Why I'm đźš« About "Masculine/Feminine Dynamics or "Polarity Work"
It’s not at all an understatement to say that what I’m about to share with you has taken me YEARS to grapple with, understand, and deprogram in myself. I come from a background of enough woo that I’ve been a not-on-purpose student of what some would call “masculine/feminine dynamics” or “polarity” for more than 20 years.
And even though at times I’ve bought in (and even reinforced) these problematic teachings, they’ve always chafed me in ways I couldn’t quite get to the bottom of. For relevant context: I was assigned female at birth, identify as a woman, use she/her pronouns. I’m not straight.
And I have felt incredibly confined by the spiritualization of gender energies.
For a loooong time I’ve known that the teachings and spiritualization around gender—sadly so common in therapy and coaching—were hurtful and oppressive because I personally felt them wielded against me. And they always felt just as potent a weapon as misogyny or even the patriarchy. But I haven’t been able to articulate the pain or the problem until now, and I’m going to do my best here:
Using “masculine/feminine dynamics” or “polarity” in a therapeutic or coaching context forces clients into a gender binary that is socially constructed, culturally biased, and inherently exclusionary—which narrows, distorts, or erases their actual lived experience. It creates relationship problems too, but I’ll get to that.
It imposes a binary lens on traits, behaviors, needs, and energies that are not inherently gendered.
It imports stereotypes about what men or women are “supposed” to be or want.
It excludes or pathologizes trans, non-binary, and gender-diverse clients by assuming that everyone has (or should have) a “masculine” and “feminine” side.
It ignores socio-cultural and historical power dynamics, especially how “masculine” traits have been elevated and “feminine” traits devalued.
It reduces freedom, individuality, expression, and complexity—key components of psychological healing and growth—into rigid archetypes.
It shifts focus away from the client’s real context, identity, trauma history, and systemic experience, replacing it with a premade template.
It assigns gender roles to healthy traits present in all people.
It’s often assumed by the therapist or coach and offered to the client non-consensually, asserting a spiritual “truth” the client must accept—even if it dehumanizes them.
And it’s all entirely unnecessary. The problem isn’t that people explore assertiveness, receptivity, boundaries, intuition, structure, or flow—those are real human capacities.
The problem is assigning them to gender.
Once the therapist or coach frames experiences as “feminine energy” or “masculine energy,” they’re no longer meeting the client as a complex, contextual, culturally-shaped human. They’re sorting them into a template shaped by patriarchal gender norms and binary thinking.
While so many of my complaints about these beliefs are about inclusion of all people, straight couples are where I have seen these indoctrinated beliefs take hold most strongly.
When couples who have absorbed the ambient noise in the culture about masculine or feminine energy come to me for couples therapy, they tend to struggle with the following things:
Acceptance: these indoctrinated beliefs tend to come with a lot of shoulds and expectations around how people are supposed to be. And so when these couples fight, it’s often about how one or the other is “not masculine enough/too masculine” or “not feminine enough/too feminine.” Attacking each other’s characters like this is toxic to healthy connection. Each person having to fill a certain (inherently constricting) role in order for the relationship to go well isn’t a sign of health.
Reciprocity: What gets missed in the polarity worldview is that BOTH partners are responsible for the relationship tasks and maintenance that tend to get labeled as the masculine or feminine responsibilities. Both partners are responsible for creating protection and safety. Both are responsible for surrendering at times. Both are responsible for taking the lead sometimes. Both are responsible for caregiving. Both are responsible for logic, strength, compromise, receptivity, intuition, leadership. Relationships in which these things are sorted out by gender are ones that don’t allow people to be fully human, ones that tend to fall into traditional gender roles (benefitting one person more than the other), and I find that each person in those couples tends to have big blindspots in certain areas of relational skills (those that they consider the responsibility of the other gender). For a relationship to function sustainably and healthily for both people, they must be equal, which means they share overlapping skill sets, even if they perform those tasks differently, and they can trust each other to hold the bond with equal responsibility and skill.
Why do I care so much about this? Empathy. Do no harm. It’s that simple to me.
I want my practice to be a place that’s big enough for everyone and doesn’t painfully exclude anyone as well as one that helps people and couples truly have the healthy relationships they want.
In SomaField, I made Socio-Cultural Attunement the second Core Principle because I believe it’s crucial to acknowledge the social, cultural, and systemic forces that shape lived experience. I call on practitioners to listen not only with empathy, but with an informed, justice-rooted lens—acknowledging identity, power, and context as integral to the healing and growth process.
I invite you to take the language and teaching of gender norms out of your work and see how much larger a space you can hold for the people who come to trust you.
Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)
