- The Split of the Masculine & Feminine
- The battle of the sexes and the birth of duality
- Shadow inner Masculine & Feminine archetypes
- How the shadow archetypes are portrayed in fiction
- How to heal the inner Masculine & Feminine
- How our modern times exacerbate our shadow archetypes
- Healing our patriarchal conditioning
In this Soul teaching on the masculine and feminine split you will learn:
- Why the masculine & feminine split
- How the split of the masculine & feminine birthed duality
- The shadow archetypes of the inner masculine & feminine
- How to heal the split between the inner masculine & feminine
- And more…
The Soul Path series is an eight-article series by Sabriyé Dubrie of Soul Teachings on the origin of our Soul path ‘birth’ and our evolution into the (human) incarnation experience. The teachings shared are gleaned from my own healing journey on a Soul path level and my experience in working with over a thousand clients using the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method. For those interested in learning this method as a therapist, I run a yearly Soul Embodiment® Therapy Certification Program to train therapists worldwide in this revolutionary healing modality.
This is part IV, you can read Part III – Our Lifetimes in Lemuria & Taking Physical Form here (click link).
The Split of the Masculine & Feminine
In our galactic lifetimes, including early Lemuria, which was simply one of the many planets we could choose from as light or Star beings still in the densification process, we created a further split within ourselves of the masculine and the feminine. This was necessary for the densification process, the ability to procreate in human form and most importantly to prepare ourselves to play the incarnation game.
On a Soul level, we are androgynous, male and female in perfect balance and harmony. This allowed us to marry all the strength of the inner feminine and the inner masculine together and access our full Soul power. I always explain to my clients that we couldn’t have played the incarnation game convincingly with this level of power intact. We would have been able to snap our fingers and get ourselves out of any difficult situation, knowing that we are all-powerful.
Illusion would have had no hold on us because if we didn’t like what we were living we could instantly alter reality. It would have been next to impossible to continue our densification process if we retained access to this level of power, so we gave it up to be able to continue our densification into the physical. This may not have been an absolutely conscious decision, but we did make it ourselves on whatever level because no one can truly ever take our power away from us especially not on a Soul level.
The possible creation of the Twin Soul
This masculine & feminine split is also where the so-called Twin Soul (or Twin Flame) would have been created out of the masculine and feminine aspects that split in two. This goes back to Plato’s Myth of the Androgyne and our search for our other half. Plato also attributes the Gods’ decision to split these androgynous beings in half as an attempt to curb their power that could otherwise rival the power of the Gods.
I am not sure that this concept was meant as literally as people take it, but my biggest criticism of this idea is that even if this was 100% true it does not ever give us the right to impede on the ‘other half’s’ sovereignty, even if we are or share the same soul. I worked in the Twin Flame industry for quite some time and witnessed the most manipulative and unacceptable behavior under the justification that this was totally okay because this other person was the other half of their soul.
Don’t even get me started on the percentage of people who have thought that someone other than their current person was their Twin Flame, which means that they railroaded multiple people’s lives because they believed they somehow had the Divine right to do so. After all, this person was them, as they believed to share the same soul.
This is obviously very wounded behavior, but that is to be expected as meeting one’s Twin Soul magnifies the subconscious wounding one carries. That being said, the Twin Flame concept tends to attract people with codependent tendencies and other such wounding that we will discuss further on, based on their own inner wounding of the masculine & feminine.
All myths and fantasies aside, the split of our (inner) masculine and feminine served to help us descend deeper into our physical form to be able to incarnate as physical beings. This was very much part of the plan all along because we couldn’t evolve from unconscious Oneness (oneness by default because it was the only flavor out there) to conscious Oneness of our own free will as described in Part I of this Soul Path Series without actually playing the incarnation game and experiencing the illusion of duality.
Once that decision was made, there was no turning back and we could only move deeper into the fragmentation needed to densify our energies into physical form. As one therapist client put it who works with Ayahuasca with her clients; “It’s kind of like taking Aya, once you ingest it there’s no turning back, and for the next six hours, you will just have to ride it out… “
Once we split from Source, there was no turning back, and splitting the masculine and feminine within ourselves was simply part of the initiated process, that we are still riding out collectively.
