This article is rich. In my mind, we can't speak to the nature of female bodied people without attributing that nature to a history of oppression and control. It was in my lifetime that women had to have bank loans signed by their husbands or fathers! My lifetime! Of course every part of our behavior has been born out of survival strategies in a disempowered position in society! How could it be otherwise? This is certainly my perspective when it comes to coaching couples in love and sexuality. It runs deep. A woman's relationship to sex is an integral part of this wounded past. Her relationship to desire, obligation, orgasm, worthiness, jealousy, competition, confidence. We're dragging the entrails of our past (and present) behind us as we move forward.
Exactly this, Corinne! Thank you for bringing in the body, the bank account, the bedroom… all the places where power has been negotiated, withheld, or distorted. You’re naming something crucial: we cannot talk about the emotional lives of women in the abstract. They are lived, shaped, and often contorted by systems that have denied women sovereignty not just legally, but intimately.
That image, dragging the entrails of our past (and present), is searing and so accurate. Because it’s muscle memory. Women carry in their nervous systems the residue of centuries: being property, being pleasing, being punished. And nowhere does that show up more acutely than in love and sex. The very site that should be freedom becomes a minefield, where desire must tiptoe past duty, where pleasure is laced with shame, and where confidence often gets distorted into competition.
What you do in your coaching is amazing work, because it insists on telling the truth. It insists on unlearning scripts that were never written for women’s liberation, only their containment.
Many women have internalised the oppression and the logic of the oppressor. They police their own bodies, silence their own needs, compete instead of connect out of an inherited survival reflex. Healing means reclaiming power and rewriting the terms of power, from domination to reciprocity. And that’s the change we’re in the middle of, one nervous system, one bedroom, one honest conversation at a time.
The powerful, incisive piece I needed to read, a rare blend of cultural critique, psychological insight, and lived empathy. Bravo! Your framing of the emotionally unhealthy woman as not simply “toxic” but wounded—and historically shaped—is a deep departure from the reductive labels often seen in mainstream discourse. It acknowledges pain without justifying harm, and that’s an important, humane distinction. I love this.
What struck me most is your observation that “emotional games” are the residue of emotional survival. That phrase alone reframes manipulation not as maladaptation—a deeply personal response to systemic deprivation. It made me reflect on how often both women and men carry forward these relational scripts, mistaking inherited defense mechanisms for personality traits. This is our society today. This.
There’s also a nuanced tension in your essay between personal accountability and structural inheritance. While you emphasize healing as a personal choice, I wonder how we can better socialize emotional literacy, particularly for girls growing up in environments that still reward silence over assertion. How do we make emotional maturity less of a personal miracle and more of a collective norm?
One last thought: I appreciate that you didn’t present “healthy womanhood” as a fixed destination but as an ongoing practice—messy, conscious, and courageous. That reframing itself feels like an invitation, not a judgment. Because I’m tired of boring mainstream judgements.
So here’s my question: what does it actually look like to raise emotionally healthy girls in a culture still obsessed with performance, likability, and control?
Your comment is the echo of my essay’s deepest intention, thank you for engaging it with such emotional generosity! That you caught the deliberate refusal to flatten the “unhealthy woman” into a caricature means everything. The dominant narrative loves labeling people as “toxic” because it’s clean, binary, and comforting, but real healing begins with complication, not condemnation.
I like your extension of the phrase “emotional games as residue of emotional survival.” Yes. That’s exactly it. Manipulation is often the emotional equivalent of a tourniquet: crude, urgent, maybe harmful, but born from desperation to stop the bleeding. And the tragedy is that these survival patterns get mistaken for identity, and then rewarded or punished based on cultural norms rather than understood for what they truly are: echoes of deprivation.
Your question is both vital and haunting. Because right now, we still expect girls to excel at emotional labour without giving them the language, boundaries, or models to do so healthily. We hand them praise for empathy while punishing their clarity. We teach them to be “nice” before we teach them to be whole.
To socialise emotional maturity, we need to start early, and not limit ourselves to affirmations or “feeling charts,” but applying modeling complexity. We raise emotionally healthy girls by giving them adults who can say: “I was wrong. I hear you. Your anger is welcome. You don’t owe anyone your likability”. We let them witness repair. We teach them how to name a need without apology. And just as importantly, we stop idealising “strength” as stoicism or “femininity” as smoothness.
Emotionally mature girls are raised by attuned environments, not by perfect parents. Community matters. Culture matters. Schools that reward curiosity over compliance, friendships where assertiveness isn’t punished, mentors who embody complexity…. all of that scaffolds a girl’s internal world. We move from miracle to norm by creating spaces where being real is safer than being pleasing.
Let’s make room for girls who interrupt, who question, who contradict, who say “I don’t like that,” and who smile only when they mean it. That’s the architecture of emotional freedom, not disobedience!
Thank you, your reply moved me deeply. It is incredibly validating seeing complexity is not only allowed but honored, especially in the realm of female emotionality, which so often gets misread or minimized. Your metaphor of manipulation as a tourniquet—urgent, messy, yet born of necessity—is very powerful. It reframes these behaviors as trauma signals, not character flaws, and that reframing is essential.
I also love how you push the idea of raising emotionally healthy girls beyond individual parenting into collective modeling. You’re absoluteley right: emotional maturity is absorbed through witnessing, and especially through witnessing repair. Imagine what shifts if a child hears an adult say, “Your anger belongs,” not as a theoretical permission, but as a lived truth.
What your reply made me consider more deeply is this: while we need to raise girls who can say “I don’t like that,” we also need to raise boys who don’t feel diminished when they hear it. Emotional maturity is relational by nature—it thrives in an ecosystem. So perhaps the next frontier is creating attuned environments for girls, but also dismantling the scripts that still teach boys that clarity is criticism, that boundaries are rejection, and that emotional fluency is feminizing.
So here’s my next question if you allow me, Tamara.
What does it look like to raise emotionally resilient boys who are strong enough to meet emotionally free girls—without fear, fragility, or domination?
Your response is everything this conversation hopes to inspire: rigorous, tender, and evolution-minded. Thank you for taking it further, Céline, this is where the real work lives in questions that stretch us forward when it’s easier to have tidy conclusions.
And what a question you ask now. Because yes, emotional maturity is an ecosystem. It’s not enough to liberate girls to say “I don’t like that” if boys are still taught to hear it as threat or emasculation. If we raise girls to be fluent and whole, but raise boys in the emotional grammar of stoicism and control, we set them on a collision course toward mutual misunderstanding, far from the desired intimacy.
So what does it look like to raise emotionally resilient boys who can meet emotionally free girls? It starts, I think, with reimagining strength. As containment (not hardness) — the kind of containment that does not need to dominate to feel grounded. Boys need to be allowed their softness without shame, their tears without urgency, their needs without ridicule. That sounds simple, but it’s damn hard. Because right now, we often raise boys to be respected, not related to.
We need to normalise boys hearing “no” and not taking it as annihilation. We need to teach them that clarity is a gift, not an insult. That boundaries are invitations to relate more honestly, not rejections as most of them think. And most of all, we need to model repair: letting them witness adults who return to each other with presence and accountability, without erupting or withdrawing.
When we raise boys to feel their full emotional range, we help them relate to girls, we give them access to their own internal leadership. That’s how we interrupt the cycle of fragility masked as control. That’s how we raise men who aren’t afraid of strong women because they’ve been allowed to become strong in the truest sense themselves.
