Are you grateful to be female? Is femininity a gift or a curse to you?
If you’re like a lot of women, you may have mixed feelings about it. In particular, it can be hard to separate out what you yourself feel about your own femaleness, from all that has been said to you, in so many words, about what being a woman means.
Can you find your true Self under the pile of projections that were thrown over you, the many rules of conduct you were taught, the words put in your mouth?How were you mirrored? What explanations were given to you, as a way of helping you understand what you feel, what you want, how you are to find your way in this world? Did the explanation of your own motivations that was given to you match what you really were experiencing on the inside? Did your role models show you what a woman can be in full?
Without knowing you personally, we here at Villa Kali Ma can venture a guess: probably not. The chances that you were seen, and reflected, for what you actually are – a vivid aliveness, a source of powerful agency, a genius creator in your own right – are slim. Because the understanding of how women and men have been wounded, and what they each need to come into more balanced fullness, is still in its infancy.
Writing about women’s rage in Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman says:
“There’s personal anger, but underneath there’s often universal rage; and when we are possessed, God help the man who’s on the end of that. Deep rage is not about the man; deep rage is this: Nobody ever saw me. Nobody ever heard me.
As long as I can remember, I’ve had to perform. When I tried to be myself, I was told, That’s not what you think, that’s not what you ought to do. So, just like my mother and her mother, I put on a false face. My life became a lie. That’s deep rage. We have lived our lives behind a mask. Sooner or later —if we are lucky— the mask will be smashed.”
In this age of heightened pressure and deepened pain for all humans, comparisons and distinctions between the male and the female experience can come out in even greater clarity.
At Villa Kali Ma, we uphold the fact that women are special. Men are special too. It’s not a competition, actually. But women have an experience of life that requires special care and tending, a kind of attention that’s distinct from the kind that best nurtures men. We have shared humanity with all humans, but we are not identical and the differences between us need to be honored.
That honoring – of the ways that men and women experience embodiment and socialization differently – informs our unique, holistic treatment programs for women.
Women experience mental illness, trauma, and addiction differently than men. Here are some considerations we keep in mind in all of our treatment programs.
Women, Complex Trauma and PTSD
Women are more vulnerable to traumatization than men. A major source of traumatization for women, in addition to the types of trauma that affect all genders equally (like physical abuse or neglect in childhood), is sexual violence.
Women are more likely to have sexual trauma originating from childhood sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Women are also more vulnerable to traumatization from criminally motivated violence, like mugging or kidnapping. Women who have experienced sexual violence are significantly more likely to attempt suicide and to be given a diagnosis for a severe mental health disorders.
The impact of traumatization in mental health is extensive. Many mental health diagnoses reflect the presence of symptoms and coping styles originally stemming from trauma. In women in particular, it is important to tease apart which symptoms may be healed through resolution of traumatic responses, as opposed to mental illness which may be present for biological or hereditary reasons.
Gendered Diagnoses: Depression, Anxiety, and Borderline Personality
Top among risk factors for development of a mental health diagnosis like depression or anxiety is simply being a woman. Women are statistically more likely to experience mental health symptoms, by a meaningful factor. In the case of anxiety, for example, women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed.
Given the higher incidence of traumatization among women, this imbalance in distribution of symptoms which could be coming from traumatization isn’t necessarily surprising. At the same time, biological influences, such as the impact of female hormones on mental health, trauma, and addiction have been shown to play a role as well.
Certain mental health diagnoses have a history of being disproportionately assigned to women, such as Borderline Personality Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder is under review in some areas of the mental health field, due to its high correlation with trauma.
Eating Disorders, Self Harm and Body Image
Women are socialized to identify with their physical appearance to a great degree, and are expected to uphold perfectionistic standards of beauty at great cost to themselves. Beauty standards for women are extremely narrow, favoring not only certain body types and abilities, but also assigning higher or lower value along lines of race and ethnicity.
This socialization factor makes the mental health topic of self-love and self-acceptance very challenging for women. Women have been trained from birth to reject or disdain our physical bodies as inadequate when not perfectly matching given ideals. Women who are considered beautiful by the mainstream standards enjoy privileges of higher social status, but typically suffer from feeling the highly conditional nature of that status. Such women are made aware how much of their good social fortune depends upon maintaining physical desirability, as well as cooperating with the boundary intrusion and open attempts at exploitation by unwholesomely interested parties.
