Stage 7  CREATING A NEW REALITY  

Affirmation:  I will rely on myself and on the encouragement of other women as I regain my sense of reality.

Reality can be interpreted in many ways and at many levels, but the truest and most profound reality is your own unique "Self."  As your culture wielded its influence, you learned to separate from your unique "Self" in order to maintain the myth of femininity.  Sometimes you may be aware of the separation or sometimes you are not; but, in either case, you pay a price.  Through your journaling in this stage, you speak about your idiosyncratic self and venture out of "normal" behavior.  As you become more "outrageous," the inner splitting will disappear and your true Self will emerge.  You will know when you're real because you'll feel happier and more peaceful...and others will notice a different energy about you.  Change is noticeable and admirable.  Your authentic Self will find old patterns of interactions uncomfortable and eventually unbearable.

With help from this chapter, you will also learn to communicate honestly with other women in your life and discuss and feelings of envy, competition, abandonment, guilt, and betrayal that have been blocking your interactions with women.  Such open communication brings you closer and dispels the internal barriers that keep you from loving your friends and prioritizing your relationships with them.  Being close to other women creates personal and political strength.  Other women can support our need for intimacy and support our growing and emerging Self.  When you practice the new skill you are learning with friends,  you are, at the same time, helping them to know the sweetness of resocialization because the support they give you will help them; they become part of your behavior with others.  Take the views of other women and connect them to your own knowledge and emotional history.  From your friendships you gather self-respect and learn new options for relationships that are not Old-Bride oppressions, but New-Bride possibilities.

Presentation based on Codependency and the Socialization of Women, by Ann Mody Lewis, Ph.D., Copyright 1996