What happens to a woman when she cannot act in accord with her being?
Like coral reefs or trees drowning in a tide of toxins, she becomes so clogged in her soul that it often manifests as emotional dysfunction.
I believe that this feeling of being clogged is at the heart of the skyrocketing depression and trauma diagnoses in women.
Women hold things in and become tumescent, swollen with wanting, frustrated. From that state, they are then labeled with any number of conditions, diseases, pathologies, or simply as pariahs.
I have witnessed women being labeled them all: crazy, hysterical, dangerous. More often than not, it was other women who cast the labels.
It does not escape me that women who fit this bill are the most powerful women in the room.
There appears to be a collective stake in the ultimate gaslighting: Convincing a woman that she is so broken that she begins to mistake the signs of her own power—her raw emotions, the untamable nature within her—for dysfunction.
What if instead it is a disproportionate amount of power attempting to emerge through too small an aperture—an aperture made small because it has become congested with wrong ideas about who she is.
I often ask what we would have to believe about women to accept how ubiquitous the diagnosis of trauma is. Who benefits from women believing this about ourselves?
If women were to dispense with this notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with us, what might happen?
Not just what would happen to the billion-dollar industry aimed at “fixing” women, but what would happen to the woman herself if she no longer believed that she was inexorably damaged?
All suffering is the result of being out of accord with the truth of natural law. That truth is that you
are incorruptible. Not infallible. Not incapable of being messy or making mistakes. But true in your nature.