Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (33 page)

Trap
#7:
Faking It, Trying to be Good
,
Normalizing the Abnormal

As the tale goes on, the girl is chastised for wearing the red shoes to church. Now, though she gazes up at the red shoes on the shelf, she does not touch them. She has, to this point, tried going without her soul-life; that did not work. Next, she tried sneaking a dual life; that did not work either. Now, in a last-ditch stand, she “tries to be good.”

The
problem with “being good” to th
e extreme is that it does not resolve the underlying shadow issue, and again, it will rise like a tsunami, like a giant tidal wave, and rush down, destroying everything in its path. In “being good,” a woman closes her eyes to everything obdurate, distorted, or damaging around her, and just “tries to live with it.” Her attempts to accept this abnormal state further injure her instincts to react, point out, change, make impact on what is not right, what is not just.

Anne Sexton wrote about the fairy tale “The Red Shoes” in a poem also called
“The Red Shoes”:

I stand in the ring

in the dead city

and tie on the red shoes...

They are not mine.

They are my mother’s.

Her mother’s before.

Handed down like an heirloom but hidden like shameful letters.

The house and the street where they belong are hidden and all the women, too, are hidden...

Trying to be good, orderly, and compliant in the face of inner or outer peril or in order to hide a critical psychic or real-life situation de-souls a woman. It cuts her from her knowing; it cuts her from her ability to act. Like the child in the tale, who does not object out loud, who tries to hide her starvation, who tries to make it seem as though nothing is burning in her, modem women have the same

disorder, normalizing the abnormal. This disorder is rampant across cultures. Normalizing the abnormal causes the spirit, which would normally leap to correct the situation, to instead sink into ennui, complacency, and eventually, like the old woman, into blindness.

There’s an important study that gives insight into women’s loss of self-protective instinct. In the early 1960s, scientists
¹⁶
conducted animal experiments to determine something about the “flight instinct” in humans. In one experiment they wired half the bottom of a large cage, so that a dog placed in the cage would receive a shock each time it set foot on the right side. The dog quickly learned to stay on the left side of the cage.

Next, the left side of the cage was wired for the same purpose and the right side was safe from shocks. The dog reoriented quickly and learned to stay on the right side of the cage. Then, the entire floor of the cage was wired to give random shocks, so that no matter where the dog lay or stood it would eventually receive a shock. The dog acted confused at first, and then it panicked. Finally the dog “gave up” and lay down, taking the shocks as they came, no longer trying to escape them or outsmart them.

But the experiment was not over. Next, the cage door was opened. The scientists expected the dog to rush out, but it did not flee. Even though it could vacate the cage at will, the dog lay there being randomly shocked. From this, scientists speculated that when a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.
¹⁷

In terms of the wildish nature of women, it is this normalization of violence, and what scientists subsequently termed “learned helplessness,” that influences women to not only stay with drunken mates, abusive employers, and groups that exploit and harass them but causes them to feel unable to rise up to support the things they believe in with all their hearts: their art, their loves, their lifestyles, their politics.

The normalizing of the abnormal even when there is clear evidence that it is to one’s own detriment
¹⁸
to do so applies to all battering of the physical, emotional, creative, spiritual, and instinctive natures. Women face this issue any time they are stunned into doing anything less than defending their soul-lives from invasive projections, cultural, psychic, or otherwise.

Psychically, we become used to the shocks aimed at our wild natures. We adapt to violence against the psyche’s knowing nature. We try to be good while normalizing the abnormal. As a result, we lose our power to flee. We lose our power to lobby for the elements of soul and life we find most valuable. When we are obsessed with the red shoes, all kinds of important personal, cultural, and environmental matters fall by the wayside.

