Fierce Feminine Rising: Heal from Predatory Relationships & Recenter Your Personal Power

Due to the nature of some of the quotes I’ve included in this review, I feel the need to include a content warning for abuse and victim-blaming.

With a title like Fierce Feminine Rising: Heal from Predatory Relationships & Recenter Your Personal Power, I expected this book to focus on helping people work through the trauma of an abusive relationship. Ohhh boy was I in for a shock. While there are a few, very few, pieces of wisdom scattered through this book, I fear it would do a lot more harm than good in the hands of someone who is either in an abusive relationship or just out of one.

It’s possible I would have liked this book more with a different title, but I doubt it. The amount of victim-blaming in this work is staggering. With lines like, “You collude in your own downfall...Innocence must be outgrown. It’s a harsh lesson but a necessary one, and perhaps the Soul engineers the whole thing…” and “Not only do you collude in your own abduction by the darkness, but the darkness contains the key to your awakening,” and “At What point did you start to collude with your own downfall? . . . What was in it for you personally -- riches, status, sex?” I found myself literally yelling at the pages of this book.

She talks about a part of this “innocence must be outgrown” thing and calls it the “dark night.” She then lists 7 signs you may be going through a “dark night.” I am here to say, if you are experiencing these “signs” you are probably dealing with clinical depression. They are almost word for word the depression checklist used by medical professionals.

To deal with your depression… I mean “dark night” she recommends a “three-month sabbatical” ideally in “a log cabin in the woods or a quiet house-sit for a friend, or maybe a reclusive ashram setting or vipassana retreat.” Oh the privilege! All you need to heal yourself is the ability to not work while house-sitting for a friend, a month-long trip to Maui, where you also don’t work, and a friend with a “huge country house in Belgium” where you can live, and also presumably not work! See it’s easy! Anyone can do it!

To be fair, the author went through her own abusive relationship. And I TOTALLY understand the desire to give it some meaning by putting spiritual value on it. Unfortunately, the truth is much shittier. Some people just suck and they HURT other people. You didn't deserve it. It wasn't some spiritual test. You didn't orchestrate it before being born. It was meaningless and pointless and AWFUL. And in a fair world, it would NEVER happen. But NO ONE deserved or colluded or engineered their abuse. Abusers are just horrible, awful, irredeemable people who should be fed to a volcano.

There is also a strong Christian slant to this book with a fair bit of conspiracy theory undertones. The author brings up God, Archons, and other Christian concepts often. Something that rubbed me personally the wrong way. And her main underlying concept is that there is a “Dark Agenda” we all need to fight against. Aliens somehow got brought up at one point too. "There have been four earlier attempts at human life on this planet. And four times humanity has died out." It really is all over the place. And don’t worry if you disagree with the author she has a solution for that too. She brings up arguments she knows people will have and then just shuts them down saying, “That’s not true.” No facts, no evidence, no discussion. Example: “It is at this point the New Agers jump in to say that nothing like this can exist. That is not true. And this is how the game continues on.”

Any good info I found in this book ended up coming from other sources that she quoted. There is a seven-page quote from Bernhard Guenther about “Spiritual Predators and Pathological Gurus” that I found highly interesting but would have rather just read the original on Guenther’s website. There was also a green clay ritual I found interesting but the author was given this ritual by another woman.

To sum up: Too much victim-blaming, too much conspiracy theory, not enough helping people heal.

~review by: Bailey Roe

Author: Anaiya Sophia
Destiny Books, 2020
pp. 240, $16.99