongings in Colorado and moved to Europe to be with the love of my life. I was living the dream of so many American women I know.
Within 2 months, I was the most depressed I have ever been in my life. I blamed it on the dark sky, I blamed it on the lack of friends, and I blamed it on homesickness. While the level of depression eased, I found myself two years later still feeling like a fraction of my former bright, energetic self. I was still crying over my homesickness at least once a week, and the energy I carried was incredibly heavy. Neither I nor my partner could bear it any longer.
He walked me through a beautiful exercise relating my values to my timeline history. I identified that I was stuck and struggling and we walked backward through my life to find where this feeling originated.
The only other bell that rang was my previous relationship with an abusive narcissist. Since my current partner is the polar opposite of an abusive narcissist, we got curious. He asked me if I had given my power away to him, and I realized I had. He then asked me if I could remember making a promise to myself to get out of the abusive relationship. I could. I remembered being willing to do whatever it took to get out of that and making all kinds of secret legal plans. He was eventually arrested, and while there was the trauma of the legal system, I was free.
My partner was now asking me if I was willing to make the same promise to myself now. Would I promise to do what it takes to be free again? It took me some time to answer that. He wondered why it was so hard for me to promise myself to take my power back and choose to live for me. I wondered too.
Then, a few days later, iit dawned on me. I had found a good man. My grandma would have been so thrilled to see me surrender my life and power to this man. He actually loves me and respects me.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last two years subconsciously resenting him for carrying all of my personal power. I’ve taken passive aggressive digs at his character as if he is responsible for my suffering. I’ve remained hungry for my own power, and as a result I have been starving emotionally for the last two years. Despite what he’s done to try to make my life better (and he has done a lot), I am after the one thing I don’t know I’m missing. Control of my own life and decisions. I am reclaiming that.
Despite my logic, there is fear about this choice. Taking my power back might mean that I make decisions for my life that threaten this good relationship. It also means that I’m now fully responsible for every horrible outcome or bad feeling that results from those choices. But in addition, I get to own my beautiful creations and gifts. I cannot claim my talent for writing from the shadow if I don’t also claim my power. When I give my power away, I am no longer free to write what I want. See? These things work together.
I write this in part for my own sake, and I write this because I know I’m not alone. I have clients who share a recognition of losing themselves to a partner, or of becoming a different version of themselves than when they were single. In fact, I believe this problem is more pervasive than I can imagine, given the cultural praise for the “God-fearing selfless wife and mother.”
Some part of all of us is stuffed down in our shadow, striving unconsciously to please and fit in. In fact, the females who are free and powerful in our culture become mythical heroes of a sort, another sign that we have disowned our own power and safely stored it somewhere in the shadow. Just look at the overwhelming response to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg or the popularity of freshly minted empowered women such as Glennon Doyle or Elizabeth Gilbert. I personally think they SHOULD be revered for their courage and determination, but more than revered they should be mere examples of who we all can be when we recognize who we’ve projected our power onto and reclaim it for ourselves.
Grandma, wherever you are, I know you love me and have always wanted nothing but the best. I love you too, and because I do, I promise to live as a fully empowered woman.
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