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While out canvassing for Catherine Connolly in the Irish Presidential campaign a woman approached, offering to help the team.
That was how I met Molly Smith. After a brief introduction we set out to rap doors and distribute leaflets while bantering along the route. It came up in conversation that Molly hosted a podcast called Healing Gals. Being a regular podcast reviewer for Being Human, my ears pricked, my curiosity stirred.
Into its sixth season, Healing Gals seeks to explore the trauma and challenges that women endure in life, while at the same time trying to devise workable solutions grounded in lived experience, so that gals may heal. Fiercely critical of ‘the Patriarchy’ - which will diminish its lure for misogynists - it is certainly no call to castrate men but is definitely one to emasculate the negative power that males often use to subjugate the women they seek to dominate.
Molly Smyth’s easy-going chatter and engagements with her guests, many of them friends – in the first season she interviews her mum – detracts nothing from the gravitas she brings to Healing Gals.
The podcast is a frank, at times an uncomfortably candid exercise, given the cruelty women have experienced - often at the hands of abusive partners – but the point Molly Smyth is making is that women need to stand up and simple refuse to take it. Part of this healing process is developing the mettle to openly discuss experiences without shame. Indeed, shame is the core theme of the opening episode in the first season.
This is not the work of some starry-eyed idealist. A Drogheda woman, Molly Smyth knows her subject well and is practical about the advice she offers. And while it might not have been her intention, many men stand to gain from engaging with her work. There is huge number of coping strategies on offer that ranges across the sexes.
Into its sixth season, Healing Gals seeks to explore the trauma and challenges that women endure in life, while at the same time trying to devise workable solutions grounded in lived experience, so that gals may heal. Fiercely critical of ‘the Patriarchy’ - which will diminish its lure for misogynists - it is certainly no call to castrate men but is definitely one to emasculate the negative power that males often use to subjugate the women they seek to dominate.
Molly Smyth’s easy-going chatter and engagements with her guests, many of them friends – in the first season she interviews her mum – detracts nothing from the gravitas she brings to Healing Gals.
The podcast is a frank, at times an uncomfortably candid exercise, given the cruelty women have experienced - often at the hands of abusive partners – but the point Molly Smyth is making is that women need to stand up and simple refuse to take it. Part of this healing process is developing the mettle to openly discuss experiences without shame. Indeed, shame is the core theme of the opening episode in the first season.
This is not the work of some starry-eyed idealist. A Drogheda woman, Molly Smyth knows her subject well and is practical about the advice she offers. And while it might not have been her intention, many men stand to gain from engaging with her work. There is huge number of coping strategies on offer that ranges across the sexes.
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