The battle of the sexes and the birth of duality
With the split of the masculine and feminine, our perspectives were no longer singular but became dualistic, rather than the masculine and feminine working as one. they now each had their own perspective and quarreled amongst themselves about which perspective was the correct one. Before they had been able to see all sides, but now they could no longer see the full truth only their limited perception of it. Kind of like seeing either the front or the back of the elephant, but not realizing there’s a view that shows us the whole elephant that you can’t see if you’re standing in front or behind it. The ability to view things as a whole or as one was lost.
When the inner masculine and feminine are one, they balance each other out perfectly. However, out of balance, the inner male becomes domineering, forceful, and disconnected from emotion – he loses access to his inner feminine qualities such as empathy. The inner feminine, without the inner masculine to balance her out becomes passive, scattered, and overwhelmed by emotions, she becomes as we will see further on, insatiable when she goes into excess.
It’s this split between the masculine and feminine within ourselves that not only created the illusion of duality, but their inner conflict became externalized resulting in the Galactic Wars described in part II of this Soul Path Series which was more than anything a war of mindsets and ideologies. Initially, there was no ill intent, only a different way of seeing things, a masculine & feminine way of seeing things. To this day, the battle of the sexes still continues both inside ourselves as well as externally.
Shadow inner Masculine & Feminine archetypes
When working on a Soul Path level, a recurring theme is that which is true on a macro level is true on a micro level as well, or as it is called within Hermeticism (alchemy) ‘as above, so below’. We saw that on a a Soul Path level (above) this inner conflict of the masculine & feminine became an outer conflict played out between the different species of Star beings.
In the same way, on an incarnation level (below) we see that our relationship with the inner masculine & feminine becomes the template for our external relationships with the masculine and feminine as well as the template for our most intimate romantic relationships. In our personal lives, this inner conflict is externalized as the battle of the sexes and how this shows up in our relationship with the opposite sex.
We all have an inner masculine and inner feminine, no matter with which gender we are born or identify. The shadow inner masculine & feminine archetypes are a great way to understand the inner relationship between the wounded inner masculine and the wounded inner feminine. We also all have both wounded as well as healthy inner masculine & feminine parts within us, no one is 100% healed or 100% wounded. Just like codependency or narcissism, we are all on a scale or spectrum.
Our wounding may have started with the split of the inner masculine and feminine, but living this dichotomy through the ages through matriarchal as well as patriarchal experiences has further wounded our inner masculine and inner feminine. Starry-eyed spiritual people often believe that a matriarchy is somehow better than the patriarchy, but that is of course not true as it doesn’t matter who subjugates who, it remains a reflection of the disbalance of the feminine and masculine when one rules over the other. Often such beliefs are already an indication of a distorted relationship with the inner and outer masculine.
Within the shadow archetypes of the inner masculine and feminine there are two states, the inner masculine and feminine are either absent or they are in excess. However, to make things more complicated we can have all four of them play out in different areas of our lives. You could say that the first two represent the matriarchy and are reflective of our current times while the latter two represent the patriarchy and are reflective of the times of our grandparents and more distant ancestors, the roughly six thousand-year period we have just come out of.
Just remember as women and men, we have both if not all archetypes playing out within ourselves.
The Collapsed Inner Masculine
When a business coach I hired first told me about the collapsed inner masculine, I immediately recognized that this was how the men in my life had been showing up. I attracted men who weren’t willing to step up to the plate, that is if a relationship was even on the table and it wasn’t just another f*ckboy. A recurring theme in my intimate relationships had been at some point the men in my life becoming so passive, that I felt like I was tugging on a dead horse trying to get it to stand up.
Like all women stuck in this relationship dynamic I was super motivated to heal it, because after a certain amount of repetitions you start to understand that you are the common denominator in this pattern….
Women with a collapsed inner masculine tend to attract emotionally unavailable men, who don’t take responsibility, struggle to provide, protect, or really assert themselves. These are often men who are softer, more feminine who reject their inner masculine whether consciously or subconsciously. In the Twin Flame runner and chaser dynamic, the collapsed inner masculine is the runner, often has an avoidant attachment style, and is the victim/taker on the victim triangle and codependency scale. These men are often emotionally crippled and with conflict will collapse into themselves which can even result in stonewalling.
But if you spot it, you got it!
So not only do these men have a collapsed inner masculine, also their counterparts whether male or female in both homosexual and heterosexual relationships have a collapsed inner masculine as well. They too struggle with setting boundaries, often as a result of their boundaries being trampled on in their childhood, they also suffer from the father wound whether through abuse, absenteeism, or emotional unavailability, they have authority issues, and struggle with feeling their emotions.
The Rigid Inner Feminine
If we have a collapsed inner masculine, it creates the rigid inner feminine archetype. This is because with the inner masculine absent (collapsed in himself) the rigid inner feminine is left to fend for her own. She becomes her own protector and provider because she cannot trust the masculine to be there for her emotionally or protect and provide for her physically.
The paradox of course is that she subconsciously wouldn’t have it any other way. because with emotionally unavailable men she doesn’t have to become vulnerable which she struggles with to a great extent because she equates vulnerability with being weak and she also doesn’t have to let go of her need for control when she provides for herself, the control she uses not to dominate others (although that is a byproduct) but to feel safe.
This is because to protect and provide for herself in the absence of the inner masculine she has tried to take his place, becoming the pseudo-masculine and she was only able to do so by sacrificing her feminine traits such as her openness, receptivity, fluidity, and softness.
The problem that both these archetypes face is that they can’t embody the masculine or the feminine, both are absent within them. Because the rigid inner feminine needs to protect herself she closes down, armors herself up, and rigidifies as a result nothing gets in and nothing gets out, which is why she struggles to receive, She has difficulty receiving love, support, money, compliments, and so on – things she desperately wants but can’t allow herself to have because if she lets go of her tight grip she fears it will all come tumbling down because she believes that she is the only one holding everything together.
There’s also a tsunami of emotions that she fears will come out that she has been suppressing for an eternity in an attempt to keep functioning and of course that she couldn’t allow herself to sufficiently process because it would make her feel vulnerable and weak. She is often very out of touch with her emotions. In the Twin Flame dynamic, these are the chasers who often have an anxious attachment style, and they identify most strongly with the rescuer (martyr) on the victim triangle and are the giver on the codependency scale.
It is interesting to note that they would die to be the receiver, and often give in order to receive but when it comes down to it they are psychologically stuck in the role of ‘giver’ because it feels much safer to give than to receive. This is because you have to be open and vulnerable to receive, but you also have to give up control to the giver. Because the rigid inner feminine needs to feel in control to feel safe, she often finds herself stuck in the role of giver wanting desperately to be the receiver instead but not recognizing the underlying dynamic that is effectively sabotaging her in life and in all her relationship whether romantic or not, although that is where it hurts her the most in her love life where she can’t get her needs met because even if someone is willing to give her what she wants, she is unable to receive it.
Most modern women recognize themselves deeply in this inner shadow archetype and as long as we’re struggling to trust our own inner masculine, this will be reflected back to us in our outer reality, our relationship with men in general, and of course felt the most in our intimate love relationships.
The Overbearing Inner Masculine
Where the first two archetypes describe the state of the absent inner masculine & feminine the last two archetypes describe the masculine and the feminine in a state of excess. These are the masculine & feminine we know from the patriarchy, the man is dominant, he lays down the law, and is actually a star at protection and provision. But because he is completely disconnected from his feminine side his main focus is going out and conquering the world with as little distraction as possible.
The collapsed inner masculine often complains that his partner acts like his mother, which makes him feel incompetent and like he’s being treated as a little boy, but the overbearing masculine actively seeks a partner who will do everything for him the way his mother always did or that he had wanted her to. He needs a partner like that to pick up the slack and make sure the home and hearth are taken care of while he is off hunting his prey aka killing it in his job or business.
