The good girl & the witch
Before the wounds, there is the fracture. This piece names the two selves most women carry and why the divide was never your fault.
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Transcript From The Audio
There is a moment for every woman when she realises she's been living in two selves: the self she became to survive and the self she was born to be.
These two selves are not enemies. They are archetypes formed by necessity. But they create a split, a divide between instinct and conditioning, intuition and fear, truth and survival.
This split is not a flaw. It is the architecture of how women learn to stay alive. To understand your return, you must first understand the divide.
Have you ever noticed that in most fairy tales, the one who curses, blesses, or gives the girl something is usually a woman? Have you ever wondered why? That witch is the girl's instinct and intuition. And what has our world done? Split her into two. Into the good girl and the witch.
“The good girl was not born. She was trained”
The good girl was not born. She was trained. The good girl is the self you created to stay safe, be loved, avoid punishment, maintain peace… She is polite, pleasing, responsible, attuned to others, and hyper aware of consequence; Not because she is shallow, but because she is necessary.
She took on the wounds of her childhood, your lineage, your world, and she learned to shrink, to perform. To earn love rather than expect it, to need nothing, (and) to make herself small so others could feel comfortable.
She is not your enemy. She kept you safe when safety required self-abandonment. But she was only a strategy, not an identity. In the body, the good girl can look like: shallow breath, tight throat, frozen boundaries, suppressed fire. She holds herself in and holds herself back.
“The witch is not magical because she is fantastical, but rather because she is accurate.”
The witch, on the other hand, is not the villain. She is the one who holds intuition, instinct, (and) clarity. She is the self you were before conditioning, before the split, before the world asked you to shrink.
She senses truth before it is spoken, she reads energy without evidence, (and) she knows what is misaligned. She's not magical because she is fantastical. She is magical because she is accurate. She is your internal compass. She was never dangerous. She was inconvenient. She saw too clearly, she felt too much, and she refused to perform.
“The witch was exiled because she saw to clearly and refused to perform”
So she was exiled. Not all at once. Not loudly, but slowly, through correction, rejection, silence. Until you learned that she could not be trusted, that she was too much, that her knowing was a liability. In the body, the witch might feel like an open throat, elongated spine, full breath, clear boundaries. She knows her desire, and she does not apologise for her presence.
“The split did not happen in a single moment.
It happened across thousands of small ones.”
The Split did not happen in a single moment. It happened across thousands of small ones. A boundary violated and then explained away, an instinct corrected, a truth you named made someone uncomfortable, so you learned not to speak it.
You learned that your instinct was unreliable, that your intuition was dramatic, that your depth was exhausting, and that your power made you hard to love.
“And so the witch went underground, and the good girl took her place”
Healing the split is not about killing the good girl. She served you. She kept you alive in systems that only like you when you remain small. But she was only a strategy, not an identity.
The return is letting the witch come back to the centre. Letting instinct lead. Letting intuition speak. Letting the good girl rest.
Not integration as blending, as though you must soften your power to make it palatable. Integration as restoration. The witch returns to her rightful place. The good girl is honoured and released from duty.
You do not become someone new. You stop abandoning who you always were. In the body, this might sound like: I don't need to shrink anymore, I'm allowed to take up space, I know what I know, I can trust this.
This is the first recognition that there was a split and that the split was not your fault. The next work is understanding how it happened, what wounds taught the good girl to form, and what she was protecting you from. But that is another essay.
For now, it is enough to see the divide, to name the two selves, to understand that one was constructed and the other was made to leave. And she, she has been waiting for her return.
* Images sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*