This is such a significant problem that I have now devoted an entire website to the Inner Matriarch and Inner Patriarch problem and how these two characters can hurt your Inner child (badly) unless you protect her or him.

Rather than repeat these pages on this site can I ask you to go to my main website

http://www.growingaware.net

I think you will be amazed at what you will discover there. That site will also carry many more updates on this topic.

Characteristics of the Inner Patriarch

The overriding characteristics of the inner patriarch is that even when he sets up his house inside a woman's village  his loyalty is to the men around her and to maintaining their power and control over all women, the way they think and act and feel. His overriding loyalty is towards the male hierarchy and the male dominated patriarchal lifestyle. Typically, you will observe an inner patriarch taking the side of another man or another patriarch living nearby in another person's inner village, in preference to the woman in whose village he has set up his house.

Disempowering the inner female child

Like the inner matriarch (see below) he is different from other inner protector characters, in that he does not seem to be concerned with the well-being of the wounded female inner child in the village where she lives. He will do nothing to assist in empowering other female villagers who live there. Rather he will do everything he can to keep them from feeling any sense of power, or ability.

In a way it's as though he is carrying within him a deep-seated almost cellular fear, a fear that goes back more than 40,000 years to the earliest days of civilisation when females were regarded as having more power than males. (Because of their perceived superior ability to connect spiritually to the sky and the earth and their ability to bear children.)
Typically his attitude is one of  fear of women in power (a fear which he sees as reasonable and justifiable) and a need therefore to disempower all women. To maintain control over females to ensure that all her life she will continue to adhere to male rules and male systems is the patriarch's way of reducing his fear. The fact that a wounded inner child is a female is sufficient reason stir the fear of her innate power and this is spurs the inner patriarch into action. He can strike incredibly fast and with much greater than expected intensity when he thinks he detects a woman getting into her power.. 

Note: If you can get hold of a copy of Sidra Stone' s wonderful book "The Shadow King" you can find out a great deal more about your own Inner patriarch, how it acts and what it thinks and says.

Characteristics of the inner matriarch.

The overriding characteristics of the inner matriarch is that even when she sets up her house inside a man’s inner village, she remains scornful of men (almost all men) the way they think and act and feel. Her overriding loyalty is towards women. Typically, an inner matriarch will take the side of another woman or another inner matriarch living nearby in another person's inner village, in preference to the male in whose village she has set up her house.

So, she is unlike other inner protector characters, because she does not seem to be concerned with the well-being of the wounded male inner child in her own village. Nor is she concerned with helping the other male villagers who live there.

In a way it's as though she is carrying within her the resentment of 40,000 years of male domination. Typically her attitude is one of justifiable resentment against all men.

Punishing the male inner child

To punish a male, any male is her way of avenging this. By itself, the fact that the wounded inner child is a male may be sufficient reason to apply pain or punishment. Certainly the matriarch specialises in punishing male inner children in nearby villages. However, as this article explains, her worst punishments are often applied the wounded inner child who lives inside her own inner village. Perhaps this is because she has a precise knowledge of that individual child, what aspects about him of are the most wounded and therefore the most likely to feel the punishment. In other words she knows exactly where the stick her knife. She can strike incredibly fast and with noticeably powerful intensity. 

These are not ordinary inner protector characters (or inner protector characters)
In summary this suggests that the inner matriarch inside a man and the inner patriarch inside a woman are each very different from the other villagers. Most inner protector characters talk about how they are trying to protect the inner child in some way. When you talk to these characters they don't express any concern for the inner child in their resident village. They do, howver,  express scorn or criticism but not in a constructive way. On the other hand they may express a strong concern for the problems "this village" is causing for someone else's village!

All this suggests that the Inner matriarch and Inner patriarch are much more like what is described as "carried or refugee villagers". 
There are many different kinds of carried villagers. The inner matriarch and inner patriarch are only two such characters. Carried villagers really belong in another village, that is inside another person. How they get into your village and what they are doing there is explained in more detail on the page Refugee or Carried Villagers 

Common characteristics of Both Inner Patriarch and Matriarch

Wherever they live or work, inside men or women each individual inner matriarch or inner patriarch possesses three common characteristics, that emphasise their lack of loyalty to the village:

In a way that’s understandable, since they don't really belong in this village. If  these self-empowering events occur, the inner matriarch and Inner patriarch are going to lose some of their power in the village.

