Ep 66 with Vanessa Bennett

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body a podcast where we dive deep into the pulp and power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life away from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, and today I'm in conversation with Vanessa Bennett, depth psychologist author and founder of a coaching academy where she trains therapists and coaches in Youngin and archetypal frameworks. She's also the author of The Motherhood Myth. Vanessa trained at Pacifica Graduate Institute, one of the only depth-oriented psychology programs in the country, and her work sits at the intersection of Youngian psychology, collective trauma, and the very particular wounds that women carry, not just from their own histories, but from centuries of inherited experience too. I wanted to have this conversation because Vanessa thinks in a way that I find rare. She holds individual and collective history in the same hand without flattening either one. In our time together, we get into the difference between ego work and soul work and why that distinction actually matters. We explore the trinity of wounds she writes about, the witch wound, the sister wound, and the mother wound, and what she calls righteous rage, which is one of the more nuanced and honest things I've heard named in a long time. I want to say up front that this conversation goes to some complex places around women, anger, and accountability. And both of us are trying to hold these ideals with great care. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Ailey Jolie. So my first question for you today, Vanessa, is one that I ask pretty much every guest. And I would love to hear from you what being in your body means to you.

Vanessa Bennett: 02:45

Well, I guess the first qu the first kind of thought that came up when you asked that question was safe and stable. So safety and stability. There's something about that that comes up. I also think I I fought really hard to be able to come back into my body. Um, and so it feels it feels hard earned.

Ailey Jolie: 03:07

I love that. For the listener who maybe resonates with the language there of fighting really hard to be back in the body or to come home to the body, I would love to hear a little bit of your personal journey, where you started and what led you to the work that you're offering today.

Vanessa Bennett: 03:24

Yeah. So I was not always a therapist, as a lot of us are not. Came to this in my um my around my, well, past my quarterlife crisis, but I was in advertising for a long time in New York. And so I feel like I've always, without realizing it, been interested in stories and archetypes and myth and all of these things, because it's really a part of telling stories via advertising. Uh, just didn't know it. And I was living in New York for a long time and just was really kind of unhappy, just felt very unfulfilled, started my own therapy journey, my own yoga journey, meditation, uh, studying Buddhist psychology, and did what I like to call followed the breadcrumbs. So I use this even with clients now, which is you don't have to know where it's leading, you're just orienting toward whatever the next thing is that makes you feel alive, right? So I did that for quite a few years. Yoga teacher training, nutrition program, yoga therapy was just kind of, you know, testing the waters. And my therapist at the time, actually a couple years in, said, Hey, I think you should check out this program. Uh, I feel like it would be really resonant for you. And it was actually Pacifica, which is in Santa Barbara. And it's one of the only depth, especially at the time, was one of one of the only depth-oriented programs for becoming a therapist. And so immediately was interested. Um, and so it, I mean, it was a long journey to get there. And I was working full-time in New York for a long time, flying back and forth from LA to New York. Uh, but eventually ended up making it my full-time leap, landed in Los Angeles, uh, made the transition and becoming a full-time therapist. Pretty quickly on, realized that I, while I love working with individuals, um, I'm actually like a very rare breed of therapist because I'm pretty extroverted. And it's not very common for therapists, turns out, to be extroverted. And so I just realized really early on that like speaking and group work, and it was just more of where I felt alive teaching, right? Guiding. And um, so I pivoted that way. And I've I've written a couple books, and I, you know, have an online community in school and all the things. And recently, June of this last year, my family moved to Costa Rica after losing everything, unfortunately, in the fires in Los Angeles in January, which was a pretty pivotal shift for everybody. Um, so now we're here and we're reorienting, and you may or may not hear really loud birds in the background, or a moped, or my internet might cut out. Who's to say, right? Tira Vita.

Ailey Jolie: 05:54

There are quite a few things that you said there that I would love to pull apart and just spend some time on. So the first one that comes to my mind, um, and it comes to my mind because I'm also someone who went to Pacifica, and this is my bias is that the exposure to embodiment or being in the body or somatics when presented through a Yungian lens is quite different than how you might engage with somatics through other orientations. And I would just love to spend a little bit of time exploring the intersection of deaf psychology and embodiment, or even that can be healing because it ties in there from this specific intersection and lens.

Vanessa Bennett: 06:35

Love that. Yeah. I and I agree. It's interesting to hear you actually articulate it in that way because it's something that I have felt and noticed, but perhaps haven't actually put into words. So yeah, I totally agree.

Ailey Jolie: 06:48

What do you feel like makes it different in your perspective? Is it the honoring of the unconscious being there in myth as well? So it's a little bit easier to grasp in the body, or are there elements that you see that kind of tie into how we understand the body or healing as well?

Vanessa Bennett: 07:06

I think because depth psychology, right? And obviously your listeners understand that when we say depth, we're working with a few different things, right? We're working with Jungian psychology, archetypal psychology, and analytical psychology. And I think because depth is inherently spiritually oriented as well, uh, you can't be in the body without also bringing the spiritual element to it. So while I love, you know, somatic experiencing, love Peter Levine's work and a lot of other body-oriented practices, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, I'm actually trained in, I use there's oftentimes not the spiritual element, right? Like this understanding of the process of individuation and the understanding of like the imaginal realm and how that plays in, um, perhaps some of the lineage that we're carrying um, you know, within the collective unconscious, elements like that, that it doesn't necessarily make it different when you're in the body, you're in the body, right? And the healing is probably the healing, but to me, it feels richer sometimes than perhaps looking at the body as just its own thing, right? Uh I think sometimes when you're looking at the body through the depth lens, you're looking at so many elements, the spirit, the unconscious, um, you know, the psyche, which is the soul, uh, again, the collective unconscious. And maybe that's, I think, the biggest difference that I see.