He can be the top mogul with the trophy wife, a workaholic, an aggressive drug, alcohol, or other type of addict, as well as a narcissist or a mix of multiple of these different aspects. He is the bully, or the persecutor in the victim triangle although he/she tends to see themselves as the victim instead, claiming their behavior is being evoked by the victim.
The overbearing masculine is the epitome of toxic masculinity, he is someone who deeply distrusts the feminine which is why he tries to lock her (the inner feminine) away – he can be very controlling holding her on a very short leash. Often this is caused in this lifetime’s childhood by a fraught relationship with the mother, aka the mother wound. On a Soul Path level, the mother wound is about our inability to trust life the mother who births us into each new embodiment.
The Insatiable Inner Feminine
The insatiable inner feminine is also connected to the mother wound, she’s daddy’s little girl, a damsel in distress, becomes vulnerable too soon before real trust is actually established and this usually gets her into all kinds of trouble that she needs to be rescued from With the insatiable inner feminine there’s sure to be a constant level of high drama. She is the empath, struggles with enmeshment, she’s demanding, draining, clingy and needy.
The insatiable inner feminine is the stereotypical codependent who can’t function without someone taking care of her, although actually, all shadow archetypes are codependent in their own way, hers is simply more easy to spot than others. She gets lost in her emotions, doesn’t accept boundaries is uncontained and wild which can easily become destructive toward herself and others.
Because she has been starved by the (inner) overbearing masculine for so long she becomes insatiable, nothing is ever enough, no amount of money, love, food, clothes, shoes, cars, and so on. Nothing can truly satisfy her either, she always wants more, more, more no matter how much she is given.
How the shadow archetypes are portrayed in fiction
Stories, movies, and fairytales often hold archetypal wisdom. If you have ever watched the series Desperate Housewives then Carlos and Gabrielle Sollis are the overbearing inner masculine and insatiable inner feminine especially as they start out in their relationship, they actually learn to balance it more over the years and both become better people because of it.
In that same series, Tom and Lynette Scavo are the archetypical collapsed inner masculine and the rigid inner feminine, they can make it together for decades until their patterns leave them no other option but to face themselves and the unconscious wounds driving their behavior.
We see at some point that Tom is no longer willing to let Lynette lead and this forces Lynette to relinquish the reins that she had held onto in order to feel safe. Tom removes himself completely from her control and starts a relationship with someone else, this forces Lynette to take a long hard look at herself and finally deal with her unresolved past. Although it seems like it’s all fun and games for Tom, living it up in another relationship, he has actually suffered all the years prior. Standing up for himself and being the ruler of his own destiny is the medicine he needs to get out of the dynamic he had been stuck in with Lynette for over two decades.
In the end, they do find their way back to each other but for most people stuck in this highly dysfunctional (emasculating or infantilizing) dynamic that is not how the story ends – unless they too face their inner motives for, on the one hand, the need for control in order to feel safe and on the other hand the giving away one’s power because they are afraid to take responsibility for their own life.
How to heal the inner Masculine & Feminine
The very first place we need to go to heal our inner masculine & feminine is our current life childhood, but that is only part of the equation and this is because these deeper wounds around the masculine and feminine were created on a Soul Path level through the split of the inner masculine and feminine, but also through the many different lifetimes in between of living this wounding in both matriarchal and patriarchal societies and how this accumulated over time into deeper patterns of wounding within our inner feminine and inner masculine.
The problem is also that we have to heal the masculine aspect within us because the feminine is merely a response to the masculine. The rigid inner feminine rigidifies because the inner masculine isn’t there to protect and provide for her, had he been there she wouldn’t have needed to fend for her own. The insatiable inner feminine becomes starved because the overbearing inner masculine has put her on a short leash and tries to keep her in a dark dungeon so that she and her tsunami of emotions can’t distract him from his goals and ambitions.
