There is an article about gaslighting that has been making the rounds lately, and it has my attention. My initial reaction to it was mixed, mostly because I don’t think it applies just to women. However, that is where I’ll start since primarily the article is about women, and that is the scope of my experience.
If you haven’t read the article, here it is. Go read it. Really, leave my blog, go read it, and then come back, please.
Every time this article surfaces on facebook or anywhere else, I keep coming back to this one fact of my life: I hated being female until I was in my early thirties. A little growing up and a lot of yoga healed this, and I came to appreciate the masculine side that I had overdeveloped with lots of male friends and great pride in not being like the other girls, and also to appreciate the underdeveloped feminine side of me that is pretty cool and really needed some attention. I’ve always been a man’s woman – I preferred the company of men, I seek reason, I thoroughly enjoy cars and gadgets and power tools, and I can’t stand romantic comedies.
It made for some confusing times. Growing up, I couldn’t quite get a handle on why I never fit in with the other girls. I knew I wasn’t gay, but wondered sometimes if the girls around me were picking up something that I didn’t know about. Eventually, I accepted that I was just more of a man’s woman, and as time went on and on, I came to recognize and enjoy the feminine aspect of myself, too, and more female friends came into my life.
What I did not recognize until recently – simply because it loomed so large that I couldn’t even see it – was that it wasn’t just that I preferred the company of men, it was that I hated being female. It wasn’t just that the feminine parts of my personality were underdeveloped – they were quite well developed, in fact, – it was that they were entirely stuffed down and denied. The sad reality is that there have been countless instances over my life when I have responded like a woman, and immediately checked the impulse in favor of something more “acceptable,” something that fit the image I had of myself. You know, not like the other girls – the perfectly reasonable girlfriend, wife, or friend, the girl who is just like your best buddy, without all the female nonsense, but has boobs and puts out.
So, when I read and re-read this article, even though parts of it rankled me, I couldn’t deny that somehow in my development I had thoroughly internalized this idea that the feminine, emotional part of myself was the problem. I can’t point to any one moment in my development that set this in motion, but I suspect it is a chicken-and-egg situation, and it’s something that I perpetuated through the experiences and relationships I chose for three and half decades, until it simply had to break. After running through the cycle enough times, it finally settled with me that this whole feminine, sensitive, emotional thing that I do isn’t the problem with me, it is me. And it’s not a problem.
Since I first read this article a month ago, I keep coming back to it, even though I was aggravated by it on the first read – I’m not a big fan of intellectualized victimization. While women do bear the brunt of our cultural dismissal of emotions, I know plenty of sensitive, emotionally tuned-in men who bear this in a different way.
The more I think about it, the more I am sure that there is no such thing as being too sensitive, for women or men. Being tuned in to the emotional world – one’s own, and others’ – is a gift. The trouble is in being ill-equipped to manage it, as one inevitably becomes after hearing endlessly that this tuning in is a defect to be patched over, rather than a gift to be cultivated. The ability to pick up on the anger of a rude cashier or sense the underlying disdain in a friend’s or partner’s seemingly joking remark is a useful connection to the world for one who understands how not to take it on as one’s own burden. When the abilities to discern another’s emotions and to connect to one’s own emotional response to others work together, it makes it easier to choose friends and partners, set boundaries, and offer and receive kindness where it is needed. Everyone’s emotional world is different, and when you know your own, you can seek and create relationships -with others and yourself- that are full, authentic, and liberating.
This, of course, is challenging, if not impossible, when the message that your emotions are wrong is deeply internalized. This is why denying someone their emotional reality is just about the worst thing you can do to a person. We all need a reality check sometimes (Is this your bad day, or the bad day of the person who yelled at you? Is this an accurate read on a situation, or is it projection?), but there is a difference between a reality check and a dismissal. The dismissal is devastating. The dismissal tells someone that who they are is wrong. And furthermore, the irony, I think, is that those instances of true “overreacting” are actually fed by the dismissal. If you keep telling a person (or yourself) that they’re crazy for being so sensitive about the big stuff, that sensitivity is going to burst in all sorts of weird places. You can’t tell a person they’re not who they are. Who they are will always come through in some way or another.
A culture that undervalues the feminine / emotional world and overvalues the masculine is damaging both to men and women. The article says it all about how this renders women insecure, and challenged to live authentically. It damages men, too. Not only does the conditioning of the emotional / feminine as less-than poison relationships between men and women, but it leaves men twisted. What is one to make of one’s innate need to seek out something one meets with disdain? Regardless of the gender one might be, masculine aspects seek the feminine for balance (either in relationships, or in self-development), and how much of a mess is it to need something you loathe?
This makes me sad because I love men. I wouldn’t trade my life as a man’s woman for anything, and while I am delighted to have enough female friends to orchestrate and enjoy regular girls’ nights for the first time in my life, I’ll probably always be a bit of a man’s woman. I still have a hard time choosing between stilettos and combat boots, I still think makeup is ridiculous (even though I wear it sometimes and love how I look in red lipstick), and I take great pride in the fact that I can pretty much fix a toilet or change a tire with my eyes closed.
I also have tremendous gratitude for the gift of being tuned into the emotional world, and the gift of years of male influence that provide a reality check when I carry others’ grief around with me needlessly. After all of these years of trying so hard not to be like the other girls, it turns out that in some of the best ways possible, I really am like the other girls, and I really love it. So, maybe I am not a man’s woman after all; the more I think about it, the more I realize I feed the imbalance by describing myself as such. What I am is a complete person, and that is something that I wish for everyone, men and women.
