Women’s groups have gathered every day and forever all over the planet. We do much vital, extraordinary work that keeps the world moving round and round. Like Mother Nature, the woman’s group is a force alone unto herself—a holding power—one whose destructive power equals her creativity, whose wrath can annihilate, and whose abiding love regenerates. Just as a woman’s body grows in a uniquely female way, a woman’s group follows her own unique developmental trajectory. When a woman’s group is able to stay within the currents of her own legacy of inherited female authority, she is capable of remaining centered in her own way of being and she stays on her own course. She is her own river with her own clear and present dangers—a natural blend of native skills and wild knowing. She lives by her own laws, rather than by the official male-defined canon of group dynamics theory.

Life in the all-female field is a thrilling blend of interwoven relational textures and an intricate and naturally elegant field of interdependence. The web we weave must be defined as an elementally female metaphor. The loom is the unconscious structure that holds interactions between the content and the process of the group life. All the patterns of a woman’s group-life weave backwards into her belly—the navel of us all—the womb of the World Mother from whose silk we eventually appear here and now. The cellular memory of uterine-holding lingers inside the unconscious connective tissue of the woman’s group. Longing to return to the locus of eternal sameness, each of us carries the cellular memory of the time before, the time when all human life was still female. We were all one—but today all is not well.

Unconscious global misogyny is woven into the deepest level of consciousness in the woman’s group because woman-hating and women-fearing dynamics are lodged in women as well as in men. Each individual woman and each woman’s group is forever reckoning with the aftershocks and reverberations of those secretive, ancient planetary waves of misogynist consciousness. We could pass the blame onto the men but that is too simple. We ourselves take each other down and out long before our men friends get to work on us. We have developed such a complicated interlocking set of collusive behaviors in our woman’s group processes that we see to it that none of us gets too far, too big, or too brilliant. In spite of the so-called global woman’s movement, not much has changed in the way we do business with each other. Part of my intention in this work is to dislodge some of the debilitating thought-forms that cause us to disbelieve each other, to turn against each other and to take each other down when we really need to be about the vital work of believing in each other, supporting our brilliance and our feminist values.

While a good woman’s group is good medicine for our collective global woman’s pain, a bad one is dangerous. That bad one exudes a lethal poison that sickens the chambers of the heart and weakens the contextual fiber of the global woman’s community. We need help in understanding why we get in trouble with each other. We have to learn how to stay out of the very predictable troubled waters of our own deeply guarded secretive misogyny. But the old navigational charts do not serve us here. We can no longer refuse to know our way around our own territory. We have to find our way—the way is in our bones and in our devotion to each other and within our collaborating wisdom. This territory is complex and difficult to navigate and we need well informed leaders—women who can see through the mists, ride in the winds and steady the boat as the group falls into her own undertow.

Whether a particular group of women has an explicit task to accomplish or not, there are always implicit behavioral contracts, unconscious psychological agreements and deep-seated patterns of meaning swimming in the historical undercurrents of any woman’s group-life. Since group dynamics theory is still male-identified for the most part, these theories do not really help us with our own intense relational field of awareness. Tourist handbooks offering maps of the domain abound. We have too many workbooks on being a woman, compilations of exercises to do with a group of women, checklists for the leader of a woman’s group. They all fail to define the territory and instead offer maps that lead to mutual ambush. The map of women’s ways is not useful if the territory is drawn through a male-identified telescope that does not mirror the behavior patterns of women. The assumptions inherent in mixed-gender group dynamics are simply not an accurate mirror for the dynamic weave of an all female system. The organic individual development issues and the larger questions of how women exist together are reflections of complex global, political, and archetypal trends. They cannot be defined in conventional psychological terms only for we need political analysis as well.

All too often the work in the woman’s group arrests herself at the individual level of naive personal storytelling, attachment to individual biographies, and investment in staying wounded. On the other extreme from the individual level of work, we see huge archetypal behavior patterns leading whole groups of women into the swamp. Since these patterns are in the connective tissue of female identity, both the Good Mother and the Terrible Mother will always be equally present in the group mind. The Wicked Sister, the Tyrannical Daughter comes with the mix as well, along with the Good Daughter and the Good Sister. Each, of course, contains her opposite. The fundamental laws of nature prevail here so, for every easy event, there will be a difficult one, for each delight-filled laugh, a groan and for each breath of freedom, a constricting gasp. Then the group will implode into self-annihilating depression and soon after explode into discontent and deterioration—leaving home, quitting and blaming. Paradise becomes Hell in a breath. The leaders feel the turn of the wheel and are tied onto it as part of the work of group level transformation. This is neither martyrdom nor sacrifice.

Instead it is a predictable, manageable offering of spiritual strength and accumulated faith in the benevolent process. But when the leaders lack understanding and complex skills, the group goes down swearing, raging and blaming the leader—perpetuating the unconscious myths of female inadequacy. When the leadership interventions into the live process of the group lack a clarity of understanding about this all-female dynamic, those interventions, whether they are verbal or nonverbal, will be couched in language and behaviors which are not a good enough mirror of the all-female process. In this instance, the group will not experience herself as adequately mirrored. It is more destructive in the end to present a wrong mirror to a woman’s group than to offer a cracked mirror. What results in the face of the wrong mirror is a group that will mature, but she will mature in such a way that she replicates the pattern of being father’s daughters eternally attached to male-identified thought patterns. The leadership in this case models an unconscious internalized sexism, which oppresses the brilliance of individual women and of the life-force of the group herself. She does this unaware and in order to maintain the status quo-security of personal and collective inferiority. Her investment in maintaining the repressive status quo is another mirror of her deeply held misogyny. If the leadership team is stuck in her own jealousy and envy, the group will break up into girl’s gangs and drive the splits in too deeply for survival. If the team is arrested in unconscious patterns of misogyny, the group swamps in inertia, depression, cynicism, dropouts and despair. So she often turns against herself and takes herself down and away from public leadership and the other leaders collude, not from malice but from unknowing, and the group follows suit. Erasure. The dilemma we see in the self-effacing pattern in a woman’s group process-group is just a mirror of the tenacious planetary patterns that annihilate the re-emergence of female authority. Both the group herself and her leaders fail to thrive.

