This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Masculine And Feminine Energetics And How To Unify Them with Dené Logan | 231

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

On this episode of TIWW, we’re going to talk not just about understanding masculine and feminine energetics, but unifying them. Within ourselves first, and then in our relationships. Our guest, Den�� Logan is a Marriage and Family Therapist with an orientation in Depth Psychology (often referred to as ‘The Psychology of the Soul’), co-host of the podcast Cheaper Than Therapy, and author of the recently released book, Sovereign Love. With her Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology and her experience being the mentee of acclaimed psychotherapist Esther Perel, Dené is passionate about sharing tools and strategies to cultivate spiritual awareness, understanding the current shifts taking place within our societal structures, and empowering others in understanding how they can live the most fulfilling lives possible. What I hope most is for you, and for me, for all of us, is shed the gender expectations, give our finger to the should and the supposed to’s, so that we can show up as our best, most authentic selves – which is a mix of the masculine and the feminine. But in order to do that, we need to know ourselves, deeply and intimately – we get to build and create from the inside out, knowing that whatever energy that exists authentically within us is as it should be. Connect with Dené: Website: https://denelogan.com/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/dene.logan/  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@denelogan  Book: Sovereign Love, available on Amazon Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Visit  https://www.heyfreya.co/ and use promo code TIWW for 25% off multivitamins and other products - I use the Thrive multivitamin, Quench, and Nourish daily!

I am Nicole Kalil, and we're going to cover a topic today that I've been thinking about a lot lately. And because I'm thinking about it, it seems to be showing up everywhere I look, in the books that I read, in the conversations I have, and over here, and in the books that I read, in the conversations I have and overhear, and in the messages that I receive. Our topic covers something that exists in every single one of us. It impacts how we show up in the world and how we show up in our relationships. And it's wildly misunderstood and widely misinterpreted, which is odd for something that's so primal and so universal. I'm talking about our masculine and feminine energy. One of the most common mistakes that people make is they think that men have masculine energy and only masculine energy and that women have feminine and only feminine energy.

But that's not true. And that's not what we're going to be talking about here. We all, regardless of our sex and our identity, have both and can choose both masculine and feminine energy. But this misunderstanding has some pretty serious consequences in that it leads many of us to live our lives out of balance, unfulfilled, and inauthentic. I think we've become confused. And even worse, I worry that we've started putting

ourselves and each other in boxes that don't serve or represent us. Somewhere along the way, our feminine energy has become discounted and constricted, dismissed and minimized. We've begun to associate all the strong traits with masculine, and therefore with men, and all the soft, kind traits with feminine, and therefore with women. And there's nothing wrong with being strong or being kind, but why can't we be both? And when we divvy up energies, we make it so women often feel wrong for being things like ambitious or direct. And we make men feel weak often for things like being nurturing or gentle. And on top of all of that, we've stopped understanding and valuing both feminine and masculine and celebrating that both are necessary for us to live balanced and fulfilled

lives. So on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're going to talk not just about understanding masculine and feminine energetics, but unifying them within ourselves first and then in our relationships. So I'm excited to introduce our guest who's here to help us do just that. Danae Logan is a marriage and family therapist with an orientation in depth psychology, which is often referred to as the psychology of the soul. She's also co-host of the podcast Cheaper Than Therapy and author of the recently released book, Sovereign Love. With her master's degree in counseling psychology and her experience being the mentee of acclaimed psychotherapist, Esther Perel, Danae is passionate about sharing tools and strategies to cultivate

spiritual awareness, understanding the current shifts taking place within our societal structures, and empowering others and understanding how they can live the most fulfilling lives possible. Danae, thank you so much for being here. And I'd love to just start by asking you to explain what are masculine and feminine energetics? What are we even talking about here? Well, thank you so much, Nicole. Such a beautiful intro. And I think you already started doing a really beautiful job diving into what we're talking about when we talk about these energetics. I think historically, there have always been spiritual concepts that talk about, you know, these energetics within all of us. But Carl Jung was the first person to really name in his work

