Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes

The Killing Force

2005-10-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

The naive self has knowledge about a killing force loose within her psyche. It is not from having her frivolous fantasies sacrificed, but is much more serious, it is a decimation of the deepest and most soulful aspects of her creative life.

In this state a woman loses her energy to create, whether it be solutions to mundane matters in her life, such as school, family, friendships, or her concerns with compelling issues in the larger world, or with issues of spirit -– her personal development, her art. This is not a mere procrastination, for it continues over weeks and months of time. She seems “flattened out, filled with ideas perhaps, but deeply anemic and more and more unable to act upon them”.

In archetypal psychology, clothing can personify the outer presence. The persona is a mask a person shows to the world. It hides much. With proper psyche padding and disguises, both men and women can present a near-perfect persona, a near-perfect facade.

The words a woman needs most in situations wherein she finds herself “flattened out, filled with ideas perhaps, but deeply anemic and more and more unable to act upon them are:

What stands behind?
What is not as it appears?
What do I know deep within that I wish I didn't know?
What of me has been killed, or lays dying?

The killing aspect of psyche, whose job it is to see that no consciousness occurs, will continue to assert itself from time to time and twist off or poison any new growth. It is its nature. It is its job.

There is a natural censoring of all negative and painful events that occur in our lives, the “censoring ego”. The natural predator is particularly aggressive in ambushing women's wildish nature. At the very least, it seeks to scorn, and at the most sever a woman's connection to her own insights, inspirations, follow through and more.

A starved soul can become so filled with pain, a woman can no longer bear it. Because women have a soul need to express themselves in their own soulful ways, they must develop and blossom in ways that are sensible to them and without molestation from others. Who among us does not know at least one female loved-one who lost her instincts to make good choices for herself, and was forced therefore to live a marginal life or worse. Perhaps you are that woman?

pgs. 55-58 paperback

Natural Predator

2005-10-13T11:11:00.000-05:00

A woman may try to hide from the devastations of her life, but the bleeding, the loss of life’s energy, will continue until she recognizes the predator for what it is and contains it.

When women open the doors of their own lives and survey the carnage there in those out-of-the-way places, they most often find they have been allowing assassinations of their most crucial drams, goals, and hopes. They find lifeless thoughts and feelings and desires: ones, which were once graceful and promising but now, are drained of blood. Whether these hopes and dreams be about desire for relationship, desire for an accomplishment, a success, or a work of art, when such a gruesome discovery is made in one’s psyche, we can be sure the natural predator, also often symbolized in dreams as the animal groom, has been at work methodically destroying a woman’s most cherished desires, concerns, and aspirations.

In fairy tales, the animal groom character is a common motif that is understood to represent a malevolent thing disguised as a benevolent thing.

When a woman is attempting to avoid the facts of her own devastations, her night dreams are likely to shout warnings to hr, warnings and exhortations to wake up! Or get help! Or flee! Or go for the kill!

This not seeing, not understanding, not perceiving that our internal desires are not concomitant with our external actions, this is the spoor left behind by the animal groom. The presence of this factor in the psyche accounts for why women who say they wish to have a relationship instead do all they can to sabotage a loving one. This is how women who set goals to be here, there, or wherever by such and such time never even begin the first leg of the journey, or abandon it at the first hardship. This is how all the procrastinations, which give, rise to self-hatred, all the shame feelings that are pushed down and away to fester, all the new beginnings, which are solely needed, and all the long-overdue endings are not met. Wherever the predator lurks and works, everything is derailed, demolished, and decapitated.

So then comes the next step, even more difficult yet, and that is to be able to stand what one sees, all one’s self-destruction and deadness.

pgs. 54-56 paperback

The “Unmothered” Woman

2005-10-12T09:27:00.000-05:00

Naïve women as prey

Many women do not even have the basic teachings about predators that a wolf mother gives her pups, such as:

If it is threatening and bigger than you, flee;
If it’s weaker, see what you want to do:
If it’s sick, leave it alone;
If it has quills, poison, fangs or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction;
If it smells nice but is wrapped around metal jaws, walk on by.

Early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions. They are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching hr young to “be nice” in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.

As long as a woman believes she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.

Women are called “nosy”, whereas men are called “inquiring”. In reality, the trivialization of women’s curiosity so that it seems like nothing more than irksome snooping denies women’s insight, hunches, and intuitions. It denies all her senses. It attempts to attack her most fundamental powers: differentiation and determination.

Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open. The ability to stand what one sees enables a woman to return to her deep nature, to be sustained in all thoughts, feelings, and actions.

pg. 46 paperback