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The Sisterhood Wound How Women Keep Themselves and Other Women Small – Healing the Masculine & Feminine Series Part IV

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Sabriyé Dubrie

As a mystic Sabriyé taps into the collective wisdom on a Soul Path level that she shares through the Soul Teachings. These teachings serve to stir the remembrance of your own Soul Wisdom. Never miss a new Soul Teaching again by signing up for our newsletter.

In this Soul teaching on the sisterhood wound and how to heal it, you will learn:

  • What the sisterhood wound is and how it was created
  • How to recognize the sisterhood wound in yourself and others
  • The various ways the sisterhood wound plays out in different areas of our life
  • How to heal the sisterhood wound
  • And more…

There is great interest these days in balancing our inner masculine and feminine parts, to for example attract the right partner or unlock higher levels of spiritual consciousness as well as higher levels of income. The missing piece however in most teachings is undoing our patriarchal conditioning and healing our patriarchal wounding.

Healing the Masculine & Feminine series is an eight-article series by Sabriyé Dubrie of Soul Teachings on healing our patriarchal conditioning and truly balancing our inner feminine & inner masculine parts within ourselves. As a society, we are only starting to understand how deeply our patriarchal wounding still influences us today; and how it wreaks havoc in our romantic relationships, our relationship with our parents, our relationship with the opposite sex, our relationship as women amongst ourselves, and in what it means to be a woman or a man in our own lives. 

The teachings shared are gleaned from my own healing journey on a Soul path level and my experience in working with over a thousand clients using the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method. For those interested in learning this method as a therapist, I run a yearly Soul Embodiment® Therapy Certification Program to train therapists worldwide in this revolutionary healing modality.

Do you struggle to feel safe with other women?

Although much has been written on the Sisterhood wound already, you will find the ideas and connections made in this Soul teaching thought-provoking, shining light on this type of wounding in a way that you have probably not looked at it before. For those completely new to the concept of the sisterhood wound and perhaps even new to my work altogether, welcome! It’s great to have you with us on this journey of Soul path healing.

If you are a healer or a therapist you will find that the Soul teachings shared help you take your clients to a deeper level of healing, but often we first need to access this deeper level in our own journey, to be able to take our clients there. The sisterhood wound once you learn how to recognize it, is a wound that plays out in many areas of our lives and therefore it’s a wound that will come up frequently in client sessions. In this Soul teaching, we dive deep into its origin, how to recognize it, and of course how to heal it.

If you find yourself:

  • being ‘one of the guys, rather being friends with men than women
  • always being the one that is left out when women gather
  • not being able to connect or have fulfilling relationships with women
  • being the woman other women fear they have to hide their husbands and boyfriends from
  • subconsciously competing with other women in life, love, business, money, etc.
  • constantly comparing yourself to other women wishing you could have what they have, begrudging them their success, tearing them down, gossiping about them behind their backs
  • judging other women on their femininity, relationship status, outer appearance, or sexuality
  • feeling better than other women or a certain group of women based on your life choices, i.e. SAHM, corporate career, promiscuity, abortion, and so on
  • making sure other women don’t get ahead when you see your chance
  • being very masculine in your behavior, thinking men have it easier, or believing that men are more reliable because they’re less emotional

Then you probably carry the sisterhood wound…

Heck, even if you have a woman with a sisterhood wound in your life doing any of the above to you, you still probably carry the sisterhood wound – you just managed to deeply disown it. While in some cases it could also be that you are projecting your Mother wound onto other (often older) women in your life, in most cases it’s the sisterhood wound that makes you struggle to feel safe with other women.

The Sisterhood wound explained

Although you may have already been struggling to have relationships with girls and being a part of girl groups as a child or a teenager, the reason why the sisterhood wound runs so deep is because it’s been there so long; collectively, ancestrally, and in our past life experiences as a woman being stripped of our status and power within patriarchal societies.

Just to clear up an illusion many spiritual women have, matriarchal societies aren’t any better. It just doesn’t matter who subjugates who, the ideal society is where men and women are equal in all ways despite their unique strengths and differences.

