Most of us have masculine wounding. And this trauma is often the root cause of a lack of discipline.
Whether that stems from absent fathers, abusive relationships with fathers and other men, or relationships with men and fathers who are emotionally unavailable determines how this wounding is translated into the subconscious mind and subsequently how it manifests in our day to day actions, behaviors, and patterns.
Now, before I dive deeper into this – I must clarify. Regardless of gender identity, biological sex, or sexual orientation, we ALL have masculine and feminine energies within us.
The terms divine masculine and divine feminine in this sense are one piece of the universal principles of duality energetics.
We all would benefit from balancing and healing our masculine and feminine energies. This is where duality transforms into unity.
In the work I’ve done with clients, as well as in my own life, I’ve discovered that most Western women today have compensated for their childhood wounds by becoming hyper-masculine.
This hyper-masculinization manifests as being extremely rigid, lack of surrender and flow, inability to receive, and use of control in order to create safety.
For men, early childhood masculine wounding in correspondence to the relationship with fathers, leads to a suppression of their own masculine energy as a survival mechanism to adapt to their environment.
Those of us who have unhealed masculine wounding that is rooted in an early childhood abuse, suppression, or rejection of the masculine pole, display a hyper-feminization of our energy.
Hyper-feminization manifests as a lack of structure and discipline, poor ability to assert and maintain boundaries, difficulty with being present, low confidence in personal power, and absence of drive and motivation.
The feminine or masculine energy itself is not the problem. The issue arises when there is an imbalance between the masculine and feminine poles within our own energy bodies.
So, how does the masculine wound manifest as a lack of discipline?
When our masculine energy is stuck in a disempowered state – we become passive and unstructured, unable to follow through with a drive to move forward and utilize action in order to bring about what we want into existence.
We start to believe that our masculine willpower is of no consequence – it is worthless in creating the result we desire.
A popular core belief here is – “I cannot use my willpower to create what I want because what I want is wrong and using my personal power will only cause me harm.”
This belief is especially prevalent if our authentic selves were rejected and conditionally loved during childhood. If a child views their personal will as something shameful, it makes sense that they would adapt by abandoning their own desires in order to survive.
So the issue with discipline isn’t actually that we are lazy, apathetic, or just couldn’t be bothered to motivate ourselves.
The root of the wound with discipline stems from the subconscious program we adopted that our masculine energy is wrong, shameful, dangerous, and bad.
We view our personal willpower as something harmful to us, especially when it got us into trouble in childhood through a withdrawal of love, constant criticism, abuse, rejection, and abandonment.
Naturally, it reasons to follow that if our personal willpower is something that is dangerous for our wellbeing, then the sustained use of our personal willpower to bring about a certain reality – discipline – is exponentially more harmful, and must be avoided at all costs.
This is why some of us can be so disciplined when it comes to going to school or working at a job that we don’t particularly enjoy, and yet have a challenging time being disciplined when pursuing things that are meaningful and worthwhile to ourselves.
Personal willpower exercised to meet societal expectations feels safer. And it is even perceived as necessary to survive.
Whereas discipline for the sake of being true to one’s own calling and purpose is more challenging to exercise and sustain. It all makes sense when it stems from a pattern of vilifying our desires and authentic selves.
We’ve adopted a belief that we are inherently wrong – that something is wrong with us. And if something is wrong with us, this means we are not good enough, and our desires and goals are not valid.
Healing the relationship with discipline often isn’t as simple as just doing it.
Yes, simply forcing ourselves to take the action may work in the short term. The challenges reveal themselves in the sustainability and longevity of these endeavors.
Radical self acceptance and shameless validation of our emotions, needs, and desires is the first step in healing our association with discipline.
From there, we begin to build on top of our healing relationship with our masculine energy, and slowly add on other tools to craft a more disciplined life.
With a disciplined mindset shift, the act of simply wishing evolves into becoming a force of creation to be reckoned with.
Grace Huang Coaching 