In this Soul teaching on the witch wound you will learn:
- What is the witch wound?
- How to recognize the witch wound
- How the witch wound is the demonization of the Divine Feminine
- What the witch wound looks like on a Soul Path level
- 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.
What is the witch wound?
- Do you suffer from ‘good girl’ syndrome?
- Are you in a codependent relationship?
- Do you find it difficult to speak your truth?
- Do you struggle to make yourself visible?
- Do you hesitate to come out of the spiritual closet?
- Do you fear stepping into your power?
If you recognize any of the above, congratulations you have the witch wound.
Where the sisterhood wound has served the purpose of women keeping each other out of power and small, the witch wound is where we have internalized the patriarchy to such an extent that we cannot take up the space that belongs to us nor fully step into our power out of fear of persecution.
It is the subconscious fear that if we speak up, if we speak out, or if we stand out that we will be punished either through torture, exile, or death.
‘The witch wound is the psychic trauma that all women carry after millennia of invalidation, disempowerment, and abuse. Patriarchal culture has systematically invalidated feminine gifts like intuition, embodiment, collaboration, emotional intelligence, and healing.’ Source: HuffPost.com
It’s the seemingly irrational existential fear that can hold you in its grip when you speak your truth, come out of the spiritual closet, step into your power, or in other ways disregard your inner patriarchal conditioning not only passed down through your personal past life experiences and ancestral lineages but also passed down collectively within the culture, religion, and society you were raised in.
It’s this conditioning that makes you subconsciously believe that it is SAFER to keep your head down, not rock the boat, take up too much space, draw attention to yourself, or be seen as a threat in any way in order to survive. Because remember, the whole concept of patriarchy was born from the necessity to survive under the harshest of circumstances.
For millennia, women have used the above coping mechanisms to keep themselves safe within a male-centered and dominated society and women who failed to do this often paid the price. Our history books are filled with their stories; such as Mary Magdelene, Joan of Arc, Marie-Antoinette, Anne Boleyn, as well as all the named and nameless witches who were drowned or burned at the stake, and so on.
You don’t have to have been a witch to suffer the witch wound
Although it is referred to as the witch wound, you don’t actually have to have been a witch in a previous lifetime to suffer this wound. Nor do you have to be a woman in your current life to suffer this wounding, this is because all persecution wounds are the witch wound. The witch wound is merely one of the ways men and women were persecuted in the past. But it wasn’t only women who were accused of witchcraft, also men were convicted of sorcery and considered warlocks although to a much lesser degree in comparison to women.
Since the beginning of time, the accusation of witchcraft has been used to make people scapegoats for personal and collective misfortunes such as not being able to conceive, miscarriages, failed crops, cheating spouses, accidents, deaths, extreme weather, famine, and so on. Not only that, it has been an effective way to get rid of rivals, political opponents, and enemies.
Various religions and especially Christianity weren’t always on board with these practices. ‘The Lombard code of 643 AD states:
Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds.
This conforms to the teachings of the Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD (alleged to date from 314 AD), which, stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to teach that it was a reality was, itself, false and heterodox teaching. Other examples include an Irish synod in 800 AD and a sermon by Agobard of Lyons (810 AD).’ Source: Wikipedia.com
But even if it wasn’t witchcraft that you were being persecuted for it could have been heresy, treason, adultery, incest, or any other trumped-up charges to be able to discredit, exile, or execute those that the powers that be, wanted out of the way. In many ways, these involved the same sham trials, false verdicts, and unjust punishment as the witch trials and were in every other way witch hunts because of the false pretenses being used to get rid of people or control people that were perceived as a threat or made to take the fall for the mistakes or crimes of others.
How do you recognize the witch wound?
Because this is both a collective wound, a transgenerational wound as well as a past life wound within both men, but especially women it often manifests in our current life as a seemingly irrational existential fear to speak up, to be seen, step into our power, and come out of the spiritual closet. It also fuels the ‘good girl’ syndrome as well as codependency within our (intimate) relationships.
Although our minds may deem this fear irrational because we don’t understand where it stems from, it only seems that way because we don’t have the personal lived experiences in our current lifetime that can explain the fear we have in a society where the rules we are subconsciously abiding by no longer exist. But because we carry the imprint of this conditioning within us that was passed down subconsciously in various ways, it is still considered a real threat in our minds that triggers an outdated protection mechanism programmed in our DNA. The same protection mechanism that has kept women “safe” and alive in previous times when women like children were meant to be seen but not heard.
