How socialization contributes to women not knowing their true purpose.
I don’t know.
It’s a phrase that actually enrages me.
Not because I’m mad at my clients for bringing it to me. Or my own brain for supplying it as an answer.
I’m mad at the world that continually stripped power and self-knowledge from women and filled their heads with answers that instead would serve the needs of the powers that be.
We’re confused.
And it’s not hard to see why. But it makes my blood boil.
It’s also why we’re drawn to the ones who seems to have discovered themselves. We think it could happen for us, too.
It’s a lie that you don’t know what you want.
There IS a part of you that knows it. A place deep down. Hidden at the back of the shelf. It’s dusty. But once you brush it off, oh it gleams.
It’s brighter than anything you’ve ever seen.
It’s you. Your ACTUAL self. Your ACTUAL purpose. Your desires and love–full of exhilaration and energy. It was hidden long ago so you could survive.
You chose to survive instead being allowed to thrive. That was not your fault.
But it doesn’t have to be your future.
Think about how insidious the phrase, “I don’t know,” is. What does it really mean? It only means that your heart is scared to say what it truly feels, for fear of being left, abandoned, unwanted, feared, shunned, shamed.
How many of my male clients (yes I have them) say the phrase, “I don’t know,” to me? None.
We think it’s normal to not know.
We think it’s a state of being.
And certainly there are moments of learning that require us to investigate until we have an answer.
But I’m talking more about when I ask women who they are and what’s meaningful to them. The only reason you would not know what’s meaningful to you is that knowing yourself became a negative at some point. So we stopped knowing ourselves.
Maybe it was too painful to not be able to live out our dreams.
Maybe it was threatening to our partners, our caretakers, our teachers, our bosses.
Maybe we became so used to self-shaming that we even began to shame ourselves for being ourselves.