The inner story is that the inner masculine either gives up on the inner feminine and walks away, or tries to control and dominate her as the overbearing inner masculine. The reason for this lies in the Soul Path wounding of the masculine, any wounding of the feminine on a Soul Path level is a result of living our masculine wounding in an attempt to heal it. The inner masculine either doesn’t trust himself in the collapsed state, or he doesn’t trust the feminine in the overbearing state this created the perception of “victimizers” and “victims.” as explained in Part II of this Soul Path Series: Our Galactic Lifetimes and Starseed Origins.
But as we know from the victim or drama triangle both the victimizer (bully or persecutor) as well as the victim and the rescuer are all on it. They are just different faces of the same thing and all of them are in a struggle for power. The collapsed inner masculine and overbearing inner masculine can definitely be seen as the victimizes here, but over time the rigid inner feminine is just as much a bully as the overbearing masculine making the collapsed inner masculine feel incompetent and small, while the insatiable inner feminine is screaming for the overbearing masculine to contain her, because she can’t contain herself and when she becomes destructive she wrecks everything that stands in her way.
As I explained before, all of the inner masculine & feminine shadow archetypes are codependent in their own way, and codependency just like the victim triangle is a struggle for control. Because we sacrificed our Soul power on our way in, when we split the masculine and feminine control is the closest thing we know that emulates power, or at least that is what we think. This lands us in power struggles everywhere we go, because we don’t realize that it was us that decided to disown our power, to begin with not only in the split of the masculine & feminine but also as a result of pivotal lifetimes that made us decide that to have power wasn’t safe or that we weren’t worthy of or deserved to have power because of for example egregious power abuse in past lifetimes that we are still subconsciously holding against ourselves. In short, we are fighting with others over something we don’t remember giving up ourselves.
It’s interesting that in the Soul Embodiment® Therapy sessions, I do with men nine times out of ten they come to me to reclaim their power and the ability to embody their masculinity even when they booked me for something else for which they actually needed to be able to embody their masculinity again. These are such deep wounds in both men and women, that we are hardly ever conscious of them until we are introduced to these concepts and see them playing out in our lives. In many cases, it’s only when it comes up in the session that people recognize it playing out in their current reality.
Our inner masculine is our agent of power and so also for women, it’s important to go back to those Soul Path wounds that made their inner masculine collapse because their way out of their conundrum when stuck in the rigid inner feminine archetype created by a collapsed inner masculine is obviously to heal their own inner masculine. Because how else is the rigid inner feminine ever going to come out of protection mode and let go of her need for control, without her own inner masculine to protect and provide for her?
This is the work I do with women in the Heal Your Inner Masculine Template Soul Embodiment® Therapy package (see packages in the payment section). Of the many women I worked with in this package, only one came to heal the overbearing inner masculine and insatiable inner feminine archetype, all the other women had the collapsed inner masculine/rigid inner feminine as the main archetype playing out in their lives.
How our modern times exacerbate our shadow archetypes
Especially the collapsed inner masculine and the rigid inner feminine archetypes are only exacerbated by our modern times of feminism, the feminization of society, the undercurrent of anger at the patriarchy which in certain parts of the world is being unleashed on white men specifically, and the never-before-seen number of single-mother households and the dissolution of family through the process of individualism we have gone through in the West have left many women unsupported and left to fend for their own.
At the same time, these developments have not done men any good especially if they are Caucasian with the demonization of toxic masculinity and concepts of white male privilege, young men (no matter their race) have no idea where they stand anymore in relationship to women, and they struggle in the current school system that favors learning environments more suited for girls.
Boys of color are even worse off in the classrooms despite the fact that most teachers are women these days. ‘For boys of color, that gap is even larger. They face suspension and expulsion from school at almost five times the rate of their White male classmates and are even less likely to finish high school or college.’ Source: American Psychological Association
Our message to young boys and men is often one of hostility, anger, distrust, and making them feel incompetent and unneeded. Some boys grow up without ANY positive male role models to teach them what healthy masculinity looks like. It’s no wonder that many of the younger generation of boys and men develop a collapsed inner masculine which is sometimes also called Peter Pan syndrome.