We would live in a world where emotionally FREE girls meet emotionally SAFE boys. We would build a generation where freedom and safety coexist in both. That’s the future, and it’s entirely within reach if we choose it!
Another brilliant and deeply layered exploration, analytical without losing emotional nuance—a Tamara original.
These inherited strategies of covert control are passed down through behavior, but also embedded in language itself. Women have long been socialized to "soften" their truths—to hint, hedge, or cushion their needs in order to be palatable. Even grammar and tone become tools of self-protection. So part of healing is emotional, but linguistic too. Learning to speak plainly, without apology or performance, is a must. What happens when women rewrite not only their roles, but also their syntax?
Ohhh, Alexander, thank you! Yes, the wound lives in action and language. And not just in what is said, but HOW it’s said, the rising intonation that turns a statement into a question, the qualifiers that pad every truth (“I might be wrong, but…”), the reflexive “sorry” that precedes even justified emotion. Women have learned to code their speech like encryption,,hiding vulnerability behind politeness, fire behind flowers.
I agree with you, the work is linguistic. Reclaiming voice means rewiring syntax. It means dropping the safety-net phrases, the breathless laughter, the diminishing tone that keeps power at bay. It’s learning to trust that clarity is not cruelty, and that directness can be the most intimate form of communication.
What happens when women rewrite not just their roles, but their grammar? Everything. Because language is how reality gets structured. Rewrite the sentence, and you change the story and you change the self who’s telling it. Right?
Here’s a thought to extend yours: healing might look like saying “I need” instead of “I was just wondering if maybe…” It might sound like “No.” Full stop. Not “No, I’m so sorry, I wish I could, I hope you understand.” Every word we reclaim from performance becomes a word we return to presence. And that is everything too.
It has always struck me how a very large number of women (I hesitate to say the majority) have learned how to smile a smile that pleases, and somehow, very adeptly, hide behind such smile making me ask this question: Is this a true smile or just the best, the most efficient way to face a difficult, untrustworthy world?
What a beautifully observed, and devastating question! That smile, as you so insightfully described, is both mask and message. It’s the signal fire of generations: I’ll soothe you so you don’t hurt me. I’ll please you so I can stay safe. And once it becomes second nature, even the woman wearing it forgets that it’s armour.
You’re right to hesitate before generalising, but the sad truth is that this smile is epidemic. It’s not always conscious, and it’s rarely malicious. It’s often passed down like an heirloom, one that says: “Survival requires charm”. Directness is dangerous. Make yourself digestible. And behind that agreeable façade lies a library of unsaid things (rage, grief, brilliance, rebellion, to give you a few examples) that never got safe passage.
I’m moved that you found a kind of answer in the essay. Maybe it’s this? When a woman smiles in order to disappear, something dies in her. But when she smiles from self-possession, from integration, from truth, it’s no longer a survival strategy. It’s a signal of presence, not performance.
We shouldn’t stop smiling. We must smile without shrinking. Smile without splitting. And the most important, smile because the world has finally become trustworthy enough to meet her as she is.
This might be my favourite unexpected metaphor yet, “hammertoes” as emotional metaphor? Inspired. And honestly, very precise.
Because yes: it is like hammertoes. High heels reshape the foot the way social conditioning reshapes the psyche,,an elegant, external conformity masking deep internal distortion. Women have been praised for walking tall in impossible shoes, both literal and metaphorical, all while their bones (or boundaries) quietly contort beneath the surface. We celebrate the silhouette, ignore the pain, and call it empowerment.
That’s the absurdity. What looks poised on the outside can be pure dysfunction on the inside but the performance is so polished, no one thinks to ask what it costs. Until the pain becomes chronic. Until the body (or the self) refuses to adapt any longer.
So yes, emotional games, gender roles, and stilettos share this in common: they were never designed with long-term health in mind. Just visibility. Control. Decoration. Which makes healing a kind of barefoot revolution. And that’s where we start! Not with better shoes, but with permission to take them off and feel the ground again.
I thought it was funny. But it isn't, obviously! You're flying! Keep going! Truly, I don't know how you guys do it, the high heels I mean. I wonder how much the pressure coming from other women attempting the extravagant and excruciatingly painful (thinning themselves to oblivion, 'makeuping' (sorry!) to infinity, etc.) may carry some of the blame. I find competition there is rife and it feels as being quite unhealthy in so far as it affects the heart/mind, it kills.
Men can somehow forget or abandon competition, even when they've lost or perhaps because they've lost, and though it may be difficult and painful, it ends up being just that, 'competition', it may be left to others once one has had their fill. But with women (please correct me if I am wrong) this seems to go on and on into old age, or at least there seems to be a desire for it to continue in many women with all the ensuing consequences to psyche and relationship that attracts.
As for the high heels, just get rid of them! Easier said than done, I gather...
This entire essay is a blueprint for how to understand the difference between an emotionally wounded (unhealthy) woman and an emotionally mature (healthy) woman, and is important for anyone to read to learn how to support an unhealthy woman trying to heal, or how to support a healthy woman being herself. This is true for men - husbands, partners, sons, brothers, fathers, etc. - and women - wives, partners, daughters, sisters, mothers, etc. It might also be helpful for friends and work acquaintances that we see frequently and with whom we want to have a positive relationship.
As the daughter of an emotionally wounded woman who did try to heal but never quite got there, I recognize the description: “She may not even realize that her strategic silences, her calculated coldness, or her orchestrated jealousy are forms of emotional control. To her, it feels like self-protection. But in truth, it’s a caged woman playing chess against her own liberation.”
What I didn’t see until I read it aloud, was when I got to the point of, “But now, something new is emerging. The rise of the emotionally healthy woman is one of the most radical developments of our time.” I read that and thought, Oh, shit. No wonder the political right is shouting about immigration and deportation, teaching religion in schools, screaming about the trans community, and then while everyone is looking at the big noise about those issues, going in and overturning Roe v. Wade, and state by state, dismantling women’s rights.
The personal side of it is incredibly important - for women to heal their wounds and rediscover life. The larger side of it is daunting, especially right now, which makes now the exact right time to look to our personal and societal next steps. I wasn’t expecting to find this here but I did. And now I can’t unsee it or ignore it.
Your insight slices cleanly through the glitter and noise, like finding a tuning fork in a costume-jewelry drawer, and it hums at exactly the frequency my essay hopes to strike.
I’m struck by the way you connect the micro-politics of a single family (“strategic silences”) to the macro-politics of a nation suddenly obsessed with governing wombs and wardrobes. It reminds me of historian Joan Scott’s line that gender is “a primary way of signifying relationships of power”. When an unhealthy mother teaches her daughter that withdrawal is protection, the lesson scales: legislatures learn to withdraw rights for the same reason. The personal is not merely political; it’s the pilot episode for the national drama.
Between “emotionally wounded” and “emotionally healthy” lies a middle terrain I think of as emotional bilingualism. These are women (and men) who can still hear the old language of fear, every territorial silence, every chess-move glance, but have learned to translate it into something generative before speaking. They are the simultaneous interpreters at the summit between the past and the possible. Naming and nurturing that bilingual skill set could be a practical next step: mentorship circles, storytelling workshops, even workplace “emotional translators” whose job is to convert passive-aggression into actionable feedback.
