313. Beyond the Hero's Journey with Stacey Simmons

Psychotherapist and author Stacey Simmons talks about hero's journey versus the queen's path, their impacts on modern-day literature, and which one you should be using in your story.

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Check out Stacey's website:
https://staceysimmonsphd.com/

Grab a copy of her book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/775761/the-queens-path-by-stacey-simmons-phd/

Follow Stacey on her socials:
https://www.tiktok.com/@staceysimmonsphd https://www.instagram.com/staceysimmonsphd/

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. The hero's journey is a framework that stories have used for centuries. But is it time to move past this one-size-fits-all approach and rethink the traditional hero archetype? Psychotherapist Dr. Stacey Simmons, author of The Queen's Path, is here to offer her insights on this topic and another method that you may want to use.

Jennia: Well, I'm thrilled to have you here and I've already enjoyed our discussion even before recording!

Stacey Simmons: I'm really delighted to be here too, Jennia! This is really great. I'm really excited.

Jennia: Well, you've written a fascinating book and I can already tell that it's going to influence both how I edit and how I read—

Stacey Simmons: Oh, excellent!

Jennia: —so I'd love to have you talk a little bit about what went into writing that and what even led to realizing that there was a need for this book in the market.

Stacey Simmons: Well, I'll start with the second question because I didn't know that there was a need for this book in the market. I would love to say that I had some grand plan that I wanted to discover something new and I—But it wouldn't be true. What happened was, I had been working in entertainment for almost two decades, in and around entertainment. So working in a university that had big entertainment connections and working as a producer and it just was eating my brain, like, entertainment was kind of killing my soul. And I started having really terrible nightmares.

Jennia: Oh no.

Stacey Simmons: And the nightmares lasted literally for years, like, every night for years. Just nightmares, nightmares, nightmares. And I got into psychoanalysis, which led me to decide to become a therapist—

Jennia: Oh okay!

Stacey Simmons: —and leave entertainment. And when I made that decision, I chose to go to a place called Pacifica Graduate Institute up in Santa Barbara here in California. And the minute I stepped foot on the campus, my nightmares stopped.

Jennia: That is amazing!

Stacey Simmons: So I was like, "Okay, I'm paying attention now." And at the end of this kind of two-and-a-half, almost three-year period, you have to write a thesis. And it had been such a difficult—And I don't mean, only like the subject matter in terms of, like, the difficulty of the courses, but the program is very psychoactive. So you're, like, dredging up your stuff while you're, like, becoming a therapist, right?

Jennia: Ahh yes. That can be incredibly hard just to deal with those emotions that are being brought back to the surface, yeah.

Stacey Simmons: 100 percent. So when it came time to write a thesis, I'm like, "I wanna do something easy," (Jennia laughs). "I worked in animation. I'm gonna write about archetypes and animation. That's what I'm gonna do." And I wanted to do, like, how women have been portrayed in animation since the first animated film, which was Snow White up to the present at the time, which was 2013, was Frozen.

Jennia: Mhm.

Stacey Simmons: And what I found was that there was this other archetype out there that was not a hero's journey. It was the story of a divided woman who eventually becomes sovereign over herself and owns herself. And I was like, "Oh, this is nice. You know, this is a nice story. I'll, you know, write up my thesis and be done." They wouldn't let me do the whole canon. They told me I had to focus on just two movies 'cause I only had 50 pages. So—

Jennia: (laughs) I wasn't all COME BACK TO

Stacey Simmons: (laughs) Yeah, so I wrote up my 50 pages. I went about my life, started a psychotherapy practice. And then that archetype kept showing up in my therapy practice. She showed up in my patients. She showed up in the movies I was watching—

Jennia: Ohh, interesting.

Stacey Simmons: —She showed up in the television series I was watching. I was like, "Hold on. What the heck is happening here?" And it kind of—you know, like the nightmares, it kind of haunted me. And I had to write it down and put it in front of me and figure out what I was seeing. And that's where it came from. And, you know, luckily for me, having gone to Pacifica, where they focus on archetypal psychology, it was kind of easy to see it as an archetype because we're so steeped in that, in that program. And so I was like, "Oh, this is something nobody's described before. That's a little worrying. And oh my gosh, I guess I better do it."