Ailey Jolie: 08:28

In your writing, you often have this thread of the collective unconscious in there. And I would love to just hear from you a little bit more about maybe even for the listener who's unfamiliar with that term or doesn't know what that term is, to hear you speak about it and why it's important for our healing, but also coming home to our bodies as well.

Vanessa Bennett: 08:47

Yeah, I think the understanding of Jung's concept around the collective unconscious was probably like the first domino for me in really um understanding the importance of everybody else and the connection that we have, right? I mean, I think intuitively as beings, we know that we're all interconnected. Maybe we lose that along the journey in our like hyper-individualist society. But this idea of the collective unconscious, right? So Jung would say that we have the personal unconscious, but then we have the collective unconscious. And really that is like the field that we are all connected in, on, at. Um, and within the collective unconscious, this is where archetypes live, right? This is where our understanding of myth lives. Um, it would be maybe, you know, maybe in layman's terms, it would be his explanation for why you have myths from centuries ago that are so similar, it's uncanny, to, you know, on one side of the globe to another side of the globe, prior to any written, you know, uh kind of language being passed around. Um, we all share this thread. And what I think is so beautiful about that is it really is a way for us to understand not only how similar we all are as beings, but it really, in my opinion, was, like I said, a domino that helped me understand oh, my pain is not just my pain. My pain is everybody's pain, right? My pain is every mother's pain, my pain is every woman's pain. Uh, and it it helped me, I guess, depersonalize in a lot of ways some of like the shame and the things that I was carrying uh when I started understanding that there was this like collective tissue, right? That was kind of there beneath the surface.

Ailey Jolie: 10:32

Thank you for bringing in that explanation. And I would love to hear a little bit more from you around you kind of named that piece of motherhood and why the collective unconscious is really helpful in that process of motherhood. And we'll start there. I know that there's like many different other initiations we could we could explore, but I know that you have a book in this topic that we'll get into soon. Yeah.

Vanessa Bennett: 10:55

Yeah, that was when I was writing the motherhood myth, it was really, again, one of the kind of the dominoes, right? For me when I had a wake up around, I mean, I don't know, I I brought my daughter into this world right before COVID happened. So it was a very interesting time to have a little one and uh realizing, okay, I feel like this is just me. But then when I realized it wasn't just me, um, and starting to understand how this collective orientation around mothering was again universal. And how much struggle and suffering has come from the moving away from, which was strategic. I don't think we chose to move away from it, um, but it was this moving away from that more collective way of approaching child rearing and community, right? And then when I started doing the research into just mothering, motherhood, parenting, uh, you know, rearing children and seeing again the elements that all cultures carry. And again, going back as far as we have documentation, it made me feel held. It made me realize again, it's like I'm not alone in this. So sure I had my individual friends that we could talk about, how we weren't alone in this, but it felt bigger than me when I realized, oh no, I'm really not alone in this. Women have been feeling this way for centuries.

Ailey Jolie: 12:14

In your book, you speak about different archetypes, which I think we'll get to, but I would love to first just stay here a little bit longer and maybe explore some other initiations that most, maybe not all, women go through that are similar to motherhood, that are times of isolation for us or shame or judgment that aren't spoken about, even though there's collectively we've gone through them for so long and they've been so individualized. Because there's a few that go through my mind as spending time as a therapist. But I know that you have a whole book around this that I've enjoyed. So I would love to just have you share a little bit of your wisdom of some of these other stages, other life experiences where this similar phenomenon plays out.

Vanessa Bennett: 12:55

Yeah, I mean, I think we would, if we pulled out and looked at the journey of individuation, right? For for we'll just say a woman or, you know, a woman presenting, it's it I feel like things like um, you know, menstruation kind of crossing that threshold into womanhood. I think maybe more in our modern culture, this idea of like the quarter life crisis, uh, which I actually pulled into my thesis. And then we have another Pacific grad, Saya Doyle Bayak, who actually has a book about it, um, which I I don't know. I I feel like the quarter life crisis has gotten maybe more airtime because we're living longer, right? So if we think about when Jung coined the idea around the midlife crisis, I mean, I think we were probably living until 60, so it makes sense. We've got a few of those now, right? Um, I think relational implosions are a huge initiation. Um, I think moving, I think, you know, starting careers, jobs. I mean, I think any, what do we call an initiation, right? It's like any kind of um where I am no longer who I was, I'm stepping over a threshold into who I will become. Um, and so we have so many throughout our lifetime, and they're realistically just not held. They're not honored, they're not respected, they're not revered, they're not given the kind of stage for us to make sense of them and integrate them so that we can develop the maturity, the emotional, the spiritual maturity. Uh, and that's why I think so many of us are kind of, we are adults in the biological sense, but a lot of us are not necessarily like spiritual or emotional adults in a lot of ways.

Ailey Jolie: 14:32

In your perspective, how does one make the most out of an initiatory experience?

Vanessa Bennett: 14:40

How do we make the most out of it? Well, I think understanding the importance of it is the biggest part of it, right? Um, actually, in my thesis, my thesis was actually titled uh trauma, uh, co-created trauma as an initiatory experience. And what I talked about is essentially the psyche through research showed the psyche needs initiatory experience. And just because we don't give it to ourselves, you know, hold that container for ourselves doesn't mean it won't get it. It will just go out and take it. It will go out and create it if it feels necessary, you know, for you to have some kind of push off that proverbial ledge. Um, and so what is necessary, I think, is an understanding of the importance and a reverence for the importance. Um, community, I think gathering people around you that understand or can hold you or can mirror back to you. Um, wise elders are really important and something that we really lack connection to in a culture obsessed with youth, right? Um, I mean, I think there's a lot. And I think there's um perhaps unraveling shame. I think shame has been integrated into our initiatory experiences in our patriarchal culture and understanding the why, you know, why shame is used and how shame is used to control um and actually to keep us underdeveloped in a way. I think that's really important. I mean, shit, I could go on and on trouble with so many.

