Calling Women ‘Hysterical’ is a Patriarchal Cop-out

If you’re a woman, it’s likely at some point in our lives we were called ‘hysterical’ or ‘crazy’ that implies we’re not meant to be trusted and it undermines our reality.

After women suffering abuse, oppression and violation in patriarchal societies for centuries, we can’t demand that women’s bodies show up like obedient soldiers.

The human body is an animal and doesn‘t respond well to oppression. It keeps storing stress because it senses the out of balance environment and, that stress will have to be discharged at some point.

This discharge of stress is part of the body’s natural healing process, and it can look messy. The voice trembles, the body shakes, the rage appears, the tears flow and the heart races.

Women’s responses lazily labelled as ‘hysterical’ are often necessary and primal responses that reconnect us with our power after a long history of disempowerment and our sense of agency taken away from us. 

They are normal discharges of stress we carry in our bodies as a result of patriarchal trauma. 

In our culture, we gloss over parts of the healing process that make us uncomfortable. But the accumulated stress across centuries doesn’t always come out softly.

The first woman in every family lineage who feels safer than women of previous generations starts discharging that stress and she’s often the first one called ‘hysterical’.

Every woman who’s been called ‘hysterical’ expressed the rage, grief and terror her mother and grandmother didn’t feel safe to express. 

These responses are healing processes and I refuse to pathologise them in myself or any other woman.

Our culture’s role is to offer a welcoming and unshaming space to that woman so she can integrate parts that she, her mother and grandmother had to disconnect from in order to survive.