The Stone Witch — Part II
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.
In the previous edition of The Seeker’s Notebook, The Stone Witch - Part I, I wrote about an archetypal complex I refer to as the Stone Witch, which came to me through reflecting on an image that emerged in my collage work. In quick review, the Stone Witch is the image of an unconscious energy pattern that wreaks havoc in the relationships of many women. These types of psychological complexes play out through the projection of our unconscious thoughts, feelings, fears, desires, etc., most often onto the people closest to us. Since this is a shadow aspect of ourselves, we aren’t aware of how we are helping to create the very situations from which we are so often trying to escape.
In my case, not only did this disowned part of myself unconsciously create discord in my relationship with my husband (and other partners before him), but I blamed him for my misery. He became my target; he was the one I had unconsciously made responsible for my unlived life and unresolved pain. I was bottled up as a woman carrying out her gender-assigned cultural roles in life (being a good girl, the perfect daughter, hot eye-candy, dutiful wife, etc.), not a fully sovereign woman living her deepest purpose, passion, and gifts. I became an uptight control freak under the suffocating gaze of the Stone Witch, and her indignant rage was being projected outward onto my husband when my identity felt threatened by him, or when I felt threatened by something not in my control.
This is the danger of this archetypal complex: she sabotages the possibility of love which is patient, kind, forgiving, and much bigger than the hurt ego. According to emotions expert Karla McLaren, rage is a natural, intelligent response to violated boundaries. By not understanding how my boundaries were being violated by my mother originally (more on that later), my husband, and society at large, I had lived my life as a seriously pent-up “good girl.” As a lifelong People Pleaser, I had an underdeveloped capacity for drawing boundaries. To remedy that, I learned that I needed to own that I was bringing this dynamic to my marriage; if I didn’t, then I was bound to destroy it and repeat this pattern in another.
Dan had his work, too, to be sure. Marriage is never a one-way street; it takes two people to create a dynamic. Our personal complexes fit hand-in-glove with others who have unconscious complexes running their personalities (as most humans do!). But Dan’s work is not my work; it’s his. And this story is about my work.
The single most powerful action I have taken that has probably saved my marriage has been learning how to draw boundaries with Dan, and letting him know in no uncertain terms when he is violating them, i.e., attacking one of my values. While many women have no problem drawing boundaries, some of us struggle to affirm our basic rights and needs, which in turn interferes with the process of creating and affirming our personal identity. I think of the Stone Witch as being the shadow side of my People Pleaser: by tending to others’ needs and desires in lieu of my own I wasn’t establishing and honoring my boundaries, thereby leaving myself vulnerable to taking in others’ projections, so the Stone Witch had no choice but to awaken and take over.
People-pleasers like me feel that everyone’s happiness or discomfort is our personal responsibility. Over the years I have learned that this largely unconscious part of my personality is a form of control that helps me to feel (erroneously) that I have some power in life vs. the pervasive feeling of powerlessness that sources it. Needing some form of power in the world is necessary for our survival in the natural and human realms, and people-pleasing seemed to keep me safe, so it quickly became an unconscious strategy that I used to succeed in life at the price of taking everything personally along the way.
Accordingly, we pleasers go out of our way to make everyone in our vicinity happy (nice, happy people feel safer than irritable, judgmental people); if someone is grumpy, we reflexively scour our memory to figure out what we did (or didn’t do) to cause it. In constantly busying ourselves tending to others, we have no time to develop our own selves and live our best lives. Therefore, when caught in the sticky web of people-pleasing, anyone within our sphere—relatives, friends, lovers, neighbors, even acquaintances—is subconsciously seen as a time-soaking responsibility and another obstacle to tending to ourselves. Furthermore, if we don’t wake up to our unconscious pandering, we become vulnerable to awakening the Stone Witch in our unconscious and either scaring people off by being uncharitable, irritable, or a downright bitch, or avoiding people altogether and isolating ourselves to a small, controllable domain. If you surprise yourself by suddenly biting off the heads of those you love or withdrawing from social situations, you may be suffering from the same complex.
It has become very clear to me that a big part of my life purpose has been to learn how to stand on my own two feet and face the world unapologetically, with my power fully available to be who I was born to be: this is who I am; this is what matters to me the most; this is what my life is about; I’m not sorry, and it’s not up for debate.
Being able to face the world in this way means that I am integrating this shadow archetype and transforming it into personal power. Rather than hiding in the shadows of fear and lying to ourselves and others about who we are, we can learn to embrace the things about ourselves that make us both unique and all too human at the same time. It’s not our job to carry the weight of another’s happiness nor is it necessary to gain the approval of others; it is our job, however, to know ourselves well and take care of ourselves from the inside out. I believe we’re here to make our signature contribution to the collective and we accomplish that by being true to ourselves, honoring our boundaries, and teaching others how we need to be treated.
In Part III of The Stone Witch Series, we’ll examine how this complex has deep roots in the collective unconscious as a result of generations of patriarchal domination and intergenerational trauma. I’ll put my personal complex into a larger collective context that will help us arrive at compassion for the Stone Witch as we explore what she has endured and how she became a force in the unconscious psyche of so many women.
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING:
Higgins, Christy. “The Stone Witch - Part I.” The Seeker’s Notebook, Oct. 13, 2023, https://www.christyhiggins.com/blog/the-stone-witch-part-i.
Johnson, Robert A. Owning Your Own Shadow. HarperCollins, 1991.
For further reading on emotions see Karla McLaren’s work.