Ailey Jolie: 16:05

And you might have already answered this question, but I do want to ask you, is it something that I find quite refreshing in your work, specifically reading uh the motherhood myth? Was this continual reframe of the system and how the system is being in the personal experience and how it's influencing you and how it's shaping you? And you might just answer this being like, I got some of that thinking from Pacifica. Or you might be like, that was absolutely not. That's just been fun foundational to me. But being in this space long enough, I know that it isn't in every clinician to have that lens of the system and question it. And so I'd love to hear from you where that perspective or that lens came from, and maybe hearing a little bit more about what developed it. And that could be life experience or professional experience as well.

Vanessa Bennett: 16:58

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Um, I guess it's like D all of the above, right? I think that Pacifica inherently has a global community tending um element to it, right? I mean, it's in our, it's in our um, what do we call that, uh slogan, motto, whatever they they call that, right? Uh kind of tending the souls of the world, really. And so I think it was maybe introduced in a way. I don't know that it was, you know, it wasn't a class. It's not like we really went into systems and the importance, but I think it's woven into so much of the work again, because within depth psychology, you can't separate the collective from the individual, right? They're inherently interconnected. And so what impacts the collective impacts the individual and vice versa. And so I think that way of thinking, what that did, I've never actually had to articulate this, I suppose, but I think what that did for me was either unlock or perhaps give permission to a way of thinking, or perhaps I even want to say like a like an anger or like a motivating rage that I feel like I always felt. Um, you know, I grew up for the most part in the 90s. And so when I think about sitting in front of my TV on Saturday watching Nickelodeon and listening to Al Gore talk about how do we save the planet, you know, I mean, it was such an impactful time in my life. And I feel like I've always been that way. Um, you know, maybe it's my um Aquarius Rising. I'm very like all about like social justice and making change. And so I think maybe depth gave me an understanding of it, uh, where it could, I could take that anger and that like I had this feeling like I wanted to do something, but I didn't know how or or what I was gonna do as an individual. And it gave me language and a container for it. And so again, going back to that word shame, once I understood, again, you can't separate the collective from the individual. And I started putting that into my own work, and then thus the work with my clients, right? I started realizing the impact that it has on us when we are able to step back and say, oh, this is actually not mine, right? This has actually been handed to me and it's been handed to me on purpose, right? Uh and it's not to maybe let you off the hook for bad behavior, right? You're still responsible for healing your own wounds and not maybe perpetuating them, but it removes the shame when you know that you are acting in a system exactly as you were meant to, exactly as these systems intended. And then what I found for me personally, again, maybe it was that little nugget in me from being a child, I got to go, oh, this is like activism work. So doing this work and unraveling these systems and and looking at things from a deconstructive lens, right? More liberal psychology, bringing that into my work. This is the activism that I've always felt drawn to. Um, it's individual, but then it also becomes collective. So I think depth psychology inherently is interwoven with liberal psychology or liberation psychology, excuse me. I don't think even maybe realizes it.

Ailey Jolie: 19:59

Who would you, in your perspective, say is someone who would most benefit or would benefit from depth psychology versus maybe a listener who's listening who, you know, maybe wouldn't, because it isn't an approach, at least in my perspective, isn't an approach for everyone at every stage and at every point in their life. If someone is in acute crisis, I'm probably not gonna put on my young hat, you know, like I'm gonna put that one up.

Vanessa Bennett: 20:26

Yep, 100%. I I talk about this actually in my in my academy. So I have a coaching academy where I train therapists and coaches who do come to me and say, I was never given the opportunity to learn about depth, right? And I don't want to go back and spend 80 grand on a three-year education. Like, can you help me? Um, and one of the first lessons, and actually week one of that program that I go into is the difference between ego work and soul work. They're different, they're both important, and we do that work at different moments, right? In different of our own life, but also working with clients, sitting with clients, or maybe we weave them together, but they're really, they're really different and serve a different purpose, right? So I would consider ego work, and I I hate that our culture has kind of vilified the word ego as if the ego is somehow bad, right? Or something to be gotten rid of. It's so important uh in our our structure of self, but also how we move through the world, how we keep ourselves safe, right? Um, and so and it can become rigid, and right? There's always a yes and. But so ego work to me feels like it's the band-aid on the bullet hole. If somebody comes in bleeding out, to your point, they're an acute crisis. Um, they are unable to maintain a job, they are in horrible relational dynamics. Um, their sense of self is so low that they have a hard time even showing up right in the world. Um, I'm not gonna really start with death. I look at that as like somebody comes bleeding out, you know, you're not gonna just slap a band-aid on it. You're you have to heal the wound, right? So we got to get in there, do some triage, stop the bleeding first. Once we stop the bleeding, then we can go deeper. Right. We have to give somebody a foundation first. The ego has to feel like it's got something to stand on in order to have that structure. Right. Um, and then once it feels safe within that structure, then I find the ego loosens its grip a little bit and it's able to move out of the way so that we can get in there and start doing the deeper, more soul tending. Um, and so again, neither is better than the other. They're both equally important. It's just an understanding of when each one is required. Why, um, what are you drawn to and why, right? And and I feel sad actually that so many therapists and coaches, which is honestly why I started my academy to begin with, have no language around soul work. So it's lovely. We have a lot of people out there doing ego work, and then that's kind of where it ends oftentimes. And then clients go out into the world and they're like, but I feel like there's more. What else? Right? I feel stable, but I don't feel a sense of aliveness. Like, now what? Right. And then now I would say is when that soul work comes into play.

Ailey Jolie: 23:10

And I'm not expecting you to have an answer to this question, but if I just imagine even taking a little scroll down my social media feed right now, I imagine, based off past experience, that I would see a lot of Youngin terms that fit in this category of soul work being marketed to people probably who need ego work or acute crisis work. And I would love to hear from you if you have any ideas why that's happened, what are the risks of that, what happens inside you when you notice it? Because I know inside myself when I see shadow work being marketed in that way, my brain actually like struggles to understand. I'm just like, I don't, please, like, just I want you to explain this to me. I I want to understand. So I would love to hear from you because you have like you've written a beautiful book that goes into archetype archetypes that brings in shadow, that really challenges, you know, bring challenges the collective unconscious and how it's impacting you. I would love to just hear from you how you engage with kind of seeing a lot of this work being represented and how it's being marketed and to who it's being marketed to as well.

