Why I will not be giving the advice of “not all men” despite having adoration for the men in my life
Just because something isn’t within your sphere doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist at the scale others are reporting.
As someone who has dedicated a large portion of their life to working alongside men, very intimately, because my heart is moved by the pain of the particularly wound that is being exposed in the collective right now — the silencing of their emotional bodies and the shadow that can emerge from that — it would be very easy for me to say “not all men” and to point to why I believe we need to focus on cultivating right relationship with the masculine.
And whilst I still believe this is the remedy — it does not cancel out, or outweigh our need to turn our gaze towards the very harsh reality that we are a witness to right now.
And fact of the matter is — despite being exposed to this world through my work — I have not lived an upbringing where I have had to protect and shield myself from abuse, violence and the harshness of the male perpetrator / gaze — or even worse, their assault.
I have witnessed it in more subtle ways — in emotional avoidance and volatility — but I have not had to live a life protecting myself against evil and for that, I am grateful. AND I am also aware of my privilege in this.
And so it would be easy for me to just tell you — and any other woman, that our attention and focus should be on learning to trust men.
But that is not the right response to what’s happening now.
And I believe we need both.
We need to learn how to come into right relationship with discernment — to learn when to trust, open and respect men and to understand WHEN there is healing available to us in our relationships.
And we need to learn WHEN to become fierce protectors and to use our anger as a way to protect the innocent — both our own innocence and the innocence of others — especially children.
So whilst I deeply adore and love men — and I am so blessed to be surrounded by so many incredible men — I will not be saying “not all men” and will not be giving any advice that asks you to simply shut off what is happening and what we are being asked to turn towards right now.
This seems obvious. And yet it is the thing most often forgotten when women speak about their exposure to male violence — the patterns they have witnessed, the data they are sitting with, the reality they cannot un-know by simply choosing a more optimistic perception.
The response that arrives fastest is usually some version of: not all men. Don’t let emotional contagion take over.
It is not offering nuance. It is asking the person with the most direct knowledge to doubt that knowledge — to treat her exposure as a distortion rather than information, her pattern recognition as hysteria rather than data. It is centring the comfort of those who haven’t seen it over the testimony of those who have.
I have sat with men in rooms most people never enter. I have witnessed, up close, what lives underneath the performance of capability and respectability.
The wound. The predictable, civilisational wound. The hunger that was never given a sacred container and became something evil and unconscious.
The data now confirms at scale what those rooms showed me in particular.
95% of men in an anonymous peer-reviewed study self-reported coercive sexual strategies. 62 million monthly visitors to a site built around the filmed assault of unconscious women.
This is not emotional contagion. This is information.
And whilst my work will continue to remain the same — to continue to open my heart to the beauty of the men around me — I can still hold the paradox of knowing that the majority of men do in fact hold deeply unconscious, societal wounding built into their psyche, that does in fact make them unsafe. And it is not my safe to tell other women, “not all men”.
Feeling privileged for not having been physically / sexually abused indicates the severity of our society's illness.
Oh, Sigourney, I could speak for weeks and years on this.
From multispectives (hmmm .. new noun word?).
Growing up in male dominated environments where female was outwardly segregated as less than.
Broken families in so many ways.
Unkindness at the fore.
Behind closed doors the antithesis of love, kindness, compassion, and care.
Relationships as I traversed life mostly echoing this.
As is the natural pattern in the 3D World.
My last relationship - 25 years of high level Narcissistic Personality Disorder Abuse, extreme coercive control, financial, emotional, psychological, social, and physical abuse to boot.
Queensland Police Department took a DVO out against him to protect our son and I.
He legally secretly set up a new home, took all that he wanted, including our son, all of our money, locked the house, hid the keys, and left.
That’s a long story.
It’s all a long story.
And I will write that story and publish it in time.
Trauma, beyond level trauma eked out a shell of me.
That is the long game goal of the Narcissist. What you are that they can’t be, they wish to take from you.
Break you. Tarnish you. And hope that you die in the process.
Of course - not all are the same. There we go with a vanilla proviso.
My life giving yes is the awareness that we choose our lives before we come in. Each and every time.
We sit around the Soul Family boardroom table and make agreements.
This is a very simplistic view.
We agree who is playing what role in this lifetime.
We show up as that for each other for the lived experience each is here for.
In the subject relationship and marriage, for his high level corporate psychopath (another term coined for Narcissistic Behaviour in the Corporate world), I played the victim to the perpetrator.
And I played it wonderfully in the realm that we lived in. Behind closed doors.
Respected in the industries within which we played and worked, the external ‘pretty and successful’ story belied the truth of what lay beneath.
Thank you your posts on what you have intimately lived and for what you learn through statistics and those you work with, Sigourney.
Each of us plays integral roles for the greater good in the evolution of humanity and all that is.
We are so much more than the games we play in the 3D field of human experiences.
Those games are integral though for the remembering, embracing, and embodying the essence of who we were before the world told us who we should be.
In that frequency, collectively, we shift the hands on the dial of the clock of the evolution of all that is and beyond.
We create the Akashic Records and live what is already written or rewrite them to reflect a greater good.
Enjoy your remembering, embracing your essence, and adding to the collective legacy, beauty, and wonder💫✨💛✨💫