The self-replicating building blocks of patriarchy

Photo by John Doyle on Unsplash

Over many years I’ve been documenting the links between patriarchy, trauma, and dysfunctional sexuality. Along the way I’ve adopted some pre-existing concepts—the mother wound, the ‘false self’, arrested development—as I noted their architecture in myself and others. In this blog I assemble them into an overarching process—the self-repeating building blocks of patriarchy.

Building blocks

Here is a simplified 7-stage process for mass-producing patriarchal humans on a multi-generational, closed-loop basis like Lego figurines:

1. Mother wound—lack of genuine nurturing through inherited trauma
2. The ‘inner child’ smothers its own femininity, armouring itself
3. Arrested development of mother-/father-child processes
4. Loss of genuine identity, leading to an identity vacuum
5. Creation of a ‘false self’ as a coping mechanism
6. Exchange of internal values for external values/validation
7. The victim/victimizer cycle of external value gratification

These are the stages in the reproduction of patriarchal society from generation to generation. Although I’ve listed them as a sequence, they overlap and interpenetrate, and it shouldn’t be taken in an overly linear manner.

1. Mother wound

I’ve already written in detail about the advent of the mother wound—the break in transmission of whole/healthy emotional nurturing between mother and child. Humanity lost the foundations for authentic identity, natural psychic development, clear emotional boundaries and healthy adult sexuality. Instead, it caused:

1. Loss of genuine emotional nurturing
2. Disconnection from nature
3. Separation from God/the cosmos
4. Disconnection from responsible use of resources
5. Disconnection from the physical body/depersonalisation
6. Loss of natural sexuality

The mother wound happened from 6,000 years ago through multi-generational drought, desertification and famine, creating the earliest patriarchal societies, who spread their toxic, emotionally stunted psychic paradigm around the globe in waves of conquest, enslavement, empire-building, and genocide.

The cornerstone

The mother wound is the cornerstone of patriarchy as the lack of genuine emotional nurturing drives subsequent stages. True nurturing tells an infant that it’s valued simply for itself and free to express itself in its own unique way. Lacking the authorisation to be itself, the child falls into line with environmental demands [see below].

With the mother wound, the child is only worth what it brings to the table. Traditionally this was fighting prowess for men and childrearing for women. Over time this softened and children became economic assets—males for what they could earn and females to barter for a dowry. Today’s children are more valued, yet the underlying 6,000-year-old mechanism remains as few have managed to disarm it.

READ MORE > What is the mother wound?

2. ‘Inner child’ smothering

In patriarchy, the child is less important than the system it’s born into. Because that system—the child’s family and community—are all emotionally damaged, the child must curb its own expression to avoid triggering its caretakers’ emotional volatility.

The newborn infant is acutely aware of the safety level of its environment—from its mother’s anxieties around feeding and bodily functions to the drunk father slamming doors on the far side of the house.

James DeMeo writes that “the ‘good’ child would be increasingly defined in terms of… the absence of emotion or feeling.” [1] Note the number of toddlers with dummies. They are not for the child’s benefit, but for that of the parents. Dummies ‘dumb’ down a child, encouraging it to not express itself.

Lloyd DeMause writes: “A hundred generations of mothers tied up their infants in swaddling bands and impassively watched them scream in protest because they lacked the psychic mechanism necessary to empathize with them.” [2]

The infant soon learns that its body and emotions cause stress reactions among its caretakers. In this charged environment, the infant’s masculine/protective aspect does the only thing it can—it sacrifices itself to protect its feminine side. The infant diverts its own life energy to create a rigid shield imprisoning its expressiveness, what early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich calls ‘emotional armouring.’

Emotional armouring

Reich writes: “The character structure of modern man… reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture, is typified by… armouring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This… armouring is the basis of isolation… fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.” [3]

Here Reich speaks to the overall building blocks—the “character structure of modern man.” Inner child smothering is the stage where armouring happens through the unconscious redirection of life energy.

This smothering action entraps what is sometimes called our ‘inner child’—the infant aspect of ourselves trapped beneath a layer of emotional armouring that has failed to grow naturally due to arrested development.

READ MORE > What is life energy?

3. Arrested development

In psychology, arrested development refers to a failure to fully mature emotionally and cognitively. In her memoir of family trauma, The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard writes simply: “I had failed to develop an adult context for myself.”

As human beings, we have three key psychological ‘development arcs,’ or circuits, leading from infancy to maturity:

1. Mother-child arc from conception to about age 6½: connection, communication, community. It paves the way for healthy nurturing, self-worth and belonging.
2. Father-child arc from about ages 6½ to 13: boundaries, negotiating with others, healthy work. It paves the way for the responsible use of power.
3. Puberty arc from about ages 13 to 19½: integrating the first and second circuits to become a responsible, productive, community-centric, sexually active adult.

I use the quite precise span of 6½ years for each circuit. It’s no coincidence that from thirteen to nineteen is a specific life stage. It’s important to note that each circuit can only develop healthily to the extent that its predecessor(s) developed healthily. Once the mother-child arc is underdeveloped, the same must apply to the father-child and puberty circuits.

Arrested development stems from an infant smothering its own ‘inner child’—shutting down its emotional expression—to survive in a threatening or uncertain environment. Lacking the proper inputs, our development suffers just like plants starved of light, nutrients and water. Think of a fern frond unfurling as it’s fed by soil, sun, and rain.

Failure of natural development circuits eventually creates a development vacuum that the child must compensate for in other ways [see the ‘false self’ below].

