Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The Emperor by Pamela Colman Smith. In the card, a person is dressed in red and sitting on a concrete throne with rams heads on four of its corners. He is wearing a crown and armor underneath his red robe and shawl. Behind him are golden desert mountains and a thin river running. The roman numeral IV is up top with The Emperor written in all caps down below.
Content warning: Misogyny & patriarchal violence
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
Back in August I wrote an Offering called Self-domination and fear of being yourself. At the time I was thinking about social anxiety and self-acceptance. I shared the story of Skeleton Woman as told by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.
In the story, a woman is killed by her father—thrown off a cliff and plunged into the sea—and then haunts the bay, as a skeleton. I was interested in one small detail from Estés’ telling of the story, which is that Skeleton Woman sits silently as a fisherman whose net she’s been caught in gently and patiently untangles her.
Skeleton Woman’s silence felt learned. A mechanism in the interest of harm-reduction, forged in response to her father’s violence. It remained unclear what she’d done that was so wrong those years ago. As Estes writes, she’d “done something of which her father disapproved, although no one any longer remembered what it was” (1996). And yet her body absorbed his perception of wrongdoing, took it up like food and wove it, seamlessly into the tapestry of safety-seeking behaviors that we often call the personality.
Last weekend, I gave a talk on The Magician. (If you’re a paying subscriber, or want to become one, the approximately forty minute audio and text transcript are up now on the Substack feed.) After the talk there was a q+a session. Someone asked a question about the magician and power, which I stumbled on.
It’s increasingly tough for me to take any word lightly and especially a big word like power. Power feels like it wants a meaning that is meticulous, painstakingly-arrived-to and at the same time fluid. I also recognize that this fixation on semantics may be one of the ways that I do what Skeleton Woman did when she sat silently in a charged moment. By not responding from the heart to a heart-felt question, I hoped to minimize what harm might come from saying the wrong thing.
Anyway, it’s always after the opportune moment that I remember something that would’ve been perfect to share. Later that day I recalled Joanna Macy’s words on power, from her chapter in the Ecopsychology book which I wrote about last summer. Macy doesn't explicitly define power, but does say that that there’s power in the “capacity to suffer with our world” (1995). This is because suffering with others orients us to our mutual belonging, and there’s “power” in that belonging.
Macy’s ideas on power have felt related to the capacity we have to go against something we’ve been conditioned to do. Conditioning seems like an expression of power in that its an imposition of forces with interests that don’t belong to us that then, often imperceptibly, constitute our lives, choices, thoughts, feelings and behaviors (1995).
Some examples: For people who've been socialized for competition, Macy writes that power might involve leaning into empathy, since empathy isn’t considered an asset in competitive environments. If, on the other hand, you’ve been socialized to take on more than your share of emotional labor, power could look like being assertive when it makes others uncomfortable, setting a boundary, or giving feedback when it feels scary to do so.
Skeleton Woman was conditioned through her father’s violence. His outrage taught her to be quiet, no matter what. I see Skeleton Woman sitting silently as an image of what Philip Cushman calls self-domination (1996), a kind of self-policing in which we internalize subjugating forces and surveil ourselves tirelessly in attempts to avoid the risk of further victimization or exile.
In the initial Skeleton Woman Offering, I cited psychotherapists Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, authors of Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities. I was happy to see their names when I went back to read it because I’ve just begun a year-long narrative therapy training with them, which I’m loving. As part of the month’s assignments, I’m reading about Michel Foucault’s analysis of knowledge and power in a book by Michael White and David Epston called Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends.
Foucault’s ideas about knowledge and power involved dominant knowledges—“unitary” and “global” truth claims—which subjugate dissenting truths and relegate them to an under realm or to the edges. Just as Skeleton Woman is plunged deep down into the sea and later holds her tongue knowing that the truths she has can’t be told safely in the open, so it is with knowledges that go against so-called “objective truths” which are generated, packaged and disseminated, to be taken as fact and without question.
