Untamed (2020) Glennon Doyle
Glennon Doyle is updating her story through this memoir - the part of her story where she questions everything she has ever known about how to be and who she is starts to listen and identify her truth by listening inside. Glennon challenges the status quo and the cultural conditioning of girls and women (but also reflects on how this is also done with boys and men) to maintain power and control of a patriarchal society. She highlights the sweeping generalizations and beliefs masked as fact of what it means to be feminine or female that are projected on to girls and women to ‘tame’ them. And while I don’t disagree with much of what she says and even resonate with most of it, I did find myself with an icky feeling in my gut that I had to sit with for a while… because it seems like she is using a parallel process (projecting personal experience into sweeping generalizations) to formulate her opposing argument. She also notes at one point that she has done a lot of research, but never cites any of it. In the end, I always appreciate when someone is willing to vulnerably share their story with the rest of the world and I appreciate her overall theme of finding freedom in feeling grounded and connection.
How was this book recommended to me? I think the library app recommended it based on what else I’d been reading
Would I recommend this to my colleagues? Probably not
Would I recommend this to my clients? Selectively and with caveats
How do I apply this content to my work: One of the things I appreciate about reading memoirs is the experience of resonating with someone else’s story and feeling less alone in my own experience. A lot of the work I do with clients is based around the notion that their current symptoms (anxiety, depression, addiction, etc.) are correlated with a disconnection from their core sense of Self–that they have learned or adopted beliefs that who they are is not okay, not safe, not good enough, etc…and so they spend their lives trying to mask, suppress, or otherwise stifle the true version of themselves. This book exemplifies how that experience created distress for the author and her (messy and distressing) journey into freeing her core sense of self and living a more authentic lifestyle wherein her capacity for freedom stems from a sense of feeling grounded and authentically connected with self and others. And I think it can be helpful for some of my clients to read this story and feel less alone as they struggle through these disorienting and often chaotic transformative periods of their journeys. From my Polyvagal lens, I believe that trauma healing occurs within the context of connection and community.
