Today I’m bringing you an archived podcast episode from January, 2019. This particular episode was one of the sparks I had that ended up developing into the creative project that is now my third book, Make Some Noise. I had listened to a podcast series that got me thinking about the conditioning we as girls and women are handed and grow up in.Those beliefs and conditioning then shape the beliefs we have about how to act and how to feel about what it means to be a woman. 

There are some questions I take you through as I talk about this, and a free worksheet you can download (see below). 

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 A few weeks ago I was listening to Scene on Radio, an excellent podcast. It was episode 10, in season 3 where it was a man telling a story about his son going to 6th grade and the changes that took place-- I’ll let you listen to it (it’s REALLY good, please go listen to both season 2 and 3). 

There was a particular part where Terry Real, psychologist was talking and said something in particular that stopped me, and I had to pause the podcast, and cry. He talks about how children are made to “halve” themselves, to cut off certain parts of themselves (generally speaking for boys, it’s emotions). He talks about a certain age when “the patriarchy hits kids, lands on them, the psychic results can be severe”. He goes on to say, “Now if you read the literature on girls and girls development, that trauma-- and I use that word on purpose-- is traumatic to excise, to cut off half of your humanity, that trauma lands on girls about 11, 12, 13-- the edge of adolescence. That’s when they learn what Carol Gilligan calls ‘the tyranny of the nice and kind’. They learn to over accommodate and resent it. That’s the traditional set up. Fifty years of the women’s movement has changed that for a lot of girls and women, but it’s still part of the culture.”

So, in essence, as we enter puberty, (and btw, he goes on in this episode to talk about how it hits even younger for boys), we learn about how to be. We learn to be nice and kind and accommodating. We learn to put others’ feelings, wants and needs before ours. 

Join me in this podcast episode as I explore this more, and ask a series of questions for you to answer about your own life to get the parts of you back that you were conditioned to let go of. 

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