There is such loss of meaning when one gives up the life made by hand that all manner of injuries to psyche, nature, culture, family, and so forth are then allowed to occur. Hie harm to nature is concomitant with the stunning of the psyches of humans. They are not and cannot be seen as separate from one another. When one group talks about how wrong the wild is, and the other group argues that the wild has been wronged, something
is
drastically wrong. In the instinctive psyche, the Wild Woman looks out on the forest and sees a home for herself and all humans. Yet others may look at the same forest and imagine it barren of trees and their pockets bursting with money. These represent serious splits in the ability to live and let live so that all can live.

When I
was a child in the 1950s, in the early days of industrial disgraces against the earth, an oil barge sank in the Chicago Basin of Lake Michigan. After a day at the beach, mothers scrubbed their little children with the same fervor they usually reserved for scrubbing wooden floors, for their children were stained with oil globs.

The oil wreck oozed a goo that traveled in great sheets like floating islands as long and wide as city blocks. When these collided with jetties, they broke into gobbets, and sank into the sand and drifted into shore under the waves. For years swimmers could not swim without being covered with black muck. Children building castles would suddenly scoop up a handful of rubbery oil. Lovers could no longer roll in the sand. Dogs, birds, water life, and people all suffered. I remember feeling that my cathedral had been bombed.

Injury to instinct, normalizing the abnormal, is what allowed mothers to wipe the stains of that oil spill, and later, the further sins of factories, refineries, and smelters, off their little children, their laundry, the insides of their loved ones as best they could, and while confused and worried, the women effectively cut away their rightful rage. Not all but most had become used to not being able to intervene in shocking events. There were formidable punishments for breaking silence, for fleeing the cage, for pointing out wrongs, for demanding change.

We can see from similar events that have occurred over our lifetimes that when women do not speak, when not enough people speak, the voice of the Wild Woman becomes silent, and therefore the world becomes silent of the natural and wild too. Silent, eventually, of wolf and bear and raptors. Silent of singings and
dancings
and creations. Silent of loving, repairing, and holding. Bereft of clear air and water and the voices of consciousness.

But back in those times, and too often today, even though women were infused with a yearning for a wild freedom, they continued outwardly to rub SOS on porcelain, using caustic cleansers, staying, as Sylvia Plath put it, “tied to their Bendix washing machines.” There they washed and rinsed their clothes in water too hot for human touch and dreamt of a different world.
¹⁹
When the instincts are injured, humans will “normalize” assault after assault, acts of injustice and destruction toward themselves, their offspring, their loved ones, their land, and even their Gods.

This normalizing of the shocking and abusive is refused by repairing injured instinct. As instinct is repaired, the integral wild nature returns. Instead of dancing into the forest in the red shoes until all life becomes tortured and meaningless, we can return to the handmade life, the wholly mindful life, re-make our own shoes, walk our walk, talk our own talk.

While it is true that there is much to learn by dissolving one's projections (you’re mean, you hurt me) and looking at how we are mean to ourselves, how we hurt ourselves, this should definitely not be the end of the inquiry.

The trap within the trap is thinking that everything is solved by dissolving the projection and finding consciousness in ourselves. This is sometimes true and sometimes not. Rather than this either/or paradigm—it’s either something amiss out there or something awry with us—it is more useful to use an and/and model. Here* is the internal issue
and
here is the external issue. This paradigm allows a whole inquiry and far more healing in all directions. This paradigm supports women to question the status quo with confidence, and to not only look at themselves but also at the world that is accidentally, unconsciously, or maliciously pressuring them. The and/and paradigm is not meant to be used as a blaming model, a blaming of self or others, but is rather a way of weighing and judging accountability, both inner and outer, and what needs be changed, applied for, adumbrated. It stops fragmentation when a woman seeks to mend all within her reach, neither slighting her own needs nor turning away from the world.

Somehow many women are able to maintain themselves in a captured state, but they live a half life or a quarter life or even an nth life. They manage, but may become bitter to the end of their days. They may feel hopeless, and often, like a babe who has cried and cried with no human aid forthcoming, they may become deathly silent, and despairing. Fatigue and resignation follow. The cage is locked.

