Healing Our Relationships by Reclaiming the Masculine and Feminine Within Each of Us

Masculine and feminine energies are related to everything. Explore an inclusive perspective of these two sacred polarities.

The challenge with our modern love paradigm is that we’ve allowed our desires to be completely relinquished in service to the safety of being connected to another person. We’ve allowed our desire for attachment to annihilate our need for personal autonomy. This brings us back to Dr. Gabor Maté’s premise of attachment trumping authenticity, and back to my perspective that an interdependent model of love is the means to restore this imbalance. But how do we get there from here? First, we have to understand the instinctual aspects of who we are and what we’ve been programmed to reject. Enter masculine and feminine dynamics.

Given the loaded connotation that often accompanies describing something as a “masculine trait” or viewing something as a more “feminine way of being,” many often wonder if there isn’t a more inclusive way to describe these energetics. The Masculine/Feminine polarities that exist within all of us have also been described in the context of Sun/Moon, Yang/Yin, Shiva/Shakti, Linear/Circular, Alpha/Omega, Logic/Intuition, Dominant/Submissive, and Ego/Soul, to name just a few. Because I understand that the labels masculine and feminine carry centuries of baggage along with them, I’m going to invite you to use the energetic description above that resonates most with you as you read.

A lot of what has historically caused us to bristle a bit when we think about the embodiment of both our masculine and feminine characteristics is that our society often puts the focus on the distorted elements of these energetics. The societal framing of these inner polarities has largely been co-opted into descriptions of how these elements manifest in their most warped forms. A society that teaches us to reject fundamental aspects of who we are results in wounded representations of the masculine and feminine within.

The good news is that we are able to identify energetic patterns that tend to represent what masculine and feminine dynamics look like—both in their wounded and healthier forms. To get us started, here’s a baseline description that gives us an idea of how we’ll explore human behavior through the lens of these dynamics in the chart to the left.

Why Do We Need to Understand This?

You might be asking yourself: What do these dynamics have to do with the path of finding fulfillment in our relationships? And I’ve got to tell you, after countless hours of curious exploration—supporting clients with various backgrounds, sexual orientations, life stages, and pain points—I’ve come to understand that these energetics are literally connected to everything. Almost every aspect of the ways this society conditions all of us to self-abandon stems from a warped perspective of these forces:

valuing productivity at all costs

feeling shame or as though we are “too much” when we’re having a hard time

fearing failure and constantly striving to be more

allowing stress and burnout to be a normalized aspect of our daily lives

believing we are somehow diminished when we make mistakes or “fail”

aggression, othering, or emotional cut-offs as a means to deal with conflict

working at jobs we hate to accumulate material success

numbing our pain and anxiety with an array of maladaptive behavior patterns

What I’m suggesting is that the values our society prioritizes are a perpetuation of our core wounds. We are in a never-ending state of flux between striving to feel like we’re enough (wounded masculine energy), or judging ourselves for being irrational, weak, insecure, and needy (wounded feminine energy). This is true for all of us—regardless of gender, socioeconomic status, or cultural background. The reverence held for the wounded masculine, and the shame experienced around our wounded feminine energy, are such consistent themes in our collective pain points that they’ve become the baseline through which I view the path to healing.

I believe we’re entering a new era as a human race—a time when we’re coming to a collective state of remembrance about the ultimate truths of who we are. This is an expanded awareness that we are not the cars we drive, we are not the things we do to pay our bills, we are not the fancy vacations we take, and we are not what other people think about us. We are Souls. We are the energetic force that remains the moment after we leave these physical bodies. The remembrance of this fact is the tangible rise of the feminine. The feminine is the energetic force that is in tune with the Source energy we come from. It is the energy of the Soul. And I believe that in order to return to an integrated state between our healthy masculine and healthy feminine energy, those willing to embrace the integration of their healthy feminine energetics will be the leaders in the structural shifts our society requires.

An adapted excerpt from Sovereign Love: A Guide to Healing Relationships by Reclaiming the Masculine and Feminine Within by Dené Logan. Learn more about the book.