The Patriarchy Will Shame You for Trying to Heal
Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
By: Lisa M Hayes
The patriarchy will shame you for trying to heal.
It’s a war for your soul.
After the pain, the betrayal, the disbelief, the shock –
after you go through it, steep in the aftermath, struggle to find your balance, your breath, and yourself –
after the trauma, the processing trauma, the disorientation of living with trauma –
some of us will go numb and fold in on ourselves, comfortably predictable, politely functional but dying or already dead on the inside, struggling to pretend we can forgive – and they will see us dying, boiling silently in a soup of our shame and say, “You, you’re a good girl.”
Others of us will come to a breaking point of rage, and the sacred heat of that rage will rise like a boundary out of hell.
The lucky ones who can no longer smile appropriately through the gauntlet will devolve into their primordial, deranged phase of
fuck it,
fuck you,
fuck this,
no fucking more –
and in that brilliant inferno, the tipping point, that moment of dropping the veil and looking straight into the abyss of your anger, you summon your strength and begin to heal.
And they will tell you that if you silently swallow your pain and pride, quietly sucking down your suffering, you are somehow winning the game and doing it right – being appropriate and polite is pretty.
If you can just tow the line and be predictable no matter what’s happened or is happening, be the good girl, be the strong, stoic woman – then and only then can you be worth something in a system that does not value you.
They will look at the woman who is letting her rage burn off,
who is done with the shit,
who has turned the corner and is no longer carrying the weight for anyone else’s behavior or crimes –
and they will tell her she is ugly, mad, broken, bitter, and even more useless than she was before.
But what they don’t want to admit about her is she is healing,
she is dying and rebirthing herself,
she is ascending,
she is finding her voice, her strength, her armor, and her purpose.
That woman is fueling her journey with the rage of her grandmothers, and she is done doing anything for him, for them –
she will not barter with her peace, her integrity, or her soul anymore.
She is warming herself by the heat of her fury, and she feels fine.
They want you quiet and compliant.
They would rather burn you at the stake than let you heal BECAUSE a healed woman cannot be controlled.
She is wild.
She is no longer for sale.
She is a force of nature.
Your rage is your medicine.
It will carry you to wholeness.
You are safe with your anger.
Let yourself slip into the fire-
then you can rise
purified, beautiful, brilliant, and free.
Confluence Daily is the one place where everything comes together. The one-stop for daily news for women.
Lisa is an LOA Relationship Coach. She helps clients leverage Law of Attraction to get the relationships they dream about and build the lives they want. Lisa is also the founder of The Coaching Guild where the world’s best coaches are trained.
