Healing Women’s Broken Relationship With Power
Healing Women’s Broken Relationship With Power
A Manifesta: Eve Reimagined
Throughout history, stories about women have severed us from an authentic relationship with our own power, because women have not been the storytellers. Let’s change that, shall we?
Powerlessness As Narrative
In my years coaching women negotiating the path to power in their lives and careers, I’ve noticed something important. Regardless of the challenges they face, even the most successful women suffer from narrative mindsets that drag them towards powerlessness, mindsets that prevent too many capable women from ever achieving meaningful power in the first place.
These mindsets are pernicious, producing a reality for women they cannot escape because they are told it is who they are by virtue of the body they were born into.
Take the Imposter Syndrome, the name given to a feeling of inadequacy most women experience when given greater responsibility outside their comfort zone. A syndrome is a medical term that identifies a disease buried in the cells and genes of your body. A person does not escape a syndrome. A person is forced to accommodate and incorporate a syndrome as a defining characteristic of their being, if not their identity.
But a core sense of inauthenticity—the essence of the imposter syndrome—is not a function of anyone’s identity or being, and it plagues men as well as women. It is a set of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors, all of which can be changed. But the powerful narrative our culture tells women, by virtue of calling it a syndrome, is that they have this inauthenticity-with-power gene buried in their XX chromosomes and that they cannot rip it out of themselves without becoming unfeminine, undesirable, and unworthy.
With this fictional syndrome posing as reality throughout history, our media, and many of our relationships, too many women have internalized the belief that when they achieve power in the world, they don’t deserve it. They believe that once they admit to having power, they will be exposed and shamed as false and that the powerful person they see on their LinkedIn bio is not who they truly are.
When a woman or any human being is this splintered from her personal source of power—the belief in herself—removing every single barrier to success in the outside world will achieve little change.
The Stories That Bind Us
Where does this cultural story that powerful women are frauds derive? Where do the other stories which shackle us in our own minds and hearts originate? Must the answer be that a woman’s natural state is powerlessness?
For years, I’ve looked for the answer to these questions in business research. I’ve sought wisdom from academic and professional service companies that track the trends of how we live and work. Decades of institutional research:
unveiled the imposter syndrome
quantified the financial motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus
revealed the non-promotable and invisible work traps
calculated the pay and wealth gaps
validated the women-work-more-produce-more/are paid less and rated higher-but-promoted-less phenomenon
exposed the double standards women struggle to navigate at work and in life
But documenting that a thing exists is not the same as illuminating where it came from or how to change it. And it’s no wonder that these esteemed sources don’t go to the narrative source of women’s powerlessness, because it lies in the tangled roots of millennia of abuse. Like a disease woven into the DNA of humanity, female power has been the subject of a human history of violence of every kind: moral, physical, sexual, cultural, reputational, legal, financial, emotional, and spiritual.
We all know the stories, true and mythical, about how women have been abused throughout history. Some of them we slough off as mere fiction and others we believe are true. Horrible as they are, these stories are not as fundamental as the underlying narratives that try to justify why the robbery of power from women’s identities is acceptable and even justified. And it is these foundational stories that lie at the root of our powerlessness, morphing and evolving through our collective consciousness with each new generation.
No story rationalizing the abuse against women is as core to our vision of ourselves in Western society as the story of Eve, the archetypal woman of the modern era. The story of Eve is seminal, not only because its biblical telling is foundational to all the Abrahamic religions, but even more so because of the way modern Western cultural and legal codes have used and evolved the myth of Eve to justify defining women as the ultimate and original sinner, responsible for every failing of men and humanity.
By blaming Eve, the original institutions of Western moral and legal power have justified centuries of shame, pain, and disempowerment suffered by women.
To learn more about Eve’s story and why I chose her as the symbol of women’s challenges, read this post: Eve as Archetype.
Eve’s Suffering Through Time
But that is ancient history. How did the defamation of mythical Eve thousands of years ago affect the women we are today?
Eve’s story has been at the core, either directly or symbolically, of virtually every foundational narrative about women’s core nature that disempowers us today. Eve’s original victimization in 410 C.E. by Augustine of Hippo has reverberated through the ages, infecting our Western cultural narrative with every diseased story about women we live with today.
One example of such a foundational story is that women are intrinsically irrational and overly emotional due to their fluctuating hormones, a punishment meted out on Eve by God when she and her husband were cast out of the Garden of Eden. This fiction weaves its way throughout history like a disease, and its untruths are now coming to light thanks to new medical research that does not treat women as broken men, but as unique beings dealing with unique physiological dynamics. But because, according to the ancient narrative, women are irrational simply by virtue of our physical god-given composition, many people hold a bias that tells them women cannot be trusted with big decisions or major resources. And this limits women’s opportunities to rise into high levels of leadership.
Normal, healthy human emotions, like anger and frustration, have been so vilified in women that the narrative now gaslights the entire human race into believing at some visceral level that when women have power, everyone is in danger. If you hear that the pilot of your airplane is a woman, and you feel even the slightest subconscious twinge of discomfort, you are infected with this narrative.
Today, millions of women model the fact that emotional volatility is no more present in women than men, and thus no more likely to lead to poor decisions in women than in men. Today we have research that tells us women demonstrate comfort and prudence with risk similar to men, regardless of which day of the month they have to make a decision. But the stereotype holds firm, in part because women are judged more harshly for mistakes, requiring them to prove themselves professionally over and over again, bearing extra burdens at home and in the office, an effort that exhausts and drains their energy, denying them the support they need to achieve great things.
The vilification of women's emotions, which began before Eve and became codified into our culture through her story, leaves millions of modern women watching with confusion while modern men are lauded for having the emotional intelligence to contain their anger or display moderate amounts of empathy. Meanwhile, women themselves are given little credit, not only for managing a majority of their own emotions in and around hormonal surges that shift and change through their lives but doing so at the same time they are expected to perform emotional labor to protect other people’s emotions, and especially to ensure men do not become angry.
Eve’s Burden
In my experience and practice working with a wide variety of women finding their power, knowledge of the double standards, practice with mindset shifts, and examples of those who have successfully navigated such tricky territory to power are essential to helping individual women access their own version of power. Each woman must dredge up her own version of the litany of the beliefs that disable her, that have broken her relationship with her power, and that needs careful tending and mending to heal. Each individual woman can transform these wounds—deep and shallow—into fresh, inspiring, and enabling stories that propel her to her next challenge.
This journey is not easy. Every woman who takes even the smallest steps of this journey must push past a deluge of cultural messages. These reminders of her powerlessness tell her that, according to everyone but her, as a daughter of Eve, she is truly broken and can never be fixed enough to deserve and retain power. To proceed towards power, she is obliged to tune out what well-meaning people tell her every day: her parents, her partner, and her brothers and sisters. She must ignore, reframe, and fight against what she sees on every screen and takes into her heart through most of the stories she enjoys.
But her individual work must be supported by broader efforts to reconnect the story of all women to the power they earn by showing up as half the human race. For more women to heal their own broken relationships with power, we must make this social journey easier and more accessible. We must also make the cultural roots of female disempowerment clearer to people who are not in a woman’s body but who want to help, easing their efforts to support her.
Reimagining Eve
Having begun this journey in 2012, documenting modern women’s challenges in the workplace and helping to InPower them, I want to turn my attention now to this larger story, illuminating the deep, historically based narratives and beliefs about the archetypal woman that we must slog through to achieve our own growth. I want to trace the origins of the stories that plague us today, uprooting Eve’s underlying diseases manifesting in symptoms like the Imposter Syndrome and over-emotionalism. I want to research the diseases themselves, to understand where their roots first twisted into humanity’s collective consciousness, to expose those ugly, twisted ropes of rot to the sunlight, and from them, discover new life and new possibilities.
Obsessing on the past only mires us in the past, but the past is key to change. What came before holds reference points to fundamental truths that must be rejuvenated through change. Each diseased narrative about women holds a kernel of truth, a genetic code we cannot escape and must reframe in order to heal ourselves and our broken relationships with power. In reimagining healthy relationships with power with each other, we can birth empowering stories about these truths for all women, to pass on to our daughters and sons.
For example, women’s expansive emotional range, which has damned us with the narrative of irresponsibility with risk, is rooted in our fundamental hormonal cycles and our ability to bear and nurture children. We must now reimagine a new relationship with the emotional tools our hormones give us--to see our hormones as gifts empowering us to infuse emotional intelligence more broadly into human cultures and workplaces. By peeking back in time to shine the light of knowledge on where the misguided myths came from, we can free ourselves from their fiction, still masquerading as truth in our culture and our minds.
But change does not take place in the past. Transformation happens when we are so entranced with the promise ahead that we will risk everything to grasp and stumble for the treasure waiting just beyond our sight. So I intend to go there, too, painting real, hopeful, fictional, and reimagined visions of what we could believe about women to see them in their power as vividly as I can. Most importantly, I will bring real women along on this journey with me. I will provide a platform and support to help those interested in retelling their own story to heal their broken relationships with power and to find more power in the world as a result.
