Beyond Gender Wars: Deconstruction Part 3
Image Credit: Sushil Nash on Unsplash
“When you shut down emotion, you’re also affecting your immune system, your nervous system. So the repression of emotion, which is a survival strategy, then becomes a source of physiological illness later on.”
It was the winter of 1997 when I began working at a drop-in centre for refugee children who had been rescued by the Canadian government in humanitarian missions to evacuate families during the war in the former Yugoslavia, and from the conflict in Somalia.
The First Baptist Church in Calgary, Alberta had recognized a need among inner-city refugee youth, who often came from homes where both parents were working gruelling long hours in minimum wage jobs to keep food on the table and their kids alive. For some reason only known to them and God, they decided to employ myself and my roommate, Paula, to staff this new initiative. We opened at 3pm, when school was out, and stayed open till midnight providing a place of safety where kids could keep warm and get fed whilst being (loosely) supervised by horrendously underqualified folks with good hearts. Classic church move. I was 19 years old and had no idea what I was doing, but it was this job that ultimately crystallized my decision to study to be a Social Worker. I was bartending on the weekends, and looking after traumatized kids with PTSD during the week for the Baptists. Over many hours spent listening to these incredible young people recount their stories of war and rape, famine and front-line tactics, families turning on each other down religious or cultural lines and government cruelty, I began to observe how trauma works itself out in the mind and body. The boys, some as young as 10 or 11, had been instructed to lie in wait at the front line of the conflict zone, where the shooting was active behind the man in front of him, until he had been shot. When the man in front of him was dead, he was directed to then take the dead man’s helmet and rifle from his still-warm body and keep shooting. Some of these boys had been forced at gunpoint to rape women in their own families whilst soldiers watched. This tactic was especially used against the Muslim families who would also experience this as religious violence, deepening the trauma. The stories the girls told me were just as horrific. Having snipers shooting holes in their water containers as they ran for cover so that by the time they got back to their homes, all the water had leaked out. Expecting to be raped weekly if not more often by soldiers or looters or both. Standing by and watching their mothers and sisters and aunties be brutalised, knowing their turn was coming next. Some were tortured psychologically on purpose in order to make them more compliant to being raped. The horror these children held inside them was truly awful.
During this time, I started to form a working theory which I have never shared publicly until now. That is because what I have to say will be wildly unpopular with all of my friends and the people who I respect, because it appears on the surface to fly in the face of traditional feminist thought. It does not, I believe, but I will circle back to that. Anyone who does not - in this day and age - identify as being a feminist, in that they agree that women should have the same rights as men, is not someone who I believe is fit for being in public, let alone holding any kind of responsibility in the public square. So lets just get that outta the way. I’m gonna assume if you are reading this, that you are a feminist, as am I, and that we have a shared lens for understanding what I am laying out here.
My theory, which began forming during this earliest work I began with refugees in Canada, and has continued to prove itself out to me over and over again through over two decades of practice of working with vulnerable people, is that the damage done to the masculine soul by the wounded and rapacious feminine causes more damage, and takes longer to heal and repair, than the same damage inflicted on the feminine soul by the wounded and violent masculine. Now, we can never ‘compare’ damage, it is not practical, ethically advisable or empirically valid to do so. What I am offering here is a series of anecdotally based observations gathered over hundreds of conversations in a variety of contexts, delivered as deliberately broad-sweeping archetypal horizons, for us to consider together.
I have worked with at-risk people in prisons, schools, in the community, for outreach teams on the streets and in hospital. I have listened deeply to people’s stories of harm and terror, and I have studied the gendered, psychological, energetic, spiritual and mythological proportions of this harm, in order to try and trace a path back to healing and wholeness with them. I have also suffered harm myself, including narcissistic, psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Much of my own abuse was systemic, enabled and covered up by powerful others. However some of it was violent, situational and downright bizarre. My divine soul covenant includes within it, I believe, the fact that over this lifetime I will have suffered from every violent wound possible as a woman, in order that I might transmute and heal it. I have been rescued by the Tactical Response Group dropping in by helicopter from a room where I was trapped with a war criminal wanted by the Hague. I have had pulled up at the lights at 3am only to have my car jumped on by a gang of men who snapped off the door handles and smashed the windscreen trying to get to me. I have been chased, grabbed, pinched, assaulted whilst strapped down and raped. I have been groomed and hit and abandoned. Many - but not all - of the worst things women can endure have also happened to me. My own healing journey has been brutal and long and I do not say what I say lightly, but I do say it with what Richard Rohr calls ‘the authority of one who has suffered’.