READ MORE > Our ‘inner child’ is the product of arrested development

4. Identity loss

As our development arcs fail, so does our identity suffer from the need to put the system first. As the infant loses its capacity to express its uniqueness, it loses its identity.

Deprived of its unique sense of identity, the child unconsciously experiences an inner sense of loss. Where there should have been direction, there is stasis. Where there should have been self-governance, there is abdication to the needs of others.

Identity loss ultimately leads to an identity vacuum—a place where the child unconsciously has no idea of who it is or what its life purpose is. Its identity has been replaced by the identity of its family, community, or tribe; its life purpose has been replaced by a single, one-size-fits-all objective: survival.

We all know how nature feels about vacuums. When contact with its authentic self is badly diminished or even devoid, the child unconsciously creates a replacement self—what psychoanalysis calls the ‘false self.’

5. ‘False self’ creation

Deprived of the ability to prevent its authentic self to the world, the child develops a ‘false self’ which pretends to fit in with social imperatives and niceties in exchange for survival, belonging, and market access. (Market access means opportunities to trade in physical, emotional, educational, financial, sexual and other needs and wants.)

The concept of the ‘false self’ emerged in psychoanalysis in the 1960s. Known by a variety of terms (e.g. the shell or ‘fake personality’), it’s attributed to Donald Winnicott.

Winnicott argues that we all have an authentic self—the part of us that feels safe, alive and able to express ourselves spontaneously—and a false self, an emotionally frozen façade we present to the world to paper over our survival fears. The purpose of the false self is to keep us functioning—by appearing to fit in—in a trauma-based society.

The false self is a collection of coping mechanisms to deal with loss of contact with the authentic self. These mechanisms function on auto pilot; when triggered we literally zone out and automatically pass control to these unconscious processes.

People pleasing and addictions are obvious examples of the false self in action. The behaviours happen instantly, automatically, and with no override ability. Whether it’s being a doormat for others or an addiction such as alcohol, porn, or self-harm, the false self takes over our waking, conscious self, until the emotional pressure passes.

READ MORE > What is the ‘false self’?

6. Internal to external values

Deprived of internal access to nurturing, nature, the cosmos, resources, its own body and sexuality, the stunted child must look elsewhere to meet its needs. Let’s compare the six fragments of the mother wound I listed above and see how they differ between natural, pre-patriarchal cultures and unnatural patriarchal ones:

We possess the technology to overcome all our resource shortages and equitably ensure global peace and prosperity. Yet we’re running on a 6,000-year-old operating system that believes only in lack—and the legitimacy of using force to overcome it.

READ MORE > How the mother wound externalises our values – and why this is critical

7. Victim/victimizer cycle

Where there should’ve been healthy emotional boundaries—a natural alignment with the mantra of ‘stay in your own lane’—there’s a loss of boundaries. This has two results: (1) it allows other to trample emotionally over the developing infant, and (2) it teaches the infant to trample over others’ boundaries in return.

The result is an unboundaried (made-up word) psyche that tramples on and is trampled upon indiscriminately as it jostles to meet its needs and stave off others’ demands [see the victim/victimizer cycle below].

Having created a false façade to replace the smothered self, isolated from genuine nurturing and the respectful, sustainable exchange of needs with others, we must engage in the vicious dance of the victim/victimizer cycle to grasp what we need or want while staving off the grasping attempts of others.

Referencing the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, in “Pleased to meet you, don’t you know my name?” It’s the right to victimize, I write:

“The rise of patriarchy created a new dynamic that became embedded in the human psyche: victimizer and victim. Ever since, we have bought into the basic notion that we can victimize those weaker than us while those who are more powerful than us can victimize us in any way they can get away with: physically, emotionally, sexually, financially.

Generally thought of as the dominion of men over women, patriarchy is more accurately the dominion of the (masculine) victimizer over the (feminine) victim. 

Both men and women can be victimizers. As well as victimizing women, men victimized other men violently, economically and at times sexually. Ruling class women victimized their servants and slaves, male and female alike, sometimes more cruelly than their men did. It was King Herod’s daughter who requested that John the Baptist’s head be served on a platter.

Every civilization since the rise of patriarchy has victimized to the greatest extent that it could: Assyria, Rome, the Muslim Caliphate, Genghis Khan, the empires of Spain, Russia, Britain and Japan. All our laws and civil institutions have been enacted to contain and control this victimization.”

The Alien

These, then, are the fundamental building blocks of patriarchy.

The traits I describe above—destroyed nurturing, endless grasping, the glazed-over eyes of the insatiable victimizer—are easily seen in current giants of the world stage such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin.

I call this armoured masculine entity the lower masculine victimizer. This is machismo; masculinity in its fallen, rabid, lowest-common-denominator state.

Ridley Scott’s Alien is the perfect embodiment of the lower masculine victimizer. It wants what it wants and will commit any brutality to achieve its ends. You can’t kill the fucker, it has acid in its veins, bursts out of your chest, drools everywhere and doesn’t clean up after itself. In fact, the original 1979 Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver is a great metaphor for the self-replicating nature of patriarchy.

We are a hodgepodge of emotional processed cobbled together to cope with a crisis long past—the drought, desertification, and long-term famine that swept through the world several thousand years ago. We are Lego figures who do not understand the building blocks of our own creation—and remain in a self-replicating loop.

To break out of the cycle I describe above—by peeling away enough trauma to access the underlying mechanisms—is a monumental task. Yet it can—and must—be done.

References

[1] DeMeo, James; Saharasia (1998)

[2] DeMause, Lloyd; The History of Childhood (1974)

[3] Reich, Wilhelm; The Function of the Orgasm (1942)