Free Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pincola Estes

in order to find out for herself. When I work with older teenage girls who are convinced that the world is good if they only work it right, it always makes me feel like an old gray-haired dog. I want to put my paws over my eyes and groan, for I see what they do not see, and I know, especially if they’re willful and feisty, that they’re
    going to insist on becoming involved with the predator at least once before they are shocked awake.
    At the beginning of our lives our feminine viewpoint is very naive, meaning that emotional understanding of the covert is very faint. But this is where we all begin as females. We are naive and we talk ourselves into some very confusing situations. To be uninitiated in the ways of these matters means that we are in a time of our life when we are vulnerable to seeing only the overt.
    Among wolves, when the bitch leaves her pups to go hunting, the young ones try to follow her out of the den and down the path. She snarls at them, lunges at them, and scares the bejeezus out of them all they run slipping and sliding back to the den. Their mother knows her pups do not yet know how to weigh and assess other creatures. They do not know who is a predator and who is not But in time she will teach them, both harshly and well.
    Like wolf pups, women need a similar initiation, one which teaches that the inner and outer worlds are not always happy-go- lucky places. Many women do not even have the basic teaching about predators that a wolf mother gives her pups, such as: if it’s threatening and bigger than you, flee; if it’s weaker, see what you want to do; if it’s sick, leave it alone; if it has quills, poison, fangs, or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction; if it smells nice but is wrapped around metal jaws, walk on by.
    The youngest sister in the story is not only naive about her own mental processes, and totally ignorant about the murdering aspect of her own psyche, but is also able to be lured by pleasures of the ego. And why not? We all want everything to be wonderful. Every woman wants to sit upon a horse dressed in bells and go riding off through the boundless green and sensual forest. All humans want to attain early Paradise here on earth. The problem is that ego desires to feel wonderful but a yen for the paradisical, when combined with naíveté, makes us not fulfilled, but food for the predator.
    This acquiescence to marrying the monster is actually decided when girls are very young, usually before five years of age. They are taught to not see, and instead to “make pretty” all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This training is why the youngest sister can say, “Hmmm, his beard isn’t really that
    blue.” This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to “be nice” in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.
    In the tale, even the mother colludes. She goes on the picnic, “goes along for the ride.” She doesn’t say a word of caution to any of her daughters. One might say the biological mother or the internal mother is asleep or naive herself, as is often the case in very young girls, or in unmothered women.
    Interestingly, in the tale, the older sisters demonstrate some consciousness when they say they do not like Bluebeard even though he has just entertained and regaled them in a very romantic and paradisical manner. There is a sense in the story that some aspects of the psyche, represented by the older sisters, are a little more developed in insight, that they have “knowing” which warns against romanticizing the predator. The initiated woman pays attention to the older sisters’ voices in the psyche; they warn her away from danger. The uninitiated woman does not pay attention; she is as yet too identified with naiveté.
    Say, for instance, a naive woman keeps