For a woman without Erotic power, the place of desire hardens into complaint both internally and externally. A primary feeling of insufficiency exists that her mind rushes in to rationalize. It is essential to understand the order of things. If she cuts off Eros, there is no flow of power through her desire.
Without desire, two things hap- pen: first, conditioned desire—the autopilot version of desire—uses up what power she does have. Second, without the nourishment that desire would guide her to, a feeling of lack and insufficiency undergirds her life.
Lack is a powerful mind state. She may even be convinced she is performing acts of generosity while having lack as the foundation of her consciousness. She will feel herself in a cage with no way out—passive and powerless.
She forms a negativity-based identity that takes on its own power. To scrounge for whatever power it can, it will pull first from her and then those around her. It will focus on how it has been harmed and what is missing, with an underlying question that becomes a demand, "How will I get mine?"
She begins to feel people and the world itself are against her. She lives in a state of self-protection and defense. She is looking to be offended about the many injustices she perceives have been done to her. She is unconscious of her impact in the world and also of how much she demands from others. She may go through the motions of offering, but in the end, she takes more than she gives, believing she has been given nothing and has had everything taken from us.
She lacks the self-reflection to see the impact of her complaints on those around her whether they are overt or covert. She has a tumescent satisfaction when people feel bad or feel bad for her. She pushes away those who will not support her identity as "harmed" and draws in those who will. It is a powerless person's revenge for all the world has done to her. Collusion replaces connection. This sense of lack in someone's communication can be quite subtle, but there is invariably a note of, "I was wronged."
Another marker of this identity is that of the long-suffering martyr. She tells herself she is there helping others, and may even convince them of such, when in fact she is using her call to drain everyone around her. She has taken on the identity of suffering and must hold it in place to distract the world from the fact that she will not switch on her own power and conceal the various ways she is drawing it from those around her.
Her life is an ever-increasing maintenance of finding ways to get power from others through complaint, discontent, loud silence, control, and subtle threats, all while donning an identity of selflessness.
What she does not understand about the type of woman she is being is that the basic insufficiency is in her lack of acknowledgment of the self. The complaint she lives in is the powerless expression of her passivity. Life keeps happening to her, sometimes to her liking and sometimes not.
The drive of a long-suffering identity does not stop operating, it just does so beneath the level of consciousness. Her conscious mind believes herself selfless while those around her experience her as self-centered, which is ultimately why she is discontent. She has been taking from others, but that must never be acknowledged or it would disrupt her identity. Furthermore, the taking is not targeted desire; it is whatever she can grab under the radar, so it is not gratifying.
She does all of this as a way to avoid truly turning on her Erotic power. While she is working so hard to convince herself and the world of her lack, it is entirely in her hands to simply turn on the switch. Of course, there is a learning period, but what could be more important or rewarding than learning to work with her own immeasurable power?
