A Life Made by Hand with Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Sounds True Interview: One of the main themes you explore in Women Who Run with the Wolves is how women can uncover their injured instincts. If a woman's instincts are injured, can they be healed or repaired?
Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Yes. There are many ways to approach the necessary mending. For example, you can seek out an individual whom you feel has her instincts intact, and then emulate this dynamic figure. You may also form a relationship with her, based on self-study and kinship. Other times, the mending begins by the taking of solitude. Be alone for as long a time as you can. Be away from all the mouths and hands that reach out, plucking at a woman, wanting to consume her mentally, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. Time spent in solitude clarifies “the core needs,” that is, aspects of life that you feel you cannot live without.
Another pathway to repair injured instinct is, as Carl Jung put it, to live a natural life. Attempt, if you can, to live close to anything that is natural and cyclical. Live close to black dirt, a garden, a house plant, a dog, or a cat—something that has no artifice to it. Observe and make a relationship with that living criatura, creature. Notice that it moves in cycles. Try then to see what your own cycles are. This brings you out of the clackity-clack outer world into the world of the Self, providing new ideas and new ways to consider yourself.So, the internal predator is the nay-saying function of the psyche, an aggressive complex that criticizes, “You are not adequate or acceptable.”
The two triggers that seem to especially energize the internal predator during the course of a woman's life are abuse and neglect—abuse of her emotional nature, her creative functions and talents. Abuse occurs by restricting or smothering her talents and the development of her ideas and personal voice. Neglect can be understood as the willful or unconscious lack of perception and attention to things that will perpetuate her growth and thriving. A woman who has experienced this lives in a dulled psychic state, as though a bushel has been forced down over a shining light.
Women-Wolves and Clarissa Pinkola Estes - Thanks to fellow Aussie adoptees for the reminder and the links to this author who has been so helpful to so many and continues to be so.