that all of us have both masculine and feminine energetics within. He called the masculine qualities within a woman, the animus, and the feminine qualities within a man, the anima. Now, since Jung's time, we've come into a little bit of a deeper understanding of the nuance and the feminine qualities within a man, the anima. Now, since Jung's time, we've come into a little bit of a deeper understanding of the nuance and the complexity and that it's not that simple. But where Jung got it correct was that we do have all of these energetics alive within us. Now, to the point you were making before, we, as a society, have really for a long time been conditioned to hold the wounded masculine energetics within us with,

you know, those are the qualities that we revere and that we sort of feel like what we should be striving for. And I would say they're not actually models of what healthy masculine energy a lot of times looks like. But as you were saying before, we've really all been conditioned to hold with a lot of contempt and not value the healthy feminine qualities within us. And so I'm primarily a couples therapist. And what I found as I was working with couples over time was what it does for us to be socialized, to really have aspects of ourselves that we're conditioned to feel like are the ones that we should revere and are like the worthy qualities of ourselves and others that we sort of turn away from and that we don't

acknowledge. And that that really starts to impact our relationships because we're sort of living in distorted dynamics of what we are as a quote self versus like an integrated sense of self within. I like the word distorted. You just said that. And that's kind of how it feels or how I've experienced it personally. I grew up in corporate environments and entrepreneurial environments where masculine energy was revered in finance, which is a traditionally masculine industry. And what I found myself doing is emphasizing all of my, what I perceive to be more masculine traits and like shoving aside and ignoring and minimizing anything that I perceive to be feminine. But one of the things that's been really interesting to me lately and why I've been thinking about that so much

is because I've recognized from hearing from experts like you that I don't even really know what are considered masculine and feminine from a healthy place. So I'll give the example. I heard a speaker recently who was awesome. And she was talking about how receiving is feminine and giving is masculine. And I was like, wait, what? Because if you would have asked me, I would have assumed giving was a healthy feminine trait. So maybe would you point out some of the ones, the traits or the energies that maybe we have distorted or that are being widely misunderstood in today's day and age? Yeah. I love that you said that because I think that there's so much about the way that we are conditioned, especially as women, that really creates these distortions around what feminine energy actually is. To the point you were making first, I think most of us by mothers that were raising us to be good, healthy feminists taught us to believe you can do anything a man can do.

You can work in the way that men can work. You can start your second shift once you get home taking care of the kids, but you can do all of it, right? And in so many ways, this constant state of giving, this perpetual giving is actually really masculine energy. And there's so many ways that we as women, I have found, are sort of embodying a wounded masculine armor. And in a lot of ways, we have to go back to the history of like the dawn of patriarchy to understand where these ways of being originated and that there was a time most of us didn't grow up learning about this in school. I know I certainly didn't grow up learning about matriarchal cultures and that there was a time when women were sort of the ones who were the more, you know, I would say dominant force of society, but that

in order for us to shift into a more patriarch dominant force of society, but that in order for us to shift into a more patriarchal way of being, there were ways that we needed to suppress feminine energy and make all of us a little bit afraid of expressing our feminine energy. And what that looked like was really our ability to be in collaboration and trust and the space of, like you said, like really receptive energy, but I would say receptive to the different flows of life and the cycles. And there's all of these ways that we as women know these things and tune into, like, I'm feeling a lot of energy because of the moon cycles and what's happening with me hormonally. A lot of that is our innate feminine wisdom, but that we're

really conditioned to hold those things with contempt. And so in order to form nuclear family structures, it was really important that not only did we get women to buy into the idea that feminine energy is like a bad thing, or, you know, that we want to like separate women from sisterhood and from sitting in these circles, but that if you aren't chosen and you don't sort of fit into this nuclear family way of being, there's something and everything that we've been taught about what creates fulfilling relationships, they're really still rooted in a patriarchal way of being and that this should be what we're striving for. And in so many ways, that is in and of itself a wounded masculine template, that this is the way you do it and an external authority knows best and productivity at all costs and we're constantly in competition. And the feminine energy is the energy that is a little bit more in that space of play and receiving

