Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (50 page)

off. They have hopes and dreams that have been cut off also. Anyone who says otherwise is still asleep. All that is grist for the mill of
descansos.

While all these things deepen individuation, differentiation, growing up and growing out. blossoming, becoming awake and aware and conscious, they are also profound tragedies and have to be grieved as such.

To make
descansos
means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths,
las muertes chiquitas
, and the big deaths,
las muertes
grandotas
, have taken place. I like to make a time-line of a woman’s life on a big long sheet of white butcher paper, and to mark with a cross the places along the graph, starting with her infancy all the way to the present where parts and pieces of her self and her life have died.

We mark where there were roads not taken, paths that were cut off, ambushes, betrayals, and deaths. I put a little cross along the time-line at the places that should have been mourned, or still need to be mourned. And then I write in the background “forgotten” for those things that the woman senses but which have not yet surfaced. I also write “forgiven” over those things the woman has for the most part released.

I encourage you to make
descansos
, to sit down with a time-line of your life and say “Where are the crosses? Where are the places that must be remembered, must be blessed?” In all are meanings that you’ve brought forward into your life today. They must be remembered, but they must be forgotten at the same time. It takes time. And patience.

Remember in “The Crescent Moon Bear” the woman said a prayer and laid the wandering orphaned dead to rest That is what one does in
descansos. Descansos
is a conscious practice that takes pity on and gives honor to the orphaned dead of your psyche, laying them to rest at last.

Be gentle with yourself and make the
descansos
, the resting places for the aspects of yourself that were on their way to somewhere, but never arrived.
Descansos
mark the death sites, the dark times, but they are also love notes to your suffering. They are transformative. There is a lot to be said for pinning things to the

earth so they don’t follow us around. There is a lot to be said for laying them to rest.

Injured Instinct and Rage

Women (and men) tend to try to draw an end to old episodes by saying “I/he/she/they did the best they could.” But to say “they did the best they could” is not forgiveness. Even if true, that peremptory statement cuts off the possibility of healing. It is like applying a tourniquet above a deep wound. To leave that tourniquet on after a time causes gangrene for lack of circulation. Denying anger and pain does not work.

If a woman is instinct-injured, she is typically faced with several challenges regarding rage. First, she often has a problem with intrusion recognition; she is slow to notice territory violations and does not register her own anger until it is upon her. Like the man at the beginning of “The Withered Trees” her temper comes upon her in a kind of ambush.

This lag is the result of instincts injured by exhortations to little girls to not notice dissension, to try to be peacemakers at all costs, to not interfere, and to stand the pain until everything calms down or temporarily goes away. Typically such women do not act upon the rage they feel but jump the gun, or have a delayed reaction weeks, months, or even years later, realize what they should have, could have, would have said or done.

This is usually
not
caused by shyness or introversion but by too much “fifth and sixth guess” thinking, too much trying to be nice to one’s own detriment, and not enough acting from soul. The wild soul knows when and how to act if a woman will only listen. Right response carries insight and right amounts of compassion and strength mixed together. Injured instinct must be arighted by practicing and enforcing strong boundaries and by practicing firm and, when possible, generous responses, but solid ones nevertheless.

A woman may have difficult) releasing anger even when it impedes her own life, even when it causes her to obsessively dwell upon events years old as though they happened yesterday. Dwelling on trauma and doing so intensely for a period of time is

very important to healing. But eventually all injury has to be given sutures and be allowed to heal over into scar tissue.

Collective Rage

Collective anger or rage is also a natural function. There is such a phenomenon as group hurt, group grief. Women who become socially, politically, or culturally conscious often find that they have to deal with a collective rage that seeps upward through them again and again.

It is psychically sound for women to feel this anger. It is psychically sound for them to use this anger about injustice to invent ways to elicit useful change. It is
not
psychologically sound for them to neutralize their anger so they will not feel, so they will therefore not press for evolution and change. As with personal rage, collective anger is also a teacher. Women can consult with it, question it in solitude and with others, and act upon their conclusions. There is a difference between carrying around old ingrown rage and stirring it with a new stick to see what constructive uses can come of it

Collective rage is well utilized as motivation to seek out or offer support, to conceive of ways to impel groups or individuals into dialogue, or to demand accountability, progress, improvements. These are proper processes in the patterns of women coming to consciousness. These are appropriate to their caring about what is essential and important to them. It is part of the healthy instinctual psyche to have deep reactions to disrespect, threat, injury. Devout reaction is a natural and expected part of learning about the collective worlds of soul and psyche.