For this Soul teaching, however, we are going to zoom in on the patriarchy as the sisterhood wound is a direct result of patriarchal conditioning in women. The reason women compete with each other and tear each other down as we see with the sisterhood wound, is due to subconscious patriarchal conditioning that has women pitched against each other and fighting each other to gain favor from men. 

The pick-me girl describes a woman who wants a man to pick her over other women.

Our modern language even created a slang term for this type of behavior that is spot on. I am talking about the term ‘pick-me-girl’, the pick-me girl is a woman who obsessively desires male approval and validation, often at the expense of other women. Despite the word girl being used, the term pick-me girl is almost always used to describe an adult woman. The pick-me in pick-me girl describes a woman who wants a man to pick her over other women. The term also alludes to the idea that the woman will do anything for attention or acceptance, similar to a small child who desperately wants to be chosen or noticed. Source: Dictionary.com

The reason this description is so spot on is back when this wounding started men represented not only SURVIVAL but a higher quality of life (depending on their status), women had to compete with each other to become chosen by the man they had set their sights on. Women were completely dependent on men for their survival and quality of life which made it a matter of life and death to please and appease men (their ruler, grandfather, father, brother, and husband) in order to be and stay safe.

As women couldn’t compete on the basis of their individuality or individual power, they had to accentuate the parts of their femininity that were appealing to men and hide the parts that put men off. Unable to express the parts of themselves that made them truly unique they turned on each other to fight over him which of course only stroked the male ego more, making him feel more masculine, more virile, etc. When in reality both women, like two dogs fighting over a bone, were just trying to survive in a societal structure where their survival depended on men.

Read this Soul teaching on the origins of the patriarchy to better understand how men were put in this position of ensuring survival at the birth of humankind and how much this actually made sense for the early human beings that lived in nomadic tribes. As this collective survival mechanism got passed down from generation to generation, it became more and more distorted but it did not start out that way.

How the Sisterhood wound plays out in love

Within patriarchal societies, women have often had to compete with other women either as co-wives in a polygamous setting or through extramarital affairs without having the real option to file for divorce or the power within the relationship to make their husbands be faithful to them.

True patriarchal societies saw to this by forcing women to stay in their marriages through appointing custody over the children to the father if women dared to leave (if leaving was even a possibility, to begin with). This made that women were potentially free to leave their husbands (for another man) but then had to leave their children behind if they did. A measure that kept most women from going and enduring whatever they had to, to be able to stay with their children. 

Often not being in a position to be able to express their anger at their spouses, their anger became directed at the women who endangered the survival of themselves and their offspring. We still see this today, when a man cheats the woman’s anger will often be directed towards the other woman and not the man who broke her trust. It’s just another way that the sisterhood wound manifests itself.

Nearly every woman comes into the world with a mythical woman in the back of her mind who is to rob her of her love.

Florence Scovel Shinn

According to Florence Scovel Shinn ‘Nearly every woman comes into the world with a mythical woman in the back of her mind who is to rob her of her love. She has been called “the other woman.” Of course, it comes from a woman’s belief in duality. So long as she visualizes interference, it will come.

It is usually very difficult for a woman to see herself loved by the man she loves (because of her subconscious patriarchal conditioning), so these affirmations are to impress the truth of the situation upon her subconscious mind, for in reality there is only oneness.

As I am one with God, the Undivided One, I am one with my undivided love and undivided happiness.’

How the sisterhood wound plays out in family dynamics

I have written before about how there was always female interference in my love life, not perse in the form of an affair although this happened too, but in the form of a mother or mother figure and also a sister once who didn’t approve or stood in the way of the relationship I had with a man I loved. This was subconscious wounding from my childhood in which I would have to fight my half-sisters and stepmother for the love and attention of my father.

In the end, I sacrificed the relationship with my father to be less close as I would have wanted it to be simply so that I could extract myself from the backstabbing by other women that came with being close to him. This created the interesting dynamic that all my adult life it was my father that made sure to keep me part of his life, but only on my terms. I stayed away or kept my distance from any gathering where both my half-sisters and my stepmother came together and I preferred seeing him without any of these three other women being present because they would make me pay either in front of him or later privately for any positive attention or affection he displayed.