Women are generally encouraged to try to change their bodies to be more appealing to men, in whatever way may be required in order to have a greater chance of fitting into the standard. Extreme behaviors, such as eating disorders, over-exercising, undergoing harsh beauty treatments, and shaming the self when not meeting standards, are topics more commonly affecting women than men.
Women who are given the message that they are less attractive to men than other women in their peer group may suffer low self-esteem and shame related to their appearance, but women who are considered beautiful suffer shame and low self-esteem due to the underscoring of the message that what is lovable about them is limited to their ability to perform in the role of “desirable female”. These issues are installed, experienced, and processed in distinctly gendered ways.
Women’s Boundaries in a context of Sexualization and Objectification
Women are expected to be ok with being objectified, if not overtly sexualized, beginning in puberty or even already in childhood in some contexts. Very often, women face social pressure to tolerate subtle or obvious transgression of their boundaries to greater or lesser degrees. Women are frequently trained out of the ability to detect their boundaries, let alone protect them.
Objectification means being thought more of in terms of usefulness for gratifying another person’s needs, rather than regarded as having personhood and agency in her own right. Women are socialized to expect greater reward and ease in life when tolerating some degree of violation of boundaries, including basic boundaries of safety from intrusive sexual energy or other harm.
In its most benign form, this socialization makes the mental health topic of boundaries very challenging for women. Women are socially reinforced to say yes to what they would like to say no to, to say no what they would like to say yes to. This makes the topic of recovering women’s right to experience anger, and its connection to boundaries, self-protection, and self-care, a core treatment issue for many women.
Emotional Caretaking and Women’s Work
Women are largely socialized to be emotional caretakers of people around them and to perform “invisible work” without being asked or noticed. Women frequently provide emotional support, attention, and encouragement to the men in their lives, including work colleagues and bosses, without explicit recognition or appreciation of this function as requiring energy and skill. For related reasons, many women develop patterns of codependency, which can make treatment more difficult than for men, who may feel less relationally fused and oriented towards survival through the specific strategy of psychological enmeshment with others.
Although some of this has changed, women are generally expected to assume household and child-rearing tasks, as something that “goes without saying”. Women are still unconsciously expected to assume a caretaker role in the workplace, if not for material comforts like getting coffee and making a nice environment for people, then for emotional comforts, such as attending to the psychological atmosphere in the room, helping people to feel at ease, seen, and acknowledged.
Women and men performing in the same role at work are still sometimes paid quite differently, women being paid less than men on average, even within the same job title and responsibilities. The gap in pay widens further when looking at overall pay, versus comparing people in the same roles, reflecting an “opportunity gap” across higher paid roles. Finally, performance of traditionally masculine work roles is given greater financial reward, while professions centered on more nurturing roles, professions generally dominated by women, like social work, child, elder and dependent adult care, nursing, and teaching, are paid far less.
Setting aside the psychological implications of valuing women less than men, women are strongly socialized to place the emotional and physical nurturance needs of others first, which makes appropriate selfishness difficult. More problematically in the immediate sense, is that due to ongoing problems with pay inequality, many women are financially dependent on their abusers.
Treating Women with Care
At Villa Kali Ma, we understand why it is that women do better in female-only healing environments, for all the reasons outlined above and many, many more.
The focus of treatment for women, in many ways, needs to be the exact opposite of the focus of treatment for men. For instance: where many, many men need to learn to experience feelings of vulnerability safely, to lower their boundaries, and to be allowed to soften, women often need to be able to experience their right to power, independence, strength, and boundaries. While men may fear that they will not be loved and respected if they are “weak”, women often have the opposite question: Will I still be loved if I am vital, strong, a force to be reckoned with?
Similarly, where men sometimes need help understanding how their outward expressions of anger, dominance, or sexuality can impact those around them in destructive ways, many women need help with the reverse – to learn how hiding their anger and their vitality away is a problem for them and others. How have we withheld ourselves from this world, and deprived it of our awareness, wisdom, our heart, kindness? Even our pain, our tears, our sensitivity are gifts that are needed here. The type of strength that women have – the strength to feel a wound from within – is sorely missing in our rigid, fragile world.
It’s not about strong versus soft, tender versus fierce, but about allowing both, inside of all people. Here at Villa Kali Ma, we are devoted to helping the women we meet to activate whatever needs activating – all within that longs to birth into this world, but has not had the encouragement, protection, and nourishment needed to do so. If you’re looking for a place to walk a path of recovery from addiction, mental illness, and/or trauma, we’re here for you.
