Reading Notes: Women Who Run With the Wolves

I have read this book four times. Each time I have read it, I have been a different person. The book did not change. I did. That is one of the things Estes is trying to tell you, and she tells it for 500 pages through stories, because the thing she is saying cannot be said directly without losing something essential in the saying of it.

On the skeleton woman chapter

The skeleton woman is a story from the Inuit tradition. A woman is thrown into the sea by her father. Her body dissolves. What is left is bones. A fisherman finds her, tangled in his line, and drags her to the surface by accident. He runs. She pursues — not because she wants to harm him, but because she is attached to the hook in his line. He eventually turns and looks at her. He untangles her. He falls asleep. She pulls the tear from his eye and drinks it.

Estes uses this story to describe what happens in intimacy at the moment when things get real.

What I find true in this is that intimacy requires a specific kind of willingness — not the willingness to feel good, which is easy, but the willingness to stay when the thing that surfaces is not pretty. The skeleton woman represents the parts of a person that have been drowned, abandoned, left at the bottom. In any intimate relationship, those parts eventually surface. The question is whether the other person runs or stays.

Most people run. Not because they are cowards. Because nothing taught them that the running is the problem, not the skeleton.

The chapter on this is the most accurate map I know of how intimacy actually works. Not the opening, which is the easy part. The moment, roughly six to eighteen months in, when the parts that were submerged begin to rise. What is asked of both people at that moment is enormous. Estes names it clearly: it requires the willingness to untangle what has surfaced rather than flee from it.

I gave a copy of this book to someone who was leaving a relationship in 2024. I did not explain why. They read the skeleton woman chapter and called me. They said: this is what happened. Yes. That is what happened. That is almost always what happened.

On the wild woman archetype

Estes describes the wild woman not as a metaphor but as an actual intelligence that lives in the instinctual body. She calls her La Llorona, Baba Yaga, the Bone Woman. The names change across cultures. The thing they point to does not change.

This intelligence is not the same as emotion. Emotion, in Estes's framework, is often downstream of the wild woman — the felt sense that something is wrong, or right, or off, before the mind can articulate why. The wild woman is the function underneath the feeling. She is older than language. She does not reason. She knows.

The problem is that most women have been trained, from early childhood, to override this intelligence. To be polite. To not cause scenes. To defer. The override is so practiced that it becomes invisible. The woman stops hearing the signal. She starts hearing only the noise of what she is supposed to want.

The work Estes describes is not the acquisition of something new. It is the unburying of something that was always there. This is a meaningful distinction. If the wild woman is something you have to build, then you can be told you are not building correctly. If she is something you have to unbury, the question becomes: what is covering her, and how do you move it.

What is covering her, in most of the women I work with, is the story that their instincts are wrong. The years of being told that what they felt was an overreaction, a misread, a dysfunction. The relationships in which they were gaslit into doubting the very faculty that would have protected them. The cultural message that certainty is unfeminine, that knowing is arrogance, that the correct posture is deference.

The wild woman is what remains when you stop deferring long enough to hear it.

On what Estes gets right about the creative wound

There is a passage in this book that I have returned to more than any other. Estes is writing about the woman who stops creating. She says: the woman who stops creating has stopped receiving life.

This is not hyperbole. She means it literally.

What I understand her to be saying is that the creative act is not about the product. It is about the channel. When a woman makes something, she is in relationship with something larger than the made thing — an intelligence, a knowing, a source that flows through her when she is open to it. The thing she makes is evidence that the channel is open. When she stops making, the channel closes. And what closes with it is not just creativity. It is the capacity to receive.

I have seen this pattern many times. A woman stops writing, or painting, or dancing, or cooking with care. She says she is too busy, or she lost interest, or she is not talented enough to continue. What she is usually doing is punishing herself. Or protecting herself. Or both. She has decided, consciously or not, that the making is not safe. That it costs too much. That it will be used against her somehow.

The creative wound, as Estes describes it, is not a wound to the work. It is a wound to the instinct that precedes the work. Healing it does not mean producing more. It means becoming willing to receive again. To be permeable to what wants to come through.

This is, I think, why the work of healing and the work of creative recovery are so often the same work. They require the same opening.

What stayed

After four readings, what stays is this: Estes is not writing about women in some general or abstract sense. She is writing about a specific intelligence that lives in the body, that was present before the training began, and that persists through all of it — quieter than the trained voice, but older, and more reliable.

The book is long. Some of it is dense with Jungian scaffolding that requires patience. But the stories hold the argument better than the analysis does. If you read only the skeleton woman, La Llorona, and Bluebeard, you will have the essential thing.

The essential thing is that the wildness you were told was the problem was never the problem. It was the answer. It took 500 pages and four readings to hear that fully. I am still hearing it.