Not having recovered my incest memories until I was twenty-five I was extremely close to my father emotionally while growing up as a teenager, so much so that I remember realizing that he would not live long (he was an excessive smoker and drinker) and that I would be in trouble if I didn’t start taking distance from him already now. I was nineteen when I decided this and by the time he died about twenty years later, I had already let go of the deep attachment I had felt to him.

However the older I got, the more of a threat I seemed to become to my stepmother and the harder I had to fight to have access to my father. Similarly, this was also true for my nine and twelve years older half-sisters who took the gloves off more as I matured and I no longer was the much younger baby sister I once was.

What makes incest families so much more complex is that it pits (step)mothers against their (step)daughters, and granddaughters as they become competition for their men’s love in a way they should never be. I can see now what made my stepmother compete with us his daughters so much was the fact that everyone knew my father had committed incest with my middle half-sister. Not only that my father and my oldest half-sister had a very emotionally incestuous relationship together where she was his surrogate wife – even though he was married to my stepmom.

This made all of us a threat to my stepmother’s sense of survival as well as her quality of life. Both while he was alive and after his death she managed to funnel his resources to herself, her children, and her grandchildren. She not only stole our father away from us both emotionally as well as provisionally (she even ran off with our inheritance) but made him the father and the grandfather of her children and grandchildren while she subtly pushed us and our children away as much as she felt she was able to get away with. Before my father died he acknowledged his failure in preventing this and admitted to us his children and mothers of his grandchildren that he regretted allowing this to have happened and missing out on so much of our and his grandchildren’s lives because of it.

He married my stepmother to protect her against the vultures that he expected my half-sisters to become after his death as he knew that there was no love lost between his wife and his daughters. My father had already reduced his capital to the bare minimum on paper and sold off all the excess real estate so that there was only a relatively small amount left to divide under my father’s four children as well as her two daughters from a previous marriage, and even that money she took with her when she disappeared.

Because my father was extremely emotionally unavailable this only fuelled my stepmother’s need to monopolize him more which is exactly what she did – and she ‘won’. But our whole family paid the price, my father, us his children, and his grandchildren who barely had a relationship with him.

Now, this may not sound like the sisterhood wound but look at it from my stepmother’s point of view, she constantly felt that she had to compete with three other women for her husband’s love and attention, knowing that at least one of them had been her sexual ‘rival’. As happens in many incest families my half-sister was blamed and shamed for the incest instead of my father. This is more sisterhood wounding because it was up to the older women in our family to protect my half-sister and condemn my father. Instead, they allowed her to carry the blame and him to be forgiven.

This very dynamic of putting the blame on someone other than the man rather than holding him responsible for his own actions is a holdover from our patriarchal conditioning, we see it in the case of the other woman in an extra-marital affair and we often see it happen in incest situations as well and this only becomes more exacerbated the more emotionally or financially dependent the rest of the family is on the man in question.

Blended families and the sisterhood wound

The sisterhood wound is a very well-known dynamic that can play out in blended families; jealousy, rivalry, and the desire to monopolize the shared person’s love and attention by the stepparents and of course, stepparents feel the same way about their stepchildren. The problem is however that the stepparent is in most cases the adult or in any case the new person entering the existing family unit.

As the adult, they cannot leave it to children to set the tone for the relationship or change unhealthy relationship dynamics, and as the new person entering the existing family unit, they need to understand that they can’t separate a parent from their biological children no matter how much they would like to. They are in a relationship with someone who has children – if that’s not what they want or they can’t accept their partner’s children then that is something they need to work on within themselves or perhaps they need to find a partner who doesn’t have children.

Too many women naively enter such relationship dynamics thinking that they can have the man without the children or end up manipulating the man into a place where he sacrifices his relationship with his children to keep the woman.

