Image description: Crum Creek in summertime Eastern Pennsylvania, with cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are The Sun and Death.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
In last week's Offering I re-visited a story I'd read several years ago in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves.
In it, a woman is thrown into the sea by her father and becomes a skeleton who haunts the bay. When she gets caught in a fisherman’s net, and eventually receives care from him, she finds the fisher’s warmth hard to trust.
There’s a scene in the story where the fisherman is untangling her bones from his net, gently and meticulously. As he does this, she’s sitting there silently.
She’s concerned—and rightfully so I’d say—about what secrets might seep from her body if she doesn’t stand guard, hitching a ride on a sigh perhaps, or a facial expression.
She’s afraid that if she were to speak, her own essence could be seen and used against her, taken as an invitation for rejection and abuse, as it had been years ago with her father.
You may know, as I do, how common an experience that is; of having been hurt in the past and finding it hard to trust warmth later on.
I don’t remember being particularly bothered by or even curious about this detail in the story the first time I read it. I guess I wasn’t ready then, and I am now.
Images are patient and tend to give a lot when we're patient with them too.
I've had social anxiety a lot of my life. I know that feeling of being stone still and silent when there’s more happening behind my eyeballs and ribcage than I know how to translate.
As some of you know, my ultimate dream is to be an old woman with the right tale for every occasion. And I do wonder if that comes from having spent so many years feeling like the person who’s always doing or saying the wrong thing at parties.
Either way, there's a belief somewhere in there that not being liked is dangerous.
That what had happened to Skeleton Woman—for having, in Estes’ words, “done something of which her father disapproved, although no one any longer remembered what it was”—could happen to me, if I’m not careful.
That I could be dragged to the cliffs and thrown out to sea and then eaten eye-balls first by fish, one bite at a time.
One of the problems with being punished or harmed for sins no one can remember or even confirm truly happened is that when there’s no real feedback about what one did that was so wrong, that wrong has nowhere to go but deep down in the cells.
There it is woven into the fabric of one’s being, which is what we later come to know and refer to as shame. What many of us understand as the self, then—a core, essential identity—feels contaminated in a way, by the violence imposed upon it; laced with an understanding that the self, if not kept under lock and key, is not safe to let out. As if the self were a rabid animal.
Self-domination, or this need to keep oneself under control, is a disturbing thing to think about because of how it can bloom in the wake of interpersonal violence, but also because of its roots in systemic violence.
I think one of the reasons systemic violence is so hard to reckon with is that once you see it you can't unsee it, but it’s so pervasive that if you’re hoping to do something that resembles healing it's hard to know where to start.
A lot of therapists aren’t trained to be with the trouble of it either, and being environmentally entangled humans—as we all are—are so entrenched, too, that the therapeutic relationship becomes a site where dynamics of violence may replicate.
In his book, Constructing the Self, Constructing America, Philip Cushman writes about how in early modern Europe, humans were undergoing a radical shift from spiritual beings, containing souls, “held in the hand of God,” to individuals, containing minds, which were “dependent upon the domination of reason and will over the wild emotions of the body” (1996).
As the capitalist economy was emerging—incapable of doing so without the forces of domination and control—the mind, which was “the instrument of domination,” was becoming closer to synonymous with the self. And since capitalism relies on a mass of people who value individuality and personal independence, whatever coercion was needed, the population would need to retain its sense of personal freedom.
For that reason, Cushman argues that self-domination—as opposed to domination by lords or religious authorities or armies—would rise in prevalence; a conditioning toward self-policing that would keep people in check.
Self-domination required humans to understand themselves as “possessing a mental apparatus that was rational, private, and located inside each individual's brain.” Coercion toward the interests of the ruling class didn’t go anywhere, it just got reframed in the lifting up of personal virtues like self-control and willpower, which "mystified [coercion’s] source and political function” (1996).
You may be wondering what any of this has to do with Skeleton Woman.
If you’ve been hurt in relationships past, but are lucky, you might find yourself in situations like she did: With kind fisher people who prefer to see you free and are willing to put aside their own convenience to ensure that you get there. To sacrifice some, stay focused, work deep into the night.
But even in the best of cases, this fear—that it's not safe to be ourselves—has roots all over. It’s rarely, if ever, just an interpersonal problem and likewise not only systemic. Knowing this as you work to develop a greater degree of ease as yourself in the world will probably trouble any hopes you might have about healing as linear. But I find that it's better not to expect thorny things to be smooth.
As I sat more with the image of Skeleton Woman sitting silently while the fisherman untangled her from his net, I was also reading Jill Freedman and Gene Combs’ book Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities.
As so often happens, I was synchronistically touched by some of their language on the self. This language is relevant to Skeleton Woman because of the way violence often results in the development of a hostile relationship with the self—both for the perpetrator and victim.
Skeleton Woman wants to be who she is, as we all do. But she fears it too. She believes that being who she is will invite danger, as it had long ago with her father.
Freedman and Combs are postmodernists, so they don’t believe in the idea of a true or "essential" self. They argue, "different selves come forth in different contexts" and that "while no self is 'truer' than any other, it is true that particular presentations of self are preferred by particular people within particular cultures" (1996).
If you've been hurt, it’s fair and understandable and even wise in some instances to consider being who you are a liability. In a world like ours, I cannot in good faith tell you, or anyone, that it's safe to be who you want to be at all times. It just isn’t.
What I can say—because I really believe it—is that we are all multitudinous. And as Freedman and Combs point out, what one environment might treat preferentially, another context might be hostile or rejecting to.
So I wonder if it's helpful to think that while it will never be safe to be ourselves in all places, we can seek places that are warm to the selves we most want to be.
And some ways of being are going to be more unsafe in more places. It's worth naming this because naming can strike a match that sparks action which may be a small ripple in a changing tide. Other ways only feel unsafe because we can not forget that long ago we were tossed out to sea for them.
Part of being human, though, I think, is learning to continually ask how likely it is that what happened before is going to happen again now. If not likely, are we open to learning to move differently. And if it is likely, are we able to move elsewhere. And maybe when the answer to that latter question is no, that’s when we have a systemic problem, and where our collective work is cut out for us.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
You’re listening the Offering for August 13, 2022. Weekly Offerings are generally for paid subscribers but this one was for all. As always if you feel moved to share it please do. If you’d like to support these Offerings and in doing so receive them weekly in both text and audio formats, you can upgrade your subscription at the subscribe button below.
Thank you so much for being here. <3
Sources
Combs, G. & Freedman, J. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. W.W. Norton & Company.
Cushman, P. (1996). Constructing the self, constructing America: A cultural history of psychotherapy. Da Capo.
i’ve been reading your offerings daily and they have filled so many gaps in “belonging”-- glue or a salve for failures i contend with, a light in the shadow and the fears that arise from the unknowable. i appreciate your work so much. thank you🕯
This offering really hit home for me.
Thank you.