Tag Archive for: Rebecca Tsaros Dickson

Why Women Resist Leadership (and How Shadow Work Sets You Free)

Let’s just name the thing:

A lot of brilliant, capable, intuitive-as-hell women secretly resist leadership.

Not because they don’t want it.

Not because they’re not qualified.

And not because they’re “too emotional” or “too much” or “not enough.”

They resist because leadership – as we’ve been shown it – is often traumatizing.

Yeah. I said it.

So if you’ve ever:

  • Delayed launching the thing
  • Procrastinated on claiming your title
  • Dimmed your voice in a meeting
  • Opted out of visibility
  • Felt exhausted at the thought of leading anything

You’re not broken. You’re not lazy. You’re not lost.

You’re responding perfectly to a system that wasn’t built with your nervous system – or your soul – in mind.

Let’s unpack it, trauma-informed style. Then I’ll show you how to work with your shadow to lead without betraying yourself.

First, the Why: What’s Really Behind the Resistance?

1. Generational Trauma Says Power = Pain

For centuries, women in power were burned, banned, mocked or silenced. That energy lingers. Even if you weren’t punished for speaking up, someone in your bloodline probably was.

So when you think about stepping up, being seen, leading a movement? Your nervous system isn’t thinking, “Hell yes.” It’s thinking, “Am I gonna die?”

Shadow Work Prompt: Where did I first learn that power was dangerous? What happens in my body when I imagine being fully in charge?

2. The Nervous System Sees Leadership as a Threat

Leadership is exposure. Visibility. Responsibility. All of which can trigger the same trauma responses as a bear attack: freeze, fawn, flight or fight.

If your system is stuck in survival, leadership feels like a death sentence. Not because you aren’t “ready,” but because your body still thinks the spotlight is a sniper.

Shadow Work Prompt: What parts of me believe that being seen equals being unsafe? What do those parts need to feel protected and empowered?

3. We Inherited a Patriarchal Model That Doesn’t Work for Us

Most leadership we’ve seen is forceful, rigid, extractive. It leaves no room for softness, for cycles, for the sacred. So we reject it – because it feels wrong. But then we shame ourselves for not wanting it.

Shadow Work Prompt: What leadership qualities have I exiled because they were “too feminine,” “too emotional,” or “too much”? Can I reclaim them as strengths?

4. Imposter Syndrome Is a Trauma Echo

Nearly 70% of women in leadership roles report feeling like frauds.

Translation? We’re leading while dissociated. Leading while afraid. Leading while hiding parts of ourselves. And that’s not leadership. It’s performance.

Shadow Work Prompt: What part of me believes I’m unworthy or fake? Whose voice is that, really? What truth lives beneath the mask?

5. Hyper-Independence Keeps Us Stuck and Small

Many high-achieving women are secretly terrified to be supported. Why? Because being let down, betrayed or dismissed in the past taught us not to trust anyone. So we do it all alone, and then wonder why leadership feels heavy as hell.

Shadow Work Prompt: Where did I learn that needing help was weak? What part of me still believes that if I lead, I must do it alone?

Now, the How: Using Shadow Work to Lead Like Yourself

Shadow work isn’t about fixing you. It’s about finding you—the version you hid to stay safe.

Here’s how it rewires your relationship with leadership:

🔥 1. You Build Safety in the Body, Not Just the Mind

Instead of forcing confidence, shadow work helps you feel safe being seen. That changes everything. When your nervous system feels secure, your brilliance stops hiding.

🔥 2. You Lead With the Parts You Used to Hide

Your rage? Sacred fire.

Your grief? Deep empathy.

Your sensitivity? Strategic edge.

Shadow work teaches you to bring all of it to the table, so you lead as your whole damn self.

🔥 3. You Redefine Leadership on Your Terms

You stop mimicking old models. You birth new ones. You build a business or movement that feels like you, not a costume.

Still With Me? Good. Let’s Burn It Down.

This isn’t about fixing your leadership gaps.

  • It’s about grieving the old stories.
  • Calling back the exiled parts.
  • And leading from wholeness, not hustle.

Leadership doesn’t have to feel like a betrayal.

With shadow work, it becomes a coming home.

5 Stats That Prove You’re Not Alone:

  1. Only 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women
    You’re not imagining the gap. It’s real.
    (Fortune, 2024)

  2. 60% of women say they’ve never had a leadership role model who looked or lived like them
    Visibility matters.
    (LeanIn, 2023)

  3. One in three women globally experience gender-based violence
    Trauma isn’t rare. It’s common, and it shapes us.
    (WHO, 2021)

  4. Women are twice as likely as men to say they feel burned out
    The cost of performing leadership is real.
    (McKinsey, 2023)

  5. 70% of women report imposter syndrome in leadership
    It’s not a personal flaw. It’s a cultural symptom.
    (KPMG, 2022)

Final Note

If you’re craving leadership that lets you breathe, rest, rage, and rise—

Shadow work is your map.

