Reclaiming the Wild Woman Sisterhood. Where are you triggered by other women?
Reclaiming the wild woman sisterhood means healing our wounds between one another. It means taking a good hard look at our insecurities and judgments, facing the betrayals we have experienced, and facing the betrayals we have invoked.
Reclaiming the wild woman sisterhood means dismantling and exposing why we have been pinned against one another so we can let down our guards and weave our hearts back together. We, women, need one another more than we may know.
If you think you don’t judge other women, I’m asking you to pause with an open mind and read on.
Empowered women, empower other women. We are each other’s greatest ally when we chose to be. We have to break any tension between one another and dismantle the complexities that fuel judgment, rejection, and any underlying sense of distrust for our sake, and the sake of all.
Even if you feel you don’t judge other women, I feel it is safe to say at the very least, there are certain women who trigger you. It is this complexity that needs to be unraveled because it is crucial to all womxn to reclaim their feminine power as a whole. My hope is to illuminate the complexity itself, and. to begin to de-charge our response to it, as well as unravel what fuels the undercurrent of it.
To reclaim the wild woman sisterhood we must first face our triggers.
What are you triggered by in other women? What type of women do you not like? Not trust? What qualities do they emanate? What gets under your skin, regarding the way they hold themselves with others? The way they show their body, how they dress, dance, move, and communicate? Where do you find yourself irritated in the way women present their sexuality, their femininity, in the way they interact with men? With you?
Are you triggered by certain levels or styles of success? Are you triggered by those in healthy, or dysfunctional relationships? By those who have children, or do not? Do you get triggered by the way they share, withhold, or spill their emotions?
Do you treat different types of women differently? Do you act differently around different types of women? Are you intimidated by some while you look down upon others? Do certain types of women irritate you, or invoke envy or resentment in you?
Are you triggered by women who strongly embody their femininity but don’t abuse the power of it? Or are you triggered by those who completely take advantage of their femininity and use it in a dark and twisted way?
Now consider the women that you do trust.
What kind of women do you feel safe around, and do you feel safe because they don’t embody the qualities that scare you, or do you feel safe because they are raw and honest with you, they inspire you in their femininity, or maybe they embody their own essence in a way that you are striving to?
Track all the qualities that get a response out of you — either negative or positive. Sift through the women in your life, and observe what is there. Notice the judgment, notice where heartstrings get pulled, or where you feel that pit in your belly drop.
Next considered what kind of a woman have you been to other women.
How do you think you make other women feel when they are around you? In what ways do other women judge, get triggered, or feel threatened by you? How does this relate to the type of women you do and don’t resonate with? Follow the threads and find any overlap.
Do you play small around other women to make them comfortable? Do hold back your happiness, success, sexual expression, self-love, or beauty because you don’t want to make other women feel uncomfortable? Or do you belittle other women with aspects of yourself that feel powerful?
Pause and observe — yourself as much as others.
The wild woman sisterhood is intentionally picked and pulled at because women would be a force if they were truly united.
Women have subliminally been pinned against one another. We have been taught to see one another as a threat. There is a competition complex and a scarcity complex, that is somehow, in a very twisted way, tied to our survival, our belief of desirability, and our sense of worthiness to be loved.
Our feminine hearts are the boss of all else. We all long for love.
There is a complex that plays out between women, that is fueled by a “man’s role” in society. The effects are vast and varying regarding different gender and sexual identities but it overspills in all realms feminine, even if the details and identifications are different. This complexity infects our society as a whole regardless of where we fall in it.
Generally speaking throughout history women have been the child bearers, and the men would hunt and gather. There is undeniable interdependency in survival. Our roles are not equal in the sense of sameness, they are many parts that make a whole. This communion of humanity is a beautiful dance when there isn’t a power play, and when gender roles, sexual identity, and preferences to have children or not, are honored and unbiased. It’s a beautiful dance when we work together to keep all the parts moving, and when the roles are not rigidly defined and are instead left free of hierarchy — but unfortunately, this is not the case.
Between the times of shifting into housewives and businessmen, individualized families opposed to communal support, heterosexuality being the only normal, and the feminist movement of women fighting to do it all, everything has gotten scrambled, and we are all seeking our footing.
In some ways, women’s rights have evolved tremendously, and in some ways, we have a long way to go. There is a history of women needing a man for basic survival, and the imagery and messaging of what a desirable woman is has taught society, and us as women to oppress ourselves. We’ve been subliminally taught to deny our authentic selves to fit this part. In turn, this creates a complexity where women feel threatened by one another.
