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

making poor choices in a mate. Somewhere in her mind she knows this pattern is fruitless, that she should stop and follow a different value. She often even knows how to proceed. But there is something compelling, a son of Bluebeardian mesmerization, about continuing the destructive pattern. In most cases, the woman feels if she just holds on to the old pattern a little longer, why surely the paradisical feeling she seeks will appear in the next heartbeat
    At another extreme, a woman involved in a chemical addiction most definitely has at the back of her mind a set of older sisters who are saying, “No! No way! This is bad for the mind and bad for the body. We refuse to continue.” But the desire to find Paradise draws the woman into the marriage to Bluebeard, the drug dealer of psychic highs.
    Whatever dilemm a a woman finds herself in, the voices of the older sisters in her psyche continue to urge her to consciousness and to be wise in her choices. They represent those voices in the
    back of the mind that whisper the truths that a woman may wish to avoid for they end her fantasy of Paradise Found.
    So the fateful marriage occurs, the mingling of the sweetly naive and the dastardly unlit. When Bluebeard leaves on his journey, the young woman does not realize that even though she is exhorted to do anything she wishes—except that one thing—she is living less, rather than living more. Many women have literally lived the Bluebeard tale. They marry while they are yet naive about predators, and they choose someone who is destructive to their lives. They are determined to “cure” that person with love. They are in some way “playing house.” One could say they have spent much time saying, “His beard isn't really so blue.”
    Eventually a woman thus captured will see her hopes for a decent life for herself and her children diminish more and more. It is to be hoped that she will finally open the door to the room where all the destruction of her life lies. While it may be the woman's actual mate who denigrates and dismantles her life, the innate predator within her own psyche concurs. As long as a woman is forced into believing she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.
    When the youthful spirit marries the predator, she is captured or restrained during a time in her life that was meant to be an unfoldment. Instead of living freely, she begins to live falsely. The deceitful promise of the predator is that the woman will become a queen in some way, when in fact her murder is being planned. There is a way out of all of this, but one must have a key.
    The Key to Knowing: The Importance of Snuffling
    Ah, now this tiny key; it provides entry to the secret all women know and yet do not know. The key represents permission to know the deepest, darkest secrets of the psyche, in this case the something that mindlessly degrades and destroys a woman's potential.
    Bluebeard continues his destructive plan by instructing his wife to compromise herself psychically; “Do whatever you like,” he says. He prompts the woman to feel a false sense of freedom. He
    implies she is free to nourish herself and to revel in bucolic landscapes, at least within the confínes of his territory. But in reality, she is not free, for she is constrained from registering the sinister knowledge about the predator, even though deep in the psyche she already truly comprehends the issue.
    The naive woman tacitly agrees to remain “not knowing.” Women who are gullible or those with injured instincts still, like flowers, turn in the direction of whatever sun is offered. The naive or injured woman is then too easily lured with promises of ease, of lilting enjoyment, of various pleasures, be they promises of elevated status in the eyes of her family, her peers, or promises of increased security, eternal love, high adventure, or hot