Vanessa Bennett: 24:24

Yeah, it's a really, really good topic. Um I think first and foremost, I want to say, and again, another reason, honestly, that I started my academy, um, I don't love how depth psychology, Jungian psychology, soul work, in my opinion, has been gatekeep for a long time. I think it's it's very traditionally been um utilized by and gatekeeped by um highly educated, affluent white men, white Western men. Um, when in fact, I mean, I'll give Jung credit that Jung Jung is somebody who, well, maybe unless it was the women that he was sleeping with, he often credited where he got his sources, right? Yes. Uh maybe not the women, but the indigenous cultures and you know, the eastern traditions. And he was one that that did credit his sources, which a lot of men don't, um, have not in the West. And so I think it's great. Like there's a part of me that feels so good that it's out there and and people are working with it and starting to experience the huge transformative benefits of, you know, um, I think especially because there's really no such thing as a new idea. I mean, again, even Jung's work comes from other cultures. Um, I think the inherent danger, however, and not understanding the power of it, or to your point, almost having that ego structure before we start engaging with the soul work, is that it can, in my opinion, be um, I guess a slippery slope to, well, I guess how do I say this? I think two things are coming up: a slippery slope to finger pointing. So it becomes another way for us to maintain the victim narrative and make everybody else the perpetrator. Um, I think there's some ego work in um, you know, one of my one of the flags that I've waved since the beginning of my career is around codependency recovery and integrating union work into codependency recovery. I think a lot of codependency recovery recovery requires a very strong ego base, um, sense of self, right? Before you can say, oh, I'm the common denominator in the relationship. I'm not actually the victim here, right? So I think there's that. That's one element. I think it can perpetuate that victim narrative. The other element I see happen a lot is a lot of bypassing, right? It's a lot, it can lend itself to like, look at me. I have all this spiritual language and these spiritual tools. Um, but have I actually sat in the fire? You know, have I actually come face to face with my shadow? Um, have I actually, you know, slain my dragons, if you will, before I'm using the language and kind of waving it around. So it, I don't want it to be gatekeeped. The work is so powerful. Um, I do feel a sense of protectiveness, you know, when you said, like, what's the feeling in your body? You know, there's a couple people in particular who have marketed shadow work brilliantly and turned it into whole areas of psychology where they have made a lot of money and a lot of fame off of it. Uh and I think that's lovely. I think there's certain language, like parts that are very helpful for people. Um, but I also want to like give homage. It's really annoying to me when we don't.

Ailey Jolie: 27:41

I love what you brought up there around it not being gay kept. I think that's such an important piece. And I know for myself, some of the body reaction that I have was from my own experiences of doing probably what would quote unquote quote fit more into soul work before the ego work had been done. And then I just ended up kicking around in really harmful relationships for even longer and justifying and learned all this new language to like make it okay. And I just look back and I'm just like, oh, I just actually really needed cognitive behavioral therapy.

Vanessa Bennett: 28:14

Like that like that's what I needed to look at my thought patterns like that. Yeah, exactly.

Ailey Jolie: 28:21

And so, and I think it's really hard. I often have people that reach out to me or even just friends in my life, they're like, Ailey, like what type of therapy should I go to? I and I'm like, I really hear you. It is kind of like the wild west out there. And it's really challenging to discern what is the right approach, where do I start? So I would love to hear from you. What are some signs that maybe you're in a place in your life to engage with soul work?

Vanessa Bennett: 28:51

Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, I mean, I often say that even finding a therapist, right? It's similar to dating. And that you have to kind of do some vibe, vibe checks, right? Like, because we know from research, I mean, that the the most healing element of therapy is not the modality, it's it's the relationship itself, right? Because inherently what we're doing is we're kind of rewriting old relational wounds through this relationship that we're creating with this other person. And so how do I know if I'm ready for depth? I mean, I I think there is, well, number one, I'll go back to this idea of codependency recovery. Um, I might not be perfect at it, but I am comfortable owning my part. I feel that I have the um, I have a solid enough sense of self to not completely get overwhelmed with shame and shut down in defensiveness whenever somebody mirrors something back to me that feels icky or uncomfortable. Right. Now we can continue doing deeper work on that through the depth lens, the spiritual soul lens. But I feel like if you're not able to go there at all, there might be some work that needs to be done first. Um so that I guess that's like the first thing that comes up for me is like, how kind of solid do you feel in your sense of self? Meaning, do I feel comfortable knowing like where I end and where others begin? Right. Um, am I able to put words to my internal experience? Um, am I able to own my part and not victimize myself and kind of point the finger at everybody else? Um, I think those like foundational elements, I mean, I mean, shit, I'm even thinking about, and I'm sure you've heard this, right? This idea that like um one of the biggest, I don't want to say symptoms, I suppose symbols of a of EQ, high EQ, high emotional intelligence is being able to hold the tension of the opposites, right? Being able to notice when you're doing black and white thinking. And so if you've got some of those foundations, I feel like it's time, right? You're like, okay, like I've got this, you're not perfect again, right? I've been doing depth work for 20 years, but you're like, okay, cool, I've got this base from which I can now jump off of. Because sometimes depth work can feel a little bit like you're either floating out into the ether or swimming down into some real dark water that you can't see at the bottom. So if I don't have that like base to come back to, I, in my opinion, it can actually destabilize us a little bit too much, right?

