Unravelling the Strong Woman

From November 2019: This entry explores my journey questioning what it means to be a strong woman and models a breakthrough I had using “Inner Work.”

This entry continues along from the last piece about “Strong Woman” which you can read about here. Weeks ago I realized that I could no longer be “the strong woman” that I thought I could be. I had the visual of a woman, swimming in a pool of her own tears, held in with a dam. In my case, the dam was starting to crack, along with my perception of what it means to be a strong woman. I was at a loss though of what a strong woman really looks like. I was aware that I had adopted a false image though and wanted to dismantle it for the sake of my marriage, my children, the happiness in our family. Whatever it was that I was doing and believing, wasn’t bringing more life and healing.

A truer image of “A Strong Woman” is emerging. On that same weekend where I realized I was falling apart, there were some “loose ends” so to speak which pervaded my consciousness. One loose end was a comment Dr. Heesoon Bai had mentioned that someone had told her when she had talked about her husband leaving her. This person had told her, “but you wanted it!” I knew I needed to get to the root of how I “wanted” my current situation.

Later that weekend, Dr. Avraham Cohen came to our class and led us through an example of “inner work.” What stayed with me from that session was the style of dialoguing with ourselves to get to an underlying cause of a problem. Thankfully, when we did a class meditation on the actual image that popped into my head during meditation was quite disturbing for me and gave me a good platform to practice “inner work” (or at least, how I interpreted it).

When we did the meditation (I was in a pretty raw state from the morning) a scene slowly unfurled itself and sadly, ended when the chime happened. For the meditation: I saw a image of a glowing orb/pearl in space. I asked myself why I was seeing such an image and realized that it was “me.” Interesting, because that morning I had mentioned that I felt like a shrivelled seed. Once I realized that the orb was me, my mom’s face came into the picture looking down on the orb. Is that my mom I see?

Yes.

How do I feel?

Fine.

Weird. Usually I feel she is the voice of criticism and I feel defensive. Is she angry with me?

No.

Does she love me?

Yes.

Is she looking at me with love?

Yes.

Is she looking at me with pride?

Yes.

Then my husband’s face popped in from the side, it wasn’t glowing like my mom’s but clouded and dark. My husband! Hooray! Is he looking at me with love?

No.

What? He’s looking at me with love, right?

No.

My mom is saying that she is proud of me. What is he saying? Suddenly I was flooded with things he’s said to me that have hurt me (I guess deeply) since we first got married fifteen years ago. Over and over, I heard the hurtful words. They were visually, black smoke encircling the glowing pearl. Ding! The chime went in class and the meditation was supposed to end. Oh shit, now what do I do? I was extremely uncomfortable.

At first, I did what I always do: I tried to stuff down the pain that these words have caused and chalk it up to the fact that he probably mentioned them because he was tired or hungry, or upset about something else. It didn’t work. The image kept popping up along with all the mean words, even later as I was walking down the street. I couldn’t help but cry.

After a few days (of spontaneously crying): recognizing that a) I can’t be the Strong Woman anymore and b) that I have been quite hurt by someone I deeply love. I decided to engage. I thought about what Heesoon had said indirectly about my situation of needing to be the strong woman with the sick husband: “but you wanted it!” Did I want my husband to be sick?

No.

Do I like him being sick?

No.

Do I want him to get better?

YES! YES! YES!

Is there something I like about him being sick?

Yes.

Yes? There’s something I like about this? (Surpise.)

Yes.

What does this situation offer me?

I can withdraw and be alone.

Do I like this?

Yes.

Why?

I feel safe.

Why?

I like being with myself.

Why?

I like being alone because I feel safe.

Why?

I can trust myself.

What else?

I can’t get hurt.

Being safe and alone is good. What do I miss out on by being safe and alone?

I miss out on being loved.

How so?

When I’m alone, I can’t feel the love others have for me.

Done. It’s like a bubble rose to the surface and popped.

To be a strong woman, I don’t need to withdraw. I don’t need to insist on solitude. A strong woman is emotionally connected.

I knew that I had opened-up something big during our class session so I took the Monday off of work to give myself a bit more space to process everything that was shifting. I could feel it was a good shift but needed some space to let it all start to sink in. These thoughts were like seeds falling on fertile ground. If I were to go to work, I would be blowing a wind on them and they would blow away. I needed to let them take root. Staying home would help.

Interestingly for me, “taking a sick day” brought up another false image I was adopting of “the Strong Woman” that was internalized by my parents. My dad, thankfully, always modelled the importance of taking time off, spending time in the woods, spending time in solitude. He did this because he needed it. My mom’s response was always something with an underlying message that, “Dad is weak so he needs time off/time to be contemplative/time to be alone.” So, for my life, I have always felt comfortable with my work-life balance and aware that what I need is to be working a little less and taking more time off than others. I always thought this was because I was weak. I needed these breaks because I wasn’t strong like everyone else. Suddenly, as I was thinking about the fact that I “needed a sick day,” I realized that I didn’t need a sick day because I am “sick”. I was taking a health day. Why? Because I’m a strong woman.

And just like that, the swirling loose ends, were gone. They were a red, shiny apple in front of my face. I took reflective bites until suddenly, the apple was gone and I walk away, fuelled with energy.

I realized when thinking of the apple metaphor, that a dam converts water into energy by using outlets where turbines reside. The power of the water, spinning the turbines, generates electricity. I think my image of the strong woman “cracking” needs to be re-drawn with a woman, still swimming in her own pool of tears, but this time, with a dam that doesn’t “crack under the pressure of her tears” but harness the power of her tears and transforms them into energy.

“Pain that doesn’t transform, gets transmitted.” -David Brooks TEDtalk (quoted by my colleague Victoria in-class on Sept. 28th, 2019)