But often, even when the woman’s group has a good enough mirror of herself, she cannot stay her own course. There are many reasons for this failure to move forward. This failure to thrive is not because she doesn’t know her own mind. It is because the voices of reason are swiftly blown out of earshot by the rougher winds of her own interwoven internalized oppression and the group falls into her own undertow and starts behaving in ways that will help her to erase her own brilliance. She will eclipse her competence, she will her knowing and as she takes herself under, she believes that her ways are functional—but they are not functional. Instead, they are anesthesia for her vision, her voice and will. Self-opiating, she lulls herself into a false security, imagines that she is doing the deeper work and numbly trudges on feeling heavier and heavier under the narcotic effect of her own collusion with the misogynist part of her own psyche.

Since on the whole, we are over-civilised and over-domesticated women, our instincts are often asleep and medicated. The wilder female self is steadily disappearing from the collective consciousness—everywhere. Perhaps this is the price of civilization. In our cells we remember that the dominant blessing in the natural law of the all-female system is maternal, female and benevolent and dense with wild natural forces—like hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tidal waves. Usually, the woman’s group and her leaders are terrified of entering these dangerous realms where the laws of culture have no control. Here again, if the leadership is asleep on the job of opening the memory of natural law, the group will fall into sleep as well and the women in the group will practice a model of conflict aversion, a pattern of keeping the fires down and crying over all signs of intense scorching heat and bone-chilling icebergs. This style of leadership leads to an immune system deficiency in which all members of the group settle for less than full access to their full life force—a slow, steady attrition of the life force, an eventual depressive fade-out.

There is a discernible pattern of growth however and this pattern leads to the embodiment of full female authority at all levels. We all know it. What is naturally true as a growing girl’s body will also be true in the imaginal body of a woman’s group. A female developmental cycle will reproduce itself in the developmental sequence of the female group-process. By staying close to the laws of female biology, we will discern some basic laws of women’s group-process. These natural laws reveal certain predictable phases of group life. They also prepare us for certain predictable difficulties in the relational field between the women and an exploration of these natural laws as they relate to a woman’s group-process is the fundamental purpose of this work. The tension between the laws of women’s culture and nature spins the weave of woman’s group life.

Our own pattern of making meaning contains a deeply instinctual internal bond to the life of the eternal female spirit. Underneath her narcotized silence, the woman’s group will always be true to the eternal necessities even under the most exigent repressive political climates, the worst of which she encounters as she looks in her own mirror and acknowledges how she ravages her brilliance and defiles her natural law. Her excruciation lies firmly in her capacity to acknowledge that she will try to kill off the strong and wise parts of herself and the strength and wisdom she sees in others. Each individual woman and woman’s group is forever reckoning with the aftershocks and reverberations of those secretive, ancient planetary waves of misogynist consciousness.

Slowly and over much time, the blurry images of understanding unfold into some distant clarity and then particular patterns will become comprehensible and take on different meanings. Slowly, each of us who is interested in seeing our own patterns and making meaning out of them and leading women’s groups will be able to understand the implications of these patterns and begin to see through a distinctly female identified template. When we remember to lean into the laws of nature, we remember that destructive forces are not naturally evil. Here we can easily see that jealousy, envy and rivalry—the natural laws of female culture are not but rather a set of feeling states that can support or destroy the fullness of the all-female system. What we have to do is understand the function of these visitations of intense affect-states and let ourselves experience them as fully as possible. Then we are able to place what we learn in the service of what we hold holy.

Several times in the past 20 years, in the very small sphere of my own work life, I have seen the finest of women taken down by small groups of envious, jealous, competitive women. These women are stuck together in treacly cliques, feeding each other’s hostile projections and acting out from inside their biographies and they persist in projecting their unfinished sister-shit and mother-muck all over the woman who dares to stand up and stand out, doing herself publicly. I see only one way through this dreadful manifestation of internalized sexism. We have to become experts in the practice of high-level accountability for in lifting shame and blame from the reality of our mortal female truth we see that we are no different from the male humans—mortal, prejudiced and internally oppressing ourselves, we collude and pretend we don’t. Awareness alone is the key to forward motion and awareness, the largest word in the human context.

As women, we contain all the capacity to do the harm that we blame on men. We can perpetrate as much evil as the war-mongers we criticize and we are as abusive to each other as we invent the men to be. We speak self-righteously from our own unconscious high moral ground and I don’t think these patterns will ever dissolve because, as archetypes, they are both internal and eternal. All we can do is to learn to see ourselves more clearly and to manage our toxic waste and share our brilliance. Lifting shame and blame, we become more accountable to each other in our various collaborations and we can stand with each other and back each other up. We can stop backbiting for we no longer need to kill our strong.

© Akmerrill 2005
please read and share with women who might be interested in this thinking.