Ailey Jolie: 31:21

Thank you for bringing in that piece around being destabilized. And that is, I know that's a part of my reaction when I see some of it out there. I'm just like, oh no, like how this is being marketed doesn't really fit what it really needs to be done appropriately and safely and with the integrity that it was really designed to have. Um, so thank you for naming that piece. I would love to also dive in with you around archetypes. Because I know that you've written a beautiful book where many of them are named, and archetype, archetypal warp really does fit into soul work, and you do, I loved how you kind of named the foundation there. So in your book, you write about the mother wound and the sister wound and the witch wound. And I would love to just explore with you, maybe even on a collective level, first, what are some of the wounds that are out there and are most common? And right now, in this moment, in the collective, from your perspective, what wounds do you see are kind of being most embodied in our collective wider world?

Vanessa Bennett: 32:30

Ooh, okay, so big topic. Let's see where we go with this. Um yeah, so in the book, I talk about what I call the Trinity wound, right? And and when I started unpacking again this collective element, how did we get here? Right. And although the book is written through the lens of motherhood, I've had a lot of people, you know, women who do not help children, um, men, have reached out to me and said, it's so helpful for me to understand um how this plays out just for women in general, right? So I just want to preface by saying you don't have to be a mother. Um, I would actually say this part of it, the Trinity wounds, might not necessarily have anything to do with being a mother, right? Uh so the Trinity wounds, you name them, right? I talk about the witch wound, the sister wound, and the mother wound and how they all come together in this lovely, lovely soup for us women. Um, the the the witch wound, I think it was, I don't remember at what point I had this aha. And I think I say in the book too, I was almost a little embarrassed to admit that I didn't realize when I'm sitting here and I'm studying epigenetic trauma, right? And the research around epigenetic trauma, right? And for those who don't know, I mean, that is the research that has shown that certain lineages of trauma are encoded in our DNA, right? So we have proven that um lineages of trauma impact the DNA of, for example, uh descendants of slaves, right? Or the descendants from the Holocaust, right? And I had this moment where I thought, okay, then inherently one would argue that the the witch trials, the witch hunts that went on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and by the way, are still happening currently today in certain parts of the world and have killed tens of thousands of women over the over the centuries. Um why that is not also considered in our research around epigenetic trauma, right? So if I were to look at the witch wound through that lens, it's really this wounding around what could have potentially caused a woman to be considered a witch and thus murdered, right? Uh sanctioned, state and religiously sanctioned murder. Let's call it that. So being too loud, right? Having an opinion, using an herb to help someone with a stomachache, right? Disagreeing with her husband, um, having too many female friends, right? Just being not liked by your neighbor, because sometimes it was just enough for some person to say that person's a witch, and that was enough. Right. So when you see how women have been taught through society to not be too loud, not take up too much space, not have not be too opinionated, right, not be too different, you can start to see and trace this back to well, if we weren't actually murdered, our wives, our sisters, our grandmothers, or our friends were, right? And so it becomes this way of keeping ourselves safe. Then you have the sister wound, which is inherently connected to the witch wound, which again, systemically and strategically used to separate women, right? So there was this process in in Europe around, you know, the enclosures of the time. And I there's a section of my book I called Women, I I call bringing women inside. We look at the strategy that was used to separate women from each other, from their support systems, from their community, bring them inside to essentially create this piece of property, right, that women then became. And so what do we need to do? Well, we need to make women the enemies of women, right? We need to take away their ability to trust themselves and then externalize it. So make them believe that, you know, for example, um, medical doctors are more trustworthy than, let's say, centuries of knowledge that was passed down, right? Woman to woman to woman. Um, and so we see it show up now, right? We should see it show up in the air quote caddy behavior. Um, we see it show up in so many of my clients who say, I don't trust women. You know, women will stab you in the back. We see it show up in this way that women look at love or success as finite and as something that we need to uh climb over each other to get, right? And establish. Women fighting amongst themselves to keep a man, for example, or to get a promotion, for example, right? And then we have the mother wound, which part of the Trinity wound, but also something that men experience too, right? You've got this um generations and generations of women who have inherently been impacted by patriarchal mothering, um, and what that does to how do I believe I need to keep my daughter and my son different safe in a patriarchal structure? What do I need to do to keep myself safe? What have I cut off from myself to keep myself and my family safe? Um, the trauma that comes along with that, and then it's inherently passed down, right? Generation to generation. And, you know, like I said earlier, it's like this kind of beautiful soup that comes together and um whether you like it or not, it impacts you. You know, you you you it's it's the air we breathe.

Ailey Jolie: 37:42

I would love to hear from you a little bit more about how you work with these wounds from an embodied perspective. And I'll start maybe first with uh let's start with the sister wound. This because I think there is, there's enough. Um, I'm gonna use a word that I don't love, but I'll use it anyways. There's enough popcorn feminism um out there that we know that we should support other women, always be there for each other, trust other women. I mean, these are narratives that are kind of thrown at us enough that intellectually we can follow them. Nonetheless, uh, I'm sure that you've had these experiences in your personal life or as a clinician, you're sitting across from someone and you hear like, oh, wow, okay, this are these are the beliefs around women, but then the behavior of how we're treating and showing up for other women are like very far apart. Like, what's going on here? And so I would love to hear from you like how we actually change those beliefs that can be so unconscious inside us are collectively held, like they're not collective unconsciously collectively held. Like they are there. You can go find them out there underneath the popcorn feminism, which is why I use that kind of light fluffy term. How you actually explore those in regards to that having them in yourself. And if you do find them in yourselves, what do you actually do with them to try and metabolize them and move them out of the body and the psyche, if we honor those are those are the same.

