EP37: Molly Caro May on Female Rage, Writing, Somatics and Motherhood

 

What You’ll Hear:

The inspiration for Molly’s memoir Her exploration of postpartum rage The connection between storytelling and healing Anger in our culture today, how it connects to the postpartum period and what it can teach us about ourselves

What Molly Shares:

The provocative title of Molly’s book and why she chose it (2:00) How Molly’s journey through birth and early motherhood inspired the book (3:45) Her exploration of and questions about rage (5:45) Childbirth as a portal to access hidden, unconscious psychic material (6:20) Even a little bit of anger is extremely threatening for many women to express (7:12) We are all dealing with anger (8:07) The necessity of questioning the integrity of the family unit in order to move forward with creative work (10:10) Molly’s relationship to her mother and how this appears in her book (10:40) Kimberly’s unique relationship with her midwife (13:20) Why Kimberly had to tell her story and the importance of knowing it’s not the only story (14:19) The struggle to gain the capacity to deal with anger without misdirecting it (17:20) “What do we do with this anger that’s really ours to work through that doesn’t need to land on another person?” (17:50) The current cultural experience of anger (18:20) How childbirth disrupts the ideal of gender equality (18:48) The need to adjust expectations, which may not happen until the embodied experience makes it happen (19:58) The tendency to train ourselves out of our innate biological intelligence (20:45) Couples today are trying to rescript a lot of engrained ideas of family and it’s complicated (21:43) A new emerging archetype of womanhood (20:51) “How do we give people permission to talk about the real experience without it becoming the race to the noble victim position?” Molly’s process in finding the balance between sharing both positive and negative truths (23:50) The “meeting of the minds” between the generations of mothers (25:07) The different challenges and benefits between this new generation of mothers and the last (26:40) What lower expectations look like to Molly (30:07) How the embodied experience of birth will never be shared and the tension this creates (31:20) Where in Molly’s path of recovery she started writing her book (33:39) Her practice of taking notes (34:35) She wrote the first draft in 12 days (34:40) What her writing is doing now (36:23) Kimberly shares the concept of pendulation from Somatic Experiencing (37:17) Rage is the fullest expression of the sympathetic nervous system (40:43) The physical feeling Molly experienced after she finished writing her book (42:08) “The telling of the story is not what’s healing, it’s how we tell the story and if the body is a part of that.” (44:00) How do we shake the narrative in order to create space for something new? (44:47) Kimberly and Molly’s workshop on somatics, writing, and womanhood (47:07) Who is the workshop for? (49:17) If Molly had a megaphone she would share…(50:38) Healthy rage and aggression can go into the creative process and action (52:29)