Trap
#
8
;
Dancing Out of Control
,
Obsession and Addiction

The old woman has made three errors in judgment. Though she is supposed to, in the ideal, be the guardian, the guide of the psyche, she is too blind to see the true nature of the shoes she herself paid for. She is unable to see the child becoming enchanted by them or to see through the character of the man with the red beard waiting near the church.

The old man with the red beard gave the soles of the child’s shoes a tippy-tap-tap, and this itchy vibration set the child’s feet to dancing. She dances now, oh how she dances, except she cannot stop. Both the old woman, who is supposed to act as guardian of the psyche, and the Child, who is meant to express the joy of the psyche, are sundered from all instinct and common sense.

The child has tried it all: adapting to the old woman, not adapting, sneaking, “being good,” losing control and dancing off, regaining herself and trying to be good again. Here her acute starvation

of soul and meaning forces her to once more grasp for the red shoes, strap them on, and begin her last dance, a dance into the void of unconsciousness.

She has normalized a dry cruel life, thereby setting up more yearning in her shadow for the shoes of madness. The man in the red beard has brought something to life, but it is not the child; it is the torturous shoes. The girl begins to whirl and twirl her life away in a manner that, as with addiction, does not bring bounty, hope, or happiness, but trauma, fear, and exhaustion. There is no rest for her.

As she whirls into a churchyard, there is a spirit of dread there who will not allow her to enter. The spirit pronounces this curse over her. “You shall dance in your red shoes until you become like a wraith, like a ghost, till your skin hangs from your bones, till there is nothing left of you but entrails dancing. You shall dance door to door through all die villages and you shall strike each door three times and when people peer out they will see you and fear your fate for themselves. Dance red shoes, you shall dance.” The spirit of dread thereby seals her into an obsession that parallels an addiction.

The lives of many creative women have followed this pattern. As a teenager, Janis Joplin tried to adapt to the mores of her small town. Then she rebelled a little, climbing the hills at night and singing out from them, hanging out with “artistic types.” After her parents were called to school to account for their daughter’s behaviors, she began a double life, acting outwardly unassuming but sneaking across the state line at night to hear jazz. She went on to college, became quite ill from various substance abuses, “reformed,” and tried to act normal. Gradually, she began drinking again, put together a little dirt band, dabbled in drugs, and strapped on the red shoes in earnest. She danced and danced till she died of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven.

It was not Joplin’s music, her singing, or her creative life finally sprung loose that killed her. It was lack of instinct to recognize the traps, to know when enough was enough, to create boundaries around her own health and welfare, to understand that excesses break small psychic bones, then larger ones, until finally the entire underpinnings of psyche collapse and a person becomes a puddle instead of a powerful force.

She needed only one wise inner construct that she could hold on to, one shred of instinct that would last until she could begin the time-consuming work of rebuilding inner sense and instinct. There is a wild voice that lives inside all of us, one that whispers, “Stay here long enough ... stay here long enough to revive your hope, to drop your terminal cool, to give up defensive half-truths, to creep, carve, bash your way through, stay here long enough to see what is right for you, stay here long enough to become strong, to try the try that will make it, stay here long enough to make the finish line, it matters not how long it takes or in what
style...”

ADDICTION

It is not the joy of life that kills the spirit of the child in “The Red Shoes,” it is the lack of it. When a woman is unconscious about her starvation, about the consequences of using death-dealing vehicles and substances, she is dancing, she is dancing. Whether these are such things as chronic negative thinking, poor relationships, abusive situations, drugs, or alcohol—they are like the red shoes, hard to pry a person away from once they’ve taken hold.

In this compensatory addiction to excess, the old dry woman of the psyche plays a major role. She was blind to begin with. Now she takes ill. She is immobile, leaving a total void in the psyche. There is no one to talk sense to the excessive psyche now. Eventually the old woman dies altogether, leaving no safe ground in the psyche at all. And the child dances. At first her eyes are rolled back in her head in ecstasy, but later, as the shoes dance her to exhaustion, her eyes are rolled back in horror.