Jennia: Yeah, that really says, too, just even what is a society that we focus on because we do hear about archetypes a lot. Not just if you're in, like, the whole Jungian school of psychology, but even just for character development or finding common themes. And so it does make you then wonder, why is this something that hasn't been addressed more thoroughly before now? So I wondered if you had any thoughts on that too?

Stacey Simmons: I mean, to be fair, I think nobody's been looking. I think we have accepted, you know, Campbell, when he discovered the hero's journey, was like 1944. And it had existed for thousands of years before that, right? And he looked at it for decades before he wrote that book. And he called it the "monomyth of human experience," you know, but he didn't let women have a role in it. He said that women were the center that the hero was trying to get to.

Jennia: It's very [Super] Mario [Bros] (laughs).

Stacey Simmons: 100 percent Mario (laughs). Exactly. And people just accepted it. And they tried to adapt the monomyth. They took his authority. Which we're trained to do, right?

Jennia: Yes, exactly.

Stacey Simmons: They took his authority that the hero's journey is the central story of humanity, as opposed to saying, is it, though? Is it the only one? Maybe there's something else. And I think it's taken this long, culturally, for us to even allow the idea that there might be another archetypal story out there.

Jennia: Yeah, that's a good point, too, about just implicitly trusting people who are in places of authority or a perceived place of authority, since, as you and I know probably from psychology studies, that you don't actually have to have a place of authority to do that. But, yeah, so even just reaching that point where people feel comfortable questioning it, and not that you are, like, the conspiracy theorist, because you are questioning it, but people realize there might be something behind that too. But before we go into the different journeys a little bit, could you explain exactly what the hero's journey is if you had to summarize it?

Stacey Simmons: I will paraphrase Joseph Campbell himself. He said, "Boy—"

Jennia: Here we go!

Stacey Simmons: Yeah! "Boy lives in the ordinary world. Boy leaves the ordinary world for the extraordinary world. Boy has a quest. Boy learns something important, becomes informed or enlightened, and loses something important on the way and returns to his people with the boon of his experience to bestow upon them the boon or the elixir of life." And depending on which expert you study Campbell with, it might be nine to 17 steps on the hero's journey.

Jennia: Well, in your book, you've written about how the hero's journey isn't representative of most women's experiences. So can you share why that is?

Stacey Simmons: I mean, the reason from a purely, you know—I mean, it might be—Maybe it's sociological, maybe it's a little bit on the feminist side. I mean, I don't really care. I'm staunchly feminist, so it's fine. But women have a different experience of the world than men. And it's because for thousands of years, women have not had equality, parity, autonomy, and sovereignty. And so you can't walk into a meeting as a woman. And even if the meeting is all women, you can't walk into a meeting and presume that everybody's going to see you as an equal. You can't walk into a public place and presume your safety. Like, women know this, we know this instinctively. We learn it from a very young age, so—And people judge us on things that have nothing to do with our value in the world. They judge us on our looks. They judge us on our bodies' shape and size. They judge us on our voices. Like, things that have nothing to do with whether or not we're capable or intelligent or have anything to bring to the table. And other things like virginity and sexuality. We get judged on things that have nothing to do with our contribution.

Jennia: Yeah. You also wrote about the different societal and familial obligations that women have, which are usually ignored quite often in literature as a whole.

Stacey Simmons: Yeah, completely. Like nobody says to—You know, when Superman's interviewing for his job at the Daily Planet, Perry White doesn't say, "Well, you know, is your job as a reporter here and your nightly engagement in vigilante justice, is it going to interfere with your desire to be a father and a husband?" Nobody presumes that a man has a different path to becoming himself. That he has to worry about other people's roles and expectations of him. Nobody does that for men. Men don't have to hold that while they're trying to also become themselves or attain some goal in the world. And women do. We have to—Even if we don't care, even if we don't want to get married or have children, people presume that that is a role that we should want. And so then we have to navigate other people's expectations when it might not even be something that's on our radar at all.

Jennia: Yeah. And you see that even with, like, the celebrity magazines. You know, so and so is, like, 54 and just getting married, nobody cares. But then you see something like Jennifer Aniston, where for a few decades, really, it just felt like every single front-cover piece that you saw was about, "Is she getting married? Is she pregnant? Is she having a baby? How does she feel about all this?" Well, obviously, we can't presume to know any of that. And yet that was the focus.

