In my last blog, Rise High Walk Low, I told the story about the first time a woman’s story baffled me into silence. She was in an emotional mess of her own making and couldn’t see her way clear of it. I asked her why she’d done what she’d done when she’d done it because I knew I had nothing else to say in the face of her hope that I could guide her where she was unable to guide herself.
Without a moment’s hesitation she responded.
“Oh I knew it was the wrong thing to do but I did it anyway!”
In that split second I understood something crucial to my life and the lives of all women. For I had been this woman, too.
Many a time I’d chosen to do what I knew I really didn’t want to do but couldn’t help myself and did it anyway. Then paid dearly for the consequences. But all the while intuiting that nothing had gone wrong. I had to do what I had to do and I did it, in the same as she’d done. It was as though we were wired to act against ourselves in accordance with some cosmological order. We were both flummoxed and fuming from the fire flaming within us and fiercely wanting to understand why?
I’ve since answered that question for myself and helped many women answer it for themselves, too. When the feminine rises in a woman, it is a force to be reckoned with and we have not been taught what it is nor how to manage it.
Animus Distortions & Discernment
To recap, the animus is the masculine element in woman. It is the masculine spirit of the unconscious mind in the female sex. It functions to enable a woman to differentiate herself from the eternally feminine unconscious. The animus is an archetype and archetypes are the the architects of human life. We are born into them as human history. They live in the collective unconscious where all souls are connected and play out as forms in the psyche. I like to think they are actors playing us until we wake up to the script and decide we will rewrite the story. I’ve also learned that if this story is living me then I have something to develop in order to move beyond it.
Animus possession for a woman requires an inner conversation as difficult as any she will ever have with a man.
The animus is neither good nor bad but it is completely a dual figure. He becomes infernal when he has hooked into a woman’s shadow and her egotistical demands. And we all know what that sometimes looks and sounds like — a raging mother, a demanding wife, a victimized woman blaming the world or worse, blaming herself, for not having what she believes she is entitled to in all that she encounters. For our purposes here, I will speak generally and of my own personal experience in order to be helpful while making it clear that every woman’s experience is unique.
When a woman is willing to do her own shadow work she engages the animus in a positive way. But when a woman unconsciously hands over her voice to the masculine-focused way of being and remains hidden from herself, she bypasses her ordinary life and moves into a fantasy of what she should have, what she should be.
The negative animus is fuelled by lack of self-belief. The positive animus is fuelled by enactment of self-trust. It’s not so much that a woman creates her life. She aligns to the life she is given. The distance travelled is lit either way, whether she is in shadow or light, with the help of her animus. We are never without him. The real function of the animus is to protect the ego and to bring unintegrated aspects of our personality into the light of day so we can become whole in our womanhood. He is designed to help us discover our true self, who wants to manifest as our life.
For a woman to work herself up to a point of such apparently presumptuous spiritual independence often costs a great deal, especially because it can so easily be misunderstood or misjudged. But without this sort of revolt, no matter what she has to suffer as a consequence, she will never be free from the power of the tyrant, never come to find herself. (Emma Jung, Animus and Anima: Two Essays, p. 27)
On Guilt
Every woman is plagued by a plot whether she knows it or not. For it is the natural urge of life moving through her to meet the unconscious beliefs and definitions she unknowingly holds about herself and her world.
If you’ve read my previous blogs, you’ll know the first time I became conscious of the unconscious plot living me was when I re-wrote the outcome I was headed for by saving myself and my sons. I decided to return to Canada and make a new home. Then I acted on my decision in a subversive way. I walked away when the disastrous consequences of the unconscious plot became manifest.
The second time I became conscious of the unconscious plot still living me, the guilt of having dismantled Iris Cottage to follow husband number four sliced right through me, but I didn’t feel it until I wrote the book about it. So it is the alchemy of autoethnography that has ultimately brought me back home to myself through the power of the written word. Living the experience of my marriages to men was only part of the journey. I needed to engage the writer in me to understand what I had lived.
Jung called the process of conscious development that we carry out with the help of objective unconscious material the individuation process. This process inevitably compels us, as the first order of business, to consciously perceive our shadow. As a result of this, our personal relationships go through a considerable change. (von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, p. 245)
My heart shattered when my first husband died and it took 32 years to gather myself into a satisfactory conclusion. The cost to me has been great but would have been greater still had I not taken courage and withstood the changes over time. Guilt and the suffering it generates was the price I paid when I could see my own part in the drama. But the suffering was nothing compared to the outcome I could see if I didn’t rise up and act in accordance with my feminine instinct. The whole positive potential in the depths of my individuation process was at risk. The inner process at work demanded wholeness. I could not allow myself and my children to be swallowed by the unconscious.
The guilt that I’d played a part in destroying a marriage between my third husband and his first wife woke me up in the fantasy. Who was I that this could happen to? How had I ended up here? I wanted out. And I got out. But it meant sacrificing the animus-possessed demands of my own ego. I would not be financially supported. I would not be able to co-parent.
… Jung as said that the plots occupy the compartment between consciousness and the animus. Presumably, therefore, it is only possible for a woman to reach a lasting awareness of the animus, and of the other figures of the collective unconscious after she has succeeded in realizing the existence of the plots. (Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Vol. Two, p. 228)
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The conscious desire and unconscious plot weaving together to pull the threads of education and autonomy through and into the design of the pattern for my life were unknitted by marriages to men. The marital thread dominated and pulled apart the other two threads. It was as though marriage was the fairy constantly unknitting the fabric of my vital goal. But it wasn’t marriage, per se; it was actually my own ambition because I knew not how to manage it. And marriage is not a true female ambition.
The Damsel’s belief that she is weak and helpless without the love and protection of a man was my own patriarchal shadow. It led me into negative expectation for myself and was based on my fear of going it alone. Disappointment opened the door into the conscious process of empowerment and learning to take care of myself. The Damsel is taught she needs a partner in life to be powerful. It is one of the greatest lies of womanhood.
Plots are purposed when a woman is not ready to face the truth. Truth is what cuts through a plot, which is where the irresistible power of nature meets an obstacle in the human mind. My desire for an education and a way to write books was naturally encoded in my soul, but my patriarchal conditioning was an unconscious barrier in my own thinking. I had to build a vessel to contain the unconscious as it rose in my experience and learn to overcome it without losing the potential of my life. To this day, I never underestimate how close I came to losing my life and my sons. And I’m not being overly dramatic. It is the truth.
C. G. Jung notes:
As people advance in consciousness and understanding, they discover more and more what an extraordinary power the animus represents. It is a miracle if a woman can escape it. (Hannah, The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, Vol. One, p. 116)
It wasn’t until writing the book Rise High Walk Low that I discovered my third husband already had another woman in his life while we were still married. It took this knowledge to finally lift the veil so I could see our interaction clearly. It was painful beyond measure. And I have learned life is a restoration project of the highest order. That is, I suspect I was finally open to receiving this information through the penning of this text and because I was ready, my encounters in life brought it to me. A mysterious and wondrous synchronicity.
A woman is driven by the unconscious plot of the story living her. So the work of her life is to become conscious of that story. Then she can rewrite it to claim her inheritance of true power. But to not realize the cosmic nature of the plot is costly. Her experience is worthy of study for she must become familiar with this archetype or lose her womanhood to him.
When the masculine in woman has freed the feminine within her, she becomes a powerful change-maker in the world man has made and rises to lift all beings from her firm root in earth and ordinary life.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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