Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (51 page)

Secrets as Slayers

Over my twenty-year practice, I’ve listened to thousands of “secret stories,” stories that, in the main, were kept hidden for many years, sometimes for almost a lifetime. Whether a woman’s secret is shrouded in self-imposed silence, or whether she has been threatened by someone more powerful than she, she deeply fears disenfranchisement, being considered an undesirable person, disruption of relationships that are important to her, and sometimes even physical harm if she reveals her secret.

Some women’s secret stories are about having told a bald-faced lie or having done a purposeful meanness that caused someone else trouble or pain. However, in my experience, these are rare. More women’s secrets revolve around having violated some social or moral code of their culture, religion, or personal value system. Some of these acts, events, and choices, particularly those related to women’s freedom in any and all arenas of life, were often held out by the culture as being shamefully wrong for women, but not for men.

The problem of secret stories surrounded by shame is that they cut a woman off from her instinctive nature, which is in the main, joyous and free. When there is a black secret in the psyche, a woman can go nowhere near it, and in fact protects herself from coming into contact with anything that will remind her of it or cause her already chronic pain to crest to an even more intense level.

This defensive maneuver is common, and, as in the aftereffects of trauma, secretly influences women’s choices in what she will or will not undertake in the outer world: which books, films, or events she will or will not involve herself with; what she will or won’t laugh about; and what interests she gives herself to. In this sense, there is an entrapment of the wild nature which ought to be free to do, be, look into whatever it likes.

Generally, secrets follow the same themes found in high drama. These are some of the themes of secrets: betrayal; forbidden love; unsanctioned curiosity; desperate acts; forced acts; unrequited love; jealousy and rejection; retribution and rage; cruelty to self or others; disapproved desires, wishes, and dreams; disapproved sexual interests and lifestyles; unplanned pregnancies; hatred and

aggression; accidental death or injury; broken promises; loss of courage; loss of temper; incompletion of something; inability to do something; behind-the-scenes intervention and manipulation; neglect; abuse; and the list goes on, most of the themes falling under the category of the sorrowful error.
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Secrets, like fairy tales and dreams, also follow the same energy patterns and structures as those found in drama. But secrets, instead of following the heroic structure, follow the tragic structure. The heroic drama begins with a heroine on a journey. Sometimes she is not psychologically awake. Sometimes she is too sweet and doesn’t perceive danger. Sometimes she has already been mistreated and makes the desperate moves of a captured creature. However she begins, the heroine eventually falls into the clutches of whatever or whoever, and is sorely tested. Then, through her wit and because she has people who care for her, she is freed and stands taller as a result.
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In a tragedy the heroine is snatched, forced, or drives straight into hell and is subsequently overwhelmed. No one hears her cries, or else her pleas are ignored. She loses hope, loses touch with the preciousness of her life, and collapses. Instead of being able to savor her triumph over adversity, or her wisdom of choices and her endurance, she is degraded and deadened. The secrets a woman keeps are almost always heroic
dramas
that have been perverted into tragedies that go nowhere.

But there is good news. The way to change a tragic drama back into a heroic one is to open the secret, speak of it to someone, write another ending, examine one’s part in it and one’s attributes in enduring it. These learnings are equal parts pain and wisdom. The having lived through it is a triumph of the deep and wild spirit.

The shame-filled secrets women carry are old, old tales. Any person who has kept a secret to her own detriment has been buried by shame. In this universal plight, the pattern itself is archetypal: the heroine has either been forced to do something or, through the loss of instinct, has been trapped into something. Typically, she is powerless to aright the sad condition. She is in some way sworn or shamed into secrecy. She complies for fear of loss of love, loss of regard, loss of basic subsistence. To seal the secret further, a curse

is placed upon the person or persons who would reveal it. A terrible something or other is threatened if the secret is ever revealed.