Stacey Simmons: Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, you know, even the way we think about women when we are held in esteem, like, someone like Princess Diana or Meghan Markle or something—You know, that we go through these things of looking at them from multiple points of view that almost always have to do with her subjectivity. Her being a subject to society or to a husband or to a culture, not about her as a human being. Like, you know, nobody looked at Meghan Markle and said, "Oh, you know, she's a really talented actor. Let's talk about her as an artist." No, you know, "She's not fit to be queen," therefore, because she's not these other things, right?

Jennia: Right, exactly. Or monitoring their weight every other day and talking about it and discussing it and what that could possibly mean. Which also usually almost always goes back to the whole pregnancy rumor (scoffs).

Stacey Simmons: 100 percent. Exactly.

Jennia: Well, shifting a little bit. If we move into the heroine's journey, how is that different from the hero's journey, but also, why is it still not quite what we should be going for?

Stacey Simmons: So the heroine's journey started with—I think it started with Maureen Murdock. She was a student of Campbell. And she really petitioned him to both collaborate with her and try to help her delineate or define a heroine's journey. Because she felt that women deserved the call to adventure and women had similar experiences. And, you know, Campbell famously told her that women didn't need to take the journey, they were the center of the hero was trying to get to. Again, very Mario, right?

Jennia: Yes.

Stacey Simmons: And she disagreed. And she's a psychoanalyst, and she was writing in the 80s and 90s, so her stuff is really kind of more spiritual, kind of New Agey. When you look at it now, it's a little bit—It feels a little dated. She very famously said she was not writing for writers, she was writing for psychoanalysts and therapists. So hers is a little—you know, it's very much, like, you know, a woman on a heroine's journey has to make peace with her feminine side. That was her thing in that. For me, it was, ehh. It feels like what you're saying is that the journey of women, in that particular period of time, she was trying to acknowledge that women had to deny part of themselves to participate in culture. And I think that's valid. But it's not a heroine's journey. Right?

Jennia: Right, yeah. That's a denying of the self. It's not an acceptance of it.

Stacey Simmons: Exactly. And there are other writers, Gail Carriger and a couple others who have, like, a journey where the character is trying to get to community. Like, I think Carriger's is as close to mine as anybody has gotten so far. But she and I still have differences. Like, there's no divided woman on hers. So I think the thing that really distinguishes the queen's path from either the hero's journey or the heroine's journey is this idea of the divided woman. That no matter what track—and women are put on one of two tracks—no matter what track you're on, you're still on the same journey, right? And we like to think of it as separate. Because we have this idea, like, of mean girls or, you know, where there's the pretty girl or the mean girls and then there's the ostracized girls. Both sets of women are on the same path, and it's a trap. If you keep women divided against each other, if you keep a woman divided against herself, then she's not competing with you.

Jennia: Oh, yeah. I never—Well, I've heard about that before. But when you think about it, too, like, even within literature and that this idea is being espoused over and over and so it just becomes part of our accepted view of how the world is and that, yeah, even maybe how that then reflects in our own lives about how we categorize people that we encounter.

Stacey Simmons: Exactly, exactly. And the idea of the divided woman and sovereignty is what separates, I think, the hero's journey or heroine's journey from the queen's path.

Jennia: Could you give an example of each from very pop culture references people will probably understand or recognize?

Stacey Simmons: Sure. First of all, there are two sub archetypes of the queen. So one is the maiden in search of relationship or MISOR These are acronyms that I created because the existing archetypes were so fraught with difficult meaning. So, like the idea of princess or witch—

Jennia: Ahh yeah.

Stacey Simmons: —we have so much meaning associated with them, it's really hard to get out of that in our heads. So the MISOR is the one that we typically align with. Like, she's Glinda in Wicked. She's Cinderella. She's Snow White. Right? Like, but she's also Regina George from Mean Girls. Right? So a woman who fits the standards is pretty—is trying it—knows that in order to get along, she's got to be liked, she's got to submit to authority. And then the other side is magical, isolated, powerful and endangered, or MIPE. And that character, we recognize her right away. Like, she's Elphaba in Wicked. She's Janis Ian in Mean Girls. And at the beginning of Mean Girls, she's also Cady, right? Like, we know her. So just understanding that women are always placed in one of these tracks. And this is true in characters, but it's also true in real life. Like, we grow up with this from the time we're little. Like, by the time we're eight years old, as women, we're told, "Be nice," right? Like, be small, be quiet.

