Racism & The Wounded Feminine

Licensed psychotherapist Jenny Hoit writes about How Healing the Mother Wound can help us become Anti-racist:

We were born into systemic racism, into homophobia, into a country that worships power and control over compassion, vulnerability, and connection. We didn’t choose it, but here we are. And we have a choice to do something about it. We have a choice to become ourselves, not just the sum of what we inherited. Individually and collectively, we are being asked to own some extremely painful realities this year: our internalized sense of racism, our culture’s racist policies, our health care practices, just to name a few. I’ll add one more to the list: our wounded feminine (often referred to as the mother wound).

Recently, I’ve started recognizing that healing the wounded feminine may help us become better at being anti-racist as well. This connection feels so important to me that, even though I don’t have any definitive or easy answers, I want to offer something to you now.

The protests of systemic racism coinciding with the global pandemic have been a massive red flag waving in our faces: WE HAVE BIG COMPLICATED PROBLEMS THAT WE MUST ADDRESS. As I heard rubber bullets, sirens, helicopters, glass shattering--my neighborhood falling into chaos--I could no longer shelter myself in my privilege; a word I thought I had understood that was finally starting to become an embodied knowing.

Shame. Curiosity. Rage. Confusion. Fear. Loss. Sadness. Overwhelm. Hope. Anger. Just some of the emotions that I’ve been riding these last few weeks while being in isolation to prevent a spreading disease of a different nature...

As I’ve taken this in, I started seeing parallels in the work I’ve been doing to heal the wounded feminine. Racism and the wounded feminine are siblings born to the abusive white supremacist father patriarchy. There are other siblings, too, such as Homophobia and Xenophobia. The list goes on. Like siblings born into the same traumatized family, they are not the same but they are all raised in the abuse of power and privilege.

[…] The wounded feminine is an injury to a woman’s sense of how she relates to herself and the world. The injury shapes her ideas of who she is supposed to be and what she is supposed to do. It is also a wound to feminine energies that course through all of us, regardless of our gender identity. It’s an injury to our sentience, stillness, nurturance, gentleness, gradualness, empathy, compassion, and intuition. Fierce feminine energies are injured, too, that protect and defend. Our sense of wholeness is injured as well, because without the feminine the magic of feminine-masculine harmony is lost.”

read the full article at astroccult.com