The backlash you describe may also be an unconscious recognition that the emotional labour market is undergoing a hostile takeover. For centuries, patriarchy outsourced empathy, care, and relational glue to women — unpaid, uncredited, taken for granted. A surge of emotionally healthy women threatens that arrangement; once care is self-directed and mutually negotiated, the old bargain collapses. Roe’s reversal, curriculum gag-orders, bathroom panics… they are not random culture-war flare-ups, they are classic strike-breaking tactics against an emergent union of self-possessed humans. I avoid talking about politics in my essays, but I hint to it sometimes.
So yes, as you say, the timing is daunting but history’s pendulum tends to overshoot just before a paradigm locks in. Think of every regressive statute as proof that the new architecture is already visible on the skyline; the scaffolding rattles precisely because the building is sound.
Thank you, Doc, for reading the piece aloud and for refusing to unsee what surfaced! Keep the tuning fork handy. Every time it vibrates, someone nearby might rediscover the key they’ve been carrying all along.
That middle terrain of emotional bilingualism I think can be more difficult than either of the others. Emotionally healthy or unhealthy, you know your steps in the dance - for the emotionally unhealthy it feels/is survival. In emotional bilingualism you are learning new steps all the time, and when you falter and return to the old steps because they’re familiar and have known consequences, you can’t unknow that it’s a step back, which adds shame to the mix. And it can take years to move through that middle terrain to emotionally healthy. When the personal journey and the societal journey aren’t in sync - one moving forward and the other seeming to be on a backward track - that makes it even more daunting. But still moving forward.
“They have deconstructed the roles handed to them” - Indeed, we have! I won’t say much more but I must say “thank you!” for writing this and for keeping the infinity mirrors of our history alive all around us. Side note - yesterday, I revisited the Mughals exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I found myself questioning: where were the women? The Mughals ruled over an empire where arts and culture flourished, and education was highly valued. While I believe the women had access to a good education, it’s disheartening that they were not permitted to use it to express themselves. Ultimately, we see the legacy of their significant contributions. The Taj Mahal, built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, remains one of the most important architectural landmarks today. What an extraordinary woman she must have been to inspire such passion!
Thank you, and yes, to all of this! That line you quoted is about honouring the countless women across history who couldn’t deconstruct those roles, but whose presence still shaped the culture in ways history failed to record.
Your reflection at the V&A is important because that’s the haunting pattern. The empires flourish, the palaces gleam, the scrolls overflow with beauty and strategy and legacy, and yet the women are footnotes, if they’re mentioned at all. Their minds were educated, their worlds rich, but their voices were often smothered before they ever made it to ink.
And still… they left traces. As you said, Mumtaz Mahal may not have published manifestos, but the Taj Mahal stands as an architectural psalm to her influence. She is remembered through the reverence she evoked, not through her words. That, too, is power, silent, perhaps, but not insignificant.
Here’s a thought your comment brings to mind: maybe part of our work now — those of us who can write, speak, question — is to become the voices those women were denied. Not to speak for them, but to speak with them across time. To keep their unseen contributions in the light. And to remind ourselves that deconstructing the role isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake, it’s a way of reclaiming the lives that might have bloomed if only they’d been permitted.
I relate to this so much as there was a time I relied on indirect ways to get my needs met too. It wasn’t until I started practicing self-love and learned self-advocacy that I began showing up honestly in my past relationship.
Thank you for sharing that, Katie, it takes courage to name your own evolution without dressing it up or dressing it down! Moving from indirectness to honesty, not by force, but through self-love is the most essential thing we can do. Because that’s the turning point. We only start advocating for ourselves when we begin to believe we’re worth advocating for. Until then, indirectness feels safer, easier to hint than to risk rejection, easier to manipulate than to ask plainly and possibly hear “no.” But indirectness comes at a cost: it starves intimacy while pretending to protect us.
What you did, practicing self-love, is the operative word. Practicing it, not arriving at it. And through that, you made room for self-advocacy as truth-telling. The kind of truth that allows real connection, because it’s no longer baited with strategy.
Honesty is a communication tool but above all it is a relational compass. When we can speak our needs directly, without apology or performance, we stop setting traps for others to fail and start building something solid, something that can hold both people’s truths. And that shift? It’s where real love begins.
At first, I was surprised to see the argument that emotionally dysfunctional women is a systemic consequence. I generally recoil when I hear the word "systemic" nowadays because it is infused with the allure of the mindless rebellion of those pathologically inclined to parade their own morally virtuous narcissism in a time when revolt against any sort of structure is an hourly endeavour.
You clearly outlined the range of dysfunction that spans across many generations and whose effects are manifested from attempting to be in the spotlight of the unapologetically authentic to making yourself completely unseen, at worst. While I wouldn't blame it all on "a system", the arguments you make are compelling and I love this essay because I never thought about this issue as a systemic issue — thank you for that!
Certain points struck me especially:
"Emotional volatility pretends to be authenticity, intensity is confused for depth" — is the definition of being your greatest enemy when you're incapable of discerning the difference between mechanisms that put us in our own way or that facilitate our growth. What makes it even worse is that it's almost impossible to become aware of our own lack of self-knowledge in such situations... Confronting that enemy is crucial and hope-infusing, as you clearly pointed out. Not only that, but it marks the beginning of awakening and, ultimately, liberation. This issue pertains more to the individual and it is a personal responsibility to address, but it certainly has systemic reverberations as well when being numb to your own awareness seems to be... the norm (or at least an inclination).
"Her clarity is not aggression; it is a form of love, toward herself, and toward others." may be the most misunderstood behaviour nowadays — it is often seen as rejection, arrogance or lack of taking the other into consideration.
If we describe "the hysterical woman" as a sistemic problem, a social pathology, then it surely means that there's an issue with the system. And I think it's right, considering how often we see the pathologisation of women who refuse to stay withing socially accepted emotional scrips. This tendency to pathologise the "outlier" is a pathology in and of itself.
"A woman with no language for her internal life" — hit me deep, because it feels like a description of the state men find themselves nowadays, and not only. This absence of language can be traced ages back and we've never been taught to express our emotions in a manner that facilitates connection. The pathological tendency here is to label men as heartless and incapable of real connection (especially among the same sex).
Collectively, as humans, we're all been damaged in one way or another by the previous actors that played out patterns that nowadays have begun to fail us. We're slowly and painfully becoming aware of the consequences because those old patterns don't serve us any longer.
The reception of the painting Madame X kind of sealed the deal for me at the end. It is a powerful argument not because it portrays female autonomy, but because it refuses to explain it in terms that don't disrupt the already established "right" conduct.
I do not know how to end my rant so I thank you once again for this eye-opening new perspective you just offered me. I'd love to read more on the subject so I'm open to any further reading recommendations!
Thank you for entering the conversation with this honest reflection! You walked through the terrain of my essay with such thoughtful resistance, curiosity, and ultimately, openness.
I understand your initial recoil at the word “systemic”. It’s a term that’s been so flattened, politicised, and flung about that it can feel like a buzzword in search of a thought. But you did exactly what thoughtful readers do, you paused, interrogated your reaction, and stayed in the conversation long enough to see through the surface. That’s the beginning of the transformation I’m seeking, both personal and cultural.