Jennia: Right, yeah. That whole thing about, like, "Don't make a fuss, it's not a big deal." I think this was something you talked about in your book, too, about women being portrayed as overemotional. And yet the reality is, as you said there, that so many women are taught or do this in their everyday life. They hold their emotions in check or don't let them out because they're serving other people's emotions first. Or letting those emotions or the ones that are being expressed and validated.

Stacey Simmons: Mhm. That's exactly it. That's our job. As a therapist, it's kind of crazy. I'm part of a really large practice and we have four or five men therapists and there's, like, 40 therapists in our practice. And the men—we have a really hard time placing people with the male therapist. Because people wanna talk to women about their feelings because women hold the feelings for our culture. So if you have feelings, you want a woman to hold them, even if you're a man.

Jennia: Yeah. Just as a mom, I can say how incredibly true that was and how much I identified with that when I saw, because I've thought there have been so many times where I'm having a lot of stress from tight deadlines or something else is going on, or maybe there's something impacting my personal life that I don't need to bring my children into. But then they come home and they have a problem with school or with a friend and I then have to act like everything is okay on my end so I can help them process whatever they're going through and so that I can be emotionally available to them. But yeah, it just really got me thinking about that and how often we do it without even realizing we're doing it. Yeah, we just shift into that other mode.

Stacey Simmons: Mhm.

Jennia: And again, yeah, everything does get sort of pushed to the side, but that doesn't mean that we ever then bring it back up and think, "Okay, what is going on with me? What do I need to be dealing with?" (laughs).

Stacey Simmons: Yes, ma'am, that is a hard reality of being woman. And it's one that almost no one addresses. Right? Like we don't talk about this in our culture. It's been maybe 10 years, people have started talking about, like, the emotional overhead and the emotional labor that women do. But, by and large, we don't have the vocabulary to talk about it.

Jennia: Right! Which is why it was really so almost invigorating to see it printed in a book. Because, yeah, I think I've seen it in self-help forums, or a few videos on YouTube, that sort of thing. But again, it's almost just glossed over. They use that phrasing, but they don't define that phrasing. And so now you have this term in your vocabulary, but you may not know exactly what it means or what all it encompasses. And so, again, just seeing that spotlighted here and gone into in depth, I think that alone is just brilliant.

Stacey Simmons: Oh, thank you.

Jennia: You're welcome (laughs).

Stacey Simmons: I appreciate that. We hold the emotions for our families, for our culture. It's something, I think, that we don't talk enough about.

Jennia: Can you think of any forms of media where this is portrayed in a character?

Stacey Simmons: I'd have to really think about that, Jennia. I mean, like, thinking about, like, a film or a novel. I think one of the reasons that people love romance so much is because it gives people relief from that, actually. They're in another realm of emotion where it's not serving someone else.

Jennia: Oh, yeah, I think that's a really good point. Not to also, again, shift topics, but we see that, too, that so many people have this poor opinion of romance, but that just goes into a whole other conversation about why that is. But yeah, it's exactly like you said, it's giving them that space to just be themselves. And it's not so much about, "Here's this expectation weighing down on me. And here's this," because we do see those characters. They feel a lot more open and vulnerable than what you see from women characters in other genres.

Stacey Simmons: Yeah, absolutely. And the characters in romance, they're an idealized version of ourselves, right? They're ready to receive support and emotion. And the love interest is almost always the ideal version as well. Like, the person who's going to overcome their own stuff to be here for and with me. That's not a reality (laughs) in most people's—most women's lives anyway.

Jennia: Yeah. Well, just to bring this all together, if you could think about the queen's path with a romance, what would that look like?

Stacey Simmons: Ah, that's so fabulous. I think romance lends itself to the queen's path really well. I—romance in particular is really clear about the divide. Right? Like, women are easily depicted in romance as divided, either against themselves or they have experiences that say, "No, no, you're going to be only on this path. You're not going to be on this other path." And then as she tries to unite the parts of herself to be whole and complete and authentic, she usually has a—a partner shows up that helps her do that and helps her recognize those aspects of herself. So if we look at the map of the queen's path—if your listeners want it, they can get it for free on my website. Just go get—Just go download it. But the path itself, like when she gets to abjection for her, there's usually somebody there.

Jennia: Mhm.

Stacey Simmons: And the person who's there for her helps her get to the next step, which is choice, and then gets to embodiment, where in romance, it's usually she owns her—either her power as a warrior, or a witch, or a priestess or something, or as a lover. So, I mean, I think most romance gets the queen's path probably better than some other genres.

