The process of unlearning to be the good girl is the process of reconnecting to our power center
Conditioned from childhood to repress parts of ourselves for nourishment.
Food, care, attention – we find it quite normal to continue repressing our true nature for “nourishment” as grownups.
When we are disconnected from our power center, intuitive knowing and self-esteem, we are not aware that we can respond to our own needs.
Whether in business dealings or personal relationships we automatically go into the mode of manipulation to get others to give us what we need.
We manipulate them by controlling their impression of us through shape-shifting to fit in and lack of authentic self-expression.
Becoming a woman for me has been the process of unlearning to be the good girl.
I became a woman when my integrity became more important to me than propriety.
When I started listening to my own voice, changing up the rules, no longer waiting for others to provide their preferences or to choose for me.
When my opinion of self became more important than outside validation.
When I realized that I no longer want to resent people I love, and started taking better care of my own needs.
When I allowed myself to stand in my naked truth, being okay with the discomfort it sometimes produced in others.
I became a woman when I understood that people I love may come and go.
I was raised to believe that love from another will heal my wounds.
That my husband will resolve all practical issues and love me better than my father did, like the brother I never had.
Having been educated in the USA, I was well-versed in feminist ideas and became financially independent at 22.
But when I got married at 24, somehow all of that independence completely evaporated and I unconsciously became someone else.
I stepped into a role of a wife. The heavy and completely unsuitable to me baggage of women in my family’s history became expressed in me.
Something happened when I married.
I lost myself.
I was no longer the savvy, accomplished and independent young woman.
I morphed into a woman driven to please, programmed through my parents’ dysfunctional relationship, inherited survival mechanisms, and ancestral trauma passed on to me through both my maternal and paternal lineage.
Now I see that I’m not the only one.
No matter how independent and self-sufficient we may be in our lives, when it comes to romantic relationships, we almost automatically fall into disempowering patterns, driven and manipulated by our unconscious drives, unhealed wounds.
Looking for love in all the wrong places
We tend to look for love in words or gestures, in courting symbols on which so much of relationship advice is based.
But have you ever found yourself in a situation where you finally received the coveted words of love, but they did not produce the resulting feeling you craved?
It’s because many of us are never able to break through the surface to connect deeply.
The emotional intimacy and safety we seek happen beyond language. It is the product of emotional attunement and exchange in the moment.
Many of us living with trauma and disconnected from our bodies are not able to create safe emotional attunement, while we harbor frozen parts within.
