In my work supporting survivors of childhood trauma to heal and embody their innate divinity, I've come across some interesting patterns of difference between how men and women heal.
Before I dive into this, the work I do is focused on somatic and energetic release and reintegration and divine embodiment - not talking therapy or CBT. Therefore my observations themselves could be skewed by the type of people coming to see me. In this article, I don't mean to over generalise and suggest it's all men or all women, but to keep this easy to read i'll refer to men and women.
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The first thing I've noticed is around the timing of when my male clients and female clients come in for healing.
Generally, men come to see me when they are a rock bottom and have exhausted all their other options, from life coaching, to medication to therapy to psychedelic healing and much more. They've often spent many decades looking for solutions and then experience a long period of disappointing stand still which is a huge block in their life force and direction, which induces stagnation and disappointment.
When healing is is not sought during this period, it becomes rapidly compounded by high levels of dysfunction -usually in 3 areas: their physical health, their career, their relationship.
Healing then becomes a last resort and a final attempt to restore these containers.
I'll explain more about this shortly.
The reason this is important is because as long as this is the context of masculine healing, they are often more vulnerable (because the structures around them that they are used to upholding are 'failing') and are therefore more focused on finding a quick solution for their immediate problem. This focus on what has gone wrong rather than why it has gone wrong can affect mens ability to do deeper healing work- particularly somatic healing and energy work that is focused on illumination and integration of the purpose of the pain.
Because men often use healing as a last resort to retain their crumbling structures (and therefore their own identity) they often arrive more skeptical, burnt out, with adrenal fatigue and extreme levels of PTSD and therefore find it even harder to connect with their body sensations or emotions, let alone the subtle body. This inherently means there is a longer process of healing because the sense of safety has to be established within first, in order to go into deeper layers of the nervous system. Connection has to be relearned - on a somatic, emotional and spiritual level. As the journey is longer, it means it requires a commitment to facing the deeper root causes and also to the elusive higher self and purpose. This inherently contradicts the focus on finding a quick fix solution to their problems and circumstances.
Women on the other hand, tend to be more sensitive to their emotional pain and their inner world and body and therefore are more likely to engage in somatic healing before their entire world has fallen apart. They tend to recognise the queues and signals from their nervous system that something is wrong, and usually come to heal as a way of preventing and averting a further catastrophe. Of course, this is not always the case and some women do only find this level of healing after major medical crises, marriage failures, traumatic births, chronic health issues and more. However, the underlying reason for this in both men and women is usually the same: somewhere in their childhood they had to learn that survival required them to override their own needs. Often this means they had to consistently suppress and override their own emotions in order to connect with a parent. As a child, survival means feeling a sense of safety and connection, belonging to a family unit and feeling accepted and worthy of love. There is certainly this imprint deep in the collective field for men, where often they were not allowed to express difficult emotions such as sadness or anger and instead were rewarded for being compliant or numb.
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Another way that men and women heal differently is related to emotional vs psychological processing. Time and time again I see that women routinely use information from their somatic experience to inform their psychological awareness and narrative. However, for men it tends to be the other way round. They often try to find evidence for their psychological narratives in their somatic experience. If I was to summarise this simply, it would be around body vs mind first. Women's bodies go through intense and radical changes through their lives, from bleeding every month to childbirth and menopause. Reading their body becomes a lifelong skill that has to be developed in order to survive and continue to give life. Men on the other hand, have more subtle processes and have a history of being hunters - where they would have to override their own body sensations, adrenaline, fear and emotions in order to hunt and survive. As a result, we have two very different legacies running through the masculine and feminine somatic patterning. Men tend to lead with their mental analysis, their self understanding tends to come from an intellectual level, rather than a somatic basis. As a result, we have both genders with work to do in order to bridge the gap and develop a cohesive embodiment of self. Women often need to do more work to mentally reframe their own internal narratives with the support of their somatic experience and men need to allow more of their somatic experience to guide and inform their sense of self.
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Another observation I've had is around the type of processing that happens during sessions. Men will rarely have huge emotional releases, it takes longer for them to get into the intensity of sensation and emotion and they are generally more controlled in their responses to charge being released through the body. The releases are less vocal and verbal and can be just physical such as shaking or twisting with perhaps some tears. They often find layers of anger but struggle to express that for fear of endangering someone, beneath that the levels of grief are rarely touched and can take longer to integrate. The reason is, grief work is often related to ancestral and collective imprints and requires a vast vulnerability that for many generations, men have not been supported to cultivate.
