Super Women Discovering Our Inner Superpowers
my entire life
i’ve been obsessed with books i loved
reading stories about different kinds of
heroes and knights and warriors that
went on fantastic
adventures to feeding evil villains and
saving the day
they possessed the kind of resilience
that i always wanted to have
their lives had meaning they stood for
something
and i wanted to be just like them
there was only one problem all of my
favorite characters
were men in all the books
that i read as a child women had only
two passive roles to be beautiful
and to be rescued and i remember
dreaming of breaking those gender
stereotypes
so that women could join the ranks of
the musketeers
solve crimes alongside of sherlock
holmes and fight dragons
just like some of the best knights could
and when i brought up this idea to one
of my elderly neighbors
she laughed girls don’t fight she said
and when i heard this i was enraged
i wanted to yell i wanted to yell how i
don’t believe
in these societal random
superimposed gender expectations but
of course as an eight-year-old i didn’t
quite have the vocabulary
to describe the fury and the rebellion
that i was feeling in that moment and it
was then
that my grandfather a holocaust survivor
and a world war ii hero took it upon
himself
to become my first ever feminist role
model
he pulled me aside and he said i have a
book for you
but it’s written in this invisible ink
that you’re not old enough to read quite
yet so i’ll read it to you for now
and when you’re old enough you can read
it by yourself
and you can read it to others
and so he took out a blank piece of
paper
he moved his finger left to right
as if reading this magical invisible ink
and he read me a story about a little
girl
me whose brother and male cousins
were kidnapped by an evil monster
and in this story i was the only one who
was able to find the monster
and stop him before he hurt the members
of my family
without ever making it obvious my
grandfather taught me
that gender was irrelevant when it came
to heroism
and he taught me that girls could go on
adventures too
he taught me that girls could even stand
up to men
when men were behaving badly he taught
me
that our lives are like a blank sheet of
paper
and that it’s up to us to determine the
way that we show up
for our own call to adventure because
too often we might follow somebody
else’s narrative
play a sidekick in someone else’s story
and believe that we must fall in line
that was predetermined for us
when i was 21 years old i worked as a
research assistant
at a hospital in new york one day when i
was rushing
i tripped and fell down the stairs
hitting my head
as soon as i was able to walk i went
straight to the emergency room
where an emergency room doctor told me
that i had a concussion
i was ordered to rest and to refrain
from screens
and from stress so i called my
then partner let’s call him jim although
that’s not his real name
that night jim and i were supposed to
see a movie that we’ve been anxiously
anticipating for several months
when i told him that i had a concussion
and i was currently in the emergency
room
and asked him if he could come and pick
me up he said
that i should just take a taxi home and
that he was still planning to see the
movie that he’s been waiting to see
i was confused and
filled with so many other emotions i was
hurt and heartbroken and angry
i burst into tears and i was pleading
with him
to come be with me just to hold my hand
i told him that it would make it easier
for me
jim was silent for a few moments
then he said look you’re being dramatic
and crazy right now why should i have to
miss out on this film
just because you have a concussion i
mean if i could actually take away your
pain
i would be there but for you to ask me
to miss
this movie just to hold your hand that’s
just plain selfish
those words dramatic
crazy selfish
they cut to the very core of me
i felt like a burden an inconvenience
and i felt shame and what i took away
from that
conversation and from so many other
conversations just like it
was that my needs don’t matter
i took away that in order to be loved
i need to turn off my needs and my
emotions
i started putting on my i am fine mask
putting up with mistreatment abuse
and even sexual assault i was taught
that
my place was to not cause a scene to be
a peacemaker
to not speak up but to shut up to use my
voice only
to elevate the voices of others however
a few years ago i read a research paper
that made me rethink
that situation between gemiini
researchers at university of virginia
and university of wisconsin-madison ran
a study
in which they brought in a group of
female participants
and recorded their neurological activity
and their emotional responses while in
the mri machine
during different parts of the experiment
participants would see a visual signal
that would predict when they would get a
mild electric
shock this is a mildly painful sensation
equivalent to being flicked with a
rubber band
when women in the mri would see the
signal indicating that a shock was
coming
they understandably experienced higher
levels of anxiety and distress
and subsequently experienced levels of
pain when
the shock was administered participants
also exhibited
a higher level of neurological
activities in
the areas of the brain that are
responsible for
pain and distress processing but
when a stranger like a research
assistant or the experimenter
held the participant’s hand their
perceived
and reported levels of pain
and distress significantly reduced
and their pain and distress levels
reduced even further when it was their
partner
holding their hand this study and
countless others
find that receiving the compassion and
support from a person that we care about
can greatly reduce our pain not only on
the emotional level
but also on the physiological one and
the science
shows us that not only are those needs
important
but that having those needs met can
actually reduce our pain and suffering
and so if we’re able to be present with
our struggles
if we’re able to receive kindness and
