The Dirty Secret of Exceptional Women
I’m not sure of the exact moment it became clear to me in my little girl mind that being chosen meant being safe.
Maybe it was while watching the “Perfect Match” blind dating show at 5:30pm on weekday evenings in Australia.
I’m sure you know it, but just in case you escaped this formative education in how to set attachment wounds in stone and call it normal; the premise is that either a slimy suited-up fella or a giggling girl with a voluminous do would sit awkwardly behind a screen, where they’d proceed to ask a series of inane questions dripping in innuendo to 3 willing babes of the opposite sex they’d never before clapped eyes on.
The aim of the game was to choose who they wanted to date based on relationship “compatibility” demonstrated in the eye-rollingly predictable answers that would then be dribbled back in return.
A personal favourite of mine were the responses to a deeply thoughtful enquiry posited by Michael, an earnest lad with a perpetually dry mouth, trained in demolitions.
“Can you tell me how do you demolish a guy when you go out on a date?” Michael asked his 3 victims - sorry, I mean possible forever loves.
Contestant #3 whose most essential biographical info included enjoying long drives and going out to clubs and discos, performed back with confidence: “I’d take him out, find out how much force he could stand and show him an explosive time”. I mean if anything was going to reveal her soulmate potential, this would be it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for dating and relating that’s about no strings fun and (mutually consensual and empowered) fucking for the sake of it. Finding a life partner isn’t on everyone’s agenda for sure. And yet, when we mix the purity of the Happily Ever After romantic Disneyideology that permeated many a little girl’s world view for the first decade of life, with the essential requisites for female contestants on a heterosexual only dating gameshow: be hot on his terms and meet his sexual needs without any consideration of your own; well it was a confusing time.
Blaming the Perfect Match gameshow for shaping my entire developmental love, sex and intimacy journey is probably a bit rich, but it’s fair to say that so called “harmless” media undeniably infiltrated my young psyche (and later, adult nervous system) with the story that being chosen, sexually desired and deemed worthy of taking a man’s last name and mothering his children, should be an obvious priority for all women, myself included.
Fast forward to my teens, through until age 40. As a Type A high achieving good girl, holy shit did I nail the brief. I nailed it so good, that in my mid 30’s I started experiencing health issues that I had a hunch (but wasn’t ready to face yet) were operating as my body’s protective alarm system.
My vulva began screaming at me with an intolerable skin condition called Lichen Sclerosis (essentially precancer of the vulva). My uterine cervix joined the party, raging back at my self-betrayal with high-grade precancerous cells. As the cherry on top, outbreaks of HSV2 that had been dormant since my early 20’s plagued me constantly.
Unsurprisingly, this hellscape of chronic lady-part pain with potentially life-threatening implications if left unchecked, spiraled me into a world of shame and fear.
Mostly, because to the outside world, I was a knowledgeable and outspoken teacher and therapist. A feminist mother of three daughters. Married to a man who epitomised the societal definition of success; living a life of holidays and property portfolios and sexy aspirations. But behind closed doors, I was suffering.
My pussy was furious as fuck and it was begging me to do something about it.
In 2019, my little sister died after a tragic 5 year journey with brain cancer. She was only 30 years old. I share this, because while I was mothering small people and navigating a marriage that had become increasingly misaligned and harmful, Sarah’s death broke me open in ways that were so devastatingly necessary that I’ve never been the same.
Grief has a way of rearranging us that no other human experience can.
For me, this rearranging eventually brought me to myline in the sand moment. I could no longer sit in awareness, drowning in longing. I was ready - albeit terrified - to move forward into the unknown, because the alternative just might kill me.
Now I look back, what I understand is this: the agony wasn't the leaving. It was the incongruence. The daily cost of my outsides not matching my insides. Of standing for something with my voice that my life quietly contradicted.
That specific flavour of shame has a texture I know well. For me it lived as a heavy ache in my heart and a smouldering heat just below my ribs. Maybe yours has a quality you can name right now, if you pause and let yourself feel for it.
What I've come to understand is that this particular brand of shame is the dirty secret of some of the most exceptional women I've ever known. It doesn't discriminate by intelligence or ambition or feminist conviction. In fact it seems to have a particular appetite for exactly those women.
The women who know better.
The women who feel the rage of knowing better and still can't get free.
The feminist who fawns. The therapist who stayed too long. The woman who can name every unhealthy pattern in her circle of besties and still feels completely trapped inside her own.
If you recognise yourself here, you're not alone. We're everywhere. We just don't say it out loud, because shame is very good at keeping its own secret.
What I can tell you now, almost three years on from my line in the sand, is that the safety I was gripping onto so hard - the financial security, the social standing, the being chosen - was never real safety.
It was an illusion. A very convincing, generationally inherited, patriarchally endorsed illusion that is bloody hard to shake. So if you're still inside it, please don't add self-blame to the weight you're already carrying. You followed a script handed down through generations. So did I. Most of us didn't know we were allowed to put it down.
But we are. And here's what I'm still learning is actually on the other side of that illusion:
Not a perfect life. Certainly not a painless one.
But a body that finally feels like yours. A nervous system that knows the difference between real safety and performed safety. A self that takes the reins and makes authentic choices, rather than endlessly, exhaustingly adapting to be chosen.
This is why I built what I built. Not only from theory, but from the specific ache of a woman who had all the awareness and still couldn't move. The Roar Truth to Power framework and the EroSoma Movement Method exist because I needed them, first.
This somatically-focussed, trauma-informed body of work has been birthed from a bone-deep understanding that your aliveness has many gateways in. Your grief can be a portal to deep intimacy. Pleasure (defined by you and no-one else) can create a passage to play and expression. Your rage can open the door to your erotic lifeforce.
These thresholds ask you to say yes to all of you, beneath the mind. Because you can’t think your way out of a body that has learned to survive by abandoning itself. You have to feel and move your way out. Slowly. Safely. And ideally, in community with other women doing the same.
If something here has you nodding, aching, or quietly furious - that recognition is your body talking. I invite you to stay with me and lean in.
Here’s to your line in the sand.
Sidenote:
If my little nostalgic tidbit above sparked some memories, I reluctantly invite you to watch this incredible piece of Aussie 80’s Perfect Match footage. Perhaps you too will make sense of your entire life thus far. You’re welcome.