This was not only a dynamic that played out in my childhood, but also in my daughter’s and son’s relationship with their father. Their stepmother found herself a single mother of two, desperately in need of a partner and father for her children. Although I am forever grateful to her for distracting my ex-husband sufficiently for me and the kids to get out alive, she made her move on him, despite knowing that I was carrying his child even though we were in the process of separation. They had a good relationship until he died in 2021 and they were together for 22 happy years, but part of that ‘happiness’ came at the sacrifice of his and my children’s relationship with him.

When my thirteen-year-old son had wanted to live with his dad in the past, his wife had threatened that if he didn’t send his son back to me – she would leave him. This ensured that I had the full-time care of both children with as good as no support from their father financially, emotionally, and otherwise which would have been the net result anyway probably because their father had never forgiven me for leaving him but rather than his new partner encouraging him to spend more time with his children she forced him to minimize his time with his children to be able to maximize the time he spent with her and her children.

I can literally count the number of times my children spent with their father as minors on one hand, their father bears the biggest responsibility in this but their stepmother is responsible as well, as part of it was also due to the difficult relationship she had with my daughter who she was very critical of and later admitted to me she hated for the fallout my daughter had with her father shortly before he died.

Much of the difficulties she faced with the children, stemmed from the fact that they had been so alienated from their father (father wound) through his own behavior and the role she played in encouraging this. Both children hungered for their father because they saw so little of him, I am quite sure that this starvation for their father’s attention and affection made the few visits they had very intense, forcing the stepmother and her children into a role they were not accustomed to but this is what happens under such circumstances; the kids will be the center of the father’s attention and the children will only have eyes for their father because they have been deprived of him so long.
Of course, they want their father all to themselves then, a biological mother would not feel pushed aside or threatened by this – but a stepmother often will.

Although men can harm their stepchildren in different ways, the idea of the ‘wicked’ stepmother goes back many centuries all the way to the beginning of time because many children grew up with a stepmother after their biological mother died often in childbirth. The problem arises when a stepmother cannot love her partner’s child(ren) as her own because that is when jealousy and rivalry set in. An unconscious sisterhood wound in the adult and child(ren) involved in this dynamic only exacerbates these feelings. This makes blended families, particularly stepmother-daughter relationships extra vulnerable to feelings of jealousy, rivalry, and competition for the father/partner’s love and attention.

But blended families pose another risk to play out the sisterhood wound when the mother brings in a new male partner. The statistics are not pretty as children are TWENTY TIMES more at risk of being sexually abused by their stepfather aka mom’s new boyfriend. As it is, child abuse is in total an appalling 40x more likely when single parents find a new partner and these children are nearly 50x more likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents. The primary cause of harm to children in blended family settings is the unrelated, usually male, adult – brought into the mix through romantic involvement with the biological parent.

…. stepfathers were significantly more likely to sexually abuse daughters compared to genetic fathers. This finding is supported in other studies and may extend to the mother’s paramours and male acquaintances.

Source: pure.hud.ac.uk

When your partner makes his relationship with your child(ren) sexual, as a mother you are put in a position where your child is made your rival for the love, attention, and affection of your (new) partner especially when this is still in a stage where you are unaware of what is really going on (the incest has not been discovered or exposed by the child). Because you want the relationship between your partner and your child to succeed you may not want to jump the gun and allow things to continue even though you’re uncomfortable with the level of displayed intimacy taking place between your (new) partner and child.

This can obviously also happen when incest takes place by the biological father. However, for example, statistics from the United States show that step and single-parent families account for only one-third of all children in the US, but more than two-thirds of all children who experienced child sexual abuse. A research report by the Centre for Independent Studies by research fellow Jeremy Sammut cites reviews of more than 70 research reports providing overwhelming evidence that girls living in non-traditional families are sexually abused by ”stepfathers” – partners of their single, remarried, or re-partnered mothers – at many times the rate of abuse by biological fathers. Source: cis.org.au

As the majority of single parents are still mothers worldwide, their children (girls and boys) are the most at-risk.

