EMPOWERMENT IS NOT ABOUT AVOIDING PAIN — WOMEN AND POWER
Adriana Tanese Nogueira
Psychoanalyst | Instituto AELLA
adrianatns@icloud.com
As custodians of the human dimension metaphorically called the “heart,” women have come to carry—visibly—the pain of the world on their backs. We live on a planet permeated by pain; those who keep the heart open are connected to their own pain and, by extension, to the pain of the world. Women need to recognize this pain—as theirs, as ours, as belonging to all. Rather than merely suffering it passively, the time has come to know it, map it, look it in the face, and carry it consciously. This is what creates the conditions for a true and effective empowerment.
The power many women have achieved today still largely operates within the domain of the masculine world—metaphorically separated from the pain of the body, the heart, nature, and the Earth. For this reason, a woman in a position of power is not necessarily an integrated, loving, or authentic woman. Quite often, the opposite is true. In order to climb the ladder of this kind of power, she had to amputate—more rigorously than others—the historical dimension of the feminine she carried with her: home, motherhood, feelings, sensitivity.
Only women who are able to take on their own pain—and the Pain of the World—have the possibility of crossing it, and only if they do so with consciousness and humility. In doing so, they cross a threshold that leads to a new stage of their own evolution and of human evolution. Like Persephone at the completion of her journey, they become the powerful queens of the invisible world. And the invisible is that which is felt. In this realm of feeling lies the key to feminine transformation—and, consequently, to masculine transformation as well, by osmosis and necessity.
For this process to finally be set in motion, women must either reach the point of no longer tolerating submission, lies, and pretense—or, before that, have the courage to face their own fear. They may then discover that the seven-headed monster was, in fact, the life they were living.