You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You’re on the edge of remembering who the fuck you are.

P.S. Check out SHADOW RISING, my exclusive mastermind for women who want an approach to business and life that gets real results. (Bonus: your clients will RAVE.) As I type this, we have 3 seats remaining for the entire year.

You are your own permission. Take it.

P.P.S. I created a brand new FR∑∑ guide to help women reevaluate – and burn down – dysfunctional businesses. Do you feel like you’ve changed more than your biz? Outgrown your clients? Are you ready to take a more aligned leap in the direction you want? GO HERE.

It’s called THE COACHING INDUSTRY EXPOSED, 15 questions that will likely shatter your coaching practice in a GREAT way. You’ll love it. xo

THE BRUTAL TRUTH ABOUT NERVOUS SYSTEM HEALING

Ever wondered why healing your f*cked-up nervous system feels like wandering through a minefield blindfolded? Yeah. Me too.

Let me rip the mask off this “gentle journey” bullshit and show you the blood-soaked reality of what’s actually happening.

THE TRIGGER LABYRINTH

Your dysregulated system isn’t just “sensitive” – it’s a goddamn chaos engine running on corrupted code.

External triggers, internal triggers, shit you don’t even recognize as triggers… They’re everywhere, invisible and lethal.

You try some healing practice that should work and your body locks up in freeze or floods with anxiety. You did everything “right” and still got knocked on your ass.

And women? Your hormonal cycles aren’t just “challenging,” they’re brutal resurrection rituals every month. Your bleeding depletes minerals and water, stripping away resources your nervous system desperately needs to hold itself together.

This isn’t weakness. It’s biological warfare against your own stability.

Clarity doesn’t come from trying harder. It comes from surrendering to the monster inside you that’s been keeping score all along.

YOUR RATIONAL MIND IS THE ENEMY

Your thinking brain believes it can logic its way through trauma. This is a f*cking lie. A big one.

Regulation isn’t a cognitive process. It’s primal, instinctual, buried in your brainstem and viscera. Your rational mind is the jailer, not the liberator. (Read that again.)

True healing happens when you stop “doing” regulation and start allowing the savage intelligence of your body to reclaim its power.

Your system doesn’t need more control. It needs permission to remember what it knew before the world broke you.

THE CRUEL NONLINEARITY

Healing isn’t a straight line. It’s a bloody spiral through darkness.

You’ll taste freedom, then get dragged back into the pit.

You’ll feel powerful, then collapse under the weight of old patterns.

This isn’t failure. It’s the brutal reality of transformation.

The momentum builds only when your system accumulates new resources: clarity carved from chaos, attunement born from ashes, somatic capacity forged in fire, and the refined perception that comes from staring into the void without flinching.

TIME IS NOT YOUR ENEMY

You want it fixed now. Yesterday. Ten years ago before it all went to hell.

Wake up. Your system spent decades building fortress walls and digging trenches. Why the f*ck would years of accumulated survival patterns dissolve overnight?

Healing takes time because your nervous system is rewriting its core operating system while still running all primary functions. It’s not being slow to spite you. It’s doing impossible work, without shutting down completely.

Patience isn’t weakness. It’s strategic violence against the systems that tried to break you.

*

THE OVERWHELM IS THE POINT

That intensity crushing you? The symptoms flooding your awareness? The feeling of drowning in your own neurochemistry? This isn’t the system failing. It’s the system speaking its truth.

Healing means living in the brutal space between old patterns (triggers, symptoms, collapse) and new capacity (stability, awareness, power). This transition isn’t gentle. It’s a war zone where past and future battle for control of your present.

STOP SEEKING VALIDATION FROM THE BLIND

The people around you will never fully understand the depths of your experience. This isn’t their fault. They can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.

Stop looking for validation from those who haven’t descended into their own darkness. Their approval isn’t the prize. Your savage self-validation is.

MORE ANGER, MORE EXHAUSTION IS THE VICTORY

Shouldn’t healing mean less anger and more energy?

F*ck no.

As your system stabilizes, it gains the strength to feel what was too dangerous to feel before. Those waves of rage, grief and bone-deep exhaustion aren’t signs of failure. They’re buried truths finally strong enough to surface.

This isn’t regression. It’s resurrection.

HEALING ISN’T YOUR FULL-TIME JOB

The endless vigilance – tracking triggers, practicing regulation, monitoring patterns – will burn you to ash if you make it your entire existence.

Healing isn’t a 24/7 crusade. Sometimes the most powerful move is to stop trying so damn hard and let your system integrate on its own terms.

THE DARK TRUTH

Healing isn’t about getting it right. It’s about meeting the monster they tried to kill in you – again and again and again.

Even when it feels like you’re drowning in quicksand, your system is fighting for your life.

Every moment of raw attunement, every pause between the chaos, and every breath of fierce self-compassion is reshaping your neural landscape.

You’re not behind.

You’re not broken.

You’re a weapon being forged in fire.

And the heat is necessary.