to have them move away. Demeter women in love relationships that
end may also react thus, as well as a Demeter woman who has
“mothered” a project for years, only to have it fail or be taken over
by others. Such organizational difficulties leave her feeling “ripped
off” and barren.
When the archetype is at its most extreme, a depressed Demeter
woman becomes unable to function and needs psychiatric hospital-
ization. She may become a personification of the grieving goddess
who searched fruitlessly over the earth for Persephone. Like Demeter,
she may not eat, sleep, or bathe. She may pace back and forth, rest-
lessly moving all the time, wringing her hands and grieving, deep
in a severe agitated depression. Or she may sit, like Demeter at
Eleusis, withdrawn, unmoving, and unresponsive. Everything looks
bleak and barren to her, the world is devoid of meaning. She feels
no green and growing quality in her arid life. This reaction is a severe
apathetic depression. In both reactions, agitated and apathetic, hos-
tility underlies her depression: she is angry that a source of meaning
has been taken away.
When a grieving Demeter is hospitalized, of course, she needs
professional help. But had she known that she was so susceptible
to an empty-nest depression, and had she taken four preventive
mental health measures, her reaction would have been much less
severe. Learning how to express anger instead of bottling it up inside
reduces depression. Learning to say no helps avoid getting depleted
and depressed from being overextended and feeling unappreciated
and martyred. Learning to “let go and let grow,” spares her the
wrenching pain of having children (or her supervisees, staff, or cli-
ents) resent her and need to break away. Developing other goddesses
within herself provides her with additional interests besides moth-
ering.
WAYS TO GROW
Demeter women find it easy to recognize the maternal pattern
they embody, including the difficulty of saying no. However, there’s
too often a blind spot when it comes to looking at their negative
feelings and negative behavior toward others. Since these feelings
and actions are what most need to
Demeter: Goddess of Grain, Nurturer and Mother