Women however, tend to drop into the intensity of the charge at a much deeper level and more immediately, and earlier on in their healing. They learn to feel, express and release the pain more directly without needing to know if it will provide a quick solution to anything. Their releases tend to be more emotional and vocal than physical (crying, howling, tears, screaming). Grief can be felt more easily, but they have not been held in that space long enough to be able to transmute that vibration for their own highest good- i.e to feel the depth of joy. This is because often, they carry an ancestral pattern of women in their line constantly self sacrificing and suppressing their own joy to remain safe.
My final observation is that men tend to heal in a somewhat linear and surprising way. When they are ready, it is immediate, direct and the work is done. What I mean by this is, the process of unearthing sub conscious traumas and fear imprints will continue week after week and it can appear that not much is changing. Then, usually after several weeks, there is a shift. This shift is incredibly subtle and it can appear surprising as it takes them from physical healing to spiritual healing and embodiment quite fast. This has led me to believe that often, mens emotional and somatic processing is happening at a level far far deeper than the nervous system. It is somewhat mysterious, but when the body feels clear enough and the mind has been made up- there is a rapid and immediate awareness of the spiritual realms. Then, the healing journey becomes a spiritual growth one and brings much of the sense of purpose and strength that the masculine has been seeking. He finally, feels he is in reach of his true self - he has FELT the connection.
Women on the other hand, tend to heal in a more circular way, spiralling through emotional and spiritual and somatic imprints at the same time. It is a fascinating journey, with deepening every week. It can become confusing, if total clarity is not offered as to how everything fits together. This is why I make it completely clear to my clients how all these processes relate to one another and to their final healing goal. Effectively the woman is spiralling through her own consciousness and receiving or picking up fragments of information throughout the process, from ancestral to her own childhood, from unconscious belief systems to her own divine feminine energy. This spiral must be done several times (it actually is a never ending process) and requires women to revisit the same fractals (or memory imprints in the field) several times, to keep receiving the deeper light. Men on the other hand, are more like a bow and arrow, when they visit sincerely, they can visit once and unlock the light and typically they are satisfied by this. When I say satisfied I mean, the light frequency at that level is enough to proceed to their next expanded level of consciousness.
Effectively what this means is, women will revisit past traumas over and over again in order to heal. This is often a deeply emotional journey and they consistently have releases in line with this. Men on the other hand, take longer to get into this deep level, but when they eventually do, the arrow is direct and accurate and all fractals simultaneously open and reintegrate in their energy body.
A final difference in how men and women heal comes down to intention. Women will often come to me for healing and also have an intention to heal their child, their partner and their parents. They want to heal the whole family system. They are also able to make clear links between how their childhood trauma is now replaying through their children and their current family. The truth is, far fewer men come to heal because they realise they have imprinted their trauma on their children. Mostly, they are looking to heal for themselves, to get back into a functioning state, or to keep their marriage together - but not necessarily to clear the family field. Time and time again, I see that women are the true leaders when it comes to healing and the men often wait for this queue and leadership position to be taken up, before they change.
However, I do believe this paradigm of women leading the healing and then men dropping in later (if at all) is starting to change. I feel we are a far way from men and women healing individually and together in order to prevent traumas and actually just to harmonise a more conscious partnership and birth. Perhaps that is human nature, we really only pay attention to changing something when it becomes painful enough that we are forced to change - after all, we created it that way to begin with, so we have a vested interest in keeping it the same...until we don't benefit from it anymore...until it starts to cost us more than it gives us...until its time to change.
It is my hope that by explaining the differences, men and women can support one another to bridging the gaps they have, knowing it is only for their own benefit. These differences can then become complimentary systems rather than competing ones. The ancient unconscious imprints deep in the collective that have forced men into a corner where they either suppress their body sensations and emotions to survive or they die are changing - we no longer live in this hunter gatherer environment and women are looking for men to become more emotionally and somatically in tune with themselves and with them. In turn, men are looking to women's hearts for softness, safety and acceptance - not a maze full of tunnels, traps and dead ends.
Together, we can support the collective field to transmute these old ways of being that have kept men and women lonely and separate for too long.