support from the people that we love the
most
perhaps over time we can learn to love
our injuries
maybe we can learn to recognize that the
very part of us
that some people might have tried to
shut out or to shame
may be the very part of us that we most
often feel the need to hide
is perhaps the most powerful
and the most beautiful part of you
a few years ago i was working with a
client whose parents brought her
in for post-traumatic stress disorder
let’s call her lisa lisa had been
sexually assaulted by her partner her
parents could not understand
why their daughter developed ptsd after
all she said
it was her boyfriend they also could not
understand
why lisa had maintained her symptoms for
over six months
they tried to shame her into getting
over it
it didn’t work it only made her shut
down
so during our first few sessions
we tried to talk but lisa could barely
speak
her voice was long buried under the
oppressive messages
that she was made to believe so i
decided to switch gears a little bit
and i asked lisa if she had a favorite
television show
movie or a book and she mentioned that
she was a big fan of the tv show buffy
the vampire slayer
in case you’re not familiar with the
show it is about a teenage girl named
buffy who is a high school student by
day
and a vampire slayer by night
so i asked lisa to share some of her
favorite story lines and episodes with
me
in finding this permission to talk about
her passion
lisa slowly started regaining her voice
she started sharing about buffy’s
experiences of struggling to
manage her responsibilities and that she
related to it
i later asked lisa whether buffy had
ever experienced anything traumatic
and she said that in one of the episodes
buffy sacrificed herself
to save her little sister’s life and
that some time later buffy was brought
back to life
by dark magic only she doesn’t quite
come back the same
she has nightmares and flashbacks
she engages in risky and
self-destructive behaviors
and she doesn’t wish to face her trauma
her suffering lasts for many months and
in other words
buffy meets all the classic symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder
so i then asked lisa if there was ever a
time that buffy disclosed
her situation or her symptoms to anyone
else
and she told me that buffy disclosed
what she was going through to her friend
spike
i asked her to pull up that clip on her
phone
and she did and we watched it together
we watched buffy tell spike
everything here is hard she said
everything is bright and violent
everything i feel everything i touch
this is hell just getting through the
next moment and the one
after that and right as we’re watching
this clip lisa points to the screen and
she
says that that
is what i go through each and every day
and it was the first time since her
assault that she was able to talk about
how she felt
and that night she was able to show that
entire episode to her parents
who for the first time were able to
understand what their daughter was going
through
and so you see sometimes seeing heroes
reclaim their lives in fiction
might allow us to reclaim our voices
because for so many of us heroes are
more than fiction
they are our voice when we cannot speak
for ourselves
they are the expression of our emotions
and
most importantly they are our call to
freedom
in changing our own narrative
this very realization happened to my
other client
jamie this is not her real name who came
to see me for social anxiety
and obsessive-compulsive disorder
jamie sat in a small demure posture
she spoke in a soft quiet voice
and she stated that she had a really
hard time advocating for herself
she also mentioned that she was the only
woman in her department
and the only one that hadn’t been
promoted in several years
i then asked jamie if there were any
movies books or television shows that
she enjoyed
jamie said that she liked star wars and
i said great
i love star wars who’s your favorite
character and she said
kylo ren that’s how she said it kylo ren
now in case you’re not familiar with
this character kylo ren is the main
villain
or some might call him an anti-hero in
the star wars trilogy episodes seven
through nine
so i asked jamie what is it that you
like about kylo ren
and she said i like that he gets angry
and i said wow do you ever get angry and
she said oh no
you see jamie was taught that she’s not
allowed to feel and express anger
and that she has to put other people’s
needs above her own
and so over the next few months jamie
and i
worked together on channeling her inner
dark side
on embodying kylo ren but without
killing people of course
and then after a few months she
requested a meeting with her boss
and she asked for a raise and you know
what
she got it and so to celebrate she went
to disneyland
and built herself her very own kylo ren
lightsaber
and now she cosplays which means dresses
up as her favorite characters
at different comic conventions she
dresses up as kylo ren or other
characters
as her way of maintaining her voice
and her self-expression
and so what it comes down to is this
you’re allowed your emotions
you’re allowed your voice and you’re
allowed your journey
you’re not helping anyone by staying
quiet
by fitting yourself into someone else’s
story
you were not meant to be someone else’s
sidekick
you’re meant to be the hero of your own
story and if you’ve ever read fantasy
books
you might have read about a creature
called the phoenix
the phoenix is this magical bird
believed to come from the sun
and like many of us humans the phoenix
sometimes goes through excruciating
changes
from time to time and when that happens
the phoenix bursts into flames
and then falls into ashes but then
the phoenix rises again stronger
than ever before and in fact sometimes
our experiences
like trauma anxiety or heartbreak can
feel like we’re on fire
and this here right now this is your
phoenix moment
this is you rising from the ashes
regaining your voice writing your own
story on your own blank piece of paper
as if to say
i am here i have awakened
thank you