Vanessa Bennett: 39:11

Yeah. I mean, you know, to to go back and weave in the question, the part of the question that I didn't answer around like what archetypes do we feel like we're embodying right now or what wounds, I think this question is kind of leaning into that, right, as well. Um, and when I talk about kind of the victim narrative or the perpetrator narrative, you know, the the victim and the perpetrator could be looked at as an archetype in and of itself, right? I mean, it's it's an embodied experience. It's something that essentially kind of you you you inhabit, you it takes over you in a way. Um, there are certain traits and behaviors that can be attached to or or um connected to these wounds or these archetypes. And I feel like that is the that's an important piece to doing the work around dismantling them, right? So really impacted when I was doing my research, and just in general, really impacted as many of us are by Bell Hook's work and how she talks so often or talked so often about what I call the enemy within, right? Which is um popcorn feminism is awesome. But if you're not doing the work of healing your inner misogynist, if you're not doing the work of dismantling your inner supremacist, your inner patriarchal wounding, right, then it actually doesn't matter at the end of the day how you show up, it will inherently be kind of calling the shots, right? Because it is it it's shadow work essentially. Um, and and I think that's cringy for a lot of us to hear, but going all the way back to this idea of shame, when you start to understand, of course I have an inner supremacist way of thinking, an inner patriarchal way of thinking, an inner misogynist, right? All of these terms, of course I do. It's the air that we all breathe. It's not something to be ashamed of, it's something to actually separate myself from so that I can go, oh, honey, let me hold myself with such grace and say, of course, this is how you acted. Right? You knew nothing else. Like you really believed in the scarcity. You really believed that this other person was your enemy. You really believed that to keep yourself safe, you had to be small. And how dare this other woman not be small? Because not only was she threatening your smallness, she was holding a mirror up to you, and that was activating. Right. So I think the work really has to start with, as always, the self, right? And where in our bodies do we hold this shame that has been carefully constructed and used to control for centuries. And it's it's a dance, right? It's a dance between where do I feel it in my body, and then how can I bring, like to your point, the psyche, the soul into the conversation so that I'm able to pull out and say what I'm feeling in my body is not just mine. I'm holding hundreds, if not thousands, of my ancestral lineage of pain and of shame in my body. Um connecting the spiritual with the embodied experience, right? To your point, I don't know that they can be separated, but I think it is important to dance with both. Um, I don't know if that makes sense. I feel like I'm kind of riffing, but it it just feels like um the shame piece is so prevalent. And and where are we holding that? And the internal work, the enemy within is is the most important kind of first domino.

Ailey Jolie: 42:51

I would love to hear from you because this is a question that this is a question that I often explore with my own supervisor because it's I find it quite tricky and quite sticky, is that I often experience or have clinically experienced a lot of resistance in specifically in my female identifying clients to do this work. My male clients love it. Like they eat it up, and it's really it's actually quite fun because um I think there's from how I write online, you would have a conception that I work predominantly with women. That's actually not true. They're quite a small number in my practice because I find that resistance actually quite challenging for me because I just want to, you know, you said, like, oh honey, sweetie, like I just want to give you a hug. That's what I I want to do. And if you can't acknowledge it, it's in you, then you can't take in the compassion. So I would love to just like explore this a little bit with you. If you have any ideas of what what the heck is going on in the collective in this present moment, or if there's pieces of the past from your lens as to why this work of like really tending to the enemy within. And like being gracious and kind and gentle with her or with them is so freaking hard.

Vanessa Bennett: 44:10

I mean, this is huge, right? I think to go to your point about why does it feel sometimes, because I agree, why men in my practice are able to go there more. I mean, partly the men that are showing up in my practice, right? Um, we have a generation, I'm obviously speaking generally, this doesn't apply to everybody, but we have a generation of men who we've been talking to about these topics for a long time, right? And and a large group of men who are really sleeves rolled up in their attempting to unpack the inner supremacist. Right. Attempting to see and understand and unpack how patriarchy has benefited them and what they need to do about it. Right. Is it easy? No. Are they doing it perfectly? Absolutely not. But there are many men, mostly I would say, like the millennial generation, right, who are showing up in ways that no prior generation has showed up in as, right? So there part of me feels like that perhaps is why we've been we've been prepping our boys for a couple generations now. Like the systems are changing. Get on board. You know what I mean? And they're like, okay, I'm here for it, you know. I do believe, and this is gonna ruffle feathers, and it's it's hard for a lot of my female clients to hear, to your point. It's hard for women online to hear. Um, you know, we're in a state of talk about like embodying an archetype. We are really in a state of kind of um loving our righteous rage right now. And I do believe it's warranted. Uh, the rage that women are feeling is is warranted. Um, there is enough trauma and enough damage that has been and continues to be done to warrant a lot of rage. And I think the culture that we live in rewards that righteousness and rewards that rage so much that there's oftentimes not an incentive to move beyond it or to use that rage as fuel for what? Like,

Vanessa Bennett: 46:19

what do I do with this rage? Right. Um, and so I think that righteousness and rage are so addictive. They feel so good because they give us the illusion of power. They give us the illusion that we are not the victim anymore. And I think for a society of people, a population of people who have been victimized, it's very intoxicating to have something that feels like a quick fix, a quick shot to the veins of power. Unfortunately, righteousness is not actually power. It's actually still victimhood. Because when I point the finger at somebody else and use the same supremacist and patriarchal tactics on them that have been used on me, I am essentially embodying the enemy I'm talking about wanting to get rid of or dismantle. Right. And so when we say looking within, the enemy within, that's kind of what we're talking about. We're talking about the ways that we as women show up in the same way that we are trying to dismantle and fighting over getting rid of, right? That's really hard when you're in a state of righteousness. And so, in my experience, I have a hard time as well working with women who are, no, this is mine. I am gonna hold on to this right now. Because I would say, okay, like who are we to tell somebody what state of evolution, development, healing that they should be in, right? Cool. If that's where you're at, that's where you're at. Nothing I say is gonna change that, right? Which is why I think your work, my work, is for some people and not for others. If you were at the stage where you were like, it's a yes and I have been victimized, I am owed my rage. And what I will not do is be the perpetrator of the same type of emotional violence that has been done to me for centuries, my women for centuries. If that's where you're at, then we start to evolve into a new place.

Ailey Jolie: 48:33

Right.

Vanessa Bennett: 48:34

And I am seeing that. I will say there are conversations around that. Um, but again, we are the victims of very intelligent and expensive technology that feeds on our righteousness, that gives us hits of dopamine for being angry, right? It's a rage-filled system. You're fighting against something a lot bigger than you, I guess is my point, right? I fall prey to it. How could I not? You know? Um, so yeah, I mean, it's a big conversation. And I don't know if I was able to kind of try to articulate it or capture it, but that is really what comes up for me, I think, when we talk about why I'm seeing those differences like you are in my practice.

Ailey Jolie: 49:16

I would have never expected you to use the language and describe it as righteous rage. But as soon as you did, I took, I had like a moment, I was like, oh, yes, that is what it is. It doesn't have to show up in this really overt, big way domineering, but it it is that same, this I I have yet to learn something different. And so the emotional violence I have experienced is what is going to come forward from me because that learning and that repair hasn't happened yet internally, and also that holding and that honoring of being harmed. And I, as soon as you said it, then also my brain started to go reflective. Like, I used to be quite a spicy activist, and I would say I was like quite a spicy person.

Vanessa Bennett: 50:02

Um a little bit up completely, but um, it was quite cute.

Ailey Jolie: 50:10

My a therapist of mine that I've been working with since I was, I don't know, 20. I made a comment last week about how I used to be spicy in my 20, and she broke her, broke her kind of cool. And she was like, Yes, you were. And I was like, the best moment. Cause I was like, oh yeah, really, like I was. And I know for myself, there was just an experience that really humbled me. Like I could see myself doing all of the things that this person had just done to me. And the shame and self-hatred I felt because I was doing what he had just done was so gripping and destabilizing and icky that I just like for about like almost two years, like just remove myself from life because there was so much self-hatred. And I'm so grateful that I had therapy and had access to practices to work through that. Because then when I kind of came out of that thing and I had honored what happened to me and explored how I had looked, what was going on, what was the transference, what was the trauma bond that was enacting out, where had my femme f femme fatale parts kind of decided to show up. There, that rage was gone. And in place of it was this deep integrity inside myself of like, I will never let myself be that in the world again, which means I will never let myself experience that again. And that was this moment of change. But um so I would love to just hear a little bit more from you around this piece of when are we maybe ready to to let go of our righteous rage? What are the things that we need or the type of support that is really appropriate? Because the last thing I want to put out in the world is that the rage isn't righteous or that it doesn't have a purpose or meaning. It it is there. There is women's rights right now are on a giant backslide. So we all have reasons to be very rage, enraged. But nonetheless, this question of like, how do I start to maybe metabolize it into something different?

Vanessa Bennett: 52:29

So I think again, highlighting something you just said, which I want people to hear and understand, which is not that we are saying that there's not a place or an importance for rage, because anger and rage are huge motivators for action, right? And so important. And also, by the way, as women, we have been taught for so long that it's so unbecoming to be angry and to be rageful, right? That even the feeling of rage, there's so much shadow in that that you we don't, I don't want to shame anybody for feeling it. Like, listen, I still feel it, right? I undulate very frequently. Um but how am I showing up in the world? I think if I feel that, like, oh my God, I've been overtaken by this um this righteousness, which let's also even unpack this term righteousness, right? It's this like, I am above you. I know better than you. I look my nose down at you, right? You're so silly and stupid to even think inserts X, Y, and Z, right? There is this air of like kind of above on a pedestal. And again, it's not necessarily real. It's a construct so that we can feel safe, right? Once that element starts to show up and kind of dance with your rage, that's when you know it's time to pause and go inward. It's time to ask yourself, what am I protecting myself from from feeling? Because there has never been a time where personally and with clients, righteousness has not showed up as a protective force against shame, against feeling victimized, against um feeling less than, against fear of actual annihilation, right? All of these things, very important. But that but that righteousness is just the shield. We can't actually get in to heal the shame and the other wounds if that shield is so strong that it can't be penetrated, right? So I don't know. I mean, how do we again it comes back to like when we go back to this idea of the sister wound, right? I find so often that, and I'm sure you you'll you'll understand this, um, I don't care what we're talking about, politics, women's rights, um, global issues. When I find myself in a state of righteousness, I may as well look in the mirror and see the thing or the person or the embodiment of that which I claim to hate staring back at me. Because it's a loop. Right? It's it's two sides of the same coin to use that image. Um, is that what and who I want to be? I'm guessing the answer is no. So where am I inflicting those beliefs on myself? Where am I inflicting those beliefs on my community, my loved ones, my partner, my child, my friends, my mother? Um, can I start there? And then does it become a ripple effect that goes out into the world? Now, again, I know we're not saying this, but I want to be really clear about this. This is not uh a justification for bad behavior. This is not saying that you have to tolerate bad behavior. You can be exceptionally boundried and hold people accountable and still not play into the righteousness. Right? They're different. It's hard, but they are different, you know.

Ailey Jolie: 56:14

I love that you dissected and really highlighted the importance of anger and that we don't actually want to take that away. And also highlighted and pulled out the importance of accountability and boundaries and self-containment and knowing your value systems and knowing when to act and when to pull out as well. Um, before we end our time together today, I would love to hear from you if you could depart one piece of wisdom for the listener when around kind of what we've shared today and the embodiment of it, if there's one piece of wisdom that you would like to leave them with.

Vanessa Bennett: 56:57

Just one? Oh God. I guess if I had to just be with whatever psyche presents first, I could go ethereal, I could go big, I could go deep, but so often I find if I'm gonna give one nugget to take away,

Vanessa Bennett: 57:22

for me it's gonna be perhaps something more on that ego level, which is in every situation, in every dynamic, there's always something that you can own. And this really comes from my work and time in Al Anon, right? And it's the crux of so much of the work that I do, which is helping us understand that it's empowering to take responsibility for that which we can own. It doesn't lessen who we are as a person, it's the opposite. And I really believe that if more of us could practice uncoupling that belief of I've like air quote done something bad means I am bad, the ripple effect out into the world would be cosmic. I mean, it would be so big we wouldn't be able to measure it. So understanding that no matter what, this is not to victim blame, it's the opposite. But no matter what, in every situation and dynamic, there's always something you can own.

Ailey Jolie: 58:29

Yeah. And what goes through my mind, even because I there's always that risk of victim blaming. And I know for myself, it was even in my experiences of childhood trauma. And I'm sharing this just for the listener who maybe is like, ah, like, are they are they saying I'm responsible for this? As someone who has a history of childhood sexual abuse, the piece that I have for myself owned, no one else has to, of wow, I was born into a family of complete dysfunction. Yep. And I have inherited a lot of trauma. And that's the part that I can own of this. The three-year-old really uh shouldn't do much. But there are pieces here for me to own and to honor and to hold and explore because they will that gives me power in the relationships I have today, how I understand myself, how I engage with my family. And I think that piece oftentimes gets missed.

Vanessa Bennett: 59:23

Yes, right, to say, I am not responsible for what was done to me. That's not what we're saying, but I'm it's this idea, right? But I am responsible for what I do with it. Yes. So even in situations like you're referring to, where you truly were the victim, right? Something was done to you. The empowering piece is, but I am responsible for how I move through the world and what I do with this thing that I inherited, this thing that was placed upon me or laid at my feet, right? Um, and so even in those dynamics, I still believe that is an empowering place to move into.

Ailey Jolie: 59:58

Yes. I love that we ended here because I feel like it's a really real example of the nuance that comes with having a depth psychology lens and how important language is and pulling it apart and being specific, because some of the the language that both of us have used has can be thrown away around in really harmful ways, even though that's not actually the tradition or the lineage that we are using that language from in this moment. And when you forget that tradition or you don't know that lineage, yeah, it can it can get quite murky and quite messy. So um I think this is a great kind of moment of real time. What the heck is deaf psychology and why is it different and why is language important? Um, so thank you so much for your book. I really enjoyed listening to it before we spent time together. I really hope that the listener picks it up. You have your academy. Do you have anything else coming up in coming up or that you would like the listener to know about?

Vanessa Bennett: 01:01:10

I'm always spinning plates. It's what I do. Right? I mean, same same as you. It's like, what am I talking about? The Substack, the community, the academy. It's all there. Um, but you can find everything at my website, vanessaBennett.com. Um, or you know, I'm mostly on Instagram, although I, like many of us, have a love-hate relationship with social media. So Vanessa S. Bennett at Instagram.

Ailey Jolie: 01:01:31

Thank you so much. I want to start by naming something clearly because this episode touched territory that can be easily misunderstood. When Vanessa and I talked about righteous rage, and when I shared my own experience of recognizing myself in the very behavior I had resented in someone else, we're not saying that women's anger is unwarranted. We're not saying that those who've been harmed should hurry up and forgive. We're not minimizing what women have collectively endured historically or right now. None of that was the point. And I want to be so explicit about that. What we were actually exploring is something clinically significant, and that is the moment when protective rage, which is real and valid and has its own intelligence, starts to become a container we live inside rather than a fuel we metabolize and use. Vanessa called it righteousness, which is different from anger. Anger is information, righteousness is a structure. And when that structure becomes rigid enough, it can actually prevent deeper healing from happening, not because the hurt wasn't real, but because staying in it has become a form of safety. In Jungian terms, this is shadow work in its truest essence. The actual clinical task of recognizing when the thing we most oppose in the world has found its way inside of us and started running our lives without our awareness at all. This doesn't make us bad, it makes us human, it makes us products of the system we grew up in. And the work is not to punish yourself for that. The work is to uncover and continually uncover all of the areas in your life where this is happening so you can see it clearly and fully. I also want to spend some time with the distinction Vanessa draws between ego work and soul work because it's one I sit with often. And I think it's important for anyone navigating the current landscapes of psychology online. Ego work, building a stable enough foundation to function, to have a sense of self, to manage the basics of emotional regulation and relationship is not lesser work. It is the necessary ground. You cannot do depth work on a nervous system that's still in triage. When you see shadow work or archetypal healing or collective trauma processing being marketed to everyone regardless of where they are in their process, that is the gap Vanessa's naming. Another piece that Vanessa named is the Trinity wounds as she describes them. And they're one of the reasons why I wanted to have her on the podcast after reading the motherhood myth. So Vanessa describes the Trinity wounds as the witch wound, the sister wound, and the mother wound. These are not metaphors, they are patterns of a traceable history. The witch wound is the embodied inheritance of centuries of women being killed, sanctioned by law and religion for being too loud, too knowing, too much. The sister wound is what happens to women's relationships with each other when systems strategically make other women the threat. And their mother wound is what passes down through generations of women who had to cut off parts of themselves to survive inside structures that were not built for them. None of these live only in the mind. They live in the body. They show up in how we contract in certain rooms and how we respond to other women's visibility, and what we reach for when we feel unsafe. The piece Vanessa said toward the end is the one I want to close with because I think it's the most honest and most useful. In every situation, in every dynamic, there is always something you can own. And I want to be clear about what that means and what it doesn't. Doesn't mean you're responsible for what was done to you. Doesn't mean the harm was yours to have prevented. It means that once you're an adult with some degree of resource and support around you, you are responsible for what you do with what you've inherited. That's not blame. That's actually the most powerful position available to you. It's a difference between being the object of your history and being the author of your history instead. I hope that the pizza I shared about my own history and my own complicated dynamic with this idea of being responsible for the things that have happened to us. Some light and adds some complexity and nuance and really establishes that neither of us are saying that you are to blame. If this conversation opens something for you, if you recognize yourself anywhere in the rage of the wounds and the questions of where soul work begins into the body, you can find out more at inbodymethod.com. Thank you again for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guests, and me, Aile Jolie, to be a part of that process for you. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.