Women have been advised that certain events, choices, and circumstances in their lives, usually having to do with sex, love, money, violence, and/or other difficulties rampant in the human condition, are of the most shameful nature and are therefore completely without absolution. This is untrue.

Everyone makes poor choices in words or deeds before they know any better and before they realize what the consequences will be. There is nothing on this planet or in this universe that is outside the bounds of forgiveness. Nothing. “Oh no!” you’re saying, “this
one
thing I did is totally without pardon.” I said
nothing
that a human may have done, is doing, or might do, is outside the bounds of forgiveness. Nothing.

The Self is not a punitive force that rushes about punishing women, men, and children. The Self is a wildish God who understands the nature of creatures. It is often hard for us to “act right,” especially when the basic instincts, including intuition, are cut away. Then it is difficult to speculate on outcome before, rather than after the fact. The wildish soul has a deeply compassionate side that takes this into account.

In the archetype of the secret, an enchantment of sorts is cast tike a black net across part of a woman’s psyche, and she is encouraged to believe that the secret must never be revealed, and further, she must believe that if she does reveal it all decent persons who come across her shall revile her in perpetuity. This additional threat, as well as the secret shame itself, causes a woman to carry not one burden but two.

This sort of enchantment threat is a pastime only among persons inhabiting a small and black space in their hearts. Among persons of warmth and love for the human condition, quite the opposite is true. They would help to draw out the secret, for they know it makes a wound that will not heal until the matter is given words and witness.

The Dead Zone

The keeping of secrets cuts a woman off from those who would give her love, succor, and protection. It causes her to carry the

burden of grief and fear all by herself, and sometimes for an entire group, whether family or culture. Further, as Jung said, keeping secrets cuts us off from the unconscious. Where there is a shaming secret, there is always a dead zone in the woman’s psyche, a place that does not feel or respond properly to her own continuing emotional life events or to the emotional life events of others.

The dead zone is greatly protected. It is a place of endless doors and walls, each locked with twenty locks, and the
homunculi
, the little creatures in women’s dreams, are always busy building more doors, more dams, more security, lest the secret escape.

There is no way to fool the Wild Woman, however. She is aware of the dark bundles in a woman’s mind that are tied round and round with ropes and bands. These spaces in a woman’s mind do not respond to light or grace, so covered over are they. And, of course, since the psyche is greatly compensatory, the secret will find its way out anyway, if not in actual words, then in the form of sudden melancholias, intermittent and mysterious rages, all sorts of physical tics, torques, and pains, dangling conversations that end suddenly and without explanation, and sudden odd reactions to movies, films, and even television commercials.

The secret always finds its way out, if not in direct words, then somatically, and most often not in a way that it can be dealt with and helped in a straightforward manner. So what does the woman do when she finds the secret leaking out? She runs after it with great expenditure of energy. She beats, bundles, and burrows it back down into the dead zone again, and builds larger defenses. She calls her
homunculi
—the inner guardians and ego defenders—to build more doors, mote walls. The woman leans against her latest psychic tomb, sweating blood and breathing like a locomotive. A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman.

My
nagynénik,
aunts, used to tell a little story about this matter of secrets. They called it
“
Arányos
Haj,
Golden Hair, The Woman with Hair of Gold.”

There was a very strange but beautiful woman with long golden hair as fine as spun gold. She was poor and without mother or father, and lived in the woods alone and wove upon a loom made of black walnut boughs. A brute who was the son of the coal burner tried to force her into marriage, and in an effort to buy him off, she gave him some of her golden hair.

But he did not know or care that it was spiritual, not monetary, gold that she gave him, so when he sought to trade her hair for merchandise in the marketplace, people jeered at him and thought him mad.

Enraged, he returned by night to the woman's cottage and with his own hands murdered her and buried her body by the river. For a long time no one noticed that she was missing. No one inquired of her hearth or health. But in her grave, the woman's golden hair grew and grew. The beautiful hair curled and spiraled upward through the black soil, and it grew looping and twirling more and more, and up and up, until her grave was covered by a field of swaying golden reeds.

