Fueling the fire
Crystal Andrus-Morissette turned her anger into power, and she’s teaching women everywhere how to step into theirs.
BY JULIE LAWRENCE
Trigger Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence and sexual harassment. I acknowledge that this content may be difficult for some. I encourage you to care for your safety and well-being first before reading this article.
Sparking the flame
On the outside, her household looked typical for the time: male chauvinist bread-winning father, stunning mother with movie-star good looks. But under that shiny surface lurked an anger that constantly threatened to bubble over.
“I found out at a way too young age that when my mother was 14, she was abducted, raped and left for dead by two men. When the men were caught, they only got 6 months probation,” explains Andrus-Morissette. “My mother was a wounded woman and so very early on I had to take on that mother role. Don’t get me wrong, my mom was fierce, but she exposed me way too early to adult concepts.”
Unfortunately the cycle of abuse continued with her daughter. Andrus-Morissette’s parents divorced when she was 12, after which a string of her mother’s suitors sexually abused her. She was dragged behind a bush and raped by a stranger and was raped on a regular basis by the father of children she was hired to babysit. When she was a teenager, she was diagnosed with HPV, which lead to cervical cancer (a sign of sexual abuse that her doctor chose to ignore).
Nevertheless, as they say, she persisted. Andrus-Morissette was a straight ‘A’ student. She excelled in the classroom and on the sports field, earning a scholarship to university. When many teenagers would have fallen apart, she stayed focused and driven, believing she was destined for greatness despite the trauma early in her life.
“I still had those first 12 years of my life believing that I was special and that was still within me. I just kept thinking, you’ll see. I’ll show you. I’ll show you my worth.”
When she was 21, she opened her first health club called Crystal’s Health and Fitness. By the age of 25, it became a chain. Along the way she found time to marry and have two daughters, but by 30, things started to change. Her husband—who, admittedly, she married to “help pay the rent”—became overly controlling. She needed out, but with two young kids in tow – four and five years old – she was told that she would be nothing without him.
“I had these two daughters who literally looked at me like the sun and moon rose and fell on me, and I didn’t want to get it wrong with them.”
Again, she channeled all that anger as fuel; she took it and used it.
"I still had those first 12 years of my life believing that I was special and that was still within me. I just kept thinking, you’ll see. I’ll show you. I’ll show you my worth.”
Turning point
She would need every ounce of that fuel as she had become a successful woman in a man’s world. She had just self-published her debut book Simply Woman, and had just completed her second when she had her most pivotal run-in with misogyny.
“I was a single mother, maybe 35, and I was out for dinner with a business associate (a supplement sponsor) to renew my contract. He ordered champagne, which I thought was inappropriate, but I really needed this contract. I’m a single mother, your products are already in my books, and my publisher is counting on you.”
If this feels ominous, it should.
“We walked down the stairs to the underground parking and he pushed me up against the wall, sticks his hand straight up my dress and says ‘I want to fuck your cunt.'”
She went to a lawyer and, ultimately, lost the contract, but this exchange made something crystal clear for Andrus-Morrisette: she would never be at the mercy of a man for income ever again. She would never pretend – the dance had to be over.
Building an empire
Every great structure is built on a strong solid foundation, and for Andrus-Morissette her Simply Woman empire is built on her concept of ‘the emotional age’, which differs greatly from what we may think of when it comes to age. Our chronological age is pretty simple: the amount of years we have been alive. Our biological age is how well we take care of ourselves throughout those years. The emotional age, however, is something a touch more complex.
While she’s not the first to present the notion that there are different egos, or selves, alive and well within each of our personalities (I’m looking at you, Freud), she was the first to wrap it in a modern package and address it to women exclusively.
According to Andrus-Morissette, our emotional age plays a crucial role in the way that we show up in love, friendships, family, and work. Through her books, course work and speaking, she helps women understand which emotional age they are operating from: the mother, the daughter or the woman.
“When we are operating in our ‘daughter energy’, we want what we want, but we don’t necessarily know how to get it, so we act out, becoming selfish and demanding,” explains Andrus-Morissette. “Conversely, our ‘mother energy’ makes us put others first and ourselves last, placing an emphasis on safety, security and nurturing.”
