Clarissa Pincola Estes

This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator.

A woman in such environs will often try to mold her daughter so that she acts “properly” in the outer world—thereby hoping to save her daughter and herself from attack.

Can’t do anything right. Try to make it better. Makes it worse instead.

Some women act as though it is an achievement to be cold. It is not. It is an act of defensive anger.

We see women who listen to someone telling them they are wrongheaded over and over again without understanding that cats don't swim and hens don’t dive under water.

All you want is love. All they want is peace.

Shunning treats the victim as if she does not exist. It withdraws spiritual concern, love, and other psychic necessities from that person. The idea is to force her to conform, or else to kill her spiritually and/or to drive her from the village to languish and die in the outback.

There is much truth to the saying that freedoms have to be fought for anew every twenty years. Sometimes it seems that they have to be fought for every five minutes.

lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic,5 or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied—about self, family, community, culture, world—and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an unending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves.

We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic,5 or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied—about self, family, community, culture, world—and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an unending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves.