Clarissa Pincola Estes

Like Vasalisa we may try to be nice when we ought to be knowing.

women who are raised in families that are not accepting of their gifts often set off on tremendously big quests— over and over, and they do not know why. They feel they must have three Ph.D,s or that they have to hang upside down from Mount Everest, or that they must execute all manner of dangerous, time-consuming, and money-eating endeavors to try to prove to their families that they have worth.

Women who try to make their deeper feelings invisible are deadening
themselves. The fire goes out.

What should die today? What should live?

When people collapse, they usually slide into one of three feeling states: a muddle (they are confused), a wallow (they feel no one adequately sympathizes with their travail), or a pit (an emotional replay of an old wounding, often an uncorrected and unaccounted-for injustice done to them when they themselves were children).

One of the most important things we can do is to understand life, all life, as a living body in itself, one that has respiration, new cell turnover, sloughing off, and waste material.

This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator.

A woman in such environs will often try to mold her daughter so that she acts “properly” in the outer world—thereby hoping to save her daughter and herself from attack.

Can’t do anything right. Try to make it better. Makes it worse instead.

Some women act as though it is an achievement to be cold. It is not. It is an act of defensive anger.