A Book That Changed Me

In the spring of 2017, a story I had been telling myself for years — the one that defined who I loved, how I loved, how I accepted love, and how I saw myself — collapsed. The sheer shock of how badly I had been beaten put me into a state of profound disconnect. Beneath the humming ache of the bruising, I felt empty. What once made sense to me and gave me meaning no longer did.

That spring, I left my abusive husband and the life I had been living and stepped fully into the darkness of the unknown.

This was both easy and difficult. Easy because I intuitively knew that the darkness offered me so many more possibilities than my abusive marriage ever could. Within the quiet of the darkness, for the first time, I saw how battered I had been—physically and emotionally. Years of gaslighting, love bombing, and belittling had left me unsure of my own thoughts and feelings. My confidence was low, but something in me knew I could fix this. What proved harder was figuring out how to move through the darkness and find my way back toward the light.

How does one navigate a loss of identity? This was the question that led me to the work of Jungian analyst and depth psychologist Sylvia Brinton Perera.

As a Jungian analyst and depth psychologist, Sylvia Brinton Perera observed something important in her work with women who came to her for analysis. She found that traditional male-oriented psychological frameworks often lacked the symbolic language needed to adequately hold and make sense of women’s psychological experiences.

Early Jungian psychology emerged within a cultural context in which men played a dominant role. As a result, its symbolic frameworks tended to reflect male-dominated social norms and aligned more closely with masculine models of development and individuation. These frameworks emphasized linear narratives of independence and self-realization, ascent and separation, heroic conquest, transcendence, and progress toward selfhood.

In her clinical work, Sylvia Brinton Perera observed that many women’s experiences could not be adequately understood through these existing male symbolic frameworks because their experiences didn’t organize themselves around those symbolic patterns.

Instead, Sylvia Brinton Perera found that women’s psychic experiences were often cyclical rather than linear, relational rather than purely individualistic, embodied rather than abstract, connective rather than heroic, and rooted in descent, integration, and transformation rather than conquest.

It wasn’t that women had “different problems,” but that the symbolic language available within traditional Jungian psychology often could not adequately contain or interpret these experiences. As a result, under a male lens, women’s psychological experiences were at risk of being misread as pathological—cast as failure, regression, or dysfunction, with the dangerous consequence of rendering meaningful psychic processes as symptoms of disorder.

So how could she help women confront grief, rage, identity collapse, and post-transition disorientation in a way that made it possible to rediscover meaning within them? This is where the myth of Inanna’s Descent became profoundly important to her.

Buried in the sand for thousands of years was the story of a curious young woman who follows her intuition and passes through seven gates to visit her sister in the underworld. In the process, she loses everything that defines her and returns transformed, with a more grounded and paradoxical awareness of life.

In her book Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women, Sylvia Brinton Perera transforms the myth of Inanna into a symbolic map for navigating periods of deep change. Rather than treating the myth as a literal story or moral lesson, she interprets it as an archetypal pattern and symbolic map that can help make sense of experiences such as loss, grief, identity breakdown, or major life transitions.

In this view, Inanna’s descent becomes a sequence of symbolic stages—from the stripping away of identities at the seven gates, to the dark suspension in the underworld, to the eventual return—each representing different phases of inner transformation.

The framework that she presents helps frame experiences like grief or crisis not as failure, but as initiation into a new form of consciousness, where old frameworks of meaning dissolve and a new sense of self gradually emerges.

In essence, she offers women a new interpretive lens for finding meaning in experiences that may initially appear meaningless.

Her framework was the one I used to reestablish the ground beneath my feet at the point in my life where I could feel none. Although it was difficult, I did it intuitively and completely trusted the process. I had nothing to lose that wasn’t lost already.

Rather than rushing to fix what is already in the process of transforming, it supports a different kind of attention—one that can remain present to uncertainty. In this way, experience is not forced into premature resolution, but given space to unfold into something new.

So what is actually changing? Not the lived experience. What changes is the story structure your psyche uses to organize that experience.

The reason why the myth of Inanna’s Descent is powerful as a framework is because it does three key things. It gives structure to what is chaotic. Instead of “everything is falling apart,” there is a beginning (call to descend), stages (seven gates), a depth point (underworld encounter), and a return (integration). It changes moral meaning. Instead of: “I am failing,” it becomes: “I am undergoing a necessary passage.” And it makes experience survivable in a different way—not because the feeling disappears, but because it is no longer interpreted as meaningless or broken. This allows for personal crisis to be reframed as potential initiation, suffering as a meaningful psychic transition, and the “underworld” as part of wholeness rather than a deviation from it.

In essence, what Perera’s work does is restore language to what was previously felt to be unnameable, and reaffirms that feminine experience possesses its own symbolic intelligence.

x Martina