Goddess: Put Your Head Back On
This morning as I was shopping on Amazon for a few necessities, this book title popped into my feed: “The Beheaded Goddess: Daughters of Narcissistic Fathers”. Nothing in my search history would have provided the fodder or reason for it to pop up, but it did and inspired reflection, enough to send me to my blog and my fingers to my keyboard. The book might prove to be a good read and this description I pulled from the online writeup … “an archetypal, mythological, and transferential analysis of the loss of healthy aggression in an adolescent daughter. The specific family researched consists of a narcissistic father, an emotionally unavailable mother, and an adolescent daughter.”
The author was speaking my language! I believe in the power of myth and the importance of the role it plays. I believe in the application of the archetype, it’s what inspired my original journey of transformation and on top of it all … I happen to be a daughter of an emotionally unavailable father. Now there are no coincidences in the world … you can call it “AI” listening in but this random pop up arrived on my screen not an hour after my husband and I were having a conversation about the opportunities that not just lie ahead of us but the opportunities that lie within us. And no, my father never came into the conversation which is why this “books you may like” was so random, but what inspired this post today … so read on.
It was 2011-2012 when I consciously chose to step out of the corporate rat race and move to the heart of the Ocala National Forest settling into the community of a yogic ashram. I became a serious student of higher learning. This was not about going back to college for an MBA, I became a student of mySelf. For the next three years, I was immersed in contemplation, reflection, a deep dive into the proverbial buttons that lie within me. My purpose wasn’t to explore my relationship with others … although trust me, that did surface. My reason for moving there in the first place was to explore the relationship that I had with the person I spent the most time with, me.
Button Number 1.
At first it felt awkward and rather narcissistic to be focused on ME. I had come from a culture of customer service and doing for others … I’d spent the majority of my corporate career living and working on cruise ships, being a part of the best moments of peoples lives. I was a people pleaser. I loved making others happy. So to turn my sights inward, shutting out the world, took some serious self-talk. Days flowed into weeks, weeks into months and months into years as I witnessed others come and go. Some students stayed for a while, and some were so incredibly uncomfortable that they ran off into the night. Hands down, I was persistent … I truly felt like I was on a mission of self-discovery so I continued putting one foot in front of the other in pursuit of emotional and psychological freedom.
I was exhausted from listening to my “inner roommate” tell me that I wasn’t “enough”. I’d spent years listening to it … but also thwarting it and living my life anyway.
Was Button Number 2 or was that an extension of Button Number 1?
This is what you do when you are in self-contemplation and reflection … you begin to recognize the patterns in your life that have become the habits you have formed in order to avoid bumping up against your self-imposed limitations. You don't go back and relive every dark moment of your past … you learn to accept your past, the decisions you made at the time and slowly begin to disconnect with the emotional hooks that have kept you living there. You begin to remove yourself from the self-blame game.
So now we have “locked down, social distancing, shuttered in, self-isolation” ... words that have become the norm in social media and on the news. The words can echo painfully, striking fear into the hearts of extroverts, sending us further down the rabbit hole into sadness, despair, depression. Whether you live alone or share space with another person, the one guarantee is that our “stuff” is going to come up. Without a doubt, tensions will rise, reactions will become stronger because we have the tendency to want to blame someone else when in reality, when you dissolve the original button, your reactions subside and eventually dissolve.
So what I am trying to say is that no one is alone. Your mind is probably telling you that you are … it’s lying to you. We all have inner demons to address, some are more extreme than others. With all of this time in self-isolation, we have the opportunity to dissolve those historical traumas that are stored in our bodies’ muscle memories and free ourselves from the memories that have held us hostage.
Remember that after the Dark Ages came the Renaissance. A time of light, beauty, creativity. This is what is waiting on the other side and it’s there for the taking.