You’re right that dysfunction isn’t solely born of “the system”, but systems shape conditions. They inform what is rewarded, what is punished, what is normalised, and what is pathologised. The emotionally volatile woman, the woman who plays games, the woman who ghosted or seduced or refused to be digestible… those weren’t random behaviours. They were rehearsals of survival, performed within structures that made directness dangerous and selfhood conditional.
And your recognition of volatility pretending to be depth, yes, that’s one of the most tragic substitutions of our time. We’ve been sold the idea that intensity equals intimacy, that chaos is passion, that emotional reactivity is proof of complexity. But it often isn’t. It’s just noise, I would say desperate noise, trying to fill the space where self-knowledge should be. The moment we realise that, we change our behaviours and we begin to see ourselves for the first time, and that’s where real love begins.
I also like how you brought it back full circle: the hysterical woman as a social pathology and the heartless man as a cultural misreading. These are twin wounds. Neither has been given an emotional language that welcomes wholeness. Men suffer too, deeply, from the erasure of emotional vocabulary. In fact, I’d argue that men often inherit silence as virtue and call it stoicism. Women inherit performance as virtue and call it femininity. Both are distortions. Both are exhausting.
And Madame X….. the refusal to explain herself, to domesticate her stance, to soften her gaze. That painting suggests autonomy, it dares us to tolerate a woman who doesn’t perform for the room. The scandal wasn’t her dress, but her dignity.
You asked for reading recommendations, so here are a few that might stir the same parts this essay did:
• “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir
• “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle
• “The Will to Change” by bell hooks
• “Women Who Run With the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Thank you again, Sebastian, for bringing your complexity into this space!
Tamara, the poetry and liquidity of your language is nourishing and mesmerizing. Your essays bring to life our inheritance we've forgotten where love and loss are intertwined, and that grief might save us by reminding us of our deep affection towards becoming whole, or actually unabridged? I keep the human biologist Paul Shepard's quote nearby, "The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered." Women seem to have inherited that sense of emptiness, as your inspired piece dazzlingly describes. Our cultural, societal, political and social structures are befalling by necessity. Capitalism, white supremacy, misogyny needs a compassionate dismantling of these detestable paradigms. Your story brings to life the blight of the feminine archetype and the alchemy needed to create a new model saturated with soul. Thank you for your offering of deep listening, humility, dreaming and imagination. I am touched by the beauty of your words, and the conversations that expand our hearts and minds, they keep my heart open.
Dear Susan, your comment feels like a hymn, thank you for meeting my essay intellectually and soulfully. You hear it in the register it was written: beneath ideology, beneath commentary, down where grief and longing braid themselves into the quiet urgency of becoming unabridged, as you so perfectly said.
That Paul Shepard quote is wonderful and devastatingly accurate. We should have encountered a “beautiful and strange otherness.” And yet, so many of us, especially women, grew up navigating absence. Absence of attunement. Absence of sovereignty. Absence of a mirrored sense of worth that wasn’t transactional or aesthetic. That ache, that emptiness is ancestral interruption, not personal failure. It’s what happens when we inherit roles instead of being allowed to remember our shape.
You name the needed work with such clarity: a compassionate dismantling. Not a burning down for rage alone, but a soft, deliberate turning away from the false gods of dominance, perfection, and performative success. The feminine archetype has been glamorised and gutted, mythologised and misused. But the version now rising, the one “saturated with soul”, will not be palatable, and it will not be pristine. It will be porous. Grieving. Wild. Wise. Whole.
Here’s what I’ll add, inspired by your closing words: these conversations are intellectual exchanges and acts of cultural repair. They keep our hearts open, yes, but they also keep memory alive. Not the memory of old pain, but of old possibility. The kind that reminds us: you were never meant to be abridged. You were meant to be a landscape. Strange. Beautiful. Encountered.
I’m incredibly grateful because you do understand me! You are amazing!
"When a piece of writing becomes a mirror it reveals who you might still become, it doesn’t actually reflect back who you’ve been. That’s the magic." You are amazing!
Your response has a quality of music that goes deep into my soul. It feels like these mind walks are actually sitting quietly together in the dark. Yet the dark is a commitment, although not knowing what's coming.
The denial is breaking "the feminine archetype [that] has been glamourised and gutted, mythologised and misused...But the version now rising...will be porous. Grieving. Wild. Wise. Whole." That is poetry in motion, a dance of delight.
Throughout my "busy/beautiful" workday, I bring a kin experience of your writings that enrich my relational exchanges influencing the shared energy field.
What a stunning image… “mind walks as sitting quietly together in the dark”. That captures something I hadn’t yet named, but deeply feel: the kind of conversation where no performance is required, no spotlight needed, just presence. The dark as commitment, not absence. Not fear. Just the place where truth is allowed to emerge before it has to shine.
When you say “busy/beautiful” workday, this carries its own quiet duality, the way we live in the tension between the demands of doing and the longing for depth. And it means so much to hear that these words accompany you there, something felt and carried, something that subtly changes the temperature of your relational field.
Thank you, Susan, for connecting with my writing with your wonderful energy!
Thank you for reading with depth, and for naming the real heart of the matter: what in us is true, and what is armour we’ve mistaken for identity? That question is urgent. Especially today when society rewards persona over presence, performance over truth.
Our defences are brilliant, at first. They protect us. They let us move through unsafe spaces without shattering. But over time, they calcify. What began as protection becomes limitation. We confuse reactivity with personality, avoidance with wisdom, charm with connection. The tragedy is that many people never pause to ask the question you just raised, and so they live their whole lives in a curated version of themselves, wondering why nothing ever quite feels real.
The true self isn’t loud or obvious. It doesn’t demand the spotlight. It waits, patiently, beneath the rehearsed responses and reflexive roles. It shows up when we are quiet enough, brave enough, to sit in discomfort without trying to control it.
So yes, keep asking that question! It’s not easy, but it’s the kind of inquiry that changes everything.
Thank you, Billy! And yes, the loss is the real heartbreak. Beneath the dysfunction there is drama and the tragedy of unlived connection. So many women (and men!) spend years mastering tactics that were never meant to bring them joy, only survival. They perfect the art of being unreadable, desirable, in control, and in doing so, they lose access to the very intimacy they crave. How sad actually!
It’s true what you said about playing to win, but actually losing, and it’s essential. I’d even say: in emotional war games, the prize is usually just more war. The “win” is a temporary high that deepens the hunger. And the saddest part? Most of these moves are invisible to the people making them. They manipulate because they have never been shown another way to feel safe, they are not necessarily malicious.
So yes, please, let the women in your life read it, I’m honoured! My intention with this essay is to be a mirror, not a magnifying glass. The goal is to spark that little internal revolution that whispers: “you don’t have to live like this anymore”.
Here’s a thought I didn’t include in the essay, but might be worth carrying forward: emotional health is expanding what feels possible in love, it’s not unlearning dysfunction as some may believe. We heal to stop hurting AND to start imagining richer ways of being together.
This article is rich. In my mind, we can't speak to the nature of female bodied people without attributing that nature to a history of oppression and control. It was in my lifetime that women had to have bank loans signed by their husbands or fathers! My lifetime! Of course every part of our behavior has been born out of survival strategies in a disempowered position in society! How could it be otherwise? This is certainly my perspective when it comes to coaching couples in love and sexuality. It runs deep. A woman's relationship to sex is an integral part of this wounded past. Her relationship to desire, obligation, orgasm, worthiness, jealousy, competition, confidence. We're dragging the entrails of our past (and present) behind us as we move forward.