We are all aching to set ourselves free and embody every ounce of our feminine soul uninhibitedly in our own unique expression. Some of us deny this longing so deeply that we aren’t even aware that we long for it all, but we all do.
The trouble is that it doesn’t feel safe to do so. We have been taught that it’s not safe to do so. This complexity is tangled on a much deeper level than black and white survival needs of money, shelter, food, and water. Our feminine hearts long to feel safe in love more than anything. Our human hearts regardless of gender long for this.
This complexity of feminine wounding has taught us it’s not safe to expose ourselves truthfully and we are the ones left suffering.
There is imagery and messaging on the ideal housewife, sexual energy, mother, businesswoman — any feminine role, you name it. All of this messaging carries an energy that completely disempowers and blinds us from our true feminine power -- it teaches us we must oppress ourselves, and withhold our natural longings.
These messages teach us we must shapeshift to fit the role of a desirable woman that in history has equated to security and survival. But the true sense of survival in our hearts is freedom of the soul. We’ve been set up to lose either way. This is what makes it so complicated. The roots are bound very deeply.
Regardless of how present you believe these complexities to be alive today, or whether you feel that they are alive in yourself, or in other women, they are. They are in our matrilineal bones to some degree, even if it’s simply the residue from our mothers and grandmothers. Our guts, our bones, and our DNA know these truths — whether in ourselves or in others.
These complexities and triggers are woven into our intimate partnerships, in our career paths and choices, in our government, and in politics. These threads are woven throughout motherhood, and our friendships with men and women, and they are woven deeply in sisterhood, or our lack of.
We have been taught that it’s not safe to let go and that it’s not safe to trust one another.
I write this with no finger-pointing or blame. It’s not men’s fault, it’s not women’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault per se but it’s everybody’s problem so we get to make the choice of whether we want to fix it.
These musings are an encapsulation of the male-female complexes that have created many wounds in all of us. These complexities have deeply affected the way we treat one another, consciously and subconsciously. Personally and collectively. It’s shaped our roles in society.
My intention in writing this is for you to look deep within yourself, and your sisters so you can see through the illusions that have separated us.
Women are meant to follow that pull of their innocently passionate hearts that are lustful to love. They have hearts that crave to be vulnerable and that crave to surrender to the truth and magnitude of their emotions. They are not meant to withhold this force of love that is within them.
Women are meant to be in love with their bodies. They are meant to move their bodies freely, shamelessly, and to seek pleasure. They are meant to embrace the sexiness and lusciousness that is alive in every shape, size, and form a woman comes in.
Their sexual energy is not meant to be feared and confined. It’s meant to be let loose, messy, and unfiltered. It’s meant to be full of love and channeled wildly and responsibly regarding their hearts and others.
Their creative life force is meant to flow abundantly with no strings attached. It’s meant to be expressed unabashedly, not burdened by concepts of worth or productivity. It’s not meant to be suffocated by perfection or pressured to make us money.
Women are meant to live a life led by their wise woman intuition. They are meant to follow the pulse of their hearts and wombs.
If you were to let go in this way, what are you most afraid of? Are you afraid of the reaction of men, women, or both?
Do you restrain yourself out of fear that you’ll hurt, trigger, or invoke judgment from the women in your life? Do you restrain yourself out of fear that men will reject you? What aspects of yourself do you restrain because it feels conflicting with certain beliefs you have around femininity, what it means to be a woman, and what you think the world wants from you?
In any journey of reclamation, awakening is the first step. Awakening is simply beginning to see. It’s beginning to see the dysfunction on a deeper level for the first time. It’s awakening to all the ways in which you have been oppressed by the people and environments around you, and it’s awakening to all the ways in which you have been oppressing yourself.
The awakening is a journey of tracking. It’s tracking our ways, our tendency, our wounds, beliefs, and fear and seeing how we have shaped our lives in ways that are not actually serving us.
Reclaiming the wild woman sisterhood is awakening to the wounds that cause us to trigger one another. It’s awakening to how these wounds cause us to cut ourselves off from not only one another but from ourselves.
When we abuse our power, betray one another, get triggered by one another, judge one another, resent or mistrust one another we are perpetuating the cycle. We have to open our eyes and stop. The beauty is, that once we see it, we can’t unsee and this makes it very hard to continue to partake. This is the awakening.
In honor of reclaiming yourself, you have to reclaim your sisters as well. We truly do need one another.
To the wild woman sisterhood.
With love,
Abby