Inner matriarch inner patriarchs do not support personal growth, self-awareness or self empowerment in an individual.

The patriarch and matriarch can also get involved in relationships between parents and children. In a typical scenario one of the children, usually the eldest child, has a strong inner matriarch or inner patriarch who tries to undermine the power and self-esteem in one of the parents.

  • Ted explained to me how he had grown up living with a mother who had three different husbands. None of his step-fathers were grown up emotionally and neither was his mother, at the time. So, quite quickly Ted became the "little grown up" in the family. In time it got to the stage where he was literally parenting his mother each time she went through to another relationship break-up. Deep down inside Ted resented having to do this, particularly as he had no choice. And this meant that inside him his inner patriarch was growing stronger and stronger, and in its typical pattern was trying to set up fixed rules that would force his mother to "grow up" and relieve Little Ted of his burden.

  • Ted did not have any success getting his mother the change, but the efforts by his inner patriarch completely destroyed the friendship between him as an an adult man and his mother. Again, there is a happy ending to the story. Once Ted and his mother could what both these characters inside them were doing, they were able to take all four of them off the case. And of course it was only after this, that his mother for the first time was actually able to start doing some serious growing up.

    Inner matriarchs and Inner patriarch's do not want to see people developing closer grown-up friendships

    If it’s a man and a woman, these inner protector characters don’t want them to get close enough to share love and trust and intimacy On the other hand they may support same sex friendships (as long as people don’t get too close) particularly if one of the outcomes is to help isolate males from females.

    For example, it's the inner matriarch in women and the inner patriarch in males who like to organise pre-wedding male-only and female-only parties of the kind that are likely to harm intimacy and trust between the couple before they marry.

    Jane told me about just how much damage had occurred as a result of a pre-wedding party given by her girlfriends, where she had, as she put it, "gone too far" with a male stripper, hired for the occasion. When she discovered that her husband Paul had also "gone too far" with a female stripper at his pre-wedding "bucks" party the scene was set for an extremely destructive flight in which their two Inner Matriarchs and their two Inner Patriarchs were major players. The outcome was a cancelled wedding, but fortunately once the four real villains of the piece were identified, things got back to normal again. Jane and Paul learned a very valuable lesson about what these four characters inside them were like and the damage they could do.

    Couples in conflict

    Matriarch/Patriarch induced conflict is most common in couples in which, sad to say, bottom-line issues such as self-esteem, boundaries, power and control are still unresolved in one or both partners. However, understanding the four-way battles between the two Inner Matriarchs and two Inner Patriarchs is a very positive step in helping people deal with their very worst and most damaging fights, the kind that often lead to the end of the relationship.

    NOTE:
    If you are listening to or watching two other people having a fight and you feel a painful impact inside you just listening to what either one is saying (or doing) to the other person, that's an indication of the intensity and power of the inner patriarch and inner matriarch characters. The energy they radiate is so strong that your own inner matriarch or inner patriarch can feed on it. As they  grow inside you, one of your two inner characters (Matriarch or Patriarch)  may even use their new energy to attack your inner child.  And that's what you are feeling. Protect your own inner child immediately.

    Carried villagers - "refugees" from someone else's village

    Personal and impersonal styles in a relationship

    The second step is to lower the energy of the Inner Patriarch and the Inner Matriarch inside you. This is a bit more complicated and it seems as though the only way it can be accomplished successfully is to use the power of the new Magic Inner Mother and Magic Inner Father.  

    Inner Mother and Inner Father - the Induction Process -2002

    Example of Inner parent induction - Inner father - 2002


    Feedback - please e-mail  me John Bligh Nutting -   at   bligh4@growingaware.com


    Copyright © John Nutting 1996 - -   and   ©   GROWING AWARENESS  1996 - -2009   All rights reserved World Wide   LAST UPDATE  Sunday, 07 February 2016 11:28

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