I have to tell you, it has been through recognizing the importance of sisterhood and community that I have come into my own as a woman, expander, teacher, mentor, business owner, boss, and leader.
I am so much better at and more connected to these roles because of the sisterhood that I have surrounded myself with, in the last few years. In connection with these women, I have experienced the truth that one of the most powerful ways for us as humans to find ourselves is through the witnessing of others.
Patriarchy may have sold us a bill of goods about individualism. However, the truth is that as humans, we are linked; we cannot be separated. The whole idea we have to succeed on our own causes us to abandon our natural wild, connected selves. Coming home to myself has been about re-wilding, rediscovering who I am, authentically.
We have all experienced trauma and shame. I’ve had so much shame around feeling like I don’t belong.
As a teenager, I ran away from home, to get away from my rigid, controlling, Pentecostal family. While I eperienced freedom, I also ended up feeling isolated and insecure. I saw women as competition. I assumed they didn’t like me. And maybe they didn’t, because I wasn’t behaving like a sister.
Many years of therapy and coaching and deep self-exploration have helped me navigate and evolve. And I have found that what has really allowed me to heal the most is being witnessed for my shame, the choices my bad girl made, the ways my good girl contorted herself to please others, and for the weight I have carried of codependency, my conditioning, the patterns I inherited from my parents’ traditional family roles.
I didn’t figure out how to truly come home to myself until I started being witnessed by my sisters. Here is what I now know. When a woman feels filled up, she reaches out a hand to lift her sisters up. Being isolated from my sisters out of competition or jealousy was keeping me from the greatest gift that we as women can share.
We can feel so much shame about our traumas, our pasts, and that shame keeps us isolated and alone. When we are witnessed in our suffering and in our trauma, when we are seen and allowed to grieve, publicly, a healing happens.
I truly no longer carry the residue of that shame from the choices I made in my younger years.
This post and video were inspired by an interview I heard recently, with one of my new favorite humans, psychologist Francis Weller. My invitation to you is to listen to Francis being interviewed by Mark Groves on “Create the Love.” It’s like bone broth for the soul. These two men having this soulful conversation helped me see why my sisterhood is such a gift.
Listen to Mark Groves interview Francis Weller on the Create the Love podcast, here.