Exactly this, Corinne! Thank you for bringing in the body, the bank account, the bedroom… all the places where power has been negotiated, withheld, or distorted. You’re naming something crucial: we cannot talk about the emotional lives of women in the abstract. They are lived, shaped, and often contorted by systems that have denied women sovereignty not just legally, but intimately.
That image, dragging the entrails of our past (and present), is searing and so accurate. Because it’s muscle memory. Women carry in their nervous systems the residue of centuries: being property, being pleasing, being punished. And nowhere does that show up more acutely than in love and sex. The very site that should be freedom becomes a minefield, where desire must tiptoe past duty, where pleasure is laced with shame, and where confidence often gets distorted into competition.
What you do in your coaching is amazing work, because it insists on telling the truth. It insists on unlearning scripts that were never written for women’s liberation, only their containment.
Many women have internalised the oppression and the logic of the oppressor. They police their own bodies, silence their own needs, compete instead of connect out of an inherited survival reflex. Healing means reclaiming power and rewriting the terms of power, from domination to reciprocity. And that’s the change we’re in the middle of, one nervous system, one bedroom, one honest conversation at a time.
Thank you for this wonderful comment!
You're talking my language Tamara. I'll be staying in touch with your word mastery. :)
Thank you, Corrine!
The powerful, incisive piece I needed to read, a rare blend of cultural critique, psychological insight, and lived empathy. Bravo! Your framing of the emotionally unhealthy woman as not simply “toxic” but wounded—and historically shaped—is a deep departure from the reductive labels often seen in mainstream discourse. It acknowledges pain without justifying harm, and that’s an important, humane distinction. I love this.
What struck me most is your observation that “emotional games” are the residue of emotional survival. That phrase alone reframes manipulation not as maladaptation—a deeply personal response to systemic deprivation. It made me reflect on how often both women and men carry forward these relational scripts, mistaking inherited defense mechanisms for personality traits. This is our society today. This.
There’s also a nuanced tension in your essay between personal accountability and structural inheritance. While you emphasize healing as a personal choice, I wonder how we can better socialize emotional literacy, particularly for girls growing up in environments that still reward silence over assertion. How do we make emotional maturity less of a personal miracle and more of a collective norm?
One last thought: I appreciate that you didn’t present “healthy womanhood” as a fixed destination but as an ongoing practice—messy, conscious, and courageous. That reframing itself feels like an invitation, not a judgment. Because I’m tired of boring mainstream judgements.
So here’s my question: what does it actually look like to raise emotionally healthy girls in a culture still obsessed with performance, likability, and control?
Your comment is the echo of my essay’s deepest intention, thank you for engaging it with such emotional generosity! That you caught the deliberate refusal to flatten the “unhealthy woman” into a caricature means everything. The dominant narrative loves labeling people as “toxic” because it’s clean, binary, and comforting, but real healing begins with complication, not condemnation.
I like your extension of the phrase “emotional games as residue of emotional survival.” Yes. That’s exactly it. Manipulation is often the emotional equivalent of a tourniquet: crude, urgent, maybe harmful, but born from desperation to stop the bleeding. And the tragedy is that these survival patterns get mistaken for identity, and then rewarded or punished based on cultural norms rather than understood for what they truly are: echoes of deprivation.
Your question is both vital and haunting. Because right now, we still expect girls to excel at emotional labour without giving them the language, boundaries, or models to do so healthily. We hand them praise for empathy while punishing their clarity. We teach them to be “nice” before we teach them to be whole.
To socialise emotional maturity, we need to start early, and not limit ourselves to affirmations or “feeling charts,” but applying modeling complexity. We raise emotionally healthy girls by giving them adults who can say: “I was wrong. I hear you. Your anger is welcome. You don’t owe anyone your likability”. We let them witness repair. We teach them how to name a need without apology. And just as importantly, we stop idealising “strength” as stoicism or “femininity” as smoothness.
Emotionally mature girls are raised by attuned environments, not by perfect parents. Community matters. Culture matters. Schools that reward curiosity over compliance, friendships where assertiveness isn’t punished, mentors who embody complexity…. all of that scaffolds a girl’s internal world. We move from miracle to norm by creating spaces where being real is safer than being pleasing.
Let’s make room for girls who interrupt, who question, who contradict, who say “I don’t like that,” and who smile only when they mean it. That’s the architecture of emotional freedom, not disobedience!
Thank you, your reply moved me deeply. It is incredibly validating seeing complexity is not only allowed but honored, especially in the realm of female emotionality, which so often gets misread or minimized. Your metaphor of manipulation as a tourniquet—urgent, messy, yet born of necessity—is very powerful. It reframes these behaviors as trauma signals, not character flaws, and that reframing is essential.
I also love how you push the idea of raising emotionally healthy girls beyond individual parenting into collective modeling. You’re absoluteley right: emotional maturity is absorbed through witnessing, and especially through witnessing repair. Imagine what shifts if a child hears an adult say, “Your anger belongs,” not as a theoretical permission, but as a lived truth.
What your reply made me consider more deeply is this: while we need to raise girls who can say “I don’t like that,” we also need to raise boys who don’t feel diminished when they hear it. Emotional maturity is relational by nature—it thrives in an ecosystem. So perhaps the next frontier is creating attuned environments for girls, but also dismantling the scripts that still teach boys that clarity is criticism, that boundaries are rejection, and that emotional fluency is feminizing.
So here’s my next question if you allow me, Tamara.
What does it look like to raise emotionally resilient boys who are strong enough to meet emotionally free girls—without fear, fragility, or domination?
Your response is everything this conversation hopes to inspire: rigorous, tender, and evolution-minded. Thank you for taking it further, Céline, this is where the real work lives in questions that stretch us forward when it’s easier to have tidy conclusions.
And what a question you ask now. Because yes, emotional maturity is an ecosystem. It’s not enough to liberate girls to say “I don’t like that” if boys are still taught to hear it as threat or emasculation. If we raise girls to be fluent and whole, but raise boys in the emotional grammar of stoicism and control, we set them on a collision course toward mutual misunderstanding, far from the desired intimacy.
So what does it look like to raise emotionally resilient boys who can meet emotionally free girls? It starts, I think, with reimagining strength. As containment (not hardness) — the kind of containment that does not need to dominate to feel grounded. Boys need to be allowed their softness without shame, their tears without urgency, their needs without ridicule. That sounds simple, but it’s damn hard. Because right now, we often raise boys to be respected, not related to.
We need to normalise boys hearing “no” and not taking it as annihilation. We need to teach them that clarity is a gift, not an insult. That boundaries are invitations to relate more honestly, not rejections as most of them think. And most of all, we need to model repair: letting them witness adults who return to each other with presence and accountability, without erupting or withdrawing.
When we raise boys to feel their full emotional range, we help them relate to girls, we give them access to their own internal leadership. That’s how we interrupt the cycle of fragility masked as control. That’s how we raise men who aren’t afraid of strong women because they’ve been allowed to become strong in the truest sense themselves.
We would live in a world where emotionally FREE girls meet emotionally SAFE boys. We would build a generation where freedom and safety coexist in both. That’s the future, and it’s entirely within reach if we choose it!
One of the deepest thoughts I’ve read on Substack. It would need its own essay I think. Wonderful, Tamara.
