Why We Doubt Women's Expertise with Ailey Jolie

What if the voices we instinctively trust have less to do with wisdom and more to do with what our bodies have been taught to recognize as authority?

In this solo episode, Ailey explores how cultural conditioning can quietly shape whose knowledge we trust and whose confidence makes us uncomfortable. Drawing from what she has been noticing while writing her book, she considers how these patterns can live beneath our conscious beliefs and influence the way we respond to women in positions of authority.

Ailey reflects on the difference between confidence and safety, questioning why women are so often expected to prove their expertise while navigating the discomfort that can come with fully claiming it. She also turns toward the women whose work has profoundly shaped modern approaches to trauma and embodiment, despite their names not always receiving the same recognition as the ideas they helped establish.

Rather than approaching these biases as something to judge or intellectualize, Ailey invites us to notice them in the body. What happens when a woman speaks with certainty? What shifts when the same message comes from a man?

This conversation is an invitation to become more discerning about whose wisdom we receive, while creating more freedom for women to take up space within their own work.

In this episode:

• 4:07 The Question Of Female Authority
• 16:44 Confidence Is Not The Issue
• 22:22 Naming The Female Elders We Miss
• 33:22 Neuroception And Somatic Misogyny
• 37:20 Family Conditioning And Inherited Safety
• 39:29 Ageism And Women As Threat
• 44:06 A Body Based Practice For Change
• 47:03 Ways To Go Deeper Together

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Transcript

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Ailey Jolie 0:49

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the pulp power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Shalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life away from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a Love Letter to Embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like: how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared call? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to In This Body, or if this is your first time here, welcome to the podcast. This is a podcast about what happens when you actually live in your body, when you let it speak, when you trust what it knows, when you stop overriding it, and you really allow its wisdom to meet both your mind, but also your heart too. I'm Ailey Jolie, a somatic psychologist and an embodiment enthusiast, I guess you could say. Today is a solo episode. It's just you and me for the next hour together. If you're familiar with the podcast, you know that I took a little break over the summer season. I had surgery again. I moved continents again, but despite all that change, I am still writing my book. I guess it's really true that some things change while others just keep repeating. Today I'm not going to get into the medical or the move, but I'm going to dive into something I've been really reflecting on as I go through the process of book writing and thinking about publicity for the book and really what the next few years of my life and my career are going to look like as I lean into the mission and the vision of this book, which has taken on a life of its own. I am just the vessel for. Even though I just feel like the vessel for this book, one thing that has been really important to me is to have really impeccable women around me. Creating that team has taken time and trial and error, but I have really stayed true to it because I wanted this book to honor the female lineage of somatics, of trauma theory, of therapy. And I knew for me to do that, I had to be really held by women. So in addition to having that really strong female team around me, I decided to go and spend time with female teachers in my field. I definitely learned a lot from them, but I also saw why their work, from my perspective, in our capitalist patriarchal society, has never really gotten the acknowledgement, the validation, or the congratulations that some of their male counterparts have. Of course, no questions asked. Patriarchy and privilege play into this in ways that could never be measured. That's obvious, and it could be the topic for a whole episode or an entire series of solo episodes. Maybe it will be one day. But this episode is not focused on how patriarchy, capitalism, or privilege benefit men in their professional fields. That's a very valid topic, just not the one I'm focusing on today.

