I haven’t followed Harvey Weinstein’s trial in detail. To me, he’s a product of our system. And so are the women who accused him. That’s not to excuse him, nor to discredit them – but to uncover the entangled dynamics we tend to overlook. We cannot isolate a person from the system that formed them. Nor can we isolate a person from the ways they were conditioned to survive within that same system.

If #MeToo (and feminism) points at men as the source of women’s suffering, it misses the deeper roots. It singles out individuals while ignoring the invisible patterns that operate beneath. These patterns are ancestral, familial, social, and gendered. They are passed down through generations.

A man who becomes a “monster” was once a baby. Raised by a mother. A woman. This is not to place blame, but to follow the thread back to its origins. Because in most cases, it is the mother – often unsupported, overburdened, wounded herself – who becomes the most formative presence in a child’s early life.

Without understanding the mother wound, we cannot understand the roots of identity, power, or abuse. The father wound is also essential, especially given how often men are emotionally or physically absent. But in the day-to-day, it is the mother’s unresolved pain that often gets projected onto her children. Not from malice, but as a cry for her own pain to be mirrored. And pain, when not metabolized, becomes its own form of cruelty.

A child will often trigger the very emotions the mother had to suppress in her own childhood. Without support, tools or awareness, she will often reenact her own unresolved trauma onto them – verbally, emotionally, psychologically.

This is how the cycle continues:
Children learn to objectify themselves from their mothers — who were taught to do the same. They learn to please.

In response to this pain:
Sons learn to perform, protect, and absorb the unspoken rage and shame.
Daughters learn to perform, self-present, and sacrifice themselves.
They internalize how to commodify themselves and seek safety in validation.

Many women still operate from scripts that go back centuries – where their value was tied to desirability, submission, and proximity to male power. So when a man like Harvey Weinstein enters the picture, he represents not just a man, but a gateway: to success, validation, money, power, fame.

This does not justify exploitation. But it reveals a deeper complicity of unconscious needs – on both sides. Some may have had ulterior motives, some may not. Some may have tolerated more than they wanted, out of fear or hope. But either way, the relationship was transactional in nature, a matter of exchange value – power for power.

Power dynamics are not limited to abuser vs. abused. We must reframe our understanding of power. It is that both exert power – just in different forms. The abuser uses aggression, domination, intimidation. The abused may exert power through withdrawal, passive aggressiveness, or other indirect influences such as manipulation. This isn’t victim-blaming. It’s naming a pattern.

As victims, we may refuse direct confrontation, but still make the other feel our pain. We may triangulate, pulling others into our narrative as witnesses. We may drop emotional hints like breadcrumbs. We may cast ourselves in roles that elicit empathy. We might genuinely believe our version of the story while subconsciously resisting accountability for our own patterns.

We self-betray to protect the version of us that was helpless. That’s where the real wound lives. And often, this entire pattern is inherited. We watched our mothers do the same – perhaps with our fathers, or with the world at large.

Both the abuser and the abused often come from the same split – helplessness in childhood. One takes on fire, the other water. One explodes outward, the other implodes inward. Both are ways to feel some measure of control. Both are seeking to not feel powerless again.

Until we acknowledge this, we’ll keep pointing fingers without understanding where to look. We’ll keep feeding the loop.

This is not about blaming mothers, victims, or men. It’s about seeing how the roles we play are handed down silently, patterned into our bodies, our relationships, our survival mechanisms. Until we question those roles, we remain stuck inside them, calling it justice or empowerment when it’s often reenactment.

The real liberation lies in seeing the pattern – not just the person. To stop protecting our identity as victim or savior or villain, and instead ask: what am I unconsciously repeating?

The moment we stop protecting the roles, we awaken.

This work is uncomfortable, but it’s the only work we’re truly called to do.