and allowing the flow of life to unfold. But so much of what we are taught as women is like, no, you've got to be doing and going and giving and making this happen, which is actually really us in our masculine. I'm going to venture a guess that you are going to mostly agree with what I'm about to say, but feel free to disagree. I feel like sometimes people think as I promote women or feminine that I'm trying to replace the masculine with the feminine. And really this is about balance and inside of ourselves and in our societies and cultures. It's not that one is better than the other. It's that it's both and all the time inside of us and in our relationships. So what would you say to this idea of

replacing one or the other and what does balance even look like? I love that you've said that because I think sometimes when we talk about unpacking the history of patriarchy or the ways that women have been harmed by a patriarchal society, it feels like it's sort of anti-male or anti-men. And I always want to be so unbelievably clear that first of all, when I'm speaking about patriarchy, I'm not speaking about men. I'm speaking about cultures of dominance, right? But that also patriarchy is deeply harmful to men. One of of self and really be in right relationship with their emotional landscape and the things that hurt them. We tell them to suck it up and be a man and get in there and fight this kid on the schoolyard when they don't want to. All of these things that are really deeply harmful to little boys. And then we grow up and we get into relationships with these little boys as men. And they're taught to be stoic and not to be present and feel. And we make them wrong for it

when we as a society have conditioned them to do that for a lifetime. So to your point, as I talk about integrating the masculine and feminine within, I'm talking about for all of us, because men are half of the population. It just doesn't work for us to be like, well, away with men, nor would we want to. I think healthy masculinity is beautiful and necessary. And we have been so severely lacking in it as a society from my perspective, which is at the core of so many of our societal problems is that we don't have men that have an integrated sense of self and are able to be really present with their lives and with their communities in the way that

I think we all need so much right now. I couldn't agree more. And I so appreciate you saying that because I believe it's harmful for all of us. And especially as, you know, we begin to acknowledge and understand different gender identities. What I would like to ask, I think next is how we determine what is the best or ideal balance within ourselves. I would imagine, you know, it's some of us are more masculine naturally or have more masculine energy naturally. Some of us might have more feminine energy naturally. How much does our sex contribute to that? And how do we find what is the right balance for us?

Yeah. Well, you know, it's one of those things. It's like when we talk about like, how do we balance like work-life balance? Like we won't, right? Like it'll never happen. But, you know, to your point, all of us have a core energetic and that isn't necessarily based on gender. So men can be a core feminine energetic and vice versa. In my book, I have a quiz that can kind of give you an idea of like what your core energetic might be. But I think for most of us, we have a little bit of an idea of it. And it's tough because sometimes it can be as a result of the way we're socialized.

And then sometimes it's like, no, this is actually my core energetic. Like, for instance, I, my best friend who I do my podcast with that you're talking about, she might be considered the more like masculine of the two of us, the more linear, the more structural, the more like this is what's going to keep us safe. This is the box we need to stay in. And I would say that that's not necessarily her core energetic. A lot of that is as a result of her life experience of, you know, having to like grow up pretty fast when she was younger and things like that, that can really sort of put us in an energetic in the world that might be a little bit different than what feels like our most healed, authentic version of ourselves when we allow ourselves to soften into that space.

But the reason that I wrote the book is that I started to realize there were ways to identify where my energy is right now. And that I think the work that is so empowering for all of us to be able to do is identify where my energy is. And so I have this quadrant in the book that I lay out and I give to couples a lot of times where you're like either in your wounded masculine, wounded feminine, healthy masculine, or healthy feminine. And if I can sort of identify where I am energetically in any given moment. So like if I'm in a relationship and we're having a conflict and I'm like in my wounded masculine and I'm really sort of like feeling like this person's being needy and I'm irritated with them and I'm just like, oh, get away from me. And like, you know,

all of this contemptuous competitive energy, then it's my work to go into my healthy feminine and like really get still and say like, okay, how can I be vulnerable with taking up space with how I feel? What's the story I'm telling myself? Can I tell that person? I tell myself the story that everything is always on me and it's never going to be good enough for you, whatever that looks like, right? And so if we can sort of identify where we are in our energetic blueprint in any given moment, we can start to meet our partners and not even just our romantic partners, like in all of our relationships, in our familial relationships, in our friendships,

we can just start to really take responsibility for our energy. And because we are energetic beings and we're all connected, I have found that inevitably, as we start to shift our energy and take responsibility for that, it starts to impact the energy between us and another person.