The Question Of Female Authority

Ailey Jolie 4:07

This episode is more about internalized patriarchy, internalized misogyny, internalized capitalism in the female body and how those things play out amongst women. I'm gonna be a bit focused today on the healing or helping professions, but this episode is for Ever in. Because if you're listening, I'm assuming you've probably purchased a book or listened to a book with Gabor Mate on it or in it, but maybe don't know the names of someone like Judith Herman or Pat Ogden even. That right there, that absence of recognition of our female elders is really what I'm going to be exploring today. And that is across professions, not just localized in therapy. But I would argue it plays out a little bit more intensely here because our field is 75% dominated by women. And of course, again, patriarchy and ageism are top contenders here as to why there is an absence of recognition for our female elders. And I don't want you to think that I'm not acknowledging that. I really am. But again, that's a whole other episode or a whole series of episodes. Today, I want to talk about how women show up or don't show up for each other in healing and therapeutic professions, and how that leaves women more available to look towards male leadership. And if clinicians aren't the hype girls for elders in our fields, our clients are gonna believe that Bessel Vandercock is the only one who ever talked about trauma in the body, which means that our clients are gonna miss out on people like Marion Woodman, who's the real OG of trauma in the female body. And I so deeply believe in change from top down and bottom-up. Both are so important, which is why this episode is gonna move between speaking towards clients, is gonna move towards those of you who are not therapists, but are interested in therapy, healing, embodiment, and also speak to clinicians as well. Because we need both if we're gonna make Marion Woodman's work just as mainstream as Gabor Mate's. We need people buying her books. So today we're gonna talk about it. We're going to get into what our bodies do when a woman speaks with authority and what they do when a man does. You could ask that question about your what your body does when a queer person, trans person, body of color, culture speaks to you. This is not a specific experience exclusive to women. It's just the one I'm focusing on today because I live in a female body. As I speak today from my female body, as a woman speaking with authority here on the podcast, I would like you to be able to listen to your own body while you listen to mine too. And just notice what happens inside of you. Is there judgment? Do you get annoyed? Do you find yourself fact-checking me more than you maybe would? A male podcaster. I don't know. I'm putting myself out there for you to explore your relationship to a female voice of authority today as we get into a tricky and tender topic. To start this conversation, I'm gonna bring forward a moment in my life. As I said, I've been attending more female run trainings as I write this book. And I noticed this pattern at all of them, really, but I will speak to one, even though this existed in many of the rooms that I've been able to be in in the past year. And this specific teacher has decades of clinical experience, a body of work, a legacy. And really, the entire room of practitioners had paid to come and learn for her because she is so incredible and intelligent and talented. And I couldn't give her a higher five-star review. But when I was in that room with her, I watched her not take up space. And I'm sure you've seen this: a woman in leadership, deflecting, hiding, moving away from the center of attention, the center of the room. And of course, there's such good reasons for this. Let's not pretend that there aren't. But in this space, it really initially surprised me because we were really all there for her. That was the whole point. And she kind of did this dance of hiding her brilliance from my point of view. And I didn't get the sense that this was because she was unprepared, that she didn't know what she was talking about. Because anytime she was unable to get away from being the center of attention, she was so luminous and her brilliance just lit up the entire room. That only happened quite rarely, because every time the room fully turns toward her, she seemed to kind of look for somewhere to pass the attention. Maybe that was to a participant, to a question, to a break, to a logistic. And my sense inside my body as she was doing this was that there is a willingness inside her to hand the baton to anyone who would take it in a room where every single person had come to watch her hold that baton. And it really struck me because it's not what you see in a room of men. I get to spend a lot of time with men, let that be as a clinician, in trainings, in corporate spaces. And what I have seen is that men take the baton. They want that baton. Of course, there are some that don't. Let's not be completely binary here, but predominantly their social conditioning has been to take the opportunity and own it. And of course, patriarchy has taught them that. It has awarded them privileges and safety around doing that. It has not afforded women. Again, I'm not in denial of that. That is very real, just a whole nother episode. Because for me, that is just an uncontested fact that our cultural conditioning has led some people to feel to be awarded more safety and privilege to use their voice to take up space, etc. I'm on that spectrum as well. I didn't get lost in those questions while I was in the space with her, but I did get lost in questions of like, how do we unlearn that so that we feel safe being seen? That was my first thought. And it was a really big one because I'm not someone who likes to be seen. I had a friend recently describe me as having quiet energy, and it was the most seen I felt in probably like a decade. I am the person who is like in the corner of the room, like watching everyone and like trying to figure out where I could position myself to be most