Stuck in Old Rage

If and when rage again becomes a dam to creative thought and action, then it must be softened or changed. For those who have spent considerable time working through a trauma, whether it was caused by someone’s cruelty, neglect, lack of respect, recklessness, arrogance, ignorance, or even fate, there comes a time to forgive in order to release the psyche to return to a normal state of calm and peace.
¹⁰

When a woman has trouble letting go of anger or rage, it’s often because she’s using rage to empower herself. While that may have been wisdom at the beginning, now she must be careful, for ongoing rage is a fire that bums her own primary energy. To be in this state is like speeding through life “pedal to the metal”; trying to live a balanced life with the accelerator pressed all the way to the floor.

Neither is the fieriness of rage to be mistaken as a substitute for a passionate life. It is not life at its best; it is a defense that, once the time of needing it for protection is past, costs plenty to keep. After a time it bums interminably hot, pollutes our ideas with its black smoke, and occludes other ways of seeing and apprehending.

Now I’m not going to tell you a big, fat lie and say you can cleanse all your rage today or next week and it will be gone forever. The angst and torment of times past rise up in the psyche on a cyclical basis. Although a deep purging discharges most of the archaic hurt and rage, the residue can never completely be swept clear. But it should leave a very light ash, not a hungry fire. So the clearing of residual rage must become a periodic hygienic ritual, one that releases us, for to carry old rage beyond the point of its usefulness is to cany a constant, if unconscious, anxiety.

Sometimes people become confused and think that to be stuck in an outdated rage means to fuss and fume and to act out and toss and throw things. It does not mean that in most cases. It means to be tired all the time, to carry a thick layer of cynicism, to dash the hopeful, the tender, the promising. It means to be afraid you will lose before you open your mouth. It means to reach flashpoint inside whether you show it on the outside or not. It means bilious entrenched silences. It means feeling helpless. But there is a way out, and it is through forgiveness.

“Oh, argh, forgiveness?” you say. Anything but that? But you know in your heart that someday, sometime, it will come to that.

It may not come until the deathbed time, but it will come. Consider this: Many people have trouble with forgiveness because they have been taught that it is a singular act to be completed in

one sitting. That is not so. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. In our culture there is a notion that forgiveness is a 100 percent proposition. All or nothing. It is also taught that forgiveness means to overlook, to act as though a thing has not occurred. This is not true either.

A woman who can work up a good 95 percent forgiveness of someone or something tragic and damaging almost qualifies for beatification, if not sainthood. If she is 75 percent forgiving and 25 percent “I don’t know if I ever can forgive fully, and I don’t even know if I want to,” that is more the norm. But 60 percent forgiveness accompanied by 40 percent “I don’t know, and I’m not sure, and I’m still working on it,” is definitely fine. A level of 50 percent or less forgiveness qualifies for work-in-progress status. Less than 10 percent? You’ve either just begun or you’re not really trying yet.

But, in any case, once you’ve reached a bit more than halfway, the rest will come in time, usually in small increments. The important part of forgiveness is
to begin and to continue.
The finishing of it all is a life work. You have the rest of your life to work at the lesser percentage. Truly, if we could understand all, all could be forgiven. But for most people it takes a long time in the alchemical bath to come to this. It is all right. We have the healer, so we have the patience to see it through.

Some people, by innate temperament, are more easily able to forgive than others. For some it is a gift, for most it has to be learned as a skill. Essential vitality and sensitivity seem to affect the ability to pass things off. High vitality and high sensitivity do not always allow wrongs to be passed off easily. You are not bad if you do not forgive easily. You are not a saint if you do. Each to her own, and all in due time.

To truly heal, however, we must say our truth, and not only our regret and pain but also what harm was caused, what anger, what disgust, and also what desire for self-punishment or vengeance was evoked in us. The old healer of the psyche understands human nature with all its foibles and gives pardon based on the telling of the naked truth. She not only gives second chances, she most often gives many chances.

Let us look at four levels of forgiveness. These stages I’ve

developed and used in my work with traumatized people over the years. Each level has several layers. These can be dealt with in whatever order and for however long one desires, but I’ve listed them in the order I encourage my own clients to begin working.

Four
Stages
of Forgiveness

FOREGO
¹¹

To begin to forgive, it is good to forego for a while. That is, to take a break from thinking about the person or event for a while. It is not leaving something undone, but rather more like taking a vacation from it. This prevents us from being exhausted, allows us to strengthen in other ways, to have other happiness in our lives.

This is good practice for the final letting go that comes with forgiveness later on. Leave the situation, memory, issue as many times as you need to. The idea is not to overlook but to become agile and strong at detaching from the issue. To forego means to take up that weaving, that writing, to go to that ocean, to do some learning and loving that strengthens you, and to allow the issue to drop away for a time. This is right, good, and healing. The issues of past injury will bedevil a woman far less if she assures the wounded psyche that she will give it healing balms now and deal with the entire issue of who caused what injury later.