Of course, mother denial plays a huge role in why mothers often fail to identify an incestuous relationship between their partner (father or stepfather) and their child. In the end, from a mother’s perspective whether consciously or subconsciously their child becomes the ‘other woman’, and although the child is innocent of course, it triggers the fear of loss of the partner (the sisterhood wound) or the actual loss of the relationship when the mother steps up to protect her daughter (or son), which not all mothers do.

It all depends on the mother’s own level of wounding how she will respond to her partner’s betrayal and if she is capable in all ways to protect her child. Many mothers turn a blind eye to the incest to protect themselves and their own (financial) interests. When this happens, they sacrifice their child(ren)’s well-being for their own survival and the higher living standards that the father or stepfather facilitates. It is well known that single mothers and their children often experience a decrease in lifestyle post-divorce. On average a woman can expect an almost 30% decline in her standard of living following divorce, while men often see an increase of 10%. Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

If you are a healer or a therapist who works with blended families, with incest victims, or the non-abusive parent of an incest victim, taking the sisterhood wound into account could help clients identify how this wound is playing out in other areas of their lives as well.

  • It’s the sisterhood wound that makes women allow men to get away with incest, the subconscious patriarchal belief that they need a man to survive, and the conscious or subconscious threat their children become in their minds when they become ‘rivals’ for their partner’s love and affection, as well as of course the whitewashing of the man’s transgressions in many cases by dismissing or minimizing what happened or putting the blame on the child in order to be able to keep the man in his position of power.
  • It’s also the sisterhood wound that has the stepmother compete with her stepchildren for the love and affection of her partner or the stepfather forcing the biological mother to compete with her children for his love and affection. In both cases, this creates an environment of rivalry and competition that one rarely sees (although it does happen, especially in incest families) within the relationship of a biological parent and child.

The sisterhood wound in business and on the work floor

But the sisterhood wound doesn’t only play out in the private sphere of love, family, or even friends, we take it with us in business and on the work floor where we play out the same wounding for very similar reasons because men, especially in the corporate world, still control most of the money and the board room. In business, it often shows up as women not helping each other up but rather seeing other women as competition for one’s own position and earning capacity. It shows up for example in big corporations as women donning a masculine persona to climb the corporate ladder, sacrificing her own femininity to be one of the boys in the hopes that this will further her career.

Where men often help other men and work together, women have tended to not pool their resources or use their connections to help other women ahead. Instead, they became queen bees. Although this is slowly changing as women are feeling more comfortable in their positions (of power) in the corporate world, we are in fact only approximately 100 years into allowing women onto the work floor and into positions of power in a significant way.

Much has changed, but on a very subconscious level we still carry this deep patriarchal conditioning inside of us, the idea that women are less than men simply because they are women.

Although women have worked for free or for very little pay for centuries, our current level of involvement in the corporate world is only three or four generations old. My paternal grandmother was one of the first female doctors in the Netherlands to graduate in 1925. She and her female peers faced a lot of harassment and obstruction in getting malpractice insurance, bank accounts, and the other things their male colleagues had easy access to simply because they were men. Much has changed, but on a very subconscious level we still carry this deep patriarchal conditioning inside of us, the idea that women are less than men simply because they are women.

We also see this spillover in entrepreneurship, never in history have there been as many female business owners as there are now, and yet the majority of these women are not doing well in their business. In 2012, 82% of women-owned firms generated less than $100,000 in revenue per year. But things have not improved since then. Because as of today, 88% of all women-owned businesses generate less than $100,000 yearly. Out of all women-led companies, there are only 4.2% that generate more than $1 million in annual revenue, women in business stats show. This means that the amount of female-owned businesses that make six figures has decreased in the last decade instead of increasing.