safe. And yes, I have a very extroverted, kind of shiny self that can appear, but like my core self is very quiet energy. I love that description from her. And so because I have struggled so much to be seen, as I was sitting there watching this teacher like pass the baton everywhere, I was like, whoa, like I really need to figure this out because when this book comes out, I don't want to do that. I want to feel comfortable to own the work that I put out in the world and to feel comfortable with all the attention that may come with that positive, negative criticism, scrutiny, praise, whatever. I I want to build that capacity in me. And so that's why that these experiences have really stayed with me because I know it's a growing edge of my own and that it's a growing edge of so many women's, because again, patriarchy and our capitalist conditioning doesn't really allow women to learn this in a way where they get to stay in their authentic core self and take up space and attention and be seen. So my first thought was like, how do we like unlearn this? Like maybe I should put myself in more spaces, maybe I should like branch out and or or or what would my clients need to learn this? And I got I got kind of lost there for a little while. And then midway through the training, I was I was in a little meditation, and again, she was still in my head. And I had this moment and I was like, what if she doesn't feel safe to be seen? What if all the things that I've experienced with women have potentially to some degree happened to her and happened to her body? What if the reason why, in a room where everyone is here to learn from her, she's passing the baton because she doesn't want to be seen. Doesn't feel comfortable. And that really stuck with me, like in a really uncomfortable way. I don't want to be so clear. I'm not judging her. I've done the exact same thing. I've just shared some of the ways that I've done the same thing. I've also done it right here on this podcast. I had someone that was supporting my business and they kept advocating for me to do solo episodes, and I was like, no way. This is the last thing I want. The first solo episode I did, I think I recorded it multiple times for like a week because it was so uncomfortable. And I would start crying because the idea of someone just listening to my voice was like the last, like just is like not for me. I've also had this experience in the book. That's why I've been writing for so long, because my agent, my editors, everyone keeps coming back with the feedback of we need more you, we need more of your story, we need more of your voice. And I'm like, let me hide behind a theory. So again, there's absolutely no judgment that I am putting out there towards women who do this thing because I'm doing it too. And because I can see it in myself, and because I know where it comes from, what experiences have laid that foundation. I wanted to have this conversation around how we respond to women in positions of authority. And again, this could be extended outside of the therapeutic or psychology or healing profession into corporate spaces, but also beyond that. Because we have all probably had an experience as a woman where we've been in a position of authority or been in a position of leadership, or maybe we've just been in a group of women. We've been mistreated or judged or shamed. And I know that I've had those experiences in training environments as a young therapist, being judged by older women for how I looked or my intelligence or my degrees minimized. I also know that that's common from not only the therapists that I supervise, but from the stories I hear with women who work in industries all across the spectrum. So today, this episode, if you are a clinician, this is for you and it's going to ask a lot of you. And if you're not, and you're someone who reads the books and listens to podcasts and you've been trying to understand understand your own body or your own trauma history, this is also for you. It's also for you if you're a woman in leadership or a woman who's ever watched another woman shrink at the front of a meeting and felt something in your own body respond. Because if we really want to have female elders to learn from, if we really want equal representation, if we really want to be able to take wisdom, deepen our knowledge of our own experience of female embodiment, we have to work through the stuff that stops us listening to the expertise and the wisdom of other women. So I hope this conversation, I hope this episode today is illuminating for you. I hope it's insightful. And I hope that you can be really gentle with yourself. This is tender and tough stuff. And again, I want to acknowledge I'm kind of fast-forwarding the conversation because I am not spending today and an hour or longer going into how patriarchy and capitalism trains uh men to take up space and trains women to seek protection through hiding their light and their wisdom. And that is a huge part of this conversation. So I hope that you can can hold what I share next with the acknowledgement. Can hold that I am selectively starting this conversation somewhere deeper and somewhere trickier and somewhere challenging because it's a conversation that needs to happen and isn't happening. Because it's a conversation that needs to happen in this in the field of embodiment and therapy that isn't happening. I want to start by saying that most of the men that I'm going to name in this episode are men whose work I use today and have benefited from greatly. We have Basil Vandercock's book, who really brought awareness to the conversation and trauma in the body. We have Peter Levine, who sits, we have Peter Levine's work that I'm fully trained in. We have Stephen Porges, who gave us vocabulary for the nervous system, vocabulary that I'm going to use today and have already used. So I want to say I'm not taking anything from them. They have been acknowledged lavishly and internationally. What I'm hoping for is that that same lavish recognition gets extended to some of the women who are also in their field. There's