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let's head back to this amazing episode. Yeah. So I really want to talk about this in relationship, but before I do ask some follow up questions there, are there any clues to when we're in our wounded, whether it be masculine or feminine, how do we know when we're not in a healthy place? There might be some obvious ones, right? Like rage is not healthy no matter what, but like, what are some other clues that would give us some insight in our day to day if we're not in the healthiest of our energy? Yeah. You know, I think that the like short version of like how to identify where we are energetically is like, am I in a conscious

space with the way I'm showing up? Or am I like a little bit in one of those unconscious moments? We all will be there. It's just, it's human, right? And I think when we are in one of those spaces of like my more wounded or distorted ways of being, it will feel like it doesn't feel good. It's like one of the best indications. Like I feel like there's something I need that I'm not getting from someone else. There's a way that I feel shortchanged. So if I'm in my wounded masculine, it's normally me feeling just like I want to be away from people. Another way to look at that and speak to that is sometimes the more avoidant attachment energy is that wounded masculine energy. It's the energy that wants to pull away, the energy that feels like you're doing something wrong and it's irritating me, that type of energetic. The wounded feminine is the more anxious energetic. So that's the one that wants to keep people close to me. I want to pull

you back. I feel like I'm not enough if you're not here. Like I really want to, you know, outsource my power a little bit by keeping people close to me. So it's, you know, when I'm in my healthy masculine, I have confidence in who I am. Like I know who I am. I know I'm imperfect, but I've got a lot of self-forgiveness and that's just like healthy masculine energy. And I feel like I can move into the space of action from that space of like, I believe in me fundamentally who I am. I believe in me, right? The healthy feminine energetic is that receptive, playful, allowing myself to flow with the energetic of life. I trust that sources got me, that there's like a higher intelligence and unfolding to all of this. And so I think the

upper energetics are really like, it feels good to be in those spaces, I guess, is like the simplest way of saying it. When I'm in healthy, masculine or feminine, it feels like I'm really feeling good about who I am and the way I'm showing up in life right now. Okay. So how do we begin to integrate the masculine and feminine inside of ourselves first? And then how do we, I'm curious in relationship, do we find people who are in their healthy masculine feminine? Do we kind of balance each other out? Like how are you seeing this show up in relationship? So here's the thing about human animals that I have found, and it's amazing to understand

because it's like I find it like never fails. We will inevitably create polarity, whether it's from a wounded space or a healthy space. We just do. I don't know why it works this way. So like I was telling you about like my best friend, like I tend to be the more circular feminine energy when I'm around her, especially she will be more in her masculine energy around me than she might in other relationship dynamics. And it's just, we start to play energetically off of one another. It's like, if one person likes sweet, the other person likes salty. If one person's a night owl, they're going to pick people to be around to get up early.

I don't know why we do this. It's just a part of the dance of humanity. Well, it's the opposite to attract that phrase, right? Like there's something to it or we wouldn't all be saying it and experiencing it, right? Exactly, right. And so the thing about energy is like a lot of times what people will say to me is like, okay, this makes a lot of sense, but how do I get my husband to move into a little bit of more healthy masculine? I will say you don't. You identify where you are

energetically. You take 100% responsibility for your own energy. And what inevitably happens is we will create polarity. So if I'm in that like wounded masculine attempting to control my husband and I have to do everything and I'm feeling resentment and I'm really irritated with the story that that's always going to be the case. I take like all the I statements. I take responsibility as I speak from a vulnerable space, like nothing about what he's doing wrong. Right. But then I really say, I guess I'm just, I'm feeling overwhelmed and I'm wondering like, would you be open to helping me? Right. All of a sudden he will, he like his healthy masculine containment will like come online and he will want to contain that energy sudden he will, he like his healthy masculine containment will like come online and he will want to contain that energy and he will want it. And this is a little, little secret for the women who, you know, who date men or who are married to men.