Feminine energy (and just a reminder, we are talking energy here, not bodies or biology - we all have both masculine and feminine energy in us in varying balances and combinations) is the more resilient of the two. That is because it is inherently fluid, chaotic, adaptive, generative, self-nourishing and dynamic. When it is harmed or violated, it has within its own signature the required ingredients, if you like, to heal. This is further supported by - broadly speaking -cultural conditioning which encourages those who carry a lot of feminine energy (usually female identifying people) to be expressive, to display and discuss their emotional life and to embrace the dynamic nature of it.
Masculine energy is inherently fixed, boundaried, directional, sequential, targeted and focused. When it is breached or harmed, it responds with equal and opposite force, and tends to aggression or withdrawal to manage fear. Men have been conditioned by toxic patriarchy (which is often propped up by women) that they must be in charge, appear powerful, unmovable, calm and keep their emotions hidden. Men have been taught that their rage is taboo, and turns them into monsters. They have been caricatured as perpetrators or cowards by the wounded feminine, and perhaps the worst injury - is that they have been punished for their ‘sins’ against the feminine by being cut off from the feminine. For the masculine soul, to have the feminine energy turn away, abandon or reject them, is tantamount to being rejected by God. When this rejection is compounded with mockery, manipulation or verbal abuse (as it often is), this then becomes what appears to me at an energetic level to be a festering, unhealable wound.
Now, obviously if I keep stopping to qualify my statements with the million caveats that each of them really needs, this will need to be a book and not a one-off piece, so I’m going to continue to speak archetypally - which is to make broad and sweeping comments about general trajectories in order to arrive at my final point - which is that the masculine soul is in desperate need of healing right now and we need to start taking that seriously and think carefully about how we create spaces for that to happen. It is part of my archetypal blueprint to be deeply concerned with the healing of the masculine soul, and the mechanism by which this can happen. Spoiler alert, it comes by first healing the feminine energetic template.
Plenty of the worlds brightest and best feminist scholars, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, writers and thinkers are at the coal-face of this work, doing brilliantly, and they must continue to do this. They are fiercely re-weaving the global feminine energetic template, re-membering it back to its original glory, strength and power, exposing and re-writing the toxic narratives and stories that have blinded whole generations of human collective consciousness, and advocating for those who identify as being female. And then there must be those of us who take the re-woven strands of healed collective feminine consciousness back to the masculine and use it to support the re-integration and healing of the masculine energetic template.
That is my task in this lifetime. This is why I have always gravitated to male-dominated spaces. This is why most of my friends were male, up until I was married and it became forbidden. This is why no matter what people may think from a distance, I have never been a ‘man-hater.’
Many have mistaken me as a feminist activist, but they are wrong. My feminist friends will tell you what a shit feminist I am and would barely be able to tolerate reading this. And that is as it should be. I have a very narrow, very easily misunderstood lane to swim in and now that I know what it is, I am single-mindedly sticking to it.
Sacred geometry and quantum mechanics bring us the truth that what is in the one is in the whole, and so it is. And so before I graduated to being invited to do this work safely ‘out there’, I first had to qualify by doing it ‘in here’, in my own body. I have spent the last two and a half years healing my own internal masculine energy first, then my feminine. I have spent over 20K on therapy, healing professionals, retreats, courses and training materials to get this work done. It has been worth every hour, every tear, every penny. I have taken every bit of integrated energetic healing that I have worked for and offered it to my two boys as nourishment for their souls, and have watched them be healed by it. There has been a sweetness of resonance and bliss that has arrived for me inside of this new season, now that the circle has closed on my own trauma-loops and I am finally doing the work I was literally created to do - to sit in all my healing and wholeness as a feminine-energied body, an incarnation of the Divine in all her cosmic, creative, oceanic beauty, and love the masculine soul back to wholeness. Now I also do it regularly in my work, with all the safety and professional acumen that come from experience, tertiary education, ongoing post-graduate studies and excellent supervision.
I honestly believe that if we started to take seriously the wounds on the masculine collective psyche and soul right now, the epidemic of violence against women would start to shift, the patriarchy would finally fall taking capitalism with it, women and girls would become safer, little boys would be raised to be the tender-hearted souls that they are and the earth would begin to heal and self-repair. I believe all this would be possible if we brought the same kind of energy to healing the masculine, as the feminist movement has brought to its own polarity.