Confidence Is Not The Issue

Ailey Jolie 16:44

the easy version of this conversation, which is one that I don't want to contribute to at all. And this is the version that says that women need to have more confidence, that they just need to quote unquote lean in. But if the problem were confidence, 50 years of women doing foundational work with enormous confidence would have been solved by now. I think that problem would have been resolved. So I don't think that the woman who I witnessed pass the badon to everyone else was lacking confidence per se. She lacked safety, which was the second question that I got to. Those are two fundamentally different things. I have struggled with both of them. And so I know that they're not the same. And I would invite you to get curious and consider the ways that you may struggle with confidence and taking up space, and then also how you may struggle with feeling safe or actually being safe in a way of being seen, because they are not the same thing, and they love to be conflated because the second one requires more reckoning. As I said earlier, misogyny is not the only system who decides whose work gets read. We have Resma, who is the author of My Grandmother's Hands, and they are a naming a lot of what I am exploring in this episode. Their work brings questions, their work brings acknowledgement to race and gender together. And I have so much reverence for their work and really invite you to go pick up my grandmother's hands if you haven't just yet. It's also important this conversation to acknowledge that body-based knowledge that was has been practiced for thousands of years before any of this became Western clinical category in the way that I'm going to talk about it today and describe it and the way that I've learned a lot of it. And that the women that I'm speaking of, and that the women that I'm going to speak to and name today have borrowed a lot of knowledge from Indigenous cultures and Indigenous people in regards to how they understood body-based healing. They've also accumulated a lot of it from their own ancestral lineage. Because if you go back far enough, even to the time of the Druids, there's a lot of body-based knowledge and wisdom that is being revered and shared in those cultures. So I'm holding all of that as I speak, that a lot of this is going to come from a clinical Western lens. There are populations that are going to be at miss in this conversation today, but nonetheless, I think it's a really important one to be having. So even though I'm going to name a pattern inside the therapy field because I think it's a bit easier to see there, because again, the profession is 75% female. I'm also going to name this in the body and how it feels in the body, because I think that's where this pattern actually stays alive, regardless of if we are a clinician or someone engaging in therapy or someone just listening to a podcast on therapy. It is happening. This pattern is happening somewhere in your life. So, as I said earlier, around 75% of practicing therapists in the United States are women. In the UK, the people delivering psychological help in the NHS are somewhere between 70 and 85% women, depending on the service. Psychologists of profession are around 70% women in the US, and the proportion rises every year because the people coming through training programs are now even more predominantly female than the people who came through them 20 years ago. Somatic and body-based modalities skew more female. If you've ever sat in a somatic experiencing training or sensory motor psychotherapy training, or even just do a scroll through your Instagram, like there aren't that many male, non-binary, or trans people offering embodiment work. And there's lots of reasons for that. For the most part, it is women in these realms. Even though it's mostly women, there's not really any famous ones. There's not really any household names in the therapy space. We have men. We have Bessel Vandercock, Peter Levine, Gabriel Matte, Stephen Porges, John Kabatzin, Dick Schwartz, Dan Siegel. I guess you could say we have Brene Brown. She's a therapist. She infiltrated the mainstream, but she's also kind of gone out of it for some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today. So we have male household names. They're the ones who get to be on podcasts, and they're the ones that women, that they're the ones that trainings are always filled. They're doing conferences everywhere. I mean, they are taking that baton anywhere that someone will pass it to them. They are taking their moment to share their wisdom. And there is nothing inherently bad or wrong about that. It's just something to be really curious about when our profession is three-quarters female. So I want you to sit with that for a second rather than try and move past it. A profession that 75% female should technically, based on statistics, should have a public face that represents that 75%. And the fact that it doesn't, in 2026, after decades of feminist scholarship and decades of women building the methods that those men are famous for, it's not a mystery that needs more research. It's an inheritance. And that inheritance is carried in our bodies. If you're not in the therapy field, which I know a lot of you aren't going to be, just think about it in your own profession. Consider how many women are in that space versus how many other genders are in that space? Who are the main people being put forward? Again, patriarchy capitalism play into this, but why patriarch capitalism play into this? But what is happening in the bodies of people for this pattern to continue on, despite all of the knowledge we have about the importance of representation? What's going on? Because I don't think it's a conscious choice that men, at least in the therapy field, are continuing to take up platform spaces and have that baton. I think it's something a lot more unconscious that happens between women, amongst women, but also other genders as well.

