The Stone Witch —Part III
Altered detail of The Stone Witch, by Christy Higgins, Mixed-media collage on wood box panel 12 1/4” x 21”, 2021. Original artwork and prints available.
As I introduced in the previous edition of The Seeker’s Notebook, The Stone Witch - Part II, it is my intuitive interpretation that this Stone Witch archetype is the shadow aspect of my People Pleaser, making this something like a People Pleaser-Stone Witch (PP-SW) Complex.
Unbeknownst to me until very recently, when I am afraid to speak my truth and resort to people-pleasing as a coping strategy, I simultaneously make an unconscious energetic deposit into the Stone Witch for future eruption. To my way of seeing it, this is how complexes work: when we lie, deny, ignore, or avoid some truth about ourselves, we send the energy of our true self into a repressed state (aka the shadow self), stored as tension, pain, or stagnation somewhere in our body, blocking the natural energy pathways that run throughout our entire neural and musculoskeletal system. (The law of conservation tells us that energy is never created or destroyed, only transformed. In the case of our bodies, for example, the energy of unexpressed anger or grief isn’t destroyed by repressing it; it is merely transformed from a healthy, intelligent response to an unexpressed energetic block that remains lodged in our bodies until we consciously connect with the original emotional energy and release it.) In other words, our lies, to ourselves and others, reside somewhere in our bodies. In this way, we literally carry around the past, shouldering the weight of our unexpressed reality.
People-pleasing and stone-witching isn’t just my problem, however; it is a collective shadow strategy for women which makes this a societal problem. While not every woman copes with domination by being a pleaser and becoming a carrier of a resulting archetypal shadow such as the Stone Witch, I sense that she symbolizes a common archetype in the feminine unconscious that was born out of thousands of years of struggle and suffering, primarily at the hands of patriarchy (via both its male and female surrogates).
For centuries, we have lived in patriarchal societies, which confine females to a narrow strip of options—just the “good girl” ones, namely: happy, agreeable, nurturing, etc. In the parlance of depth psychology, this is how we create masks, or our Persona. Our Persona is what we cultivate over a lifetime of trying to fit ourselves into a prescribed way of being. When a society believes it is unacceptable for women to have and express their life-given power through their sexuality or feelings of grief, dissatisfaction, despair, or rage, we’re collectively creating a lot of pent-up unexpressed truth in the bodies of women. I believe this form of domination causes women to be at greater risk for becoming neurotic, mentally ill, and self-attacking (i.e. autoimmune disorders). In our culture, we like to joke about and dismiss “crazy” or “bitchy” women, but this is no laughing matter. There is deep suffering taking place in the collective psyche and individual bodies of women, and a more appropriate response to suffering is always compassion—full stop.
In my own psyche and body, I have suffered from endometriosis, infertility, GERD (I began experiencing stomach issues when I was a ten-year-old competitive gymnast), and I have struggled at various times in my life with anxiety and depression. How our beliefs and emotional landscape effects our bodies is a huge topic that deserves a much deeper analysis than I have space to address in this post, but I want to assert that there is a connection between what is being projected onto women and how that gets internalized in our bodies.
This PP-SW complex is relevant to many modern women since this is how so many of us have coped collectively with patriarchal indoctrination, however it may have played out in our individual lives. At least since the invention of property ownership around 10,000 years ago, women have been molested, raped, oppressed, sexually enslaved, dominated, controlled, dismissed, overlooked, and negatively projected upon (i.e. Eve as the perpetrator of original sin). Patriarchal domination and intergenerational trauma have been global in scale, not to mention the profound collective consequences of war, terror, and genocide as humans play out a need for violence, domination, and conquest; all hallmarks of patriarchal ideology. The shadow of patriarchy lives in women and the Stone Witch is what it looks like. (It also lives in men, of course, but that’s a topic for a different post.)
The Stone Witch, by Christy Higgins, Mixed-media collage on wood box panel 12 1/4” x 21”, 2021. Original artwork and prints available.
I believe my complex started developing soon after my birth. Long story short: I was born in 1970, a few months after my father was drafted and sent to Vietnam. A year later, he returned a changed man: traumatized and addicted to heroin. When he left for war he was one person; when he came home he was another (and, sadly, we never got the former back).
A period of extreme discord and even domestic violence between my parents followed, and though I do not remember those events, I witnessed and experienced these traumas in the first year and a half of my life. At the age of only 21, to ensure our safety, my mother was forced to flee and face the world with a year-old baby on her hip and not much more than a high-school diploma (supportive family members notwithstanding). It would be decades before I fully realized the effects of this traumatic beginning, and that it did not begin with me; not surprisingly, my parents were also victims of intergenerational trauma. And this brings us to the topic of how we pass trauma down through families.
In Part IV of The Stone Witch series, I’ll discuss how intergenerational trauma affects families and how owning our projections helps us to break the patterns that negatively affect us and our relationships. I’ll also detail the making of my Stone Witch complex and show how it is our interpretation of traumatic events (in other words, the meaning we gave it) that creates the lasting damage they can cause. Later, in the final installment of this 5-part series, I’ll discuss how art can be a powerful tool for discovering unconscious shadow parts of ourselves that can create a vicious cycle of contempt, anger, and disconnection within ourselves and in our closest relationships, and how to turn the sabotaging power of the Stone Witch into positive feminine power in our lives.
NOTES & RESOURCES:
The Stone Witch - Part I, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins
The Stone Witch - Part II, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins