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)