Why?
Because wounded feminine energy housed in female bodies is the biggest threat to the wounded masculine. It is lethal to them. And they are bigger, stronger and often more able to commit violence. Often you will hear violent offenders who murdered their intimate partners insist that they were the real victims. This is why. They sincerely believe that to be true. They are making a pre-emptive strike, out of terror, aggression and their own deep wounding. This does not mean it is not inherently evil. It is, of course. But so is the mother who shames her son for having a wet-dream, or the older sister who calls her little brother a coward because he won’t beat someone up at school. So is the woman who mocks her partner for not being able to perform in bed. All of these are evils perpetrated on the masculine soul, and they are hardly ever discussed, let alone remedied. Now you might say, ‘listen, we can’t equate having someone mocked with having someone killed,’ and you would be quite right. But what our research into gender dynamics and all our best sociological frameworks do not currently take into account is the impact of epigenetic trauma, of energetic blueprints and of the story of the soul of the world. There is no time or space here, that truly is a book’s worth of discourse. But suffice to say that for the masculine soul, to give in to his instinctual longing to do what he knows he needs to, and return to the feminine to be healed and to surrender to her power, feels like death and dying, and is therefore to be avoided at all costs. The masculine energy strives to maintain power and control over the feminine (who is actually the more powerful of the two), because it (sensibly) equates control with safety, and the feminine energy is ‘othered’, harmed, ignored, repressed, silenced, excluded and killed. While masculine energied folks do this, they remain trapped in their own dysfunction, and not able to access their true power and authentic self-hood. They remain impotent, literally as well as figuratively, not able to access their deepest creative and erotic self-hood which is awakened by their own internal polarity of their feminine and masculine energies in dynamic dance. They literally cut off the hand that would feed them, because they have been gaslit, trained and conditioned to do so.
What is in the one, is in the whole.
When you see a man doing this externally to a woman, please understand that he has first done this to his own internal feminine energy. He has his own source of healing and nourishment locked down, gagged, bound and has silenced and murdered that side of his own soul. He is not a well man. This is how I now feel about all the men who identify as complementarian Christians, who subscribe to that violent stripe of fundamental patriarchy that women should submit to men. The amount of hatred their own soul must have for their own subconsciousness is staggering…I cannot even get my head around it anymore. I have stopped trying to fight it, and have instead become insatiably curious about how to heal it in the soul of the world.
When I remember those kids I worked with who had survived the trauma of war, I will never forget the hollow and vacant look in the eyes of the young men. It was like something in them had died. I knew instinctively that what they needed from me was something akin to the softness of a mother, the warmth and safety of the feminine embrace to heal them. And so I sincerely tried to offer that to them. I saw how it healed them, being nourished and nurtured. There was something that made my soul sing, tucking them under my wing and listening to how their day was, making them a sandwich, cheering their basketball moves, hugging their smelly adolescent bodies and marching them down the hall with a clean towel and soap and a fresh can of deodorant and insisting they shower while I dug out clean clothes for them to wear. Driving them home and seeing them through the door. Marching down school hallways and making sure they were getting language tutoring and appropriate counselling and a free meal from the public school system. Their own mamas were grinding it out at work, and not available to them, were traumatised themselves and mostly didn’t speak English, so I stepped in and loved them with all the fierce feminine softness I could muster. And so I continued throughout my career to seek out broken and hurting young men and do my best to mother them with all the softness that I had inside me. With all of my case-loads in all of my jobs, I always felt it was easier for me to heal the young men than it was the young women. I knew then, that I wanted to mother boys.
The young women’s eyes were steely and fierce, they wore their wounded feminine energy like armour, as all wounded young women will do if they want to survive what life has coming to them next. I wore mine like armour too, for the first 40 years of my life, and I know how it gives the illusion of safety, being aggressive, a ball-breaker, fearsome and strong all at once. They did not need what I had to offer, they needed safe masculine energy, and if I had been able to find any for them, I would have kept it for myself because I was in desperate need of that too. I tried my best with them too, of course, all the things I was doing for the young men, I was doing with them too, but their deep wounding reflected back to me my own so I was probably projecting my own needs on to them and trying to remedy myself through them as an untrained practitioner. It took me a long while to gain mastery over this kind of easy countertransference, and I still get regular supervision around it today.