Shepherds cut the curly reeds to make flutes, and when they played them, the tiny flutes sang and would not stop singing,

Here lies the woman with golden hair murdered and in her grave, killed by the son of the coal burner because she wished to live.

And that is how the man who took the life of the woman with golden hair was discovered and brought to justi
ce so that those who live in the
wild woods of the world, like we ourselves do, were safe again once more.

While this tale overtly gives the usual instruction to be careful in lonely places out in the woods, the inner message is profound, and that is that the life force of the beautiful wilderwoman personified by her hair continues to grow and to live and to emanate conscious knowing even though overtly silenced and buried. The leitmotifs of this tale are probably fragments of a much larger and more ancient death-and-resurrection story centering around a female Godhead.

This segment is beautiful and valuable, and additionally it tells us something about the nature of secrets and even, perhaps, what it is that is killed off in the psyche when a woman’s life is not properly valued. In this tale, the murder of the woman who lives out in the woods is the secret. She represents a
kore,
the woman- who-will-not-marry. This aspect of the female psyche represents that which wishes to keep to herself alone. This is mystical and solitary in a good way, for the
kore
is taken up with the sorting and weaving of ideas, thoughts, and endeavors.

It is this self-contained wilderwoman that is most injured by trauma or by the keeping of a secret... this integral sense of self that needs not have much around itself in order to be happy; this heart of the female psyche who weaves in the forest on the black walnut loom and is at peace there.

No one in the fairy tale asks about the absence of this vital woman. This is not unusual in fairy tales or in real life. The families of the dead women in “Bluebeard” do not come seeking their daughters either. Culturally, this needs no interpretation. Sadly, we all know what it means, and many women, too many, understand that lack of inquiry firsthand. Often the woman who carries secrets meets with the same response. Though people may perceive that at center her heart is pierced, they may accidentally or purposefully go blind to the evidence of her injury.

But part of the miracle of the wild psyche is that no matter how badly a woman is “killed,” no matter how injured, her psychic life continues, and it rises above ground where in soulful circumstances it will sing its way up and out again. Then wrongful harm done is consciously apprehended and the psyche begins restoration.

It is an interesting idea, is it not, that a woman’s life force can

continue to grow even though she is seemingly without life? It is a promise that under even the most anemic conditions the wildish life force will keep our ideas alive and developing, albeit only for a while, underground. Life will pry and scrabble its way above ground in time. This living force will not let the matter rest until the buried woman’s whereabouts and circumstances are revealed.

As with the shepherds in the story, this involves drawing a breath and putting the soul-breath or
pneuma
through the reeds, in order to know the true state of affairs in the psyche and what must be done next. This is the work of crying out. Then the digging work follows.

While some secrets are strengthening—for instance, those used as part of a strategy in order to gain a competitive goal, or those .happy ones kept just for the pleasure of savoring them—the secrets of shame are very different, as different as a beribboned medal versus a bloody knife. The latter must be brought up, witnessed by compassionate humans under generous conditions. When a woman keeps a shameful secret it is horrifying to see the enormous amounts of self-blame and self-torture she endures. All the blame and torture that were promised to descend upon the woman if she tells the secret does so anyway, even though she has told no one; it all attacks her from within.

The wildish woman cannot live with this. Shameful secrets cause a person to become haunted. She cannot sleep, for a shaming secret is like a cruel barbed wire that catches her across the gut as she tries to run free. The secrets of shame are destructive not only to a woman’s mental health but to her relationships with the instinctive nature. Wild Woman digs things up, throws them into the air, chases them around. She does not bury and forget. If she buries at all, she remembers what, and where, and it will not be long before she has disinterred it again.

Keeping shame a secret is profoundly disturbing to the psyche. Secrets erupt in dream material. An analyst must often go beyond the manifest, and sometimes even the archetypal content of a dream in order to see that it is in fact broadcasting the very secret the dreamer cannot, dare not, tell aloud.

