Reclaiming Your Magic and Healing the Sister Wound

If you are a woman, you have experienced the deep cut of the sister-wound, even if you didn’t have the name for it. 

We live in a culture where women are pitted against one another. You don’t need to look far to see it. Women gather together to watch a TV show where 30 women compete for the love and attention of one man. Ads on television tell you that you will be a better mom and homemaker if you use a more expensive paper towel brand than your hapless (female) neighbor. The up-down look that women give to one another, silently calculating if the stranger they are looking at is competition in some way.

How Did We Get Here? 

There used to be times when we were gathering together, when we weren’t putting each other down, where there wasn’t a need to undermine one another. Women would gather at the well, eat together at tables, or gather in nature together and create magical healing experiences where they would listen to one another and learn from their wisdom. Women started to become more powerful, more vocal. They started to make changes in their town and communities. 

So, what happened? 

Open up social media, search for the latest shamed celebrity, and scroll to the comments. I guarantee a supporter will say “this is a witch hunt!”. This statement misrepresents what the witch hunts were. We are in a culture where politicians, celebrities, and social figures are starting to be held accountable for their actions. But what were the witches of Europe and the early colonies being held accountable for? For being women, and for daring to be in community. 

When you learn about the witch trials in high school, you’re taught that they were a nasty little blight in history, and those days are long behind us. Maybe your teacher tied it into the collective fear of communism or talked about groupthink. In doing so, they reinforced the message of the patriarchy and boiled the witch trials down to a story that fits the patriarchal agenda. 

So, what were the witch trials really? 

The witch trials were a chance to stop women from growing, healing, and gaining power together. The power of women when they worked together was frightening to the men in charge and threatened to usurp the patriarchal structure that was keeping women powerless. And so, the women were killed. Millions of women over the years have been murdered for being ‘witches’, for acting in ‘covens’. And so, women stopped gathering, the patriarchy puttered on, and a deep part of us feels an unease when considering these kinds of gatherings because of the danger historically associated with it. 

Women have had sisterhood stolen from them. By branding the gathering of women as a dangerous act, we have been conditioned to believe what the patriarchy wants us to think: that other women are dangerous, are competition, are unreliable. By reclaiming our right to sit with other women in the community, we are able to heal and reclaim so much of what the sister-wound has taken from us. 

The Sister Wound

Simply put, the sister wound is the pain, distrust, or dis-ease that many women feel when relating to other women. Jealousy, insecurity, cattiness, comparison, fear— these are all ways that the sister wound manifests itself in relationships with other women. Instead of viewing the other woman as a sister, we see her as an enemy, competition, or source of harm. 

This sense of alienation is designed by the patriarchal society to keep women small and fighting each other, rather than fighting a larger system of inequality and oppression. We feel like we need to compete with other women for jobs, for positions of power, for other men; we are so focused on these fights that we have no energy left to battle the bigger enemy. We don’t even have the energy to even see the bigger enemy. 

This type of infighting has become so common that for many women, it almost feels like a rite of passage. Middle school and high school is the place where you learn to judge other women for their bodies, for how they are or are not sexual beings in the world, for how they talk, for how they dress. For some of us, these lessons in cutting other women down were prevalent even earlier in life. 

One of the clearest ways that the sister-wound manifests itself is in the language women use against other women. We take words that were created by the patriarchy to make us feel small, and then we wield these weapons against other women. Slut. Whore. Cunt. Bitch. We use terms that have been created by a system that does not honor or respect women, and then we hurl them at one another and think that we are the ones with the power.  

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” -Audre Lorde

How To Reclaim What Was Taken From Us

Healing the sister-wound is the only way that we can reclaim our power, our phenomena, our magic. 

Healing the sister-wound is also the last thing that the patriarchy wants us to focus on.

 When we spend time and energy fighting each other, we are not spending any energy fighting a system of oppression that hurts us all. When we put down other women, we simultaneously hold up this system, and we put down a part of ourselves. We are all similar in so many ways, and when we insult one woman, we are insulting all women that share that trait. 

We reinforce our own disempowerment. If we lift each other up and support each other and value each other, we can help each other reclaim our power. The patriarchal system we live in works to keep women away from being a part of leading institutions, companies, and systems that can make changes. In order to claim our power, we must live our lives as an act of rebellion against the patriarchy: we must heal the sister-wound. 

Healing the Sister Wound

The sister-wound thrives in darkness and isolation. The sister-wound convinces you that you need to operate alone, that other women can’t be trusted, that other women will shame and judge you. The culture we live in reinforces these beliefs; you need only listen in on conversations at a workplace or happy hour to notice how prevalent and embedded this weapon is in our lives. To heal it, we must step into the light. 

We heal the sister-wound by acknowledging that it exists. We want to say, “I don’t do that” or “I used to do those types of things when I was younger but I grew out of it”. The power comes from saying “I do that, and I don’t want to anymore.”

We can put down our weapons and confront it with other women. Notice- I did not say ‘confront other women’. We confront ‘it’, the patriarchy, the shadow, the shame, with other women. It is us against ‘it’. We work in community to heal one another, to cheer each other on, to take off our masks. 

By seeing another woman, seeing her insecurities, and sitting in vulnerability together, amazing things can happen. This is a form of reflective healing. When we see each other without fear of judgment or shame or competition, we can more clearly see and accept ourselves. This is how we heal: by sitting in a circle, in ceremony, in community, and own the part of ourselves that carries a wound.

Women’s Circles

Being in community is essential to healing the sister-wound. Women’s circles are a chance to sit in community with other strangers and name our shame, our fear, our insecurities. The magic of the circle happens as you hear other women, women who you might have perceived as so ‘confident’ or ‘put together’, and realize that they have the same feelings, wounds, and experiences you do. 

“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.” -Brene Brown 

The shameful parts of ourselves live in the dark and our subconscious; the subconscious can’t be healed until we bring our thoughts into the light and the open. By healing the parts of ourselves that are untouched and unrecognized, we can find lasting change in the rest of your life. And, we don’t have to do it alone. 

You have been robbed of a sense of community because of the sister-wound. By reclaiming that community, you reclaim the power that can help you heal your own shame. Instead of operating alone, we share with one another, affirm one another, and lift each other up so we are better prepared to face the challenges that the patriarchy presents us with every day. 

You will leave the circle with a newfound sense of the world, and the type of women that you interact with. By understanding how many women share your pain, your feelings, and your shame, you begin to view women as sisters, not as competition. Attending a women's circle slowly unties the knots that years of patriarchy have tied. This will affect your entire life in a beautiful way. 

A Place at the Table 

The roots of the sister-wound run deep. This hurt started the moment that we burned women at the stake and led to the present day. But it doesn’t need to repeat itself. 

Sometimes, activism comes in the places you least expect it. You may have seen the movie“Mean Girls”. At one point, Tina Fey says “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores.. it just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores." That moment was not lost on the generation of women that viewed their movie in their adolescents. We know what we need to do, and now is the time for us to do it. 

We need to reclaim our right to sit with other women, to create magical healing experiences with our own wisdom. We need to tell the girl being talked about, and the girl talking about her, that this is a safe time to come out, to take a place at the table, at the circle, because we don’t have to hide anymore. 

References

 Castro, Madeleine. “Introducing the Red Tent: A Discursive and Critically Hopeful Exploration of Women’s Circles in a Neoliberal Postfeminist Context.” Sociological Research Online, vol. 25, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 386–404, doi:10.1177/1360780419889973.

Edward Bever, Witchcraft, Female Aggression, and Power in the Early Modern Community, Journal of Social History, Volume 35, Issue 4, Summer 2002, Pages 955–988, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2002.0042

Hester, Marianne (1996-07-13), "Patriarchal reconstruction and witch hunting", Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, pp. 288–306, 

Longman, Chia. “Women’s Circles and the Rise of the New Feminine: Reclaiming Sisterhood, Spirituality, and Wellbeing.” Religions 9.1 (2018): 9. Crossref. Web.