FOREBEAR
¹²

The second phase is to forebear, particularly in the sense of abstaining from punishing; neither thinking about it nor acting on it in small or large ways. It is extremely useful to practice this kind of containment, for it coalesces the issue into one place instead of allowing it to flow everywhere. This builds focus toward the time when one proceeds to the next steps. This does not mean to go blind or dead and lose self-protective vigilance. It means to give a bit of grace to the situation and see how that assists.

To forebear means to have "patience, to bear up against, to channel emotion. These are powerful medicines. Do as much as you can. This is a cleansing regime. You need not do all; you can choose one, such as patience, and practice that. You can refrain from punitive uttering, muttering, from acting resentful, hostile. To refrain from unnecessary punishing strengthens integrity of action and soul. To forebear is to practice generosity, thereby allowing the great compassionate nature to participate in matters that have previously caused emotion ranging all the way from minor irritation to rage.

FORGET
¹³

To forget means to aver from memory, to refuse to dwell— in other words, to let go, to loosen one’s hold, particularly on memory. To forget does not mean to make yourself brain-dead. Conscious forgetting means letting go of the event, not insisting it stay in the foreground, but rather moving it off a stage, allowing it to be relegated to the background.

We practice conscious forgetting by refusing to summon up the fiery material, we refuse to recollect. To forget is an active, not a passive, endeavor. It means to not haul up certain materials or turn them over and over, to not work oneself up by repetitive thoughts, pictures, or emotions. Conscious forgetting means willfully dropping the practice of obsessing, intentionally outdistancing and losing sight of it, not looking back, thereby living in a new landscape, creating new life and new experiences to think about instead of the old ones. This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.

FORGIVE
¹⁴

There are many ways and portions to forgiving a person, a community, a nation for an offense. It is important to remember that a “final” forgiveness is not surrender. It is a conscious decision to cease to harbor resentment, which includes forgiving a debt and giving up one’s resolve to retaliate. You are the one who decides when to forgive and what ritual to use to mark the event. You decide what debt you will now say needs not be paid further.

Some choose blanket pardon: releasing a person from any

r
estitution
now or ever. Others choose to call a halt to redress in process, abandoning the debt, saying whatever has been done is done, and the payback is now enough. Another kind of pardon is to release a person without his having made any emotional or other sort of restitution.

To some, a finalizing of forgiving means to regard the other
indulgency
, and this is easiest with regard to relatively benign offenses. One of the most profound forms of forgiveness is to give compassionate aid to the offending person in one form or another.
¹⁵
This
does not mean you should stick your head in the snake’s basket, but instead respond from a stance of mercy, security, and preparedness.
¹⁶

Forgiveness is the culmination of all foregoing,
forbearing
, and forgetting. It does not mean giving up one’s protection, but one’s coldness. One deep form of forgiveness is to cease excluding the other, which includes ceasing to stiff-aim, ignore, or act coldly toward, insisting on being neither patronizing
nor phony. It is better for the soul-psyche to closely limit time and repartee with people who are difficult for you than to act like an unfeeling mannequin.

Forgiveness is an act of creation. You can choose from many time-honored ways to do it. You can forgive for now, forgive till then, forgive till the next time, forgive but give no more chances— it’s a whole new game if there’s another incident. You can give one more chance, give several more chances, give many chances, give chances only if. You can forgive part, all, or half of an offense. You can devise a blanket forgiveness. You decide.
¹⁷

How does one you know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to remember to say about it all. You understand the suffering that drove the offense to begin with. You prefer to remain outside the milieu. You are not waiting for anything. You are not wanting anything. There is no lariat snare around your ankle stretching from way back there to here. You are free to go. It may not have turned out to be a
happily ever after
, but most certainly there is now a fresh
Once upon a time
waiting for you from this day forward.

CHAPTER 13

Battle Scars:
Membership in the Scar Clan

Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better.

There are oceans of tears women have never cried, for they have been trained to carry mother’s and father’s secrets, men’s secrets, society’s secrets, and their own secrets, to the grave. A woman’s crying has been considered quite dangerous, for it loosens the locks and bolts on the secrets she bears. But in truth, for the sake of a woman’s wild soul, it is better to cry. For women, tears are the beginning of initiation into the Scar Clan, that timeless tribe of women of all colors, all nations, all languages, who down through the ages have lived through a great something, and yet who stood proud, still stand proud.

All women have personal stories as vast in scope and as powerful as the
numen
in fairy tales. But there is one kind of story in particular, which has to do with a woman’s secrets, especially those associated with shame; these contain some of the most important stories a woman can give her time to unraveling. For most women, these secret stories are her own personal ones, embedded, not like jewels in a crown, but like black gravel under the skin of the soul.