There are many dreams that, when analyzed, are understood to be about immense and extensive feelings that the dreamer, in

real life, is unable to cry out. Some of these dreams pertain to secrets. Some of the most common dream images I’ve seen are lights, electric and otherwise, flickering and/or going out, dreams in which the dreamer becomes ill from eating something, those in which the dreamer cannot move out of danger, and those wherein the dreamer tries to call out, but no voice issues forth.

Remember
canto
hondo
, the deep song, and
hambre
del alma
, the starved soul? In time, these two forces, through dreams and the woman’s own wild life force, rise to the surface of the psyche and break out the necessary cry, the cry that frees. A woman finds her voice then. She sings out, cries out the secret, and is heard. Her psychic footing will be restored.

In the tradition of my families’ ethnic and religious practices, the core meaning of this fairy tale and others similar to it are
medi-,
cines
to be applied to wounds which are kept secret. In prayerful
curanderismo
they are considered encouragement, advice, and resolution. What stands behind the formation of fairy-tale wisdom is the fact that for both women and men, woundings to the self, soul, and psyche through secrets and otherwise, are part of most persons’ lives. Neither can the subsequent scarring be avoided. But there is help for these injuries, and absolutely there is healing.

There are general wounds, and there are wounds that are specific to males, and there are wounds that are specific to females. Abortion leaves a scar. Miscarriage makes a scar. Losing a child of any age makes a scar. Sometimes being close to another person lays down scar tissue. There may be extensive scarring as the result of naive choices, from being entrapped, as well as from right but difficult choices. There are as many shapes of scars as there are types of psychic woundings.

Repressing secret material surrounded by shame, fear, anger, guilt, or humiliation effectively shuts down all other parts of the unconscious that are near the site of the secret.
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It is like shooting an anesthetic into, say, a person’s ankle in order to do a surgery. Much of the leg above and below the ankle is also affected by the anesthesia and no longer has feeling. This is how secret keeping works in the psyche. It is a constant IV drip of anesthetic that numbs far more than the area at issue.

No matter what kind of secret, no matter how much pain is

involved in keeping the secret, the psyche is affected in the same way. Here is one example. One woman, whose husband forty years earlier had committed suicide three months after they were married, was urged by his family to not only hide the evidence of his major depressive illness but also her deep emotional grief and anger from that time. As a result, she developed a “dead zone” regarding his anguish, her anguish, as well as her rage at the cultural stigma attached to the entire event.

She allowed the husband’s family to betray her by agreeing to their requirement that she never reveal the fact of their cruel treatment of her husband over the years. And each year on the anniversary of her husband’s suicide, there was dead silence from the family. No one called to say “How are you feeling? Would you like some company? Do you miss him? I know you must. Shall we go out and do something together?” The woman dug her husband’s grave once more and buried her grief alone, year after year.

Eventually she began to avoid other days of commemoration: anniversaries and birthdays, including her own. The dead zone spread from the center of the secret outward, not only overtly covering commemorative events, but then stretching to celebratory events, and even beyond. All of these familial and friendship events were disparaged by the woman, who overtly considered them a waste of time.

To her unconscious, however, they were empty gestures, for no one had come close to her in her times of despair. Her chronic grief, that shameful secret keeping, had eaten into the area of her psyche that governed relatedness. Most often we wound others where, or very close to where, we have been wounded ourselves.

If a woman desires, however, to retain all her instincts and abilities to move freely within her psyche, she can reveal her secret or secrets to one trustworthy human being, and recount them as many times as necessary. A wound is usually not disinfected once and then forgotten, but is tended to and washed several times while it heals.

When a secret is finally told, the soul needs more response than “Hmmmmm, oh really, that’s too bad,” or “Oh well, life is tough,” from both the teller and the listener. The teller has to try not to depreciate the matter. And it is a blessing if the listener is a person