The Oprah-endorsed, New York Times best-selling psychotherapist, author and speaker, Dr. Shefali Tsabary, will host her sixth Evolve weekend workshop here in Atlanta later this month, which gave us the opportunity to interview her in person about her latest book, A Radical Awakening. 

To be clear, the book is about women’s radical awakening. To Tsabary, to “awaken” means living one’s authentic self. But in order to discover one’s authentic self, one needs to peel off all the layers of one’s inauthentic self. And the problem with that is we tend to have few clues about what’s inauthentic. 

As revolutionary biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton often says, 95 percent of what we do is a function of our subconscious mind; we feel that we’re living consciously—thinking and making decisions independently—but the truth is that 95 percent of our thoughts and actions are pre-programmed.  

The first part of Tsabary’s book is devoted to talking about that programming. She writes: “This book is an exposé of all the ways we have been asleep.” 

This programming starts from the minute we are born. The process of socialization and acculturation is, in effect, brainwashing—without the nefarious motives that usually accompany the term. Our parents simply do what they do, as they themselves are products of their cultures and environments. We are all fish in the sea, swimming in a culture that has molded us. Just like fish, we don’t notice the water we swim in; that would require knowing a reality beyond water.  “Moldable as children are, we capitulate to our parents’ dictates, often without pushback,” writes Tsabary. “We contort ourselves until we match the picture others have of us such that their picture of us becomes our own picture.” 

Tsabary goes to great lengths to explain exactly how women find themselves in the positions they are in as a function of socialization and acculturation, and in doing so, draws sharp contrasts between how girls and boys are raised. Starting from biological differences that result in emotional differences, she explains how women are more nurturing, but goes on to say that society has taken that inherent difference and exaggerated and bastardized it to the point of making women subservient to men. 

One foundational issue for all of us, men included, is that most of us have an extremely strong tendency to look outside ourselves for validation. We look to society and other people to let us know when we succeed, when we meet expectations for whatever role we’re in, when we “deserve love.” In raising girls to be caring and nurturing, “women are trained by culture to receive love through sacrificing ourselves,” writes Tsabary. It’s the “good girl” syndrome/archetype, but, she says, “‘good’ for women means subservient, lesser-than, not equal.” 

Of course, one term associated with our societal structure is patriarchy, and Tsabary leaves no rock unturned when analyzing what the patriarchy has done to women. “There isn’t a woman I know who has escaped the crushing weight of the patriarchy in which we live,” she writes. 

But because of the “good girl” archetype, acculturation has trained women to not only be good, but to assume everything is their fault. 

“I see many women who constantly make excuses for our ill treatment at the hands of the modern-day patriarchy. Our habit, our automatic default, is to think something is our fault… There are two arrows, you see? One is the actual denigration and silence we women endure. The second is the blame–shame we feel for having endured it.” 

But like Natural Awakenings, Tsabary is a champion of personal awakenings, not political revolutions; the latter may occur, but only as a natural consequence of the participation of enlightened individuals. 

“Protesting against culture or the patriarchy may feel like a relief on one level but doing so also ensnares us. Whenever our cure is bound to another, even if it’s justified, we stay enslaved to them… How can someone subjugate us on the outside if we don’t allow it somewhere on the inside? Dominance by men involves submission by women… We women are cocreators of the system that subjugates us as much as we are its pawns… For us women to achieve a state of inner freedom, we need to acknowledge our part in the patriarchy.”

I heartily recommend A Radical Awakening for its thorough exposé of how society and culture creates “us,” and how much of what we accept as “right” and/or “true” is mere cultural assumption. As Tsabary says, we cannot arrive at our authentic self, and therefore live freely, until we fully understand what we are not, and that means understanding what society and culture has made us. Until then, our true power remains obscured. 

“Our power isn’t against any man. True power is never against anyone. If it was, it wouldn’t be power; it would be weakness. True power is always over the self, whereas pseudopower is over the other.” ❧

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Publisher of Natural Awakenings Atlanta since 2017, Paul Chen’s professional background includes strategic planning, marketing management and qualitative research. He practices Mahayana Buddhism and kriya yoga. Contact him at [email protected].