Transcript:
Good morning, friends. So excited to talk about patriarchy and migraine. Today, as promised, I’m gonna be doing a few different videos in this series because this is a really big topic. I’ve already tried to make a few more succinct videos on this, and these videos are gonna be a little bit longer than my usual five to six minutes because I have a lot to say about this and it’s a complex topic. The most complex thing about the topic of the connection between migraines and patriarchy, which I believe exists, my hypothesis is that in a patriarchy, women would have more migraines because migraine manifests in part from low serotonin levels. And as I found out in the book, Status Games, which is an excellent book, which I recommend reading, serotonin is the neurotransmitter of status.
So when people have high status or they’re acknowledged for their status and or when their expectations are met, you have an expectation and that expectation gets met, you get a little hit of serotonin. So my hypothesis is that women and mothers in a patriarchal society, to the extent that they have a lower status than men and to the extent that their expectations and needs are not being met, will have lower serotonin levels and therefore will be more prone to migraine. So, but before diving into some of the details of how this difference in status manifests, I have a big disclaimer to make, which is kind of a funny one.
I feel a little bit weird sometimes saying things like, migraine is caused by patriarchy, because the funny thing is, is I don’t actually really believe in migraine. I don’t even believe in discrete diseases, nor do I believe that patriarchy is something that exists. So how could I say this? Well, these two words are very succinct ways of describing what are actually processes.
And in NLP, we call that a nominalization, when you describe a process as a thing. So I just wanna make it real clear that when I’m describing patriarchy and I’m describing migraine, what I’m actually referring to is a process, not a discrete thing. You can’t touch migraine, you can’t touch patriarchy. They’re not real things that exist as a discrete thing in the world, right? So now that that disclaimer is out of the way, what is this process characterized by of patriarchy? Similar to how we can define and recognize the patterns of imbalance that manifest as the disease process that we call migraine, we can observe and recognize the patterns in our culture that lead to imbalances in power and one-up, one-down behavior and competition and certain groups of people being victimized by that. And I certainly don’t wanna suggest that women are victims. I mean, I think that a lot of my work and the work that I’ve done personally and that I share in my coursework, Repattern Migraine, is all about understanding how to not be a victim in a system that actually doesn’t really value mothers very much and doesn’t value these skills that we live by that we have to emulate and embody in order to raise children and have healthy families.
So the point here isn’t to paint a picture of victim and victor, but rather to ask how we can transcend that dichotomy that is set up in a hierarchical system like patriarchy, that patriarchy very much depends on the power and status that people have. It depends on this hierarchical structure. So what are some of the characteristics of patriarchy as we’re describing it here? Well, Terrence Real’s definition is that patriarchy is the illusion of dominance and the denial of vulnerability and I think that’s a really compelling definition and just notice that it’s patriarchy in this definition is not the more traditional simplistic way that men have more power than women over women. It’s anytime anyone is caught up in the illusion of dominance and the denial of vulnerability and that could be a woman who does that. I mean, women participate in patriarchy as well. It could be even the way that a mother is domineering and abusing her own power in her relationship as a mother with her children, right? Anytime any human is doing a one up, one down maneuver to try to gain higher status at the expense of someone else is patriarchy, right? Okay, so these are some of the characteristics of a culture of patriarchy as it manifests as a process. It’s the valuing of competition, individualism, hyper-individualism, rugged individualism, status, performance, self-esteem arising from performance rather than from inherent self-worth, drive, a power over kind of mentality, invulnerability, trying to be invulnerable and denial of connection. Denial of these things that these qualities and skills that mothers actually have to have to raise children which are kind of the opposite of these things that patriarchy glorifies. Women and mothers naturally in our role as mothers have to value connection, emotional integration over denial of vulnerability, right? Sensitivity, cooperation and a power with mentality rather than a power over mentality.
So, and then there’s like the way that our hormones affect this. So I think of it as more horizontal and vertical. We could see why it is that patriarchy is a system where men are more domineering over women because of the way that testosterone tunes information out and is goal seeking. So we could even see that through evolutionary history is that men did a lot more hunting whereas women did a lot more gathering. And so testosterone is a hormone that tunes out information to try to reach the goal, right? And it’s very vertical. It’s a vertical and sharp energy whereas estrogen is a soft and horizontal and diffuse energy.
So estrogen has a direct effect on women’s perception of the world. And I go over this in my coursework in Repattern Migraine when we’re trying to understand ourselves as women and how to nourish ourselves and support ourselves and have better boundaries. It’s much harder for women to have boundaries because of the way that estrogen creates diffuse awareness. And so diffuse awareness, this is something that Alison Armstrong taught me is it’s the inability to tune information out. And there’s an evolutionary reason why women have it, right? Because if we were raising children and we could tune out the sound of their voices and we could tune information out, we would miss a lot of details in the environment that we would need in order to ensure our children’s survival. So all of these things have, of course, evolutionary advantages in certain respects and also disadvantages.