This means that rather than react to our current reality as it is, we are reacting to it from an outdated mechanism meant to protect us from a perceived threat that no longer exists in our own day and age. We are literally fighting ghosts & phantoms here.
Visibility wounding
It’s no wonder then that the witch wound manifests as a difficulty in making oneself seen and heard. Although it might seem that this is other people’s fault, our external reality is created from within. It’s the witch wound and other persecution wounding that makes us afraid to take up the space that is rightfully ours, speak up and out on matters we are knowledgable and passionate about, and make ourselves visible within our communities, countries, or the world.
If you are struggling to get clients, get your book published or read, receive recognition, etc., nine times out of ten, it’s because you have visibility wounding and some subconscious story of persecution (or sometimes even a conscious fear of persecution) holding you back.
Fearing coming out of the Spiritual closet
Another way the witch wound manifests is fear of coming out of the spiritual closet, this is when you hide your spiritual gifts, try to tone down your woo-woo-ness, and hide that rather than let your life be led by the reasoning mind you actually allow your heart and intuition to guide you.
It’s very common for spiritual entrepreneurs to struggle with any of the above. I remember when I first started exploring my spiritual gifts, I had to work through a lot of persecution fear and had to regularly remind myself that it is safe now to re-own such gifts and that there are no laws against it in our current day and age.
Fear of stepping into one’s power
Of course, stepping into one’s power was an absolute no-go for most women throughout patriarchal history. Women would be severely punished for stepping out of line or challenging a man’s authority either privately, but especially publicly. Stepping into our power now in our current lifetimes can set off alarm bells in the subconscious mind and trigger patterns of self-sabotage as our outdated patriarchal protection mechanisms run riot in an attempt to keep us safe from imaginary threats that no longer exist, but are still subconsciously feared nonetheless.
The witch wound and ‘good girl’ syndrome
The “Good girl syndrome” is a term used to describe a pattern of behavior often seen in women and girls. In this pattern, women strive to please others, conform to societal expectations, and avoid conflict at the expense of their needs, desires, and well-being. Source: Sonia McDonald
It will come as no surprise that seeing the above, the witch wound contributes to disempowering mechanisms within girls and women such as the ‘good girl’ syndrome which is nothing but the manifestation of this outdated protection mechanism that we have been talking about. It is HOW women have through the millennia of the patriarchy kept themselves safe from being ostracized, punished, exiled, or sentenced to death. In other words, it’s how women have survived the patriarchy as best as they could choosing what they believed was the lesser evil of self-betrayal above the greater threat of annihilation that being cast out of society (women’s survival depended on men) or being executed represents.
Codependency in relationships
Being stripped of one’s power whether voluntarily or involuntarily leads to a disbalance of power within relationships and where there is a disbalance of power, there is codependency. Within a codependent relationship, it’s often not only one’s physical survival that depends on the partner aka financial dependency, it’s above all one’s emotional survival that depends on the other person in the relationship.
For many people, codependent relationships offer them an opportunity to recreate their unresolved patriarchal trauma to help them heal patterns of financial, emotional, and mental dependency on a partner to navigate life. Money and power in the hands of women is only a more recent development that is a little over 100 years old. We do not have a lot of past life, ancestral, or collective experience to fall back on. We do however have loads of patriarchal programming within us that have us conditioned to believe that we can’t stand on our own two feet or that we need a man (or masculine energy) to survive.
The demonization of the Divine Feminine
The witch wound is the demonization of the Divine Feminine as it cuts women off from their feminine power in multiple ways. Just think about it women who beguiled men sexually were thought to be in league with the devil. Women who were in touch with their psychic gifts and powers were deemed witches. Women who had an extensive knowledge of herbs and healing were often called witches as well. Women who were wise and in touch with their feminine wisdom were put away as mad or ridiculed.
The only part of the feminine that was deemed acceptable was in service of men and their offspring, all other parts of feminity had to be shut down to fit the patriarchal mold of what it meant to be a woman.
This has led women to disown vital parts of themselves to fit in. Parts such as:
- Her sexuality and sensuality
- Her wisdom and intelligence
- Her spiritual gifts and intuition
- Her innate connection to nature and healing powers
- Her passion and conviction
- Her anger and her rage
- Her boundaries and sovereignty
Instead, she became reduced to the bearer of children, the cook, and the housemaid as well as the object of man’s sexual gratification. Only those parts of her femininity were allowed to see the light of day, the rest had to be shoved down in order to be safe.