I will do my best to connect both the past and the possible future narratives of Eve to the symptoms I see us struggling with today, to offer healing beliefs that give women a bridge to their power, moving beyond the broken stories that manifest as the Imposter Syndrome, double standards, body shame and so much more.
I'll start by finding the twisted roots of the cultural diseases holding women captive to unfounded narratives of identity and potential, beginning with Eve herself. My intention is to research and reimagine Eve in ways that allow women and men to reclaim her strengths and support her human frailties without damning her to powerlessness.
I do not know where this journey will take me, but I am excited to begin, and I hope you will join me.
Dana Theus
Executive Coach
InPowerCoaching.com
Connect with Dana on LinkedIn
Notes to Readers
A Note About Women’s Bodies
Like most professional women I know, I’ve spent my entire adult life and career divorcing myself from my body, justifying this cleavage in the diseased narratives that women should be ashamed of their physical needs and desires, and that work and home are two separate places in a person’s life and should not overlap.
Like many who’ve struggled with body shame or flirted with and succumbed to burnout, I’m done with these false divisions. But more importantly, I’m done pretending that a woman’s body does not belong in the workplace as a unique and valuable asset. Untangling the roots of the narrative that women’s bodies are merely broken versions of the ‘correct’ human male body will be part of this journey because it must be.
Eve was not cast out of the garden because she failed to deliver a software project on time when her kid was sick. She was cast out and blamed for the downfall of man because of her authentic desire to understand the miracle of creation her body could support. The hormonal patterns that underlay her power to host the miracle of life were framed as punishment and damnation when they are, in reality, the burden and joy of continuing the human race for our species.
We cannot resurrect and reimagine the potential of women in the office, at home, or in society without investigating and reimagining new ways of thinking about women’s bodies.
So I will go there, as uncomfortable and confusing as that journey may be for me and everyone who chooses to come along. I will do my best to flag uncomfortable topics for those who do not wish to, or are triggered by, that part of the journey, but I will no longer turn away from it.
A Note To People Who Are Not In A Woman’s Body
I am very aware that the dynamic I mention here--of untelling and reimagining ourselves as distinct from the cultural narratives that entrap us--is a human phenomenon. It defines the process of individuation and maturation that humans in society transition through as we grow and evolve.
Anyone who does not inhabit a woman’s body may well relate to the challenges of confronting cultural stories that limit them. Men’s narratives do not allow them the full range of emotional expression they need for a healthy inner and social life, and threaten to penalize them for speaking out against sexism. Many people who are not white struggle to gain vision outside the dominant cultural paradigm to see beyond the white gaze, just as women often struggle to see beyond the male gaze, the white male gaze being so predominant in our culture.
Each of us struggles to evolve our own narrative beyond that which was given to us at birth and continues to reinforce itself in our environment. But the narratives themselves differ. A white woman fights to see beyond the white male gaze, while a black woman bears double the burden, struggling against both the male gaze and the white gaze in unique ways. People who are not white struggle with different narratives based on whether their heritage includes the traumas of enslavement, what part of the world they were born into, and the particular cultures they live in today, as we all do.
While I wish I could solve all these problems for humanity, I am not so bold. I am going to focus on what I need to focus on, which is reimagining Eve for modern women of every hue. I will do what I can to support Adam and my colleagues of color with compassion and hope, but they are not my challenge alone. I will do what I can to mend the divide between white women and black women that plagues our collective efforts for justice. I welcome all people into my life who are on parallel missions, and perhaps together, we can reimagine humanity at its most fundamental level. But for me, right now, I am on the brink of launching this new framework for myself and the women and men seeking to heal their broken relationships with feminine power. For me right now, these other battles are a problem for another day.
A Note On Religion
I am spiritual, but not religious. I’m very interested in the myths and stories that have evolved us and evolved with us through time to create the worldview we all carry inside ourselves today. Many of these myths originated in religious frameworks, but I view them as cultural narratives, not religious doctrines.
I choose Eve to symbolize the heritage of archetypal, modern, Western women because the religious stories of her are so historically seminal, infecting our cultural consciousness, governance, and legal systems for thousands of years. I cannot and will not engage on the subject of Eve as a religious figure, but only as a metaphorical character in our culture. For this reason, you will not see me engage in religious theology or doctrine.
I know Eve is important to many people for many reasons, and I do not wish to disrespect anyone’s views of her or religious institutions that claim to know her truth. Please do not take offense, and do not assume my intent is to offend. I invite anyone genuinely interested in exploring the stories and beliefs about women in our culture, including spiritual beliefs, into a genuine, open, and curious dialog. If that is not what you seek, move on in peace, but please move on.