Within the wild psyche are a woman’s fiercest instincts for survival. But, unless she practices her inner and outer freedoms regularly, submission, passivity, and time spent in captivity dull her innate gifts of vision, perception, confidence, and so forth, the ones she needs for standing on her own.

The instinctual nature tells us when enough is enough. It is prudent and life-preserving. A woman cannot make up for a lifetime of betrayal and wounding through the excesses of pleasure, rage,

or denial. The old woman of the psyche is supposed to call time, is supposed to say when. In this tale, the old woman is kaput; she is done for.

Sometimes it is difficult for us to realize when we are losing our instincts, for it is often an insidious process that does not occur all in one day, but rather over a long period of time. Too, the loss or deadening of instinct is often entirely supported by the surrounding culture, and sometimes even by other women who endure the loss of instinct as a way of achieving belonging in a culture that keeps no nourishing habitat for the natural woman.
²⁰

Addiction begins when a woman loses her handmade and meaningful life and becomes fixated upon retrieving anything (hat resembles it in any way she can. In the story, the child tries again and again to reunite with the diabolical red shoes, even though they increasingly cause her to lose
control. She has lost her power of discrimination, her ability to sense what the nature of a thing really is. Because of the loss of her original vitality, she is willing to accept a deadly substitute. In analytical psychology we would say she has given the Self away.

Addiction and ferality are related. Most women have been captured at least for a brief time, and some for interminably long periods. Some were free only
in
útero.
All lose varying amounts of instinct for the duration. For some the instinct which senses who is a good person and who is not is injured, and the woman is often led astray. For others, ability to react to injustice is slowed way down and they often become reluctant martyrs poised to retaliate. For still others the instinct to flee or to fight is weakened and they are victimized. The list goes on. Conversely, a woman in her right wildish mind rejects convention when it is neither nurturing nor sensible.

Substance abuse is a very real trap. Drugs and alcohol are very much like an abusive lover who treats you well at first and then beats you up, apologizes, gives you nice treatment for a while, and then beats you up again. The trap is in trying to hang in there for the good while trying to overlook the bad. Wrong. This can never work.

Joplin
began carrying out the wildish wishes of others as well. She began to carry a kind of archetypal presence that others were

afraid to carry for themselves. They cheered on her rebelliousness as though she could free them by becoming wild
for them.

Janis made one more try at conformity before she began a long slide into possession. She joined the ranks of other powerful but hurt women who found themselves acting as flying shamans to the masses. They too became exhausted and fell from the sky. Frances Farmer, Billie Holiday, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Judy Garland, Bessie Smith, Edith Piaf, and Frida Kahlo—sadly, the lives of some of our favorite role models of wild and artistic women ended prematurely and tragically.

A feral woman is not strong enough to carry a longed-for archetype for everyone else without breaking. A feral woman is supposed to be immersed in a healing process. We don’t ask a recovering person to carry the piano upstairs. A woman who is returning has to have time to strengthen.

People who are grabbed and taken away by the red shoes always initially feel that whatever substance it is that they are addicted to is a tremendous savior in one sense or another. Sometimes it gives a sense of fantastic power, or a false sense that they have the energy to stay awake all night, create until dawn, go without eating. Or perhaps it allows them to sleep without fearing demons, or calms their nerves, or helps them not care so deeply about all the things they care so deeply about, or maybe it helps them not want to love and be loved anymore. However, in the end, it only creates, as we see in the tale, a blurred background whirling by so fast that no real life is truly being lived. Addiction
²¹
is a deranged Baba Yaga who eats up lost children and drops them off at the executioner’s door.