Thank you for everything you write.
Another brilliant and deeply layered exploration, analytical without losing emotional nuance—a Tamara original.
These inherited strategies of covert control are passed down through behavior, but also embedded in language itself. Women have long been socialized to "soften" their truths—to hint, hedge, or cushion their needs in order to be palatable. Even grammar and tone become tools of self-protection. So part of healing is emotional, but linguistic too. Learning to speak plainly, without apology or performance, is a must. What happens when women rewrite not only their roles, but also their syntax?
Ohhh, Alexander, thank you! Yes, the wound lives in action and language. And not just in what is said, but HOW it’s said, the rising intonation that turns a statement into a question, the qualifiers that pad every truth (“I might be wrong, but…”), the reflexive “sorry” that precedes even justified emotion. Women have learned to code their speech like encryption,,hiding vulnerability behind politeness, fire behind flowers.
I agree with you, the work is linguistic. Reclaiming voice means rewiring syntax. It means dropping the safety-net phrases, the breathless laughter, the diminishing tone that keeps power at bay. It’s learning to trust that clarity is not cruelty, and that directness can be the most intimate form of communication.
What happens when women rewrite not just their roles, but their grammar? Everything. Because language is how reality gets structured. Rewrite the sentence, and you change the story and you change the self who’s telling it. Right?
Here’s a thought to extend yours: healing might look like saying “I need” instead of “I was just wondering if maybe…” It might sound like “No.” Full stop. Not “No, I’m so sorry, I wish I could, I hope you understand.” Every word we reclaim from performance becomes a word we return to presence. And that is everything too.
It has always struck me how a very large number of women (I hesitate to say the majority) have learned how to smile a smile that pleases, and somehow, very adeptly, hide behind such smile making me ask this question: Is this a true smile or just the best, the most efficient way to face a difficult, untrustworthy world?
I may have found an answer in your essay.
What a beautifully observed, and devastating question! That smile, as you so insightfully described, is both mask and message. It’s the signal fire of generations: I’ll soothe you so you don’t hurt me. I’ll please you so I can stay safe. And once it becomes second nature, even the woman wearing it forgets that it’s armour.
You’re right to hesitate before generalising, but the sad truth is that this smile is epidemic. It’s not always conscious, and it’s rarely malicious. It’s often passed down like an heirloom, one that says: “Survival requires charm”. Directness is dangerous. Make yourself digestible. And behind that agreeable façade lies a library of unsaid things (rage, grief, brilliance, rebellion, to give you a few examples) that never got safe passage.
I’m moved that you found a kind of answer in the essay. Maybe it’s this? When a woman smiles in order to disappear, something dies in her. But when she smiles from self-possession, from integration, from truth, it’s no longer a survival strategy. It’s a signal of presence, not performance.
We shouldn’t stop smiling. We must smile without shrinking. Smile without splitting. And the most important, smile because the world has finally become trustworthy enough to meet her as she is.
Thank you for making it even more clear to me.
Thank you too for giving me the possibility to explain more!
Actually, this whole thing is a bit like hammertoes isn't ? Forcing outside, deforming inside. You know, high heels.
This might be my favourite unexpected metaphor yet, “hammertoes” as emotional metaphor? Inspired. And honestly, very precise.
Because yes: it is like hammertoes. High heels reshape the foot the way social conditioning reshapes the psyche,,an elegant, external conformity masking deep internal distortion. Women have been praised for walking tall in impossible shoes, both literal and metaphorical, all while their bones (or boundaries) quietly contort beneath the surface. We celebrate the silhouette, ignore the pain, and call it empowerment.
That’s the absurdity. What looks poised on the outside can be pure dysfunction on the inside but the performance is so polished, no one thinks to ask what it costs. Until the pain becomes chronic. Until the body (or the self) refuses to adapt any longer.
So yes, emotional games, gender roles, and stilettos share this in common: they were never designed with long-term health in mind. Just visibility. Control. Decoration. Which makes healing a kind of barefoot revolution. And that’s where we start! Not with better shoes, but with permission to take them off and feel the ground again.
Excellent metaphor! Thanks!
I thought it was funny. But it isn't, obviously! You're flying! Keep going! Truly, I don't know how you guys do it, the high heels I mean. I wonder how much the pressure coming from other women attempting the extravagant and excruciatingly painful (thinning themselves to oblivion, 'makeuping' (sorry!) to infinity, etc.) may carry some of the blame. I find competition there is rife and it feels as being quite unhealthy in so far as it affects the heart/mind, it kills.
Men can somehow forget or abandon competition, even when they've lost or perhaps because they've lost, and though it may be difficult and painful, it ends up being just that, 'competition', it may be left to others once one has had their fill. But with women (please correct me if I am wrong) this seems to go on and on into old age, or at least there seems to be a desire for it to continue in many women with all the ensuing consequences to psyche and relationship that attracts.
As for the high heels, just get rid of them! Easier said than done, I gather...
The essay all women AND men need to read.
Thank you!
This entire essay is a blueprint for how to understand the difference between an emotionally wounded (unhealthy) woman and an emotionally mature (healthy) woman, and is important for anyone to read to learn how to support an unhealthy woman trying to heal, or how to support a healthy woman being herself. This is true for men - husbands, partners, sons, brothers, fathers, etc. - and women - wives, partners, daughters, sisters, mothers, etc. It might also be helpful for friends and work acquaintances that we see frequently and with whom we want to have a positive relationship.
As the daughter of an emotionally wounded woman who did try to heal but never quite got there, I recognize the description: “She may not even realize that her strategic silences, her calculated coldness, or her orchestrated jealousy are forms of emotional control. To her, it feels like self-protection. But in truth, it’s a caged woman playing chess against her own liberation.”
What I didn’t see until I read it aloud, was when I got to the point of, “But now, something new is emerging. The rise of the emotionally healthy woman is one of the most radical developments of our time.” I read that and thought, Oh, shit. No wonder the political right is shouting about immigration and deportation, teaching religion in schools, screaming about the trans community, and then while everyone is looking at the big noise about those issues, going in and overturning Roe v. Wade, and state by state, dismantling women’s rights.
The personal side of it is incredibly important - for women to heal their wounds and rediscover life. The larger side of it is daunting, especially right now, which makes now the exact right time to look to our personal and societal next steps. I wasn’t expecting to find this here but I did. And now I can’t unsee it or ignore it.
Your insight slices cleanly through the glitter and noise, like finding a tuning fork in a costume-jewelry drawer, and it hums at exactly the frequency my essay hopes to strike.
I’m struck by the way you connect the micro-politics of a single family (“strategic silences”) to the macro-politics of a nation suddenly obsessed with governing wombs and wardrobes. It reminds me of historian Joan Scott’s line that gender is “a primary way of signifying relationships of power”. When an unhealthy mother teaches her daughter that withdrawal is protection, the lesson scales: legislatures learn to withdraw rights for the same reason. The personal is not merely political; it’s the pilot episode for the national drama.
Between “emotionally wounded” and “emotionally healthy” lies a middle terrain I think of as emotional bilingualism. These are women (and men) who can still hear the old language of fear, every territorial silence, every chess-move glance, but have learned to translate it into something generative before speaking. They are the simultaneous interpreters at the summit between the past and the possible. Naming and nurturing that bilingual skill set could be a practical next step: mentorship circles, storytelling workshops, even workplace “emotional translators” whose job is to convert passive-aggression into actionable feedback.