Jennia: Are there any genres where you think it would be harder to follow the queen's path?

Stacey Simmons: I'm gonna, uh, oh, put my foot in it (both laugh). Like, I think . . . I don't read it, so this is pure speculation on my part. But I think Christian fiction would be really hard. Because I think the idea from the most idealized version of womanhood for Christian fundamentalism or for evangellicism is the MISOR. And so the cultural shift to sovereignty for that woman is not endorsed. So I think it would be hard. I don't—But I don't read that genre, so I don't know. Right? That's just external belief. But, I mean, the thing about archetypes is they're in us.

Jennia: Mhm.

Stacey Simmons: I didn't create this. I discovered it. So it's not something that I'm saying, "This is the way," right? This is what I saw in looking at movies and films and fairy tales and novels and plays and sacred literature. The archetype is there, and it lives out in the world, and it lives in us. So we reproduce it all the time. We don't reproduce it because somebody found my story map, and they're like, "Oh, this is what I'm supposed to do." No, the story map came from people doing this for thousands of years. And it just says, "If you want to follow the thing that seems to work, here, I codified it for you." But, yeah, the archetypal model itself, it's in us. We reproduce it all the time (laughs).

Jennia: What was one of the earliest examples you saw of the queen's path when you were doing your research?

Stacey Simmons: Well, there were two that were really striking. Well, three, I guess. So one was in the very first poem ever written down. It's a poem called Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart. And it's a Sumerian poem. And that's like 6,000 years old. And it shows this woman who is on a quest to the underworld, where she has to meet her sister-self, Ereshkigal.

Jennia: Mmm.

Stacey Simmons: And she arises through the seven gates to come back from the underworld. She takes on all of the parts of herself that she had to put down in order to go to the underworld. And she becomes a queen when she comes back. So that's the oldest one, but it was—I found it in the Christian Bible. I found it in the Hebrew Bible, like, in the story of Lilith and Eve. I found it in the story of Mary of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene. Like, she shows up everywhere. She's there for us all the time.

Jennia: Yeah. I do think it's important to bring that up just so people realize this really is not a new concept or idea or a configuration of how women are portrayed and how they have gone through their journeys in life. But it's really been there as long as we've had the written word to record it.

Stacey Simmons: Exactly. It's just—It's like anything. Like, when things are so steeped in your society. Like,  in depth psychology, we talk about invisible archetypes being the most dangerous.

Jennia: Mmm.

Stacey Simmons: So when an archetype is undefined and unnamed, it just lives in the unconscious and just haunts the unconscious like a poltergeist. And that's true whether it's the personal unconscious or the collective unconscious of culture. So, yeah, it wasn't until, what, the 90s and Greg Maguire started writing about the Ugly Stepsister and the—

Jennia: Yes!

Stacey Simmons: —Elphaba, and we started thinking about the baddies, right? And that they had another life. Before that, stories about women ended with marriage and ended with the happily ever after. And, I mean, it's what, 30 years since we've stopped presuming that? So it's not very long.

Jennia: Well, before we end, could you share some favorite modern examples of stories that utilize the queen's path framework?

Stacey Simmons: Oh my gosh, so many. Like—

Jennia: List them all! (laughs)

Stacey Simmons: —All of the Katniss—Anything with Katniss Everdeen and the whole entire Hunger Games series. Like, it's all right there. I mean, Mean Girls. Wicked. Legally Blonde. Waitress, one of my favorite movies and favorite musicals. Game of Thrones. All the female characters are on the queen's path. Oh, and Promising Young Woman! Oh my gosh, she never gets to sovereignty, though. Her story ends in the third quadrant.

Jennia: Thank you! I feel like we could almost call this an ode to Wicked because it (both laugh). Just very timely, so thank you for that.

Stacey Simmons: I might break out into song (laughs).

Jennia: Yeah. Trendy topics. Yeah, if you want to just sing "Defying Gravity" to close this out (both laugh).

Stacey Simmons: No, thank you. You don't want that. Trust me (laughs).

Jennia: Well, thank you—

Stacey Simmons: Thanks so much, Jennia. I really—This is so much fun!

Jennia: I agree. This has been fantastic!

Jennia: Well, thank you for listening and be sure to check out this show notes for additional information. And then please join me next week when Annie Sklaver Orenstein will tell us how to sell a book without having a large following or platform. Thanks again!