Why Women Are Taught to Doubt What They Know with Psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Vora

Women learn early which parts of themselves make other people comfortable. After enough years, that performance can begin to feel like our identity, and the intuition underneath it goes quiet.

Dr. Ellen Vora spent much of her life inside that worldview. A Yale- and Columbia-trained psychiatrist, she built her life around science and skepticism. Then, during an acupuncture treatment, Ellen received a message she couldn’t explain away, and it opened a question her training couldn’t answer: When someone dies, does the relationship actually end? That experience forced her to reconsider what she believed about grief, intuition, and the limits of what we can prove.

Today, Ellen shares the full story behind her new book, Season of the Witch: A Psychiatrist’s Case for Magic, and why women are taught to give up essential parts of themselves in order to be taken seriously. She argues that we’ve been missing something, and the way back starts in the body.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How being agreeable and low-maintenance can become a form of self-abandonment
• Why women have been taught to distrust their intuition
• How to distinguish intuition from anxiety, and the ways the body signals yes and no
• Why menopause can represent a rebirth rather than a disappearance
• What grief can teach us about continuing relationships with the people we have lost
• Why the “witch” archetype has always been connected to women who are no longer easily controlled
• Simple ways to become more receptive to meaning, guidance, and magic in everyday life

This is a conversation about returning to the parts of ourselves we learned to suppress, and letting life become a little more mysterious and alive.

‍