Naming The Female Elders We Miss

Ailey Jolie 22:22

So at the start of this episode today, I named this individual who's really one of who's really an elder in the realm of trauma and sabbatics. And this is Judith Herman. Judith Herman published Trauma and Recovery in 1992. If you haven't read this book and you are someone who has a history of sexualized violence or sexual trauma, please go read it. This is a hard read. It's head It's challenging, but it is so incredibly liberatory. And if you like my work at all, this is someone that you will love because I pull so much inspiration from this individual. One of the things that she talks about in her book is this three-phase model of healing. Her three-phase model has safety, then remembrance and mourning, then reconnection. If you've heard any, if you've heard anything like that, it has been an interpretation of her work. So when someone talks about stabilization before processing, they're talking about Herman. When someone describes complex trauma as a distinct thing, different than single incident trauma, they are speaking words that she wrote. I've talked about complex BTSD on this podcast before, and every time I did, I was speaking her language because it's something that she came up with. It's something that comes from her. Pat Odgin is another name that I gave voice to earlier in this podcast. Pat Odgin's training is something that I participated in and benefited a lot from. She began her career working in a psychiatric hospital in the 1970s, teaching yoga and dance and watching what happened in her patients' bodies when they were made to relive the past. That was before PTSD existed as a diagnosis, because it didn't enter until 1980. But by then, by the time it did enter, she had already spent most of a decade building what would become sensory motor psychotherapy. And in 1981, she founded her own institute to train people in it. As I said, I'm one of those people trained in sensory motor psychotherapy. It's in one of the ways I sit with people. I name these two names here today, but there are so many more, all of which that deserve their own episode. And maybe I should do an episode on the female founders of somatics. We also have Mary Woodman, who brought the body into Jungian work when the body was not welcome there. We have Bonnie Brainbridge Cohen, who used body mind centering, underlines half of what gets taught as embodiment right now. We have Soon as Way McConnell, who put the body inside internal family systems. Janina Fisher, whose writing on structural disassociation is some of the most clinically useful work on trauma that exists out there. We have Babette Rothschild, Ruth Laneus, whose neurology research is a science a great deal of popular trauma writing equally relies on, although she is never named. We have Emily Conrad, Anna Halprin, Maureen Chase, who is building dance therapy in the 1940s. These are some of the names, these are some of the women that these are some of the names that you do not scroll past on your Instagram feed. And yet, they are the ones who developed this theory that all of that trauma in the body, or the body keeps the score, or get into your body, they are the ones who developed all that theory that those cliches rest upon. These are our elders. Some of them are still teaching, some of them are women that I have learned of. Some clinicians do know their names, but most clients don't know their names. Even though these women's work are why they had the spark of awareness or insight that something was off or that they're disconnected or that there is some trauma there that they wanted to go investigate. All this is to say that the intellectual content of what is now called somatics and trauma therapy was being developed by women decades before somatic became a marketable category attached to a man's face on a podcast. So this is not a story about women's work not existing. It has absolutely existed. There's no question about that. It's just that these women's work hasn't been read. And I think it hasn't been read for yes, reasons of patriarchy and capitalism, but also because of because of that moment that I noticed where the female teacher was like passing the baton to anyone who would take it, or even myself rewriting this book again because I don't want to bring myself into it and be seen. Because maybe it doesn't feel safe to be seen amongst not only other genders, but among women too. So before I get into that, I want to give some data. As you guys know, I always like a good statistic. So I'm going to give some research on gender. In 2017, Molly King and her colleagues published an analysis of one and a half million research papers across every field they could access, going back decades. They were looking at self-citation. Often an author cites their own previous work. Over the whole data set, men cited their own papers 56% more than women did. In the most recent two decades of data, that figure was up to 70%. And women were more than 10 percentage points more likely than men to never cite their own earlier work at all. That's kind of insane, isn't it? That a man is 70% more likely to give credit and acknowledge his past work, and a woman is 10% more likely to not cite it at all? Think about that. A citation is not only an acknowledgement. It's how a piece of work becomes findable. It's how it accures the count that makes it look foundational. Men in the dataset were quite literally handing their own work forward more often, and women were leaving theirs on the shelf. And this gap has not closed as women have entered more academia. It's held steady. Nothing has changed despite the rise in women receiving degrees. And here's another finding that is quite relevant to the realm of therapy. A 2024 review of this literature noted that the citation gap does not shrink in fields where women are the majority. In some analysis, it is actually larger there. When there are more women in the field, we cite ourselves less. What is going on there? What is going on there? More women in a field does not on its own produce more women being cited. In the realm of therapy, women are the majority. And yet, we are the field where the citation, the recommendation, the reading list still privileges men first. We also know that more women come to therapy. So here we are, a predominantly female-centered profession with more female clients than other genders. And we are handing them male reading lists. I mean, that is something to seriously pause and consider why this is happening and how we can change it. So again, I don't think that this is just confidence. This is about structure, publishing economies, who gets institutional research in the 1970s and 80s, when the foundational somatic work was being done outside institutions by women on their own time. It wasn't getting the same press or publicity. It wasn't being put on the conference circuits. Again, this all ties into patriarchy. And I don't want to not acknowledge that. I wanted to give some context of how that plays out in this research here. But the part that I want to focus on today is where internalized capitalism, as I mentioned, starts to come in. It's not only that men self-cite more, it's that the market rewards it too. A field's ideas become a product the moment someone is willing to be the face of them. And being the face requires exactly the thing women in the profession have been trained out of taking the baton, saying, I built this, putting your own name on the cover in the size that can be read from across the airport. Women in this field did this work and very often they gave it away or they didn't claim it. They taught it in small rooms, they let a colleague put his name on the synthesis, and the market, which does not care who did the work, only who is selling it, took the name it was offered without question, without curiosity. And why this is so important is because those structures that I've just named out there, that process, it happens inside our bodies too. They shape who we cite, who we recommend, what books go on our reading lists, whose name we reach for when a colleague asks who to read on trauma, those choices multiplied across a profession that is three-quarters female are how the structure outside of us writes itself through our hands and into the next generation of clinicians and also our clients too. Because I really do believe in research. There's one more study that I want to share about. And this comes from the University of Miami, and they ran a series of experiments where they recorded men and women saying the same sentence. They digitally altered each recording to produce a higher pitched voice and a lower pitch version, and then asked listeners which one they would vote for. Both men and women chose the lower voice for male voices and for female voices. Listeners rated the lower pitched voice as more competent, stronger, more trustworthy. And these patterns have been replicated outside of this. The researchers were super careful to say that there's no evidence that people with lower voices are actually more confident. This is a perception, body level response to frequency. Now put that beside some other research by Lori Redman, who looked at women who self-promote. When a woman speaks about her own work as a matter of fact, she's rated as less likable. When she softens, she's rated as less confident. So if she comes out and she's like, matter of a fact, bing bang boom, this is my work, not likable. If she softens, she's not confident. This is what the literature calls the backlash effect. Clinically, I would call it a double standard or a double bind, but I would call it a double standard or double bind. Why this is so important though is because it means that a woman who speaks with authority in a training room, in a boardroom, on a stage, on a podcast right now, is speaking on average in a register that listeners read as less authoritative. If she lowers and flattens her voice to match the register body settled into, she's read as cold. If she keeps the warmth, the upward inflection, the small laugh, she's read as unconvincing. There's no frequency of her voice at which her authority is allowed to be received uncontested. This is the bind that all women are in. And I want to be super clear. And this is where the piece around how this plays out between women plays out is that the listeners in these studies were not mostly men. They were nicely, evenly mixed between men and women. So those results that I just said there, she comes out, this is what I am, this is what I do, this is my theory, here I am. She's going to be read as unlikable. She softens that, she makes it tangible, she puts in some lyrical language, she's not competent. This is how this cycle repeats, regardless of what profession we're in. So until we start having a conversation around the unconscious, body-based ways that we perceive and also consequentially judge other women, we are going to continue to have men pedestaling all professions. In my profession, we don't really talk about internalized misogyny. But I had the experience of one of my first therapists being a really hard-edged feminist. It's also why, in my therapy at 20, 21, I was introduced into the ideas of looking at my own internalized misogyny, my own internalized sexism, my own internalized

