The Emotional
Self-Defense Course
for women &
nonbinary folks
Patriarchy coerces us to sever connection from
our body's felt knowledge of our own experiences.
It also silences the language we need for naming its harm and
connecting the personal to the political.
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The Emotional Self-Defense Course combines training in somatic awareness and trauma with the feminist analysis we need to name and transform the systems shaping our lives.
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Is this course only talking about patriarchy?
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No. Any sound feminist teaching is rooted in the decades of research in intersecting systems.
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Can I do the course on my own timeframe?
Yes! The Emotional Self-Defense Course is 12 online modules of teaching videos (4.5 hours) and the 12 ESD Course Workbooks (200 pages).
The Course is online and self-paced.
All the online feminist studies courses I create are rooted in my research conducted across 2 Ph.D. programs, 3 M.A. programs, and 15 years of teaching inside and outside academia.
My work is part of a growing and vital conversation on the body, power, trauma, healing, and spirituality.
~Dr. Kimberly B. George
What are the Emotional Self-Defense Course Workbooks?
The 12 ESD Course Workbooks are your learning portals to connect with the knowledge gestating within you.
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I created the ESD Course Workbooks through innovative Ph.D. research in ethnic studies on feminist writing practices, trauma studies, and somatic experience.
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The pages are holding spaces for your awakenings, grief, and growth.
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The exercises help you link the video teachings in the course to your own desire, creativity, and life transformations.
The 12 Modules of teaching videos in the ESD Course are important because they distill down and make accessible my extensive body of work in feminist studies, ethnic studies, counseling psychology, and contemplative studies.
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But...
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The 12 ESD Course Workbooks are equally critical because their teachings, somatic practices, and writing prompts help you access and integrate your knowledge and body of experiences you already hold.
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Feminist learning is both about reuniting with a lineage of suppressed women's knowledge, texts, and histories...
And...
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"doula-ing" the suppressed & embodied knowledge held within you.
The ESD Course Workbooks guide you to read your body as a sacred text— and birth your voice, again and again.
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"If, like me, you find that trying to get a feminist education from social media alone is deeply unsatisfying, you snoozed past any opportunities to learn what Women's Studies was actually about when you might have had the option to study it, and reading ALL the books is a nice idea but it's just not going to happen... Kimberly's work merges present moment exploration of what it is like to live in a non-cis-white-male body with an in depth and elegantly articulated synthesis of the history and highlights of feminist writings."
Jessica Farrell, Creative Leadership Coach
Whether you are building on prior studies in feminist history—or The Emotional Self-Defense Course is your first experience—you will find transformational, life-changing ideas.
The Online & Self-Paced Emotional Self-Defense Course Provides:
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trauma-informed teaching
(but we also question the patriarchal,
white, and class-privilege based assumptions in
neuroscience trauma studies!)
feminist theory for naming
power dynamics
("theory" is about having language
to name our embodied and relational experiences
inside larger, intersecting systems)
self-assessment guides and exercises
(to reflect contemplatively as we connect the feminist
teaching to our identities and lived stories)
recommended readings
of feminist foremothers
(readings are optional, but get introduced to
women's knowledge silenced in most of our education!)
frameworks for intergenerational healing, creative awakenings, and community care
(to heal unhealed stories and to unfurl transformative change)
The 12 ESD Course Learning Modules
Module 1:
Mind-Body Reconnection As the Foundation of Emotional Self-Defense
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Learn why reclaiming mind-body reconnection is your feminist superpower —and
how patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism coerce us to be disconnected.
Module 2:
Trauma as Feminist Knowledge
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Learn why trauma studies holds important insights—
but also why most trauma
studies is still encased in white, white,
and class-privilege based models of the body.
Module 3:
Patriarchy's Looking Glass
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Learn from Virginia Woolf's 1929 theory of the looking glass that linked the psychology of patriarchy at the kitchen table to other systems of domination (like colonization).
Module 4:
Engaging Men Who Use the Language of Feminism
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Learn to read the power dynamics of male feminist privilege in a time of #metoo and learn to spot and assess the red flags of male fake feminism.
Module 5:
Preventative Feminist Medicine
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Learn to assess how wounds and traumas perpetuated by patriarchy, capitalism ,
and white supremacy are then targeted by narcissists and sociopaths.
Module 6:
Everyday Patriarchal Abuse
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Learn how to identify, name, and no longer negotiate with male defensive mechanisms that are meant to gaslight you from knowing what you know.
Module 7:
Mirroring, Exhaustion, & The Naming Labors of Feminist Life
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Consider neuroscience research on mirroring, attachment, brain development, and emotions— then learn how a feminist reframing gives us entirely different questions to pose.
Module 8:
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Feminist Grief Work
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Learn how to grieve how patriarchy hurts everyone of all genders; how to trust the transformations of our grief; and howto turn collective grief into creative power,
healing, and community.
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Module 9:
Community Care Practices as Emotional Self-Defense
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Learn how dominant systems (like patriarchy) shape access to certain forms of community and marginalize other forms. Then, let's imagine feminist
kinship and protection from the model of tree roots.
Module 10:
Reconnection to the Earth as Emotional Self-Defense
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Learn Indigenous feminist research on how settler colonial violence is central to reproducing patriarchy. Also, learn how reconnection to land, water, and ancestral memory is foundational to flourishing feminist life.
Module 11:
Intergenerational
Healing as Emotional Self-Defense
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Learn how healing of patriarchy is three generations deep and develop practices for reclaiming all the split pieces of our own identities and histories.
Module 12:
Awakening Your Creative Power as Emotional Self-Defense ​
Learn how strengthening our creative practices is core to healing the wounds of patriarchy—and how healing patriarchy is core to unleashing all our creativity.
My life's work is teaching the transformative texts of feminist history and theory.
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The language of "theory" can feel distancing.
BUT... feminist theory isn't about being elite and academic.
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It's about the fact that feminist writers, scholars, and artists have given us language and images for the realities we live within.
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It's about recognizing that most of our education systematically denied us their voices.
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(Over and over, my clients and readers say, "Thank you for the language.")
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The language I offer as a writer and teacher is rooted in my devotion to studying feminist theory.
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The language cuts through gaslighting.
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The language connects you to your body.
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The language honors community-based power.
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The Emotional Self-Defense Course draws on my body of work and research in my most distilled, accessible format yet.
~Dr. Kimberly B. George
