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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
, 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.
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.
, 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.
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.
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.
, 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.
, 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.
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. |
Women’s groups have gathered