The backlash you describe may also be an unconscious recognition that the emotional labour market is undergoing a hostile takeover. For centuries, patriarchy outsourced empathy, care, and relational glue to women — unpaid, uncredited, taken for granted. A surge of emotionally healthy women threatens that arrangement; once care is self-directed and mutually negotiated, the old bargain collapses. Roe’s reversal, curriculum gag-orders, bathroom panics… they are not random culture-war flare-ups, they are classic strike-breaking tactics against an emergent union of self-possessed humans. I avoid talking about politics in my essays, but I hint to it sometimes.
So yes, as you say, the timing is daunting but history’s pendulum tends to overshoot just before a paradigm locks in. Think of every regressive statute as proof that the new architecture is already visible on the skyline; the scaffolding rattles precisely because the building is sound.
Thank you, Doc, for reading the piece aloud and for refusing to unsee what surfaced! Keep the tuning fork handy. Every time it vibrates, someone nearby might rediscover the key they’ve been carrying all along.
That middle terrain of emotional bilingualism I think can be more difficult than either of the others. Emotionally healthy or unhealthy, you know your steps in the dance - for the emotionally unhealthy it feels/is survival. In emotional bilingualism you are learning new steps all the time, and when you falter and return to the old steps because they’re familiar and have known consequences, you can’t unknow that it’s a step back, which adds shame to the mix. And it can take years to move through that middle terrain to emotionally healthy. When the personal journey and the societal journey aren’t in sync - one moving forward and the other seeming to be on a backward track - that makes it even more daunting. But still moving forward.
Once again, you are reading my mind. Thank you, Doc!
This is by far one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever read.
I am touched and grateful. Thank you so much!
The painting Madame X ruined Virginie Gautreau’s life, yet we love it.
Correct…. life happens in inexplicable ways though.
“They have deconstructed the roles handed to them” - Indeed, we have! I won’t say much more but I must say “thank you!” for writing this and for keeping the infinity mirrors of our history alive all around us. Side note - yesterday, I revisited the Mughals exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I found myself questioning: where were the women? The Mughals ruled over an empire where arts and culture flourished, and education was highly valued. While I believe the women had access to a good education, it’s disheartening that they were not permitted to use it to express themselves. Ultimately, we see the legacy of their significant contributions. The Taj Mahal, built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, remains one of the most important architectural landmarks today. What an extraordinary woman she must have been to inspire such passion!
Thank you, and yes, to all of this! That line you quoted is about honouring the countless women across history who couldn’t deconstruct those roles, but whose presence still shaped the culture in ways history failed to record.
Your reflection at the V&A is important because that’s the haunting pattern. The empires flourish, the palaces gleam, the scrolls overflow with beauty and strategy and legacy, and yet the women are footnotes, if they’re mentioned at all. Their minds were educated, their worlds rich, but their voices were often smothered before they ever made it to ink.
And still… they left traces. As you said, Mumtaz Mahal may not have published manifestos, but the Taj Mahal stands as an architectural psalm to her influence. She is remembered through the reverence she evoked, not through her words. That, too, is power, silent, perhaps, but not insignificant.
Here’s a thought your comment brings to mind: maybe part of our work now — those of us who can write, speak, question — is to become the voices those women were denied. Not to speak for them, but to speak with them across time. To keep their unseen contributions in the light. And to remind ourselves that deconstructing the role isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake, it’s a way of reclaiming the lives that might have bloomed if only they’d been permitted.
I relate to this so much as there was a time I relied on indirect ways to get my needs met too. It wasn’t until I started practicing self-love and learned self-advocacy that I began showing up honestly in my past relationship.
Thank you for sharing that, Katie, it takes courage to name your own evolution without dressing it up or dressing it down! Moving from indirectness to honesty, not by force, but through self-love is the most essential thing we can do. Because that’s the turning point. We only start advocating for ourselves when we begin to believe we’re worth advocating for. Until then, indirectness feels safer, easier to hint than to risk rejection, easier to manipulate than to ask plainly and possibly hear “no.” But indirectness comes at a cost: it starves intimacy while pretending to protect us.
What you did, practicing self-love, is the operative word. Practicing it, not arriving at it. And through that, you made room for self-advocacy as truth-telling. The kind of truth that allows real connection, because it’s no longer baited with strategy.
Honesty is a communication tool but above all it is a relational compass. When we can speak our needs directly, without apology or performance, we stop setting traps for others to fail and start building something solid, something that can hold both people’s truths. And that shift? It’s where real love begins.
I admire you!
At first, I was surprised to see the argument that emotionally dysfunctional women is a systemic consequence. I generally recoil when I hear the word "systemic" nowadays because it is infused with the allure of the mindless rebellion of those pathologically inclined to parade their own morally virtuous narcissism in a time when revolt against any sort of structure is an hourly endeavour.
You clearly outlined the range of dysfunction that spans across many generations and whose effects are manifested from attempting to be in the spotlight of the unapologetically authentic to making yourself completely unseen, at worst. While I wouldn't blame it all on "a system", the arguments you make are compelling and I love this essay because I never thought about this issue as a systemic issue — thank you for that!
Certain points struck me especially:
"Emotional volatility pretends to be authenticity, intensity is confused for depth" — is the definition of being your greatest enemy when you're incapable of discerning the difference between mechanisms that put us in our own way or that facilitate our growth. What makes it even worse is that it's almost impossible to become aware of our own lack of self-knowledge in such situations... Confronting that enemy is crucial and hope-infusing, as you clearly pointed out. Not only that, but it marks the beginning of awakening and, ultimately, liberation. This issue pertains more to the individual and it is a personal responsibility to address, but it certainly has systemic reverberations as well when being numb to your own awareness seems to be... the norm (or at least an inclination).
"Her clarity is not aggression; it is a form of love, toward herself, and toward others." may be the most misunderstood behaviour nowadays — it is often seen as rejection, arrogance or lack of taking the other into consideration.
If we describe "the hysterical woman" as a sistemic problem, a social pathology, then it surely means that there's an issue with the system. And I think it's right, considering how often we see the pathologisation of women who refuse to stay withing socially accepted emotional scrips. This tendency to pathologise the "outlier" is a pathology in and of itself.
"A woman with no language for her internal life" — hit me deep, because it feels like a description of the state men find themselves nowadays, and not only. This absence of language can be traced ages back and we've never been taught to express our emotions in a manner that facilitates connection. The pathological tendency here is to label men as heartless and incapable of real connection (especially among the same sex).
Collectively, as humans, we're all been damaged in one way or another by the previous actors that played out patterns that nowadays have begun to fail us. We're slowly and painfully becoming aware of the consequences because those old patterns don't serve us any longer.
The reception of the painting Madame X kind of sealed the deal for me at the end. It is a powerful argument not because it portrays female autonomy, but because it refuses to explain it in terms that don't disrupt the already established "right" conduct.
I do not know how to end my rant so I thank you once again for this eye-opening new perspective you just offered me. I'd love to read more on the subject so I'm open to any further reading recommendations!
Thank you for entering the conversation with this honest reflection! You walked through the terrain of my essay with such thoughtful resistance, curiosity, and ultimately, openness.