So if you’re a woman with estrogen and having a hard time tuning things out, it’s gonna be a lot harder to have boundaries. And we live in this culture where women, we go to college, we develop all these very masculine skills. Of course, women can also focus. Women also have drive. Women also have testosterone, right? But I think that a lot of the conflict and challenge comes up for women in our lives when we realize that we’ve gone through life developing a skillset that’s essentially masculine and we’re expected to actually emulate and embody these masculine values and skills and areas of focus and priority at the same time that our estrogen and our diffuse awareness and our role as mothers requires a completely different set of skills, right? So there’s a gap there. There’s an enormous gap between the way our culture prepares us for what we need to be able to do in life to be successful and the actual skills that we need.
And the actual skills that we need as mothers are actually undervalued in patriarchy. And so this is extremely complex to be needing to hunt and gather at the same time and to be someone who’s needing to show up for children emotionally and teach them self-esteem and all of these really important human values at the same time that we’re living in a culture that has this very kind of binary mentality. And these are some of the characteristics. Again, it’s this all or nothing. Patriarchy is very all or nothing kind of mentality. It’s black and white. It’s hunting over gathering. It’s the winners and the losers, the wimps and the jocks, goals over process, sharp focus over diffuse awareness, and again, the vertical over the horizontal. So it’s really about one-up behavior and in this book, Status Games, that I highly recommend you read, what she says the antidote to that is is learning how to raise yourself up without putting someone else down. Because often that’s how we as mammals and we in this culture try to gain status is by being above someone else. And the interesting thing about this is that when you look at those maneuvers of one-up, one-down behavior, they’re all compensations for low self-esteem. So if you’re someone who believes that your value is based primarily in performance and performance-based self-esteem, which is actually not a true form of self-esteem, is really the defining characteristic of patriarchy. If you’re someone who does that, then you’re constantly gonna be having to prove yourself over and over. And so if you don’t have the resources or you’re not actually set up in terms of your role in your life to be in that position, you’re gonna feel inferior or you’re gonna feel like your status is not recognized or seen. And I think previously when we used to live in villages, and women were actually hanging out, raising kids together more, I’m sure that there were different levels of status within women’s groups and there were different ways that we could feel seen and where we could get our expectations met through cooperation and through help. But now that the village is fragmented and women are raising children without the village, there’s a really deep sense of lack of fulfillment and of just no upward mobility whatsoever. You can do the dishes and do all of the household tasks however many times you want, and you’re still not gonna go up. You’re not gonna advance. You’re not gonna progress. You’re not gonna get a raise for doing that. There’s no progression and it’s very invisible.
So I think we need to be more open in talking about the reality of the world that women are living in and the way, just kind of how defeating it is. I know there’s so much about motherhood that’s deeply fulfilling and rewarding, and I don’t wanna downplay that. But I think that it’s, when you look at our culture and what our culture values, the position that women are in and the life situations that we’re in are very difficult when it comes to finding deep fulfillment and self-esteem in who we are.
And so the antidote to all of that is self-esteem, but I think it’s interesting that in patriarchy, all of this performance-based esteem, not that it’s bad to want to be competent or good at something, but a lot of this overexertion and over-proving how good and how amazing you are is a compensation for low self-esteem. So as mothers, our job is not only to raise our self-esteem where we know our inherent value inside of ourselves without needing status or one-up behavior in order to feel good about ourselves, but also we need to develop this so that we can teach our children about what real self-esteem is. So I go over all of this in my Repattern Migraine coursework, but essentially it comes down to not only developing self-esteem, but having better boundaries. And even in this culture of patriarchy, we think of boundaries in a kind of different way than the way Terrence Real defines it. So we usually think of a boundary as like a barrier or something where like no one can get in, but Terry Real defines a healthy boundary as something that allows both connection and protection simultaneously. So how do you go about your life in a way where you’re meeting your roles and expectations of your role, and yet you still can conserve your energy and have the boundaries that you need to respect yourself in a way that still allows you to be connected, but also protecting yourself from overexertion and from being a doormat at the same time. That’s an interesting paradox and question and challenge, right? And so again, I go over this in the Repattern Migraine coursework, because I do think that self-esteem and boundaries are some of the core ways that women need to learn these skills in order to conserve their energy so they don’t get too depleted, because we know that that constant stress of feeling like you’re serving everyone while at the same time feeling invisible and unfulfilled is a really difficult thing that does lead to depletion and does lead to chronic migraine and chronic dysregulation, right? So if you’re interested in learning more about that, of course, check out my Repattern Migraine coursework. And then in my next video on patriarchy and migraine, I’ll be doing a deeper dive into the root causes of patriarchy. Why does patriarchy persist? And just sharing a little bit of the research that I’ve done in that area. So thanks for watching.