Neuroception And Somatic Misogyny

Ailey Jolie 33:22

patriarchy. And I was uncomfortable and it was hard. And at that time I didn't really understand it. But I'm so grateful for it because internalized misogyny lives below the level of thought. It's really a sensation. It's a nervous system event that happens before you've decided anything at all. So those of you who've listened to the podcast for a while will know Stephen Porge's word for this. And that's neuroception. And then this is the nervous system's way of reading a situation for safety or danger without going through conscious thought. It's a way that makes you settle when you walk into a room where you're welcome, embrace when you walk into one where you're not so welcome. And this is before you can tell why or you see someone's or you see your ex. This process in the body is fast and it's old and it learns from what it's exposed to. So I'll use my own body as an example. Internalized misogyny shows up as a small downward settling when a man speaks with authority, a kind of finally that happens in my nervous system. There's a vigilance that softens, my shoulders drop half a centimeter, my nervous system reads his voice as ground, as stability. When a woman speaks with the same authority, without softening her voice, without the upward inflection at the end of her sentences, without the small apologetic laugh, I watch how my body still responds. There's oftentimes still like a faint contraction. There can be a scanning. There's kind of like a pull to find what's wrong with her. And I and I'm at the place now where I can kind of like watch all of this happen and like work with these parts to get them to be present. But nonetheless, this conditioning is still there. I can be in relationship with it because I've explored it in therapy. I can name the internalized misogyny as a part of my experience. I'm curious about where it's showing up in my life. And this is important because if I don't do that, this is important because if I were to let that think contraction or that scanning or that pull to find what's wrong with her, I won't be able to listen to her. I won't be able to receive her wisdom. I won't be able to actually take in what she's offering me. There is a somatic signature to internalized misogyny. And yours is going to be different than mine and different than hers and different to that person over there. And it's really yours to become curious about how do I respond to female authority? How am I even responding to this podcast right now? Am I rolling my eyes? Am I tuning out? Fact-checking. This is all information for you to really get curious about that unconscious patterning that we have inside of us that comes from our culture, conditioning that needs to be changed for women to take up more positions of leadership in their authenticity. And there is a difference there. There's a difference between a woman being in a position of leadership and deeply embodying patriarchy and capitalism and deeply embodying patriarchy, capitalist, and misogynistic ideals, that's different than a woman taking up space and authentically sharing her wisdom without embodying that patriarchy and capitalism and misogyny. I really want to emphasize that having internalized misogyny or internalized patriarchy, internalized sexism inside your body is not personal failing. And I really want you to hear that before we go any deeper into this, because I know in my younger self that brought up a lot of shame to look at the ways that I hadn't championed women because of my scarcity beliefs or the ways that I had maybe subtly competed with women because of my own beliefs of scarcity or my fear for her that she was going to use her voice and there be on and therefore be unsafe. So I wanted to warn her and in my warning was silencing her. So I know that this stuff can bring up a lot of shame. So I really want to acknowledge that we're all trained inside the same system. If you're a clinician and you're thinking about lecture halls you sat in, maybe the syllabi, the superversors who told you to read, we are all trained inside the same system. So yes, this happens in our professional lives, but it also happens years before any of us are professionals at