At the Executioner’s House

Trying to Take Shoes
Off,
Too Late

When the wildish nature has been nearly exterminated, in the most extreme cases, it is possible that a schizoid deterioration and/or psychosis may overwhelm the woman.
²²
She may just suddenly stay in bed, refuse to rise, or wander around in her bathrobe, absently leave cigarettes burning three to an ashtray, or cry and not

be able to stop, wander in the streets with her hair disheveled, abruptly leave her family to wander. She may feel suicidal, she may kill herself either accidentally or with purpose. But far more commonly, the woman just goes dead. She doesn’t feel good or bad; she just doesn’t feel.

So what happens to women when their vibrant psychic colors are mushed all together? What happens when you mix scarlet, sapphire, and topaz all together? Artists know. When you stir vibrant colors together, you get a color called mud. Not mud that is fertile, but mud that is sterile, colorless, strangely dead, that does not emit light When painters make mud on the canvas they must begin all over again.

This is the hard part; this is where the shoes have to be cut off. It hurts to cut oneself away from an addiction to self-destruction. Nobody knows why. You’d think a captured person would be relieved to have turned this comer. You’d think they would feel saved in the nick of time. You’d think they would rejoice. But no, instead they go into a funk, they hear teeth gnashing, and discover they’re the ones making that noise. They feel they are bleeding somehow, even though there is no blood. Yet, it is this pain, this severing, this “not having a foot to stand on,” so to speak, this no home to go back to, that is exactly what is needed to start over, to start fresh, to go back to the handmade life, the one careful and mindfully crafted by us every day.

Yes there is pain in being severed from the red shoes. But being cut away from the addiction all at once is our only hope. It is a severing that is filled with absolute blessing. The feet will grow back, we will find
chit
way, we will recover, we will run and jump and skip again some day. By then our handmade life will be ready. We’ll slip into it and marvel that we could be so lucky to have another chance.

Returning to A Life Made by Hand,
Healing Injured Instincts

When a fairy tale ends as this one does, with a death or dismemberment of the protagonist, we ask, How could it have ended differently?

Psychically, it is good to make a halfway place, a way station, a considered place in which to rest and mend after one escapes a famine. It is not too much to take one year, two years, to assess one’s wounds, seek guidance, apply the medicines, consider the future. A year or two is scant time. The feral woman is a woman making her way back. She is learning to wake up, pay attention, stop being naive, uninformed. She takes her l
ife in her own hands. To re-learn
the deep feminine instincts, it is vital to see how they were decommissioned to begin with.

Whether the injuries be to your art, words, lifestyles, thoughts, or ideas, and if you have knitted yourself up into a many-sleeved sweater, cut through the tangle now and get on with it. Beyond desire and wishing, beyond the carefully reasoned methods we love to talk and scheme over, there is a simple door waiting for us to walk through. On the other side are new feet. Go there. Crawl there if need be. Stop talking and obsessing. Just do it.

We cannot control who brings us into this world. We cannot influence the fluency with which they raise us; we cannot force the culture to instantly become hospitable. But the good news is that, even after injury, even in a feral state, even, for that matter, in an as yet captured state, we can have our lives back.

The psychological soul-plan for coming back into one’s own is as follows: Take extra special caution and care to loose yourself into the wild gradually, setting up ethical and protective structures by which you gain tools to measure when something is too much. (You are usually already very sensitive to when something is too little.)

So the return to the wild and free psyche must be made with boldness, but also with consideration. In psychoanalysis we are fond of saying that to be trained as a healer/helper it is as important to learn what not to do as it is to learn what to do. To return to the wild from captivity carries the same caveats. Let us take a closer look.

The pitfalls, traps, and poisoned baits laid out for the wildish woman are specific to her culture. Here I have listed those that are common to most cultures. Women from differing ethnic and religious backgrounds will have additional specific insights. In a symbolic sense, we are composing a map of the woods in which we

live. We are delineating where the predators live and describing their modi operandi. It is said that a single wolf knows every creature in her territory for miles around. It is this knowledge that gives her the edge in living as freely as possible.