Although there are many different reasons why female entrepreneurs are earning so little in their businesses such as merely wanting to be able to combine earning money with other life responsibilities such as children, or money, and visibility blocks as well as wounds around authenticity and reclaiming their power – we do also see the sisterhood wound play out amongst female entrepreneurs and it isn’t pretty how women treat other women in business. You will probably recognize a lot of this from your own experience or from what other women have shared on social media:

  • Lying about one’s success and revenue to bring in clients – how can there be so many women bragging about insane amounts of revenue in record time when the statistics are clear that only 12% of women entrepreneurs are actually making 6-figures?
  • Deciding that an investment is no longer ‘aligned’ and refusing to pay future installments or asking for a refund
  • Slandering another woman’s business on social media or offline because of a dispute that should have been resolved privately
  • Lying to get a Paypal refund or credit card payment refunded that you have no right to because services have been delivered, are still in progress, or that you have contractually committed to
  • Copying another businesswoman’s social media or blog post and pretending it’s your own
  • Stealing another woman’s program and selling it as your own (either translated or in the original language)
  • Attacking other female entrepreneurs online or offline
  • Telling female entrepreneurs that copycatting their work is a compliment, that they don’t really own their work anyway, etc.
  • Trying to haggle over their prices, shame or ridicule them for their pricing – if you can’t afford them, that’s your problem
  • Going social justice warrior on another woman’s business or shaming them into joining trends you feel are politically important
  • Ganging up on a female business owner with other women or inciting others to gang up on her
  • Belittling or shaming a woman for promoting her business because you feel it’s the wrong day, or because you feel that it’s the wrong circumstances, or because you feel that she must be having a sale because she needs money…
  • Not supporting the female business owners you know but rather taking your business elsewhere
  • Demanding free work because you’re a sister, or you are part of the same group, or have the same background, etc.
  • Not crediting another woman’s work when appropriate

I could go on, but I think you get the drift. It’s all those actions that you would never in a million years do to a man’s business, but that are somehow not an issue to do to a(nother) female business owner. And yes, of course, some women or men do this irrespective of gender, etc. But you will find that how women treat other women in business is in a league of its own, especially for women who service primarily female clients this kind of wounding often quickly rears its ugly head. The next section will explain the deeper dynamics of this programming.

A programming to their own detriment

In Dutch feminist circles, the phenomenon of the sisterhood wound is known as the ‘krabbenmand effect’ (the crab bucket effect) or crab mentality. A state where women have internalized patriarchy so deeply that they have become the ones that perpetuate it.

The crab-bucket effect is a way of thinking best described by the phrase “If I can’t have it, neither can you”.

The metaphor is derived from a pattern of behavior noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its efforts will be undermined by others, ensuring the group’s collective demise. The analogy in human behavior is that members of a group will attempt to reduce the self-confidence of any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of envy, resentment, spite, conspiracy, or competitive feelings, to halt their progress.

In other words, the sisterhood wound is women keeping other women in check and small, because if they themselves have to adhere to their own patriarchal conditioning, they’ll make sure that other women do so as well. 

This is also what motivates women to lash out and undermine other women, this feeling of ‘If I can’t have it, neither can you’. The reality is that the majority of women aren’t doing that great for themselves at different levels. We are obviously doing better than we ever have before, there are for example 252 million female entrepreneurs worldwide as of 2023. Twelve percent of 252 million is still 30,24 million female entrepreneurs earning six, seven, or more figures a year. But it also means that there are 221,76 million female entrepreneurs and I don’t know how many women who want to start a business but haven’t yet, who want out of the crab bucket but are being undermined by others and their own subconscious wounding.

I have taken the example of female entrepreneurship here, but it applies to everything that women desire which they for whatever reason don’t have themselves and begrudge other women being able to have; which can be love, a man, children, a career, money, a business, a good relationship with their mother, beautiful friendships, etc.

How to recognize the sisterhood

Women have been stripped of their power for centuries (for over the past six thousand years at least) and as a collective, we have to unlearn manipulating to gain and access power and learn how to wield our power wisely. The sisterhood wound is simply a way in which women perpetuate the disempowerment of themselves and other women because of their own patriarchal conditioning. 