I understand your initial recoil at the word “systemic”. It’s a term that’s been so flattened, politicised, and flung about that it can feel like a buzzword in search of a thought. But you did exactly what thoughtful readers do, you paused, interrogated your reaction, and stayed in the conversation long enough to see through the surface. That’s the beginning of the transformation I’m seeking, both personal and cultural.
You’re right that dysfunction isn’t solely born of “the system”, but systems shape conditions. They inform what is rewarded, what is punished, what is normalised, and what is pathologised. The emotionally volatile woman, the woman who plays games, the woman who ghosted or seduced or refused to be digestible… those weren’t random behaviours. They were rehearsals of survival, performed within structures that made directness dangerous and selfhood conditional.
And your recognition of volatility pretending to be depth, yes, that’s one of the most tragic substitutions of our time. We’ve been sold the idea that intensity equals intimacy, that chaos is passion, that emotional reactivity is proof of complexity. But it often isn’t. It’s just noise, I would say desperate noise, trying to fill the space where self-knowledge should be. The moment we realise that, we change our behaviours and we begin to see ourselves for the first time, and that’s where real love begins.
I also like how you brought it back full circle: the hysterical woman as a social pathology and the heartless man as a cultural misreading. These are twin wounds. Neither has been given an emotional language that welcomes wholeness. Men suffer too, deeply, from the erasure of emotional vocabulary. In fact, I’d argue that men often inherit silence as virtue and call it stoicism. Women inherit performance as virtue and call it femininity. Both are distortions. Both are exhausting.
And Madame X….. the refusal to explain herself, to domesticate her stance, to soften her gaze. That painting suggests autonomy, it dares us to tolerate a woman who doesn’t perform for the room. The scandal wasn’t her dress, but her dignity.
You asked for reading recommendations, so here are a few that might stir the same parts this essay did:
• “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir
• “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle
• “The Will to Change” by bell hooks
• “Women Who Run With the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Thank you again, Sebastian, for bringing your complexity into this space!
Tamara, the poetry and liquidity of your language is nourishing and mesmerizing. Your essays bring to life our inheritance we've forgotten where love and loss are intertwined, and that grief might save us by reminding us of our deep affection towards becoming whole, or actually unabridged? I keep the human biologist Paul Shepard's quote nearby, "The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered." Women seem to have inherited that sense of emptiness, as your inspired piece dazzlingly describes. Our cultural, societal, political and social structures are befalling by necessity. Capitalism, white supremacy, misogyny needs a compassionate dismantling of these detestable paradigms. Your story brings to life the blight of the feminine archetype and the alchemy needed to create a new model saturated with soul. Thank you for your offering of deep listening, humility, dreaming and imagination. I am touched by the beauty of your words, and the conversations that expand our hearts and minds, they keep my heart open.
Dear Susan, your comment feels like a hymn, thank you for meeting my essay intellectually and soulfully. You hear it in the register it was written: beneath ideology, beneath commentary, down where grief and longing braid themselves into the quiet urgency of becoming unabridged, as you so perfectly said.
That Paul Shepard quote is wonderful and devastatingly accurate. We should have encountered a “beautiful and strange otherness.” And yet, so many of us, especially women, grew up navigating absence. Absence of attunement. Absence of sovereignty. Absence of a mirrored sense of worth that wasn’t transactional or aesthetic. That ache, that emptiness is ancestral interruption, not personal failure. It’s what happens when we inherit roles instead of being allowed to remember our shape.
You name the needed work with such clarity: a compassionate dismantling. Not a burning down for rage alone, but a soft, deliberate turning away from the false gods of dominance, perfection, and performative success. The feminine archetype has been glamorised and gutted, mythologised and misused. But the version now rising, the one “saturated with soul”, will not be palatable, and it will not be pristine. It will be porous. Grieving. Wild. Wise. Whole.
Here’s what I’ll add, inspired by your closing words: these conversations are intellectual exchanges and acts of cultural repair. They keep our hearts open, yes, but they also keep memory alive. Not the memory of old pain, but of old possibility. The kind that reminds us: you were never meant to be abridged. You were meant to be a landscape. Strange. Beautiful. Encountered.
I’m incredibly grateful because you do understand me! You are amazing!
"When a piece of writing becomes a mirror it reveals who you might still become, it doesn’t actually reflect back who you’ve been. That’s the magic." You are amazing!
Your response has a quality of music that goes deep into my soul. It feels like these mind walks are actually sitting quietly together in the dark. Yet the dark is a commitment, although not knowing what's coming.
The denial is breaking "the feminine archetype [that] has been glamourised and gutted, mythologised and misused...But the version now rising...will be porous. Grieving. Wild. Wise. Whole." That is poetry in motion, a dance of delight.
Throughout my "busy/beautiful" workday, I bring a kin experience of your writings that enrich my relational exchanges influencing the shared energy field.
What a stunning image… “mind walks as sitting quietly together in the dark”. That captures something I hadn’t yet named, but deeply feel: the kind of conversation where no performance is required, no spotlight needed, just presence. The dark as commitment, not absence. Not fear. Just the place where truth is allowed to emerge before it has to shine.
When you say “busy/beautiful” workday, this carries its own quiet duality, the way we live in the tension between the demands of doing and the longing for depth. And it means so much to hear that these words accompany you there, something felt and carried, something that subtly changes the temperature of your relational field.
Thank you, Susan, for connecting with my writing with your wonderful energy!
Amazing insight! Very important question what in each of us is true self and what is part of our defences. Thank you for writing this dear lady.
Thank you for reading with depth, and for naming the real heart of the matter: what in us is true, and what is armour we’ve mistaken for identity? That question is urgent. Especially today when society rewards persona over presence, performance over truth.
Our defences are brilliant, at first. They protect us. They let us move through unsafe spaces without shattering. But over time, they calcify. What began as protection becomes limitation. We confuse reactivity with personality, avoidance with wisdom, charm with connection. The tragedy is that many people never pause to ask the question you just raised, and so they live their whole lives in a curated version of themselves, wondering why nothing ever quite feels real.
The true self isn’t loud or obvious. It doesn’t demand the spotlight. It waits, patiently, beneath the rehearsed responses and reflexive roles. It shows up when we are quiet enough, brave enough, to sit in discomfort without trying to control it.
So yes, keep asking that question! It’s not easy, but it’s the kind of inquiry that changes everything.
Thank you, Billy! And yes, the loss is the real heartbreak. Beneath the dysfunction there is drama and the tragedy of unlived connection. So many women (and men!) spend years mastering tactics that were never meant to bring them joy, only survival. They perfect the art of being unreadable, desirable, in control, and in doing so, they lose access to the very intimacy they crave. How sad actually!
It’s true what you said about playing to win, but actually losing, and it’s essential. I’d even say: in emotional war games, the prize is usually just more war. The “win” is a temporary high that deepens the hunger. And the saddest part? Most of these moves are invisible to the people making them. They manipulate because they have never been shown another way to feel safe, they are not necessarily malicious.
So yes, please, let the women in your life read it, I’m honoured! My intention with this essay is to be a mirror, not a magnifying glass. The goal is to spark that little internal revolution that whispers: “you don’t have to live like this anymore”.
Here’s a thought I didn’t include in the essay, but might be worth carrying forward: emotional health is expanding what feels possible in love, it’s not unlearning dysfunction as some may believe. We heal to stop hurting AND to start imagining richer ways of being together.
Of course!