There’s something I keep coming back to. Women have never been freer, and so many of them have never felt more disconnected from themselves. Those two things exist at the same time. And I think that tension is worth sitting with, because it’s pointing at something real.
We live in a moment where society is slowly pulling back toward “traditional values.” Men are flying abroad to find “softer” women. Comments like that sting, and they’re supposed to. But I think the more interesting question is: why do they sting in that particular way? Because for a woman who’s spent her whole life navigating a world that wasn’t built for her, any jab in that direction hits the same wound every time. The wound that says: you’re too much, and also not enough.
What if the real problem isn’t that women have become too hard, too cold, too unyielding? What if they were just never given an honest, complete model of what it actually looks like to be fully themselves?
The Mirrors We Were Given
Think about the women celebrated throughout history, religion, mythology. There aren’t many. And the ones that do exist were, for the most part, written by men. Filtered through a male gaze, shaped to reflect what men needed to see.
Take the Virgin Mary. Held up across centuries as the model of womanhood: pure, gentle, maternal. Beautiful in her way. But incomplete. She represents one narrow slice of what it means to be a woman, and everything else, the fire, the desire, the shadow, the complexity, gets quietly filed under “undesirable.” The softness is sacred. Everything else gets no name at all.
It’s the same reason there’s been so much conversation in recent years about representation in film. Everyone needs mirrors. Everyone needs to look up and see something reflected back that says: this is valid, this is real, this exists. We understand this instinctively, even when we struggle to articulate it.
So what does a girl do when the only mirrors available to her are men, or women filtered entirely through a perspective that was never really hers?
She adapts. She survives. And she reaches for something psychologist Carl Jung called the Animus.
What Jung Was Actually Talking About
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who spent much of his career trying to map the deeper, stranger layers of the human psyche. One of his core ideas was that we’re never just one thing. Every person carries both masculine and feminine energy within them. The conscious self tends to express the traits associated with its biological sex. But underneath, in the subconscious, lives the energy of the opposite.
For men, Jung called this the Anima: the feminine soul living in the shadows of a man’s inner world.
For women, it’s the Animus: the masculine spirit that lives beneath the surface. And in a balanced life, it’s genuinely a gift. It’s the part of a woman that sharpens her thinking, drives her ambitions, pushes her to pursue what she wants. It’s creative force and determination.
The problem isn’t the Animus itself. The problem is what happens when a woman doesn’t just draw on her masculine energy, but disappears into it. When the Animus stops being one voice among many and becomes the only voice. When it stops being a tool and starts being a total identity.
And the reason that happens is, at its core, so simple it’s almost hard to look at directly. It starts when she’s very young.
It Starts Early
A little girl gets praised for being brave, for being strong, for not crying. She watches “girly” things get eye-rolls. She learns, not from anyone telling her explicitly but from the air itself, that sensitivity is weakness and softness doesn’t earn respect.
I remember pretending blue was my favorite color for years, even though I genuinely loved pink. I’d already absorbed the message that pink was “for girls,” and not in a good way. Nobody sat me down and said that. I just knew.
So she buries the parts of herself that feel too feminine, too vulnerable, too soft. In their place, she builds something sturdier: rational, independent, unshakeable. Her Animus steps forward. The world rewards her for it. And that feedback loop runs for years, then decades.
Often, this rupture deepens through her relationship with her mother. If her mother is dismissed, ridiculed, or dismissed for being too emotional, too soft, the daughter learns to distance herself from those same qualities in herself. She may ally with her father and together they look down at the mother for her femininity. Or she’s rejected by a mother who’s already armored herself, who has no patience for vulnerability. Either way, the message is the same: femininity is a liability. The girl sees her mother, to some degree, as a cautionary tale.
The Wonderwoman Trap
She grows up. She works hard, she climbs, she handles everything. She becomes what I’d call a Wonderwoman: extraordinary career, solid home life, always moving, never stopping. The woman who cannot sit still because sitting still means feeling something she’s been outrunning for a long time.
And then one day, she achieves it. The success, the independence, the respect. She looks at everything she’s built.
She feels nothing. Or worse, she feels lonely.
I once watched a woman in her 30s arrive at exactly this moment. Always in jeans and a T-shirt, mostly male friends, cool and rational under pressure. Smart, capable, put-together in every visible way.
But when her armor finally cracked, what surfaced was a little girl who just wanted to be heard. Disoriented, tearful, she said something I haven’t forgotten: “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
She’d been living inside her Animus for so long, she’d simply forgotten what lived underneath it. And that forgetting, that’s the real cost.
The Way Back Isn’t Loud
If the Animus grows by consuming the external world, achievements, approval, success, recognition, then femininity gets rediscovered by going in the opposite direction. Inward. Into the quiet.
That means solitude. It means stillness. It means softening the grip on an identity you built just to survive.
And for a lot of women, it also means doing something that doesn’t come easily: healing the relationship with the mother. When we reject our mothers for being too soft, too traditional, too weak, we’re often, in the same motion, rejecting a part of ourselves. Forgiveness doesn’t mean approving of everything she did. It means releasing the part of you that got buried in the rejection. And slowly, quietly, things begin to shift.
The people around you may not love who you’re becoming. The allies the Animus gathered over the years, the ones who connected with you precisely because you were guarded and driven and “not like other women,” they may push back. That’s part of it. It’s worth knowing that going in.
A Note on Not Burning It All Down
Before you decide to destroy your Animus completely: please don’t.
It kept you safe. It helped you survive a world that wasn’t designed for you. It gave you resilience, courage, the fire to keep going when you had every reason to stop. Those aren’t small things.
The goal isn’t to eliminate your masculine energy. It’s to stop letting it be the only thing running. To let it know when to step back so the rest of you can come through.
Being feminine isn’t the same as being inferior. Not knowing everything isn’t stupidity. Needing softness isn’t weakness. These things are obvious when you write them out, and so many of us are still living as though they aren’t true. That gap, between what we intellectually understand and how we actually move through the world, that’s where the real work is.
Your Animus will still show up. It has a big ego and it doesn’t love being challenged. But the more you learn to recognize it when it takes over, the more choice you have. Over time, it starts to learn when it’s actually needed. And when it’s just habit.
A Question to Leave You With
Think about the last time a man said something that made you feel attacked. Your ego spiked, your defenses went up, and you either fired back or went cold.
Can you find your Animus in that moment?
I’m not asking you to stay quiet. I’m not asking you to shrink. I’m asking you to get curious. Because the shift you’re looking for, the one toward real peace and real self-knowing, it tends to start right there. In that small moment before the reaction.
You’re not your armor. You never were.
