In A World That Hurts Women So Much, How Do We Begin To Trust And Heal?
The many types of harassment, abuse, and violence that women face throughout society are injuries - wounds that we carry in our experiences, communities, and relationships. Women’s trauma compounds the other types of trauma all humans face, whether it be childhood abuse or neglect or surviving a natural disaster. That compounded trauma follows us into our interactions with our friends, coworkers, and especially our significant others and can oftentimes harm our connections or make us particularly vulnerable to further abuse. Everywhere we go, women are getting hurt.
Women carry three different buckets of trauma in our lives. Societal trauma is broad and pervasive, like the trauma we face from the patriarchy, systemic misogyny, rape culture, and discrimination. We experience childhood trauma, like abuse or neglect, in similar but distinctive ways from men, oftentimes having issues with attachment or security magnified by sexism at a young age. And the first two traumas are ever-present in the relationship trauma that women can face, making them unlikely to voice their opinions or assert their boundaries in minor disputes or making them less likely to escape from domestic violence if they’re victimized by it.
For example, humans, in general, tend to gravitate towards the attachment styles we formed in our childhoods - attachment styles that were dictated by the behavior of our parents or other significant caregivers and the safety of our surroundings. If a woman faced insecure, disorganized attachment as a kid as a result of an absent, frightening, or abusive father or a neglectful, disengaged mother, she may gravitate towards relationships that mirror that style as her brain recognizes it as familiar and “normal.” If we saw our mothers or sisters be abused by inconsistent, dangerous men growing up - or if we ourselves were victimized by it - we may gravitate towards a “trauma bond” with abusers in our adult relationships. Our brain’s signals become crossed, and we mistake that attachment for safety, digging ourselves deeper and deeper into holes of intimate partner abuse that’s magnified by societal discrimination towards women. I’ve talked about this draw to stay in bad situations on the podcast Staying Past The Expiration Date, and I’ve seen it in many of my clients as a therapist.
In a world that hurts women so much, and in a universe that seems to chase us with our own traumas, how do we heal in our own relationships? How could we ever dare to be brave enough to accept our injuries like wounds and begin to heal? There is safety in the burden we carry, a sort of familiarity in finding ways to cope or shake things off. This can show up in small ways, like a woman choosing not to remind her partner that she doesn’t like a certain kind of food even though she’s told him five times and he keeps forgetting because dealing with her annoyance internally is better than the unknown of confrontation. Or it can show up in large, insidious ways - accepting a partner compulsively cheating or behaving violently while intoxicated because we have watched generations before us just “learn how to survive.”
Learning how to survive is not learning to thrive. Survival mode is an extended trauma response, a place of hyper-vigilance, self-betrayal, and danger. The injuries inflicted on us by society, by our childhoods, and by our partners do not have to be permanent - there is a world of healing that can be cultivated and cherished by women.
Our healing journey to thriving must begin with self-trust. Our ability to trust ourselves is attacked constantly by sexism and discrimination, and it becomes even further damaged if we face abuse. Too often, women learn to lie and to not trust their own instincts - believing that something must be wrong with them if they’re being abused and that they’ll be able to “fix” and “change” the relationship despite their internal acknowledgment of its pain and abuse. We bury our feelings. We hide from them. We voice our feelings or our hesitations honestly instead of suppressing them or people-pleasing, we must assert our boundaries about what we like or what hurts us, and we must trust ourselves to feel our emotions - including the bad ones.
We should surround ourselves with the support of other women and professional resources. Women who have been hurt - by society or by a partner - feel alone in their pain, but nothing could be further from the truth. When we feel alone, we’re more likely to carry our burden in silence. Join a women’s circle or other empowering space where you can be heard, validated, and appreciated. Additionally, women who have faced serious abuse or neglect should not be afraid to be “crazy” and should seek out the support of a trauma-informed therapist, who can help them recover from abuse through talk therapy and trauma-processing therapies like EMDR.
We must honor our progress and reject the chase of “perfection.” Healing and establishing self-trust is hard. It is messy. It is, at times, terrifying and exhausting. Take small steps forward in building a routine that gives you safety and empowerment. Learn to trust yourself in small exercises - staying off of social media for an hour if you know it’s going to make you insecure, for example. Start journaling and praying, spending time with your body and mind. You will be surprised that you find you can get to know yourself again.
Where we are in our healing journeys does not dictate our lovability. No matter where you are in your journey to heal from the trauma that women carry, you are worthy and you deserve to live in a world you create out of safety, love, trust, and respect.