Every man I have found has this like innate desire to be a woman's knight in shining armor. This is like one of those things that like working with couples after a while, I've just noticed it is what it is, but not from the space of like, I will make you that from the space of like, can you support me? And that's like asking for that consent. Right. But the trick about polarity is we can't manipulate our energy. Like it has to be like from a really authentic space, not because I'm attempting to control another person. So if I'm in that space of like, I'm really taking ownership of coming into my healthy feminine, it will create polarity if it's earnest. It's like me being honest, but I can't do it because I'm attempting to bring my husband there, if that makes sense. No, it makes perfect sense. I mean,

I think when we try to manipulate, at some point people figure that out, right? And it just never works in our favor. And I love that you said the responsibility is only ever always with us, just like the responsibility will only ever always be with the other person. I always think of when people go to therapy, there is this, I hear this with so many women, Michelle Obama even said it, like when they went to therapy, she thought the therapist was going to fix her husband. And unfortunately, you know, we can't change people. We can only change ourselves. So I wonder if the knight in shining armor thing has anything to do with this giving energy, you know, because when you when you said it, I will be honest. My first reaction was, I don't need to be saved. Like, Oh girl. Yeah, I know. Is that my wounded masculine

right there? Um, but yeah, I, that was my first reaction, but then I thought about it and I found this to be true in my relationship too, is when I'm vulnerable and when I'm honest and when I share of myself, my husband very much wants to give and take care of. And maybe I don't see it as knight in shining armor because I have my own stuff about it, but there's something true about that. Yeah. And I just want to name and thank you for saying that, Nicole, because there is a time, I would say even five years ago, where I would have heard me say something like, you know, a man wants to be your knight in shining armor. And I would have been like, it would have been really difficult for me to metabolize.

And, you know, what I've come to understand is that there's ways that we do have that innate longing, but we want it to look a little bit different because of the way that we're socialized, right? So many of us as women, because we are really socialized to not be needy and not have needs and don't be a burden and all of these things, mostly because we're afraid

that that person won't show up for us and then we'll be let down. It's incredibly vulnerable to say, would you be open to helping me and supporting me. It's incredibly vulnerable to say, would you be open to helping me and supporting me? It's a lot easier to live in resentment that you're not doing it, right? Because I don't have to ask for your buy-in. I don't have to ask for that consent. But a lot of times we have this like really suppressed secret longing that you will see me struggling. I mean, all of us have been there, that you will see how hard this is. A lot of times

we're giving in excess because we're hoping this person will get the hint and start giving in the way that I'm giving to them. And that's not how it works. When we overgive, people just think we love to overgive. And so they're like, oh, well, that's what you do, who you are. They don't really see that desire that is within us because we're not acknowledging it. But I find that we as women, a lot of times there's this energetic that's dormant within us. we're not acknowledging it. But I find that we as women, a lot of times there's this energetic that's like dormant within us. And I didn't even realize until I felt it, like how much I was hungry for a man to say to me like, hey, I got you. Just like, you just relax. You do a ton. Let me handle it for a minute. And I was like, whoa, you know, because I'd spent so much of my life and like, I got me, I don't need anybody. I can handle all the things that it's, you know,

there's something really beautiful and healing about a man who says, of course, I know you do. I see that. And I would like to give to you because I see how hard you work and how much you're putting out into the world, you know? Yeah. Well, I can't speak for everybody listening in, but you just directly spoke right into my heart and into my relationship because I have a few times over the course of our marriage done the, like, I'm struggling and I just want him to notice. Yes. But the reality is I was avoiding the really important, scary work of verbalizing to my husband, I'm really struggling and I could use some help. And I went the easy route of feeling resentment because he didn't notice as opposed to being responsible for getting my needs met and being honest about what was going on. I also, as you were saying that it

kind of brought tears to my eyes, Jay and I were driving once just on the highway and long story short, some crazy person cut us off and it was like this, did his thing, but I like scrunched up and covered my face because I was convinced we were about to get in this massive accident. And he like put his arm out like the, you know, the mom arm that we took, but he put his arm out and he's like, I got you. And I will forever remember that moment. Like it was like not about the accident anymore. He spoke something that was true and deep and so meaningful to me. And I think that you're right. We want, we carry a lot and it's nice to know that there's somebody out there who's got us. So,

okay. Different question. And it might be a weird big question, but what do you see as the value of identifying things as masculine or feminine? Would we be better served letting go of those, I don't know if labels is the right word, but at the same time, it feels so old. There's something from way ancient back where the yin and the yang, there's something about it that feels important. So my question is like, what's the value of putting it in these categories? Yeah, I love that. And you're right. There is like an ancient wisdom in understanding the interplay of these energetics. And it's like, just because we don't understand it or learn to

work with it doesn't mean it's not playing out. But to the point we've been speaking of, it's playing out in some distorted ways. And I often say there's an unspoken war of the sexes that, from my perspective, has really been heightened over the last few years. In a lot of ways, these patriarchal structures are really being challenged and I would say even dying and no longer going to be sustainable for the future. There's so much about the way that we are living in this hyper productivity, capitalism focused way of being as a human race that's not sustainable. We're literally destroying mother earth that we are inhabiting right now. Um, you know, and I really struggled when I was writing the book to your point, there's a lot of ways of talking about these energetics other than masculine and feminine. And most of us have a lot of energy, a lot of, um, history with what those

labels bring up for us. You know, a lot of us have pain points around those binaries. And so I thought, you thought, maybe I speak about them in a different way, linear, circular, yin, yang, like as you were saying, there's all these ways, dominant, submissive, that we could talk about it without saying masculine and feminine. But if we can't talk about something, then we're never really having a reckoning with where we've had pain. And as we talked about earlier, there's so many ways that we've never had a reckoning around what has been done to the feminine and how we haven't held the feminine with reverence for, oh my gosh, almost 35 plus hundred years now. And in the same way that if you say to me as a woman of color, Denae, I don't see color.

Like to me, you're just exactly the same as me. I will say, well, that's an interesting sentiment, but that actually doesn't speak to all the life experience and nuance of what my life has been as a woman of color. So if you are interested in knowing me, like we got to be able to talk about that. But I would say that is true of all of the ways that we're socialized around gender. And so I do believe that we are evolving in that we're not going to be like stuck in these binaries. We are going to be more fluid and more able to sort of define our truth and our relationship dynamics for ourselves. But if we can't talk about them, we can't heal what's been hurt. So I ultimately landed on like, no, let's talk about it. Let's just like get in there and talk about all the things openly.

I don't think I could have loved that answer any more. Thank you. That was very well said and I think wildly important. I can't believe we're out of time, Danae. Thank you. For those of you listening, go to DanaeLogan.com to find more about Danae and her work. You can also find and follow her on Instagram and TikTok. And of course, you can find her and her BFF and their podcast. It's called Cheaper Than Therapy. And thank you for being here today. Oh, such a delight. Thank you, Nicole.

Okay. It often feels like the world is trying to shove us into either or decisions. But friend, we are mostly both and. And what I want most for you and for me and for all of us is to shed the gender expectations, give our finger to the shoulds and the supposed tos so that we can show up as our best, most authentic selves, which is a mix of the masculine and the feminine. But in order to do that, we need to know ourselves deeply and intimately. We get to build and create from the inside out, knowing that whatever energy that

exists authentically within us is as it should be. We spend so much time focused on the packages we come in that we forget that the real gift is what lies inside. And while one and two-year-olds love the box more than the gift, the rest of us should really know better. Find, be, and celebrate all of you the gift that is you, because that is woman's work.