This week on the Goddess-Witch Spectrum™ podcast we explore the power of choice.
Now, maybe you’re wondering why choice is so important for women…don’t we make choices every day? We pick out our clothes, what we are going to eat for breakfast, how we take our coffee/tea in the morning.
These are the types of choices we often don’t think about. They aren’t defining moments in our lives. Yet throughout our lives, our ability to choose will shape who we are and how we feel about ourselves. The choices we make are what help us become whole.
Which is why it is essential to talk about choice for women.
In this podcast, I dive into the impacts of trauma for women and how the collective trauma women have experienced through systems like patriarchy forces us to occupy two distinct roles. The Goddess and the Witch. You can either be good or bad. There is no in between.
On the surface, this dichotomy may not seem like a trauma response, but as a psychotherapist, I have observed that the hallmark of any trauma response is an inability to access flow.
Embodying Flow
Flow is the ability to move between two states of being (rest to active and vice versa) or emotional responses (calm/happy to sad/mad) with ease. The same is true for our “good” girl and “bad” girl aspects as well. If we feel like in order to receive love, attention, support, and validation (all valid human needs for survival), we have to be good constantly, we are then stuck in a trauma response.
In other words, when we put ourselves and other women in the categories of the “Goddess” or “Witch” or we allow men to do this for us, we become stuck. We lose our ability to flow between these parts of us. The ability to access the energy and wisdom of both. Thus, we are never able to achieve self-actualization.
This is because our ability to choose how we want to express ourselves, whether we lean into the Witch or the Goddess, at any given moment, is how we fear ourselves from our collective trauma as women. When we learn that we can embody both or one day be the Witch and the next day want to lean into our Goddess, we are defining for ourselves who we are and what we want. We take back power and control over our own voices, needs and wants.
You can not achieve self-actualization without choice. Which is why when women’s rights are being stripped away and women can not make life-saving choices about their health, their family systems, or even access to resources, they become stuck in these roles. They don’t have the ability to choose what is right or wrong themselves. Thus, they can never integrate both sides of themselves fully.
The easiest way to keep an oppressed group of individuals down is to deny their power of choice. We saw it throughout the early 1900s with the Jim Crow laws, which enforced segregation of Black people from White communities and spaces. We saw it with LGBTQ+ folks when they’re right to gay marriage was denied over and over again until Obama took office. And we’re seeing it now with women again, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade and how married women are being prevented from voting or accessing their right to CHOOSE which candidate they support if their last name does not match their legal documents.
Choice is how we self-actualize, which for a long time has been something privileged White cisgender men have been able to do.
When you deny someone their right to become a whole person, you are oppressing them. It is a way to separate them from yourself or the group of individuals you represent. It becomes an “us” vs. “them” dynamic until eventually, you don’t even see them as human. Which then makes it even easier to create a rhetoric that turns women into objects of projection.
The domestic Goddess, in her pearls and heels, who needs saving and uplifting, or the evil Witch hell-bent on destroying you and everything that “makes America great again.”
Being Both
So, how can women integrate both sides of themselves and reclaim their power of choice? In this podcast episode, I specifically discuss the Lovers card in Tarot, a card which at its core represents not only choice, but what Jung referred to as the process of individuation. (I.e. self-actualization). This process is done by learning how to balance and integrate the masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche, or the Persona and the Shadow, which I wrote about here.
Lovers Card in the Thoth Tarot Deck
However, while that process often works well for men, because Jung was ultimately creating his own theory for himself (As all psychotherapy theorists do – whether or not they are consciously aware of it). It does leave out one crucial piece for women – learning to reconcile the light and dark aspects of the feminine. Because women ultimately have to make two processes that often coincide. The first is reconciling their masculine and feminine aspects (i.e. the ego and their unconscious/shadow), yet they must also reintegrate their connection to their feminine aspects and the aspects they have been socialized to deny.
Thus, they need to find not only balance and harmony between the “masculine” and “feminine” parts of themselves, which is often reflected in their trauma responses (I.e., hyper-independence or fawning behaviors). They also must learn how to find harmony within both sides of their feminine aspects. The Witch and the Goddess.
And that is what choice gives us. The ability to decide which version of us we want to access and the power to know that ultimately, we have access to both.
OX
Your Dark Fairy Godmother
What to learn more about how Tarot can be used as a road map to understand women’s self-actualization process? I am offering a LIVE 2-hour workshop on 6/13/25, which breaks down Maureen Murdock’s Heroine Journey and how it corresponds to the 21 cards of the Major Arcana. Sign up to secure your spot today!
As always, if you want to learn more ways to integrate your inner Goddess and Witch, sign up for the Goddess-Witch Spectrum™ course offering this upcoming Fall!
Can’t wait to see you there!
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