Family Conditioning And Inherited Safety

Ailey Jolie 37:20

anything. It happens in our family homes. And the reality is that for most of us, a man's voice decided what was true in our family home. Of course, this isn't true for everyone. Not every family includes a man, but in the majority of family systems for the past hundred years, the man's voice has been the dominant one. His tone of voice, his nervous system state was the measure of safety for everyone else. This is so important to acknowledge because it plays out in how our body responds to a man's authority. This can also be something that's intergenerationally inherited. So maybe it wasn't your father's voice that settled your nervous system and you took lead from, but it was someone way back when, and your body still remembers because it was maybe the moment that allowed your intergenerational lineage to survive. When we start getting into the unconscious and things that we've inherited and how those play out in our bodies and our responses, we start to get a little bit into the woo, and it's hard to track all of the influences on us and on our bodies. So it's important to hold curiosity here, to practice curiosity onto how these patterns are playing out inside this. I will invite you to practice some curiosity and consider if if you start scanning a room when a woman starts to speak. For some of us, there can be more vigilance. For some of us, our experiences with women have made us feel on edge or unsafe. And so we can look around. For some of us, practice curiosity. And I'll invite you to be curious if it's the opposite. For some of us, maybe the settling that I've named happens when a man speaks in authority. It's not comfort at all for you. Maybe there's no settling. Maybe you totally disassociate, totally disassociate and leave yourself. And for you, you settle around when a woman uses her voice. Or maybe when you're with women, you're constantly scanning. You're constantly scanning. You're more vigilant because our culture has taught us that women are competition or unreliable or too much or not to be trusted. And that is a pretty standard cultural message. So I imagine some version of it probably lives inside you. Another thing that probably lives inside you is something I named right at the start of

Ageism And Women As Threat

Ailey Jolie 39:29

our time together. And that is about ageism that exists among women. When I was a really new therapist, I had a lot of uncomfortable, unkind experiences with older therapists. And now that I'm a supervisor, I know that this is quite common. And because I've explored my own internalized misogyny and sexism, there's a level of compassion that I can have that these women in their bodies were scanning. They were doing what they had been taught to do by culture. Doesn't make it right. It just makes it an expected response based on unconscious conditioning for older women to see younger women as a threat. Because there aren't very many spaces that actually allow women to band together and learn from each other or commune, share wisdom. And one of the reasons is because of the unconscious stuff that we have inside our own body. Stuff that hopefully today you're a little bit more curious about after listening to this episode. Before we wrap up, I want to be clear on a few things. I'm not saying men should stop writing books about the body or that their work should be read less. I'm saying women's work should be read as foundational, should be read just as much and be seen as foundational because it truly has been. I'm also not saying that individual clinicians who cite Vanderkock instead of Herman are doing something wrong. I'm saying that when a whole profession does this, the choice stops being individual and starts being systemic. And the only way that we can change larger institutions and systemic systems is through embodiment and through exploring our own cultural imprinting that lives in our unconscious and plays out in those moments. Why do I check out whenever I'm listening to a female podcaster? Why are all the books on my shelves men? Why am I more likely to seek wisdom from anyone who's not my female boss? It could be because she has her own internalized misogyny and won't be welcome to sharing wisdom because she sees you as a threat. Or maybe not. Or is it your internalized misogyny that's stopping you from seeing her as a source of wisdom? Real elder who could be a leader for you. I want to be really clear that I'm not saying in any way that if women fix their internalized misogyny, everything will change. That makes this, that makes this issue private and individual. And it's really not. It's really not. It's collective, which means all of us, all of us together have a part to play. But our individual part is not enough for this whole thing to change. And that is kind of the worst part about collective change, is that it does deeply reside within us to be that change, but also it requires community. And so I hope, I hope that you can hear that this is a shared inheritance absorbed under shared conditions. It is not a personal feeling, and that it will shift under shared conditions. And it will only shift under shared change. I also want to be clear that I don't think this only happens in therapy. I've tried throughout this episode to bring in other fields. I'm just using mine because it's the one that I know. It's the one that I can speak to in an embodied way. It's also one that I've said before is three-quarters women, and therefore it's a lot more obvious. But I do invite you to get curious and consider how it may be playing out in the field that you work in. I'm also not saying that women's voices are the only ones that are being oppressed or oppressed or unseen or experience a lack of safety in being named. There are many others that intersect with this. We have bodies of color and culture, indigenous, weird and trans people, all of this, all of them are carrying a version of this that describes its own conversation. And I didn't want to snuggle that into this conversation around women and women being seen when they deserve their own time and their own space and their own voice. I hope that the conversation today inspires you to get curious about your own internalized misogyny or internalized patriarchy, internalized capitalism, and how that maybe stops you from how that maybe stops you or limits you from being the change that you wish to be in relationship to other women or being the hype girl for another woman's work or platforming people or who you get your wisdom

