Disgust, Shame and Guilt. The Poison They Fed Us.

Trigger warning: this piece speaks honestly about shame, religious conditioning, ancestral trauma, and the reclamation of the female body. If you are in a tender place today, read gently. Or save it for when you are ready. It will wait.

The first time someone said the words pussy power to me I laughed.

Not a comfortable laugh. A caught laugh. The laugh of a woman who recognised something she had never been given permission to name.

I have spent years discovering and reclaiming the hidden parts of myself. My desire. My body. My genitals. My womb. The parts that were imprinted by my experience as a young girl and a young woman. Layered with the inheritance of my mother line. Wired into my instincts by an ancestry that carried its own wounds, its own silences, its own survival strategies passed down through the body like a language nobody taught you but you speak fluently anyway.

I know how hard this work is. Not from a textbook. From the inside.

Because you are not rewiring information when you do this work. You are rewiring instinct. Protection mechanisms built over a lifetime. Over generations. Over evolution itself.

Good fucking luck, right?

And yet.

Nothing changes if nothing changes…

The Three Poisons

Women are not afraid of their bodies because something is wrong with them.

They are afraid because something was done to them.

Three poisons, administered so early and so consistently that most women cannot remember a time before them.

Disgust. Your body is unclean. Something to manage, to hide, to make acceptable. Never something to meet with curiosity. Never something to find genuinely, specifically, extraordinarily beautiful.

Shame. Your desire is wrong. Too much, or the wrong kind, or proof of something broken in you. The good girl does not want too loudly. The good girl makes herself smaller than her hunger.

Guilt. Even pleasure, when it comes, should not be kept. It is selfish. It takes something from someone else. The woman who receives fully, who stays in the feeling, who asks for more, she is doing something she was not supposed to do.

Disgust, shame and guilt. That is the poison they fed us.

And we swallowed it. Not because we were weak. Because we were human, and we were young, and there was no one to tell us otherwise.

The Five Wounds

But the poison did not arrive the same way for every woman.

It came through different doors. Read these slowly. Notice which one lands in your body.

You were rewarded for staying small and punished for your fire. The more agreeable you were, the more accepted you felt. Your intensity slowly went quiet. You learned that being too much was dangerous. So you became less. And less. Until less felt like you.

Religion split your body from the sacred. You were taught to seek divinity above, not within. The body was left out of the equation entirely, too physical, too earthly, too animal to be holy. You learned to live from the neck up and call it spiritual.

Too much became your identity. You learned to edit yourself before anyone else could. To manage your reactions, censor your needs, control your expression. Your pleasure became conditional, something allowed only when it was appropriate, when it was approved, when it would not make anyone uncomfortable.

You were taught that Eros was a distraction. That desire would pull you away from who you were supposed to be. That wanting, really wanting, in your body, in your flesh, was evidence of weakness or sin or both. So you learned to want quietly, or not at all.

You were taught that desire was dangerous. The most fundamental wound. You learned to disconnect from your own desire before it could cost you safety, love, or belonging. You severed the connection yourself. To protect yourself. And then forgot you had done it.

Which one shaped your relationship with your body the most?

You do not have to answer out loud. Just notice what moved in you as you read. That movement, that tightening, that recognition, that grief or anger or exhausted relief at finally being named, that is the information. That is the map of where your work begins.

The Princess Lie

And then they gave us the night time stories…

The princess waits. The right one comes. He sees her, chooses her, completes her. Her desire, her pleasure, her sense of being enough, all of it outsourced to that moment of being chosen.

We were handed this story as little girls and told it was love.

It was not love. It was a transfer of power so complete and so early that most of us never noticed it happening.

We learned to locate our worth outside ourselves. Our desirability in someone else's eyes. Our pleasure in someone else's hands. Our satisfaction in someone else's approval. We built our entire inner lives around being chosen rather than around knowing ourselves.

And the body became the metaphor for all of it.

The body that waits. The body that performs. The body that is available for someone else's pleasure while her own goes quiet, goes numb, goes so far underground that she stops remembering it was ever there.

I have watched women build the entire centre of their lives around finding the one. All their attention, all their longing, all their aliveness pointed outward. Waiting. Hoping. Outsourcing the most essential thing, the connection to themselves, to someone who was never equipped to give it to them in the first place.

This is not their fault.

They were taught this from the beginning. Fed it through every fairy tale, every film, every well meaning adult who asked a little girl if she had a boyfriend yet and smiled when she blushed.

We gave our power away before we even knew we had it.

And the body holds all of it. Every moment of performing instead of feeling. Every time pleasure was given rather than received. Every time she made herself smaller, quieter, more acceptable. The body stored it. In the muscles. In the tissue. In the places that have gone quiet and do not remember how to speak.

The Mirror

I have spent years leading women back to themselves.

And the most confrontational moment in that work, every time, without exception, is not the breathwork or the ceremony or the practices that go deep.

It is this.

Sit down. Find a mirror. Open your legs and look at your pussy. Stay here. Breathe.

That is it. That is the moment everything either opens or closes.

Because what lives in that moment, the laugh, the recoil, the quiet oh absolutely not, the surprising and terrifying yes, tells you everything about what you were taught, what you inherited, what you have been carrying in your body without knowing you were carrying it.

You are not broken because this feels confronting.

You are responding perfectly to a lifetime of being taught that this part of you was not for you.

You may be the first woman in your lineage to do this.

The first to look with curiosity instead of judgment. The first to stop outsourcing her own knowing and come home to it instead. The first to say, this stops with me. The waiting ends here. I am not a princess and I was never meant to be.

Your mother probably could not do this. Her mother certainly could not. The women in your lineage carried this part of themselves as something to manage, to hide, to give away, almost never something to truly, tenderly, meet.

You are the one who gets to do it differently.

Not because you have to.

Because you choose to.

The Reclamation

This work does not require a partner. It does not require experience. It does not require a version of ready that you do not already have.

It requires one thing.

A willingness.

A willingness to sit with a mirror and breathe where no one has ever taught you to breathe. To stop waiting to be chosen and begin the work of choosing yourself. To touch yourself with the tenderness and compassion you have given freely to everyone else your entire life.

To discover, slowly, in your own time, at your own pace, that your desire was never the problem. Your body was never the problem. The part of you that was named dirty, dangerous, too much, is the part that is most sacred. The part that holds the most power. The part that, once reclaimed, makes you very difficult to diminish and manipulate…

I am forty five. I wish I could go back to my younger self and hand her all of this. Tell her she does not have to wait. Tell her the power she is looking for outside herself has been living inside her body all along.

I cannot go back.

But I can come here. To you. And tell you now.

You do not have to wait.

You never did.

If something moved in you reading this, even slightly, even uncomfortably, that is not an accident.

That is the part of you that already knows.

She has been waiting long enough.

à bientôt

— Fleur

Something just moved in you. I felt it from here. Come and tell me what it was. Fifteen minutes. Just us. Book below.