The Stone Witch — Part IV
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 covered in my previous post, The Stone Witch Part III, patriarchal societies have historically limited the acceptable expressions of women, often forcing them into “good girl” roles in which it is their main (and often only) responsibility to be sexually attractive (but not sexually empowered), give birth, raise children, and feed and nurture the tribe. When combined with early life trauma, this cultural structure can easily result in one becoming a “people-pleaser” who feels that everyone’s satisfaction in her sphere is her responsibility. I am one of those women; or rather, I used to be. (Now I’m something in-between.)
I spent decades being the “good girl,” but when I’d had enough and couldn’t play a role anymore, I felt a gathering rage within me that I would project in grand fashion onto those who were closest to me, often hurting or driving away the people I cared about most. It’s as though the energy of the Stone Witch gets activated when there’s too large an imbalance of the energies between my light and dark sides. When I start to fall into unconscious “good girl” behavior (whereby I don’t check in with myself about my truth, but play “nice” rather than face the world honestly) the shadow of that lie comes as a crack of thunder from a brewing inner storm; when rage gets activated it comes fast. If I can’t find an appropriate outlet for it, that same unexpressed energy gets heavy and morphs into depression.
For years, I blamed my mother’s bad moods and ill-tempered eruptions for causing the same behavior in me. But I’ve learned that this “bad witch” who lurks in the shadows of our psyches isn’t personal to us; rather, she is handed down through families as a result of intergenerational trauma. When my parents divorced very early in my life and my father continued to struggle with addiction and mental illness, I erroneously thought I was the cause. Children naturally adopt their family’s narratives, life experiences, beliefs, and coping strategies. As pack animals, we are designed to learn from our forebears, come what may. My father’s addiction and my mother’s reactions to the tremendous challenges of becoming a single mother (and provider) were not the result of moral failings, they were playing out the traumas of their lives, and in doing so, unwittingly passed their anxieties and neuroses on to me. (Despite earlier impulses to blame them, I now believe they each did their best in difficult circumstances, and that I might not have done much better had I been in their shoes).
And so, before I could even speak, the volatility in my home was teaching me to walk on eggshells. That inclination led to pleasing at all costs the people I was dependent upon for survival, and people-pleasing became my unconscious strategy for survival that I am still challenged with healing five decades later.
My nervous system was trained from an early age and let me tell you, it’s not easy changing a nervous system! To do so, we have to first challenge our narratives, our personal stories. Thankfully, humans are resilient, adaptive, and malleable, and we are capable of overcoming our self-destructive patterns. But it takes work—shadow work, to be specific.
We start by asking what do we value so much that when someone doesn’t recognize, respect, or honor us we feel violated and/or enraged? If you don’t know what you value, what you stand for, and who you are, then people can easily take advantage of you by violating that which matters most deeply to you.
I’ve learned that if we don’t speak our truth, raise our voices, and draw our boundaries when something begins to trigger our highly intelligent internal alarm system, we are vulnerable to repressing our greatest strengths and turning our power over to others, and, tragically, against ourselves. Fittingly, this collective fear of speaking up that many women suffer from, of claiming their power, and drawing boundaries, has been dubbed the “witch wound,” which refers to the deep trauma in the feminine psyche from thousands of years of patriarchal domination. This intergenerational trauma that gets passed down through family lines is the result of women having been punished on pain of death for being empowered and wise.
Adversity happens to all of us , and much of the results of it gets hidden in our shadow. In shadow work, we challenge the psychological narratives we invent as a result of those events. As I’ve looked more deeply at my own People Pleaser-Stone Witch Complex, I have come to see more of what has been hidden from my view; namely, my interpretation of what happened, or the filter of my perception.
I have been victimized numerous times in my life, and it was scary, disorienting, and traumatizing. I didn’t know how to process or talk about the things that happened to me with the adults in my life, so the inner meaning I assigned to those events went unchecked. For example, my unconscious interpretation of my father’s addiction and my parents’ divorce was that I had somehow been responsible. It’s not logical, but is a common reaction of the children of divorced parents. Believing that I was the root of the discord I was experiencing, I felt a deep shame to the core of my being. Bad things weren’t happening around me; I was the bad thing that was happening to others. I was to blame for all of the pain and hurt that I felt around me, and eventually for the fracturing of my family. For over fifty years, I have unconsciously been carrying the blame for all that took place between the people I loved most in the world; it’s been a psychologically and physically expensive misunderstanding, to be sure (see list of health conditions in Part II).
Of course, the truth is that I am not to blame for any of it. We all did our best in difficult circumstances, and no one person is to blame for the way things unfolded in my family. My parents are responsible for their actions, but not for how I interpreted them.
I love both of my parents deeply and wish only grace and beauty for them in all their remaining days and beyond. I’m grateful to feel that way now but it’s taken me a while; three decades’ worth of intermittent therapy, transformational education coursework, contemplation of life’s big questions, and self-reflection coping with undiagnosed PTSD. Thankfully, along the way, I found the forgiveness I had been searching for all along. Forgiveness has afforded me a much better view of all that I have to be grateful for, most especially to my parents who brought me into this life experience where I’ve had the opportunity to heal my soul.
In recent years, we have come a long way in our understanding of trauma, which has given us new definitions of its various forms and effects, such as Intergenerational Trauma and Complex-PTSD (which has more to do with recurring traumas in our most important relationships than a single war-time experience). This deeper understanding of trauma and how we project it onto the screen of our perceptions can help us reclaim the parts of us we lost in our suffering. We don’t have to suffer in our relationships, but we do need to make the effort to understand ourselves and others in a deeper and more compassionate way. We are profoundly complex beings with so much yet to understand and realize about our internal psychic structure and how we create our suffering through the meaning we attach to our traumatizing experiences.
In the fifth and final installment of The Stone Witch Series, I’ll discuss how we are tasked with healing that which we inherited through our families and how art can be a powerful tool for discovering unconscious shadow parts of ourselves. Left unacknowledged, our shadow can create a vicious cycle of contempt, anger, and disconnection within ourselves and in our closest relationships. In the process of healing ourselves, however, we can start to re-direct what was once the sabotaging intentions of the Stone Witch and use the same energy to consciously create our highest aspirations in life using our feminine power.
LINKS:
The Stone Witch - Part I, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins
The Stone Witch - Part II, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins
The Stone Witch - Part III, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins