The Wounded Masculine Within Ourselves And In Our External Reality – Healing the Masculine & Feminine Series Part VI

There is great interest these days in balancing our inner masculine and feminine parts, to for example attract the right partner or unlock higher levels of spiritual consciousness as well as higher levels of income. The missing piece however in most teachings is undoing our patriarchal conditioning and healing our patriarchal wounding.

Healing the Masculine & Feminine series is an eight-article series by Sabriyé Dubrie of Soul Teachings on healing our patriarchal conditioning and truly balancing our inner feminine & inner masculine parts within ourselves. As a society, we are only starting to understand how deeply our patriarchal wounding still influences us today; and how it wreaks havoc in our romantic relationships, our relationship with our parents, our relationship with the opposite sex, our relationship as women amongst ourselves, and in what it means to be a woman or a man in our own lives. 

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.

In this Soul teaching on the wounded masculine you will learn:

• What is the wounded masculine?
• The Yin and Yang of the wounded masculine
• How the inner masculine is the template for our romantic relationships
• What the wounded masculine represents on a Soul Path level
• And more…

What is the wounded masculine?

The wounded masculine is the masculine out-of-balance, either going overboard in his masculinity or unable to assert himself. Because we all have an inner anima (feminine) and inner animus (masculine) to use Jungian terms, this can apply just as much to our inner masculine as well as to the outer masculine (the inner masculine in men) or the inner masculine in other women.

‘When balanced, masculine energy can be empowering. It drives ambition, fosters resilience, and encourages strategic thinking. However, when out of balance, it can result in what is often termed as “wounded” and/or “toxic” masculinity which are in many ways different from each other.

While toxic masculinity refers to an individual who is predominantly a bully masquerading as masculine, wounded masculinity refers to an individual who suffers from a paralysis by analysis.

This individual can’t decide what is masculine enough or not, consumes extraordinary amounts of self-help and in the end still remains placid.’ Source: the-invisibleman.com

The wounded masculine is the masculine cut off from his inner feminine whether that is because he doesn’t trust her and wants to control her or because he has abandoned her because he feels he can’t give her the protection and the provision she wants or needs. Due to his sense of inadequacy, he has collapsed into himself.

I primarily work with women, but when men do come to me to do Soul Embodiment® Therapy it’s next to always about them reclaiming their masculinity that they have disowned in previous lifetimes and on a Soul Path level. Don’t let the above image fool you though, because I have worked with men who very much look like the man on the left, and yet despite their very masculine appearance still found it difficult to assert themselves and step into their masculinity. This has nothing to do with outer strength or masculine presentation, it’s about how a man feels and what he believes about his own masculinity deep within his own psyche.

Within women, the wounded inner masculine creates the wounded inner feminine which we will discuss in the next part of this series.

The Yin and Yang of the wounded masculine

In pop culture, we often hear the terms toxic masculinity and wounded masculinity being used, but both states are wounded states of masculinity. I prefer to look at them as the yin and yang expression of the wounded (i.e. out of balance) masculine because both are a result of childhood, ancestral, and past life wounds. They were created differently and they are expressed differently, but they are the same thing the masculine out of balance. When we view them as the same thing then toxic masculinity is just as acceptable as so-called wounded masculinity, rather than something that we need to fight, reject, eradicate, etc. No, toxic masculinity needs to be healed just as much as the other manifestation of wounded masculinity which of course, is perceived as a lot less threatening because of how it manifests itself.

We are also never 100% the one or the other, rather we carry a percentage of all four including the yin and yang manifestation of the wounded feminine within us that manifests differently in different areas of our lives and that can even be different from relationship to relationship. A man might be overbearing in his intimate relationships but completely collapsed in the relationship with his boss and his superiors, this is a well-known pattern that we can see around us in family and friends, read about in books, or watch in movies.

It’s only logical because both wounded forms of masculinity are on the victim triangle, and we know from the victim triangle that we are always moving through the different expressions of victimhood; bully, victim, rescuer. The victim can be the bully, the rescuer can be the victim, and the bully (just ask any bully you know) can feel victimized as well.

They are simply different faces of powerlessness, which is what they all have in common – even the rescuer who likes to see him or herself as the superior one compared to the victim and the bully is on the victim triangle.

Here’s how to recognize the wounded masculine inside yourself:

The Overbearing Inner Masculine (Yang)

The overbearing inner masculine is what we typically would label toxic masculinity, it’s the masculine embodying a very patriarchal version of masculinity. These men are great protectors and providers, but they can also become very abusive toward their spouses and children. This inner masculine archetype doesn’t trust his inner feminine and therefore keeps her locked away deep inside of him or herself.

This can also show up in same-sex relationships because everyone has an inner masculine, no matter their sex, gender, or how they identify. The below statistics on domestic and sexual violence in same-sex and bi-sexual relationships are staggering. We can see that lesbian women are more at risk than women in a heterosexual relationship to be physically or sexually hurt by their partner, which is an example of how the overbearing masculine can also manifest in women. Likewise, heterosexual men are more at risk than gay men to become victims of domestic and sexual violence which again points to the women these men are in a relationship with.

‘According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Williams Institute of Law: Around 44% of lesbian and 61% of bisexual women have experienced forms of rape and physical violence by an intimate partner as compared to 35% of straight women. 26% of gay men and 37% of bisexual men have experienced forms of rape and physical violence by an intimate partner compared to 29% of straight men.’ Source: dcvlp.org

Overbearing inner masculine keywords are:

● Too masculine ● Bully/persecutor ● Toxic masculinity ● Controlling ● Mother wound ● Narcissist ● Avoidant/Disorganized attachment ● Disconnected from the inner feminine ● Is too self-centered to give ● Lacks empathy ● Risks burnout ● Too rigid boundaries ● Denies (represses) feelings ● Feeling of lacking purpose in life ● Doesn’t want to get distracted by the feminine

The Collapsed Inner Masculine (Yin)

The collapsed inner masculine applies to the men who find it difficult to embody their masculinity. They are emotionally unavailable, often suffer from Peter Pan syndrome, can’t take responsibility, flutter from relationship to relationship, or are in multiple relationships at once whether overtly (polyamory) or covertly (cheating), can’t commit (fu*k boys), and so on. Although this obviously doesn’t apply to all collapsed inner masculines to the same degree, they are examples of how a collapsed inner masculine can manifest itself.

‘People with this (Peter Pan) syndrome exhibit a series of social behaviors, ideologies, and traits that are considered immature. In most cases, they may struggle with commitment, maintaining employment, doing chores, keeping up with responsibilities, and having purposeful direction in their lives. Although it’s more common in cisgender men and people assigned male at birth (AMAB), anyone of any sex or gender can develop the behaviors associated with the syndrome.’ Source: clevelandclinic.org

In the case of the collapsed inner masculine, you could say that in a way opposites seem to attract because someone with a collapsed inner masculine needs a partner who will pick up the slack. In comes a partner with a rigid inner feminine (which we will discuss in the next part of this series) and he/she will become the parent (the rescuer) they need to face adult life. This often leaves the partner in the role of breadwinner, appointment setter, personal shopper, therapist, and so on…

Although initially this relationship seems like a match made in heaven, the partner will at some point feel resentful about having to do most of the work in the relationship but also the person with the collapsed inner masculine will start rebelling against the authority that they themselves have allowed the other person to become in their lives.

Collapsed inner masculine keywords are:

● Too feminine ● Victim/taker ● Impotent ● Father wound ● Retreats within ● Avoidant/Anxious attachment ● Twin Flame runner ● Can’t give ● Can’t exert himself ● Can’t protect the inner feminine ● Can’t provide ● Can’t draw boundaries ● Passive-aggressive ● Mama’s boy ● Men who reject their masculinity ● Authority issues boss, police, government

Father absence and its impact on masculinity

As discussed in the Soul Teaching in Part III of this series The father wound, the impact of emotionally unavailable fathers & father absenteeism, fathers need to be a part of their children’s lives, this is true for girls but even more so for boys.

In our modern, post-feminist age more and more children are growing up without their fathers in the home or even in their lives. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 17.8 million children, nearly 1 in 4, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. That’s enough children to fill New York City twice or Los Angeles four times over. Source: Fatherhood.org These are just the American statistics, but of course, this is an increasing trend that is running rampant throughout the (Western) world.

Live-in boyfriends can actually exacerbate the father wound through abuse, neglect, etc. This is not to say that all blended families are doomed, however, the statistics don’t lie. ‘Children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Likewise, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America to find himself in is a home that includes an unrelated male boyfriend—especially when that boyfriend is left to care for a child by himself.’ Source: thepublicdiscourse.com

Men often suffer a father wound if they were raised by a belittling, demeaning parent who wanted to exercise dominance over his child. Alternatively, men, who were raised without a father whether that is because the father died or because of divorce or abandonment tend to develop a father wound as well. What makes the father wound extra complex for boys and men, is that it is the father that teaches them what it means to be a man in this world. If the mother does not have male relatives, due to the feminization of society and the absence of male teachers boys can grow up without any healthy male role models which makes them turn to other boys and young men (gangs) to figure out manhood for themselves. Because they are left to figure it out on their own, this often leads to the embodiment of what we call toxic masculine traits (developing the overbearing inner masculine).

Or the pendulum swings to the other side of the spectrum…..

Boys and girls with a father wound tend to have authority issues. ‘A fatherless child often rebels against authority, for it represents the sacred position his father once held. Authority is something to be avoided, mocked, or scorned….  Distrustful of authority, fatherless boys leave behind a wake of failed jobs and failed relationships. Each of these may start well, but they are inevitably sabotaged by his distrust and rebellion. With the passing of each, he blames his boss, pastor, manager, girlfriend, or spouse. But without knowing it, he is the common denominator in the long line of failed relationships.’ Source: Fatherless Generation, John Sowers.

It doesn’t really matter much if the father was absent (collapsed inner masculine) or had an overbearing inner masculine himself, the net result remains the same; a distorted example of what it means to be a man, and father wounding is one of those wounds that are passed down from generation to generation, from parent to child through the ancestral lineage.

The inner template for our romantic relationships

As women our own inner masculine is the template for our romantic relationships, for men, it’s of course their inner feminine. Before I said that the collapsed inner masculine appears to attract his polar opposite in a relationship but that is only partially true. Because it’s the wounded masculine that creates the wounded feminine within the self.

If we have as we discussed above a yang inner feminine (rigid inner feminine), it’s only because our own inner masculine has collapsed within ourselves, and the inner feminine was left to pick up the slack in the same way that we would do in our external romantic and other relationships because it corresponds with our inner programming.

If we have a collapsed inner masculine (yin) and a rigid inner feminine (yang) we have been conditioned from an early age to become the pseudo masculine to compensate for the fact that our inner masculine doesn’t go to the bat for us. If you have a yang inner masculine and a yin inner feminine, you will be a magnet for overbearing men (or over emotional women if you are a man or in a same-sex relationship) even though it’s likely that this part of you has been deeply disowned.

When it comes to relationships it’s if you spot it, you got it.

If you attract men with a yin-wounded inner masculine, you yourself have a yin-wounded inner masculine as well, that you compensate with a yang inner feminine. If you attract yang-wounded masculine partners, you have a yang-wounded inner masculine as well and a yin-wounded inner feminine. The opposite is true for men, if you attract a yang-wounded woman, you have a yin-wounded inner masculine, and if you tend to attract damsels in distress and massive drama queens (yin – insatiable inner feminines) rest assured you have a yang-wounded inner masculine.

You attract the type of partner that will help you heal your own unique disbalance of the inner masculine and feminine because rather than find the yin to your yang outside of you, we are all meant to balance the yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) within ourselves. This is only possible once we start healing the wounded inner masculine within ourselves, as this is what underlies the wounded inner feminine.

For example, the yang inner feminine has stepped up because her inner masculine could not protect her which is often a result of childhood abuse and the crossing of boundaries that a child couldn’t protect itself from. We cannot get the inner feminine out of survival- and protection mode, without first getting the inner masculine out of his collapsed state and able to support her. Within this dynamic, the person can neither embody their masculinity, nor their femininity. The man becomes the pseudo-feminine, while the woman becomes the pseudo-masculine when these inner archetypes are at play.

Likewise, if you have a yin-wounded inner feminine, you need to heal the yang-wounded inner masculine inside yourself that keeps suppressing (distrusting) his inner feminine counterpart so that she doesn’t become so limited and confined that she manifests herself destructively. In this specific dynamic, we are either too masculine or too feminine, and if that is the case we will attract a partner that will do for us what we can’t do for ourselves either contain us (masculine) or break through the walls that imprison us (feminine).

What the wounded masculine represents on a Soul Path level

Our masculine is our agent of power, it’s our ability to do and take action in the world. We need to do and take action because we can’t go through life only being (feminine). Being is not superior to doing (masculine), in the same way, that the masculine is not superior to the feminine or vice versa. Too much being is just as ineffective as too much doing, you need to balance them both especially when you are in a human body. Polarity teachings that encourage women to only be and men to only do are missing the point, we all have an inner feminine and inner masculine that needs to be balanced as well, inside ourselves not just externally within our relationship.

On a Soul Path level, it’s about reclaiming your power, and one of the things I always tell my clients when they reach this part of their healing process is that we have had to sacrifice our power in order to play the incarnation game. Because as long as we retained the power we have on a Soul level, we would have never been able to densify our energies to experience life in the physical form and fulfill the goal of the incarnation process which I described in Part I of the Soul Path Series – Our Split From Source And How It Still Impacts Us Today.

As soon as things got just a little bit gnarly and uncomfortable we would snap our fingers to beam ourselves out of there, which would have defeated the purpose of incarnating and only lengthened our suffering because we would continue to pull out when we should have actually pushed through.

As discussed in Soul Path Series: Part II – Our Galactic Lifetimes and Starseed Origins:

Although on a Soul level we are the masculine and feminine in perfect harmony, it’s this split between the masculine and feminine within ourselves that created the illusion of duality, because with our inner masculine and feminine no longer at one with each other an inner conflict arose that we witnessed being reflected back to us externally. It’s important to remember that this has always been part of the Divine plan, there was no mistake made when we went into a deeper level of fragmentation because we wanted to play the incarnation game and so we needed to densify our energies to be able to take physical form.

As this inner conflict within ourselves grew and grew it became externalized and soon manifested as a galactic war:

‘At the outset, a little over 20 million years ago, the wars started over territory in the constellation of Lyra. But soon the war spread to Orion, and it became a war of mindsets and ideologies. On the one hand, there was a group of mainly humanoid races that was committed to the idea of service to others. On the other hand, there was a mixed group of humanoids and reptilian races that propagated service to self. These were mainly located in the constellations of Draco and Orion. Initially, the philosophy of service to self implied that when everybody takes care of him- or herself, then the whole is taken care of, too. But gradually it changed into service to self, if necessary at the expense of others, which resulted in “victimizers” and “victims.” The victims and their allies, who by now had joined forces in a Federation, started looking upon the victimizers as evil, while they started seeing themselves as good. As a result, the wars got polarised and ended up being wars of duality, even though things didn’t start off like that, at all.’ Source: exopaedia.org

Thus the concept of good and evil was born in the evolution of this conflict, a concept that we before had never even fathomed because all we knew was the Oneness with all that is.

We see the masculine and the feminine viewpoints even within these two camps, the service to others vs. the service to self, we just have to turn to science to see that on a whole ‘females may be more empathic and thus more altruistic than males.‘ Source: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 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.

We can also see the seeds of patriarchy being planted here when those in the ‘feminine’ camp started to see themselves being victimized by those in the ‘masculine’ camp. Perception is everything on the Soul path journey when the feminine group self-identified as victims this became part of their wounding that they would bring into consecutive lifetimes and experiences.

Of course, we have been both masculine as well as feminine throughout our incarnation journey, this is not about being a man or a woman. As a human race, we have identified as victims even before we fully incarnated as humans, this happened even long before when we were still in the process of taking human form. This is because, on our incarnation journey, we have used trauma to densify our energy field from light being to taking physical form as a human being. Seeing ourselves as victims has locked us into the cycle of death and rebirth (reincarnation) as it became part of our samskaric imprints within our karmic templates.

Seeing ourselves as powerless (or victims) became part of our self-identification.

We already saw that both the overbearing masculine as well as the collapsed inner masculine are on the victim triangle, as are of course the yin and yang expressions of the wounded inner feminine. The reason they are all on the victim triangle is because when we have disowned our power (no one can take our power from us) we are left with no option but to fight with others over who gets to be in control. This is also what creates the battle of the sexes within and externally, this trying to substitute power with control.

It’s also why codependency is rampant in our intimate relationships because we either have a yang masculine overpowering a yin feminine or a yang feminine overpowering a yin masculine. At some point, the yin archetypes whether masculine or feminine always fight back because they don’t like feeling disempowered either and this is why we end up in these tug-of-war moments or eras in our intimate relationships.

In each of our Soul journeys, there was a set of incarnations that caused us to disown our own power through a traumatic experience. It’s when we can heal this on a Soul path level that we can reclaim our power and stop trying to substitute it with control. When we truly step into our power, we realize we don’t need control or to fight others over who has the control. This is how you get off the victim triangle.

How to heal the wounded masculine within yourself

When it comes to healing the wounded masculine within yourself, because we can’t heal the wounded masculine anywhere else it’s not only our Soul path and past life wounds that need to be addressed, but also our ancestral and childhood wounding.

This includes healing the mother- and the father wound as these wounded relationships recreate the masculine distortion we carry within our karmic templates in our causal body (read more about how this works in this Soul Teaching on Past Life Psychology). The overbearing inner masculine is created through the mother wound, while the collapsed inner masculine is created through the father wound.

Because we are healing at such a deep level within the psyche, you aren’t going to fix everything in one single session, no matter how potent the healing modality. This is because the wound was created on different levels and needs to be addressed on different levels as well. Personally, when I work with clients on healing their inner masculine template through Soul Embodiment® Therapy I work with a three-session package so that we can address the different levels of wounding that created the wounded masculine within the client.

If you are a bum magnet or for example identify as an empath who makes the narcissist come crawling out of the woodwork, healing your own inner masculine template can drastically shift who you attract into your life. If you are a man struggling with the yin and yang expression of the inner masculine, the same applies to you. Not only will you feel better about your own masculinity and be more capable of embodying the healthy masculine, but you will also attract partners that reflect your inner healing. In some cases, healing yourself can also work through within existing partnerships but only if you are sincere about your own healing and not ‘healing’ to get the other person to be the way you want them to be (which is of course more covert control to try to change or rescue them).

Attracting the Divine Masculine into your life

So many women want to attract the Divine Masculine into their lives without necessarily embodying the Divine Feminine, or they think that their spells and rituals or sheer willpower have somehow magically made them the embodiment of the Divine Feminine. The spiritual community is rife with all sorts of spiritual bypassing, so let me be crystal clear; you CANNOT embody the Divine Feminine without healing the wounded masculine inside yourself first. We cannot get the inner feminine out of her wounded state, without first getting the inner masculine out of his wounded state. As long as the inner feminine is wounded, you cannot embody the Divine Feminine.

You can make-pretend that you did because your ego likes to see itself that way, but as long as your own inner masculine is wounded that inner wounding will be reflected back to you in the external masculine in your life. This is why it is so important to first heal the wounded masculine within yourself so that you can heal the inner feminine as well and truly embody the Divine Feminine. This is what aligns you to the Divine Masculine because you have healed your inner masculine and feminine template within yourself. You have reclaimed your power and put an end to the battle of the sexes and the endless rotations of the different positions on the victim triangle.

There is no magic pill or quick-fix solution to this process because it has to be moved through rather than skipped over.

To help you in your healing process I am offering an 8-week group healing container called Goddess, Reclaiming the Divine Feminine Within. In this healing container, we will work through all the masculine and feminine wounding discussed in this series from the father wound, the mother wound, the sisterhood wound, and the witch wound, to healing your deepest patriarchal convictions as well as healing the inner masculine and inner feminine so that you can fully reclaim the Divine Feminine within yourself.

We start September 13th – Claim your spot here! Payment plans are available.

I pray this Soul Teaching on the wounded masculine has helped you recognize the wounded masculine inside yourself and gives you the motivation to start healing your inner masculine and feminine template. If you are in a partnership or the external masculine shows up in an undesirable way in your life right now, use this information to look at your own inner masculine and where he may be treating your inner feminine like this as well.

This obviously doesn’t mean that you should be in relationships that aren’t good for you or hold on to people that hurt you. One thing that I always taught my Twin Flame students was that you DO NOT have to be in a relationship with that person to be able to heal yourself. Your healing never depends on your relationship status, in fact, often it’s a lot easier to work on your healing outside of a relationship rather than in it. At the same time, don’t be in a hurry to leave your current relationship if you are for the rest safe within it, because you take your inner template with you into each new relationship which is why so many times we find ourselves attracting the same kind of partner over and over again. This will continue to happen until we heal the wounded masculine inside of ourselves.