Angry Girls Are Unattractive
The cultural story that damages female psyches and bodies
Several years ago I did some healer training that was offered by an organization that also does a lot of survival training. The work had all originated with an Apache shaman and tracker in the 1950s, and both elements of that work were very intertwined. I was there for the healer part, but at one point the instructor asked for a volunteer to walk through a sandpit and I raised my hand. Then he read my tracks and told me what was going on with me to a degree that seems preternatural to modern humans — how much was in my bladder, about a hip injury that I’d suffered many years before in childbirth, and the fact that I had a huge amount of repressed anger. “The earth sees all,” said the teacher. “It shows you who you are.”
After some very intensive healing work, I again walked through the sand, and this time my big toes made a much deeper impression, a sign that I had released a lot of that repressed anger and was now in a more emotionally balanced place. I’d spent my entire life as a female containing and repressing anger — from the ongoing bullying and harassment to the routine marginalization, I was fucking furious. And mostly, I didn’t allow those feelings into my conscious world, at least not until that course.
