Research – Julia Fry – Psychotherapist, Neurodivergence Coach, Writer, Poet, Artist.

How to stop paternalism triggering your inner saboteurs

image shows a heart made with oil pastel — Fiery Heart (2020)
oil pastel and clay on paper

I want to explore how patriarchal belief systems get into our nervous systems / psyches / energy bodies as spirits of sickness, and what we can do to remove them. In this article I’ll look at what spirits of sickness are, and how they’re related to our inner saboteurs and exiled vulnerable parts of us. Then I’ll explore the power that awareness of them brings, and some ways of releasing their power over us. Some of this might sound strange, so I invite you to open your mind, and listen with your heart. Here we go!

Moving with infinity – an intuitive walk in Venice

As I practised my shamanic drumming before going on an intuitive walk today, I found myself pacing in a figure of 8 around the bedroom. The movement came from my body – a natural urge – rather than my mind leading the way. The intention I set for the intuitive walk is: to find ‘dead’ space to sing to (I am doing art research in Venice for the British Council – see bottom of this post for more information on my project).

Image shows an art exhibit with sculpted landscape with a sheep with elongated legs laying down with legs folded up, a tiny deer (in relation to the sheep's - a tenth of the size) and a spherical light hanging above.

Othering Me, Othering You

Image shows strands of finger knitted wool of differing lengths arranged in a circle with the ends at the centre in a spiral. The wool is multi-coloured. — Othering Me, Othering You, 2023, Wool

I created this piece using wool. The wool came from a cardigan I made where I found the seams to be too irritating so I unpicked it. I am very sensitive to seams and labels in clothing. I was left with lots of small balls of wool in varying sizes and I followed an intuitive prod to finger knit each ball into a long strand. This took a few months and during this time I was working on my dissertation for my creative psychotherapy master’s, which was a heuristic inquiry into the experience of othering people different from me.

Othering Me, Othering You Is This The Best We Can Do?

I completed my MSc Counselling and Psychotherapy – Contemporary Creative Approaches in August 2023 with a research project called Othering Me, Othering You – My Living Experience of Internalised Patriarchy. I’m going to share the following sections from my dissertation in this post: definition of terms, introduction, and conclusion. If you’d like me to send you the dissertation or have a conversation about setting up creative workshops to uncover hidden biases with compassion, please email me.

image shows a wall with 2 canvas paintings and 8 pieces of paper with drawings on them: a heart with 2 people inside, a person with their head inside a cloud with the word "worry" in it and the word "othering" written on the paper, a large multi coloured heart, two spirals - red and blue, a series of black circles, a pink triangle, a red circle with black spikes surrounding it with yellow outside of the black and green in the corners of the image, a diagram with colour coded lines leading to bits of paper, a collage with the words "would I have known where to start without this?" written on.

Some of my creative outputs from my research that I analysed for themes