These are some more ways to recognize how the sisterhood is being played out:

  • Struggling to be part of women’s only group experiences
  • Aligning ourselves with men and other people enjoying systemic power, rather than with each other
  • Turning internalized self-hatred against other women (where women hold other women to a higher and different standard than men and then enforce it with a ferociousness that is quite something to behold)
  • Dishonoring each other – talking behind each other’s backs in friendship groups, in coaching circles, in online forums – and creating cliques within groups of women
  • Refusing to openly acknowledge problems (because women are not conditioned to confront people openly and so the problems are minimized and the emotions suppressed)
  • Having a preference – when thinking about future children – for boys because ‘girls are such hard work’ and ‘boys are easy’
  • Speaking up against each other but not against men (in patriarchy it’s so much easier to turn against women than it is to be the ‘troublesome woman’ defying a man, challenging masculinity, or speaking about the operation of sexism. And because women are trained to avoid confrontation, while men are encouraged to be confrontational, invariably there are fewer repercussions to speaking up against a woman than there are against a man)
  • Choosing not to raise each other up, whether at home, in the workplace, or in our communities
  • Disrespecting other women’s businesses – by not paying them or angling to pay them less than a man for the same service, bad-mouthing their service to others rather than speaking to them directly about any concerns, copying their work, and generally treating their business as though it were a hobby or just not as serious as other (namely male-owned) businesses. 

Source: Theschoolofvisibility.com

How to heal the sisterhood wound

This Soul teaching would not be complete without going into how to heal the sisterhood wound. The first step is becoming aware of such behavior in ourselves and seeing where we are dishonoring ourselves and other women in our lives in the ways described above.

The knee-jerk reaction is to say ‘Well, I don’t do things like this.’ but the truth is of course, that because it takes place across so many different types of relationships with so many different women in different kinds of situations, we have all done it to some extent in some form in the past. We are all guilty of such behavior to some extent and acknowledging this allows us to explore to which extent this type of wounding is still subconsciously playing out in our lives.

Of course, we have as women all been on the receiving end of this type of wounding by other women in our lives – it is after all a deep collective wound that women carry. But the reality is that we can’t change other women, we can only change ourselves and how we show up in the world. Often the more we disown our own wounding, the more we see it in other people as a mirror of what is playing out under the surface internally although this isn’t of course always the case. It could actually even be a mirror of your own past life patriarchal beliefs as a man about women, that want to become conscious so that you can finally release them.

That is the issue with the sisterhood wound though, that it doesn’t have this one direct origin because it ties into many aspects of our patriarchal wounding. It’s not only about our worth as a woman but also about our right to power, our right to our own opinion and voice, our right to autonomy, our right to sovereignty, our right to financial independence, our right to bodily autonomy, our right to being seen and treated as an equal, our right to seeking and fulfilling our own destiny and so on.

Although these may seem like feminist talking points, I don’t mean them in that way. I mean the rights we should all have as human beings, no matter our gender. The sisterhood wound to me is much more about healing our relationship with the Divine Feminine, which goes so much deeper than simply claiming that we are the Divine Feminine which so many unhealed women do simply because they want to see themselves this way (as spiritually evolved) or because of the benefits they associate coming with this title such as being the equal to their Divine Masculine (Twin Flame, Soulmate, etc.).

However, truly healing our relationship with the Divine Feminine is about healing our subconscious (patriarchal) beliefs about what it means to be a woman in all her different roles, rather than only the feminine in service to the masculine. This inevitably ties into other wounding as well such as wounding around love, self-worth, power, money, and so on. To me healing the sisterhood wound is rather a peeling off layer by layer of these different wounds that are deeply intertwined with our patriarchal wounding to be able to heal it completely.

The sisterhood wound and the New Earth

In the end, spiritually speaking, we can never have ourselves what we begrudge others. Everything we don’t want others to have, becomes inaccessible to us as well which is what the metaphor of the ‘crab bucket’ teaches us. In a way, the belief ‘If I can’t have it, neither can you’ is the epitome of scarcity thinking which comes from the belief that there’s not enough to go around. Instead, we should flip it into ‘If I can have it, you can have it too’ which brings us into the realm of unlimited abundance and co-creation/cooperation. This just goes to show that we have to heal the sisterhood wound to access and anchor into the 5D or the New Earth that we are here to unlock collectively.