For Foucault, it was the recovery of lost details that a rich history of struggle and protest against subjugating forces could be recovered. As these details emerge, “an effective criticism of the dominant knowledges becomes possible…[a criticism whose] validity is not dependent on the approval of the established regimes of thought” (1990).
The detail about Skeleton Woman sitting silently as the fisherman untangles her bones is such a detail—easy to miss, but speaks volumes—and it’s the kind that I’ve learned to look for, in part from years of working with symbols and images, and in part from reading about narrative therapy.
Recovering Skeleton Woman’s killed off or swallowed secrets seems to be one of the primary tasks in narrative work. When we note small details and strengthen them through feeding with attention, we can recover and re-story the under-told truths in our lives.
There’s also a technique called externalizing in narrative work, which is about putting some space between yourself and a problem. Space makes it easier to locate what dominant knowledges might be operating unexamined, making objects of us in the way that unquestioned truths tend to do. Paradoxically, we can reclaim our subjectivity by making our problems into things that are distinct from our selves.
Epston and White ask questions about the beliefs we have about ourselves or others that are confirmed by the continued presence of a particular problem. Perhaps I have an interpersonal betrayal problem, which confirms that my peers are untrustworthy, relationships in general aren’t safe, and I don’t deserve a thing like loyalty. Wherever we find that the problem confirms a personal defect or an expectation we’ve fallen short of, we can be sure a dominant knowledge is involved (1990).
Once we see the dominant knowledges, we can start to look back at how long these alleged truths have been impacting us, and the consequences. One question Epston and White suggest asking is about what the problem requires to survive. If my problem is that I stay silent in social situations because I’m afraid to say the wrong thing, does an inner monologue of comparison, judgment and criticism fuel this problem? What else gives it such a robust and thriving life? And where do these things come from?
In identifying the ways the problem “prompts and compels” us to treat ourselves and others, we can see the “techniques of power” that we’ve been trying to make a life under the weight of (1990). Skeleton Woman was silenced by her father, and the way she later enforced silence upon herself in an intimate moment replicated that.
I have my own lineage of fathers whose weight I live under, but I also have an iPhone, and social media. I see thousands of advertisements a day on average, all of which need me to know that I’m not as good as I could be. It’s honestly no wonder then, when I’m at a party, or a fisherman is untangling my bones from his net, or a person is asking me a question about power in a q+a session—I’m wracked with self-doubt. There’s a voice saying “well you’re alright I guess, but not as good as you could be!”
Another thing we can do, suggest Epston and White, is look for moments when we could have deployed the technique of power, but didn’t. We can “perform meaning”—a phrase that I adore—around those moments; flesh them out like Skeleton Woman’s cheeks and belly filling in as the fisherman slept.
Even if there’s only one time in her life she can recall speaking up when she could have stayed silent, to give value to that moment—pay attention to it—demonstrates a refusal to acquiesce to the silencing imperative, and the capacity to undermine “the ideas that it both reinforces and depends upon for its survival.”
In doing so, Skeleton Woman creates her own “historical account of resistance” (1990). And though I still don’t have a clear definition of power, it feels powerful to imagine my own historical accounts of resistance, timelines to mark the moments of brave struggle against the many imposed “truths” that have constituted my life, despite the fact that I never questioned or would have chosen them for myself.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
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Sources
Cushman, P. (1996). Constructing the self, constructing America: A cultural history of psychotherapy. Da Capo.
Epston, D. & White, M. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. W.W. Norton & Company.
Estés, C.P. (1996). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. Ballantine Books.
Macy, J. (1995). Working through environmental despair. In T. Roszak, M.E. Gomes, A.D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, healing the mind. (pp. 240-259). Sierra Club Books.
Hi Jessica, I have been reading you and listening to you since 2016 I think when i first started delving into the Tarot. My interest was because Im trained as a psychologist and therapist and love the tarot and you brought these together. In 2018 I did a narrative practices course and really found home in its ideas. And often thought how you’d love it :)
Ive been thoroughly enjoying myself listening to you bring the narratives ideas and the tarot together. Its one of those correspondences with so many possibilities. Thank you for your work, your vulnerability, your commitment to these writings. It is always such a joy to listen/read.