A Body Based Practice For Change

Ailey Jolie 44:06

from. I also will invite you to bring this into practice. The next time you read a piece of writing by a woman, and this could be by a woman in maybe the therapeutic field, maybe someone like Prentice Hill or Janina Fisher or Ariel Schwartz. Pay attention to what your body does in the first 10 seconds of reading their work or listening to a podcast. And if you are not in the field of therapy, pick a woman yours and just notice what happens in those first 10 seconds. Be curious about how internalized misogyny stops you from receiving the wisdom that other women are trying to share with you. Notice it does. Your body have a contradiction? If it does, where does it live? Is there's a subtle search for inadequacy before comprehension has even had a chance? Do your eyes drift away from the page? Be very curious about what happens. And then also I'll invite you to practice this by engaging with a man's work. Do you read it slowly? What happens in the first 10 seconds? Do you settle? Do you get annoyed maybe? What loosens? Do you totally check out and disassociate and just like get lost in absorbing the material? Do you stop scanning without judgment? Just notice what is different, not what it should be or what you like it to be. Work what is. This is how this will change. Lastly, if you are a man or any other gender listening to this in this field or any other, I really hope that you were able to take pieces of this conversation and apply it to yourself today. Because the practice that I just offered is one that you can do as well, because your body has been trained in the same room, been trained by the same culture as mine. And the next time a colleague asks you who to read or who to hire, who to put at the front of the room, if this practice has been embodied and you've gotten curious and gotten to know some of your own internalized misogyny or sexism, there might be a different name that comes out of your mouth, or maybe it will be the exact same male name because they are the expert in your eyes. But at least you'll know this is the expert in my eyes because of what they've given, because of what I've received from them, versus this is the expert in my eyes because of the conditioning I've received. Embodiment is all about having the time and the space and the capacity to choose consciously so we can be our most authentic and aligned selves. I hope that there were pearls of wisdom in this episode today that you can apply to your life. And I also hope that it inspired greater curiosity into some of the patterns and conditioning that lives in your very own body. Thank you so much for your time, your attention today, and for being willing to play with listening to a female voice of authority. It's such important work, especially in our world right now. And I know that it can be just as hard to listen to a woman as it can be to be a woman, taking up space and sharing in the way that I did today. So thank you for allowing me and you to practice together.

Ways To Go Deeper Together

Ailey Jolie 47:03

If this episode sparks something in you, you can read more of my work on Substack. Each paid article comes with a set of journal questions for you to dive deeper and continue exploring how the content relates to your embodied experience. On Substack, I also have guided meditation practices and offer live calls to my paid subscribers. So you can find out more at aliejolie.substack.com. You can join my online program, Embody. This is a seven-module online course that is focused on rewriting the story of your body. We begin by doing investigative work on the stories that we've inherited from society, family, beauty and diet culture, and so much more. And we end the course by rewriting our body story together. You can also join me in person this November. I will be hosting an in-person retreat at Blue Spirit in Nosara, Costa Rica. All of this information is available at embodymethod.com. And lastly, if this episode meant something to you, share it with a woman in your field, in your life, or anyone else that you would like to practice exploring your internalized misogyny with or leave a review. It really does help more women find this conversation. Thank you again for being here, for listening, for being in your body, and for listening and for allowing me to be in your process of coming home to your very own body. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.