Now you may not have suppressed or disowned all of these parts or all to the same degree, but if you look closely you will recognize the parts of you that you find difficult to embrace. Yes, current life trauma plays a role in this as well but all current life trauma serves to help us heal these deeper imbalances within ourselves.
This of course doesn’t mean you are to blame for the trauma you experienced in this or any other lifetime, nor does it absolve the people who have hurt you from being responsible for their own behaviour and actions. But when we have suppressed or disowned parts, our Soul in all its wisdom orchestrates the experiences we need to reclaim these parts as they are part of our wholeness. Without them, we are incapable of embodying the truth of who we are no matter how high vibe or spiritual we attempt to be. There is a time and a place for rituals, positive thinking, journaling, and so on but when it comes to bringing back suppressed or disowned parts we need to address the trauma that caused these parts to split off.
The witch wound on a Soul path level
On a Soul path level, the witch wound represents the distrust of the masculine toward the feminine. Not only externally, but within our own psyche and inner masculine and inner feminine template. We all have an inner feminine (anima) and an inner masculine (animus) no matter if we were born as a man or a woman, or identify with neither. It’s this part of us, this inner template that has been subject to the patriarchal conditioning. It’s here that we have internalized the subconscious belief that women are inferior to men and it’s here that our own inner masculine distrusts our inner feminine and vice versa.
The feminine is the collective shadow that is dying to be integrated again within the individual. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, for the past 6.000 years and more the feminine has not been an equal to the masculine, and that conditioning is a legacy wound that we have all inherited not only from our ancestors and society but from our own Soul paths & past live history.
On the most abstract level, the masculine represents doing, while the feminine represents being. Being is not better than doing, nor is doing better than being we need to embody both especially while incarnated as humans. If you take away the idea of inferiority and superiority and you realize that we all have an inner masculine and an inner feminine then we can even say that the inner feminine represents the soul, while the inner masculine represents the ego (we could not take physical form without the ego – the ego is our ally, not an enemy).
Throughout our incarnation process, the ego has tried to run the show by fixing, doing, saving, putting in motion, etc. because it doesn’t have the faith that if it doesn’t make it happen, it will get what it wants in life. This is because the ego doesn’t trust the soul, in the very same way that our inner masculine doesn’t trust his inner feminine. When we can restore this trust between, the inner masculine and the inner feminine – between the ego and the soul, they can join forces and use both parts of their nature. This is also our truth on a soul level, the soul is androgynous which means that the masculine and feminine are in perfect harmony and each other’s equal.
We cannot access our BEING state and harmonize it with our DOING state until we heal the idea within ourselves that one is better than the other, or that the other aspect of us is not to be trusted whether that is the inner masculine distrusting the inner feminine, or the ego distrusting the soul. We have to end the internal tug-of-war, the battle of the sexes within ourselves. Although we may consciously agree with this idea, as long as we have subconscious beliefs that contradict this we won’t be able to EMBODY (aka live) it.
How to heal the witch wound
To heal the witch wound we not only need to find our wounds of persecution, but also where our inner masculine feels it can’t trust the inner feminine. Our external reality reflects to us our inner state. As long as the battle of the sexes rages within our own psyche, we will see it mirrored back to us in our external reality. As long as we suppress and disown parts of our femininity, we will attract experiences that are meant to help us reclaim these suppressed or disowned parts in ourselves that we often fail to recognize as healing opportunities because of how painful these experiences can be.
This is why rather than PLAY out your wounding, it is better to pre-emptively CLEAR out your wounding through healing modalities such as Soul Embodiment® Therapy. It’s a lot quicker and a lot less painful, than having to play out all your false beliefs and false identifications (your unresolved pain and trauma) in your everyday life.
I pray this Soul teaching on the witch wound has helped you identify how the witch wound is playing out in your own life and that of your clients. As a collective, we are reclaiming the Divine Feminine within ourselves – we have no other option because when it comes to embodied spirituality rather than wishful thinking, healing our inner feminine is a non-negotiable. This is because the Shakti energy that lies coiled at the tailbone in the root chakra is the Kundalini energy and it is feminine. As long as we subconsciously believe that the feminine is inferior to the masculine, the Shakti energy cannot rise. This means that we cannot reach enlightenment without balancing our inner masculine and inner feminine energies within ourselves.
With my deepest love,