Not only does the sisterhood wound keep us fighting each other and out of power, but it also keeps us from being able to embody the Divine Feminine. For as long as we are pitched against our sisters competing for the love, attention, and validation of men we are focused outwardly on something we can in the end only find within ourselves; our own worth, authority, and power.

This is why instead of pretending that we are already holier than thou which is another game spiritual women tend to play with each other, we should seriously dive into this type of subconscious wounding because this is what is holding us back as women, our own subconscious beliefs about our worth, our authority and reclaiming and owning our power after being stripped of it for centuries and centuries (which is also true for men in different ways).

This work is not simply about reclaiming our sexuality (which is often shallow promiscuity in disguise) or reclaiming our rage and inner warrior or dark Lilith archetype. In many ways, this so-called healing work is nothing but reinforcing the wounds of patriarchy instead of healing them.

Our modern level of promiscuity for example isn’t a sign that this conditioning has been broken, because in many ways hookup culture is playing right into our patriarchal conditioning and it’s not contributing to healthier relationships or commitment.

The sexual revolution has changed our sexual culture from one that most women prefer (a committed long-term relationship) to one that many men prefer (one-night stands and no real emotional commitment). ‘While some (women) may be interested in a casual hookup, others may not be interested in that at all—but, as a result of hookup culture becoming the new norm, many feel hooking up is their only option. What was once sexual liberation for women and a win for feminism, in which women having casual sex was destigmatized, is now a sexual license for men. Our support and encouragement of hookup culture can actually promote the patriarchy by telling women that there is a greater expectation for them to have casual sex than to have a real relationship.’ Source: bcheights.com

Most young college women for example don’t like being promiscuous. ‘However, they feel like if they don’t “put out,” they’ll be outcompeted by the more sexually adventurous women among them, i.e., that another girl will end up in a relationship with the guy in whom they are interested (Hello, sisterhood wound!). What most of these women don’t know, however, is that recent research shows the opposite to be true – at least when it comes to true love and lasting relationships.’ Source: naturalwomanhood.org

The answer to all of this is healing our patriarchal subconscious conditioning (programming) and the psychological patterns it created that keep us from fully embodying the Divine Feminine & the Divine Masculine in an authentic (rather than a make-believe) way.

This patriarchal programming or conditioning runs so deep that it shows up in all of our relationships in our family, our love life, our community, and our work life. It is what is keeping us as a collective stuck in the old paradigm fuelling porn, prostitution, sex trafficking and slavery, incest, sexual violence, and so on. We can’t spiritually bypass such wounding and quantum leap ourselves into a place we can’t arrive at without truly undoing this programming on a subconscious level and the false beliefs that they are predicated on.

Reprogramming our subconscious programming

The mistake most people make is to think that their conscious beliefs are stronger or their only true beliefs. You can be the most radical feminist and still have deep subconscious patriarchal contradicting beliefs that inevitably bleed through in your life. The fact that you are consciously not aware of your subconscious beliefs, says absolutely nothing and the reality is that most people are completely oblivious to how much they are living out their subconscious wounds and programming rather than being the master of their own fate and destiny.

In fact, even most healing modalities treat the subconscious mind as this thing that they can merely force their will on and then command it as they see fit.

The subconscious mind doesn’t work like that, it has an intelligence of its own that you need to work with in honor and with respect.

All you need to do to reprogram the subconscious mind is show it the truth on a Soul level, we can only do this by revisiting the misinterpretations (false beliefs) that were created in the past. Showing the subconscious mind the truth from the Soul’s perspective triggers it to reprogram itself and signals the brain to rewire itself accordingly. In other words, it’s not until you make your deep subconscious patriarchal beliefs conscious that you can neutralize them by deciding that these beliefs are no longer true for you today.

I pray this teaching helps you identify how the sisterhood wound and patriarchal conditioning are still playing out in your life today. Reach out if you would like personal support healing this type of wounding and/or join my online program ‘Coming into Oneness’ where we work deeply on both patriarchal woundings as well as other subconscious woundings that are keeping you out of embodying who you truly are on a Soul level and living the life that is yours by Divine Right.

With my deepest love,

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