It’s of course not politically correct to say this but single mother parenthood does not benefit children and of all the many negative effects it has on children, one of the biggest negative effects is that it creates ancestral patterns of single parenthood. This is especially true for girls who end up raising their children alone as well (rigid inner feminine), because these two archetypes are created by the father wound it effects boy and girls in different ways. For boys it can keep them stuck in a perpetual state of adolescence (Peter Pan Syndrome) which is the collapsed inner masculine state, boys that don’t grow up can’t become men that carry responsibility. In this way it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
Healing our patriarchal conditioning
The above applies to most men and women in the West whether married or single, for those in the East, the struggle is often still a patriarchal one. It’s in these societies such as India, China, Pakistan, etc. as well as Arabic, and African countries that we see men embodying the overbearing masculine and women the insatiable inner feminine. There are of course individual exceptions, but on the whole, the emancipation of women in these parts of the world has not come full circle even not in a modern country such as China where women who remain single are called leftover women. Although our feminist approach has not been the full answer, it has been a part of our attempt to heal these wounds collectively.
However, as long as we subconsciously equate femininity with a lesser value than the masculine (the concept behind patriarchy) we cannot ever come to true equality. My biggest criticism of current-day feminism has been that it has not brought a reevaluation of for example the value of childrearing, homemaking, cooking for our families, housecleaning, and taking care of the elderly and others in our community.
Instead, it has only opened the way for women to have access to the male world often forcing them to masculinize to be able to survive. Of all the benefits this has obviously brought us and that we are very grateful for, there have been severe drawbacks as well such as how this has impacted the male-female relationship, families, childrearing, and the epidemic rise of single parenthood, deteriorating health (obesity) as well as the continuing unequal distribution of unpaid care and housework.
Women still do the lion’s share of this type of unpaid work, next to their full-time jobs and/or businesses. The fact that in the past sixty-plus years we haven’t been able to ‘free’ women of their domestic enslavement as it was once called in feminist circles represents our own remnants of our patriarchal conditioning. The reality is that as women we subconsciously feel we have only been allowed on the work floor, as long as we remain to take responsibility for the homefront, to give you an example of how deeply engrained this programming is when women with children outearn their husbands they compensate this by taking on more housework.
In the West, women have traded one imprisonment for the other whereas before women weren’t allowed on the work floor or only in a limited capacity, and to a certain extent, they often felt imprisoned by domestic life and the unpaid work they did in the home. Women now are forced to work outside the home either because of the economy or for example single parenthood and are still stuck with either the lion’s share or all of the unpaid work on top of their workloads in their job or business.
The tradwife movement among the younger generation of women is an attempt to reevaluate the worth of these tasks that no matter how hard women try they can’t seem to get rid of 😉 hahaha.
Okay, what I actually mean to say is in an attempt to reevaluate the worth of these with women-equated tasks (the ones even feminism couldn’t free us of). Rather than this being a setback to feminism (and all the genuine good it did bring us), it’s a further evolution of it because how can we ever be truly equal if we continue to subconsciously equate feminine and everything associated with the feminine as lesser than? It’s not only on the home front that this is evident, there is also a correlation between the feminization of a profession and the depreciation in esteem and pay of such professions. In other words, as women take over a male-dominated field, the pay drops. This shows us how deeply this programming runs within us collectively.
The path to healing a society at large starts by healing oneself and one’s own family lineage, the above just goes to show how we are on a collective level playing out these deeply subconscious wounds around the inner masculine & feminine. If we want to truly create a society based on full equality of the masculine and the feminine, it has to start within the individual in order to create the critical mass needed to transform the whole. But our motive can be much more selfish, starting with healing our own lives and relationships and giving our children a better masculine & feminine template to start with and to pass on to future generations.
I pray that reading this Soul teaching has helped you recognize how the wounded inner masculine & feminine are playing out in your life. The problem is that just putting on some lipstick and a dress doesn’t get us out of these deeply engrained patterns, we need to find the underlying wounds on both a current incarnation as well as Soul Path level in order to truly heal these age-old wounds to not only reclaim our power on a Soul Path level but to fully embody our masculine & feminine in a healthy way.
With my deepest love,