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Women's groups gather every day all over the planet. Women in groups do much vital, extraordinary work that keeps the world moving round and round. While a good woman's group is good medicine for our global pain, a bad one is dangerous. A bad group exudes a lethal poison, sickens the chambers of the heart and weakens the contextual fibre of the women's community through its avoidance of the inevitable painful dynamics such as: refusal to resolve conflicts, the choice to create scapegoats rather than reconciliations, and the insistence on avoiding the politics of projection in the circle. We all want to break through these painful congestions. We need help. We have to understand why we get in trouble with each other and how to stay out of the very predictable troubled waters of our own deeply guarded secretive misogyny. Refusing to learn what we have forgotten is not a solution. Refusing to know is one more collusion with the oppressive force of misogyny which lives both within us and outside us in our world. For the purposes of this essay, the definition of misogyny is that force which turns against a woman because she is born woman; that force in a woman through which she turns against herself and other women.
Whether a particular group of women has an explicit task to accomplish or not, there are always implicit behavioral contracts, unconscious psychological agreements and deep-seated patterns of meaning swimming in the historical undercurrents of women's group life. Since group dynamics theory is still male-identified for the most part, these theories do not really help us with our own intense relational field of awareness. We have too many workbooks on being a woman, compilations of exercises for a group of women, and check lists for the leader of a women's group. They all fail to define the natural laws of the territory. Instead they offer maps that lead to ambush. The map of women's ways is not useful when the territory is defined and analysed through a male-identified, misogynist, telescopic lens.
Toward a Female-Identified Theory
My exploration of the less charted territory of complex female process is offered in the service of strengthening the individual, interpersonal and collective field of women who are called to lead women's groups, organizations and systems. It was very early in my professional life that I decided to make women's group work my life work and to formulate a distillation of a female- identified group dynamics theory. A series of dreams revealed that if I stayed long enough, reading the same river of women's group life over and over until almost forever, I would eventually be able to write down some of the natural laws that govern the complex elegance and the natural dynamics in the pattern of the all female group. The river of the group life of women alone together is a deep and passionate river, filled with multiple voices of emerging female authority. In this work, I attempt to chart the river in a useful way.
By consistently referring to the women's group as "she", I engender her; I do not call a "her" an "it". Women have been objectified in this linguistic structure for too long. For too long, and in too many places on the planet, women have been and are still sold into marriage and into prostitution to be someone else's property. We women are treated too often as beasts partially because of this objectification through language. We need to remember that as a collective we must reclaim and re-own our natural processes. I do not join that global social construct of gender which neuters both women's and men's groups and their unique processes. The very gender construct we humans have grid-locked into the depths of our psyches is the structure which is disempowering all of us, keeping us asleep, and holding the technologies of oppression in place all over the planet.
I do not talk about men's groups in this work because, as a woman, I have never and will never be in one. It is not my intention in this work to attend to the dynamics of mixed gender groups. I do acknowledge that there are many men who have the same feminist, anti-racist position; in that they are devoted to dealing with the forces of oppression everywhere. In particular, I acknowledge the amazing work done by men in the global LGBTQ community. These people live the work of lifting oppression and in so doing, help us all. Many, straight men also devote themselves to these issues, to their own inner work, and to the larger agenda. Not a man-basher, I bow to the spirit which moves our common work forward and to the humans who have the devotion to stay in the fire of it.
The Natural Environment of a Women’s Group
Just as a woman's body grows in a uniquely female way, a woman's group follows her own unique developmental trajectory. When a women's group is able to stay within the currents of her inherited birthright to female authority and her woman-based power and leadership, the group is able to remain centered in her own way of accomplishing the task at hand. The group can stay on her course. She is her own river with her own clear and present dangers, a natural blend of native navigational skills and wild knowing. The group actually lives and breathes by her own laws, rather than by the official male-defined canon of group dynamics laws or by the unconscious global collusion with the politics of misogyny.
More often than not, the women's group has little or no skill in staying within the domain of her own female-identified authority. Although our work can be a thrilling blend of interwoven textures, a naturally elegant field of interdependence and a bittersweet awareness of our shared suffering through political oppression; we have typically internalized the global patterns of oppression, and succeed in oppressing ourselves and each other in spite of our deepest wishes not to do so. This results in a group that will most likely fragment, fracture, and fail to thrive. That is the bad news. The good news is that we are in a global process of awakening, remembering, restoring and revitalizing ourselves as women of power who have the capacity to work for the good of all of us all the time.
Telling Our Stories
As always, good news brings along lots of work; and with the work there is a great deal of support waiting to be called forth. Creative images support us in remembering what we know deeply in all the cells of our female bodies, in the ancient memories embedded in our muscles, and in the unconscious world of our dream lives. We can teach each other how to remember the locked up wisdom by sitting together and by talking ourselves into the memories. Sooner or later, we come back to the seed stories, to the fables, the myths, the patterns of meaning that describe a woman's way of knowing her own wisdom. In this work, each individual story is necessary. No woman's tale is irrelevant. All the smallest details are needed in order for us to really remember and re-integrate the wisdom we had all agreed to forget.
As the stories return to us, we realize that the pattern of a woman's group life weaves all the way back into the earliest human communities. In those early times, maybe all the humans, men included, had the awareness of the power of The Great Mother and, by extension, the human mother, the grandmother and the mother-to-be. There was a time, after all, when the appearance of a pregnancy in a woman's body was not yet associated the sexual intercourse but rather with the will of the Great Cosmic Mother. Truly a woman's mystery it was. How did life begin inside her body and not inside his?
Over time, we have been able to see that the life of a women’s group mirrors the developmental cycle of human conception, pregnancy, and birth. There is only one story, after all, and that story begins within the female body. We all know this story because we are women and came from woman.
Trusting Our Deeper Selves
All the behavioural patterns of women's group life weave backwards into those early times where we lived in caves by the rivers when we imagined that he Earth herself was our Mother and that we had all actually been seeds in the cave of Her Belly before we sprouted in a human woman's belly. All humans, at least until now, begin to take human form after implanting in a mother's uterus, so we must all contain the cellular memory of her uterine holding-- men and women alike. Such a universal memory will be lingering inside the unconscious connective tissue of the women's group. Longing to return to the ground of motherbeing, of eternal sameness, each of us carries the cellular memory of the time before; the time when all human life was still female when we were all one. We were in fact, all one- all female- during those early weeks of pregnancy before sex differentiation took place.
The Persistence of Global Misogyny |