As you have probably guessed, neither of these options are ideal when we’re trying to navigate being a professional woman in the world.
“Your ‘mother energy’ will go into work early and she’ll stay late and take care of everyone else and put up with all the crap. Your ‘daughter energy’ will have an affair with the boss. So, we have to find out what our ‘woman energy’ is, because a strong adult woman will not do either of those things.”
Embracing these three selves has proven to be healing for the tens of thousands of women who Andrus-Morissette has helped, especially those trying to recover from underlying trauma. She attributes her own knowledge on the subject to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s ground-breaking book, The Body Keeps the Score, which has helped her to understand that under the surface of all trauma survivors, there exists an undamaged self.
“Our true selves won’t emerge until she feels safe enough to shine. So, our job is not to try to find our woman energy, Our job is to create a life that’s safe enough and an environment that’s supportive enough that she will naturally emerge. She’s already part of you, but our mother energy and daughter energy are battling because that’s all we ever knew.”
If you need proof that this work is the key to recovering from trauma and becoming the woman you were always meant to be, well, look no further than Andrus-Morissette herself. Her ability to overcome what can only be described as a truly horrifying childhood, should be all the evidence you need to make an informed decision as to whether her method works.
Aside from penning six books, she is the founder of the SWAT Institute (which stands for ‘Simply Accredited Woman Trainer), a global organization with the modest mission of healing the world, one woman at a time. The organization is an empowerment coach certificate, currently operating in 45 countries. She also created the Empowerment Spectrum, a tool to help people understand their communication style, their Emotional Age, and which dominant emotional archetype they embody most often.
Aside from penning six books, she is the founder of the SWAT Institute (which stands for ‘Simply Accredited Woman Trainer), a global organization with the modest mission of healing the world, one woman at a time.
An inside job
After spending time with Andrus-Morissette, I get the distinct feeling that world domination is not an overly lofty goal for her. She has the experience, empathy and energy to do anything she wants, but all of that comes at a cost, too; a cost that for a while, like many successful women, she tried to ignore.
“I’m in my fifties now, and I really didn’t feel like I was broken open until my forties, if I’m being honest. I was in my early forties and I’d just written The Emotional Edge. I’d had five best-selling international books and I really was killing it,” she recalls. “But there was this exhaustion and this feeling like I can’t keep this up. It was almost a feeling like it would be better to just check out and end on a high note.”
She bought into the old adage, ‘never let ‘em see you sweat’, feeling that she was supposed to be the expert. Seeking help from a therapist – admitting that she needed help – was a chink in the armour that she had worked so hard to keep impenetrable.
It was worth it though, making her an even more relatable figure. She has let her guard down and healed the relationships from her past (including making amends with her father prior to his death). While not repairing the relationship with her mother, she has forgiven her, not for what she did, but for who she was. (Side bar: In response to the publishing of her first book, her mother incidentally wrote a book herself, a memoir called My Daughter, The Sociopath, which was shockingly never published.)
“I'm in my fifties now, and I really didn’t feel like I was broken open until my forties, if I’m being honest."
New ways to be
During the first wave of the feminist movements, Susan B. Anthony said that if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper or a drudge. If she married rich, she became a pet and a doll. That was it: drudge or doll. Pick one.
Fast-forward a century, and women like Andrus-Morissette are helping us define new ways of being in a patriarchal society.
“We’re out on the front lines creating a new way of being in the world and this is always uncharted territory. We are seeing women stepping into their power, and I don’t mean being power hungry, I mean stepping into their purpose. We are stepping into our humanness, our greatness, our passion and in doing so, we start to stand in equality.”
But one thing hasn’t changed; her desire to keep men from messing with her business. She admits that her work relationship with her husband (her CFO) has run its course and that, for the sake of their marriage, he has to go.
“It’s my empire and I’m not going to be arguing over the subject line of an email.”
I think I can speak for women everywhere when I say, amen to that.DEFY
Julie Lawrence
Julie Lawrence is a journalist and communications specialist from the east coast of Canada. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of DEFY Magazine.