What If Your Inner Bitch Is Your Friend?

What if the parts of yourself you've been most afraid of aren't actually the problem?

The bitch. The good girl. The hot bitch. The cold bitch. The little bitch. The big bitch.

We got into all of them recently when I joined the Virgin Beauty B!tch podcast, and I found myself thinking about something I come back to again and again in my work:

No part of us just goes away.

We can shove her in the basement. We can lock the door. We can pretend the basement isn't even there.

But she's still in the house.

And the more determined we become not to go down there, the bigger our resistance to the basement can become than whatever was actually waiting for us inside.

That's shadow work.

The Good Girl and the Bitch

I knew the Good Girl well.

Be good. Behave. Don't hurt anyone. Be acceptable. Be lovable.

There are beautiful things about her, of course. But when I look back at my own life, I can also see how clinging to the Good Girl meant sacrificing pieces of my inner knowing—what was right for me, what my body was telling me, what I wanted, what I needed.

And meanwhile, the Bitch hadn't disappeared.

She couldn't.

She just didn't have a conscious place in my life.

That's the funny thing about the parts we exile: they don't politely pack their bags and leave because we've decided they aren't acceptable. They find sideways ways of getting their needs met.

Which made me realize something during this conversation:

For much of my life, the Good Girl was dominating—and the Bitch was submissive.

Now that is an interesting power dynamic.

There Isn't Just One Bitch

I love playing with archetypes because they let us turn something around and look at it from another direction.

Take the Cold Bitch.

Cold-hearted. Unfeeling. Uncompromising.

Okay.

But what happens when we turn her toward the light?

Maybe the Cold Bitch is the part who says:

What I need is what I need right now. It might feel cold to you. Well, that's your opinion.

She's capable of holding a boundary even when someone else doesn't like it.

Then there's the Big Bitch.

She's loud. Bold. Maybe abrasive. Too much.

But turn her around and suddenly I see the Queen. The leader. The advocate. The woman who is purpose-driven enough to take up the space necessary to move her vision into the world.

And then there's my personal favorite:

The Hot Bitch.

What If "Hot" Has Nothing to Do With How You Look?

The unconscious Hot Bitch may be performing.

She sees herself from the outside. Is this sexy? Am I desirable? Am I doing femininity correctly? Am I being looked at the right way?

But the conscious Hot Bitch?

Oh, she's having a completely different experience.

She's luxuriating in her own life.

She's drinking a cup of tea and actually tasting it. She's feeling her body. She's passionate. She's playful. She's experiencing pleasure because pleasure is happening inside of her—not because someone standing outside of her has confirmed that she's pleasurable to look at.

She radiates her own aliveness.

This comes up constantly in my work.

Women rarely arrive saying, "Melinda, I'd like to reconnect with my pleasure."

They come because they're anxious. Or stuck. Or disconnected from themselves. Or struggling with a habit. Or wanting to show up differently in their work, their parenting, their relationships.

And again and again, somewhere underneath the thing they thought we were going to work on, we find desire.

Oh.

I want to want again.

That's when I feel like we're getting close to the heart of it.

Shadow Work Isn't Just About the "Dark" Stuff

We usually imagine the shadow as the ugly basement where we've hidden anger, jealousy, selfishness, sexuality, shame and all the other things we've decided we're not supposed to be.

But we exile beautiful things, too.

Joy.

Exuberance.

Silliness.

Creativity.

Sensuality.

A ridiculous sense of humor.

The desire to be seen.

The audacity to make something enormous.

Sometimes shadow work isn't discovering that you're secretly darker than you thought.

Sometimes you open the basement door and discover:

Oh my God. I'm FUN.

And maybe that's why I don't see shadow work as a project of rooting around looking for everything that's wrong with us.

I'm much more interested in integration.

The Goal Isn't to Let Every Part Run the Show

Reclaiming the Bitch doesn't mean becoming cruel.

Embracing anger doesn't mean hurting people.

Finding your sexuality doesn't mean performing it.

Having boundaries doesn't mean abandoning compassion.

There's a conscious and unconscious expression available to all of these parts.

The point isn't to hand the microphone to every impulse and say, You're sacred! Do whatever you want!

It's to know our parts well enough that we aren't unconsciously being driven by the ones we've refused to meet.

Because when I can see her, hear her and understand what she's protecting or reaching toward, suddenly I have options.

And options mean agency.

That's one of the greatest gifts I see in shadow work: more access to who we are means more freedom of choice about who we want to be.

So, Who Is My Bitch?

She's the Wild Woman.

She's the Queen.

She's an artist.

She's a visionary.

She's the part of me that sees something she believes needs to exist and says, Okay. Let's go.

She moves the message out into the world.

She doesn't require everyone to approve of the mission before she's willing to pursue it.

And if someday I decide the mission needs to change, she'll change it—not because somebody convinced her to become smaller, quieter or more serviceable, but because she decided another direction was more aligned.

Maybe reclaiming the Bitch isn't really about reclaiming a word at all.

Maybe it's about opening the basement door, turning on the light, and finally discovering how much of ourselves has been waiting down there.

And saying:

You can come upstairs now.

Big thanks to my new friends Christopher and Heather at Virgin.Beauty.B!tch Podcast.

Check out our full conversation here: