How the Lack of Masculine Presence Taught Her to Control Everything

Episode 136 of the Infinite Devotion Podcast

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Last week I talked about killing the nice guy in me. About how passive compliance, people-pleasing, and the avoidance of conflict nearly destroyed my marriage, and what it took to find my way out of it.

This week I want to speak to the other side of the same wound.

Because if you listened to that episode and thought "okay, so I just deal with my nice guy stuff and she'll come along," you only have half the picture. And if you're a woman who listened and thought "great, so this is all on him," same thing. You're off the hook in a way that doesn't actually serve you.

The truth is that the wounded masculine and the wounded feminine don't just coexist. They create each other. They mirror each other. And you cannot understand one without understanding the other.

So this is what I want to dig into here. Where the feminine control pattern comes from, why it runs so deep, why "just let go" is about the most useless thing you could ever say to a woman, and what it actually takes for her to find her way to freedom.

I want to say upfront: I acknowledge that I'm a man talking about women's inner experience. Everything I'm sharing here I learned directly from leading my wife Dawn through this, from 17 years in the trenches of our own relationship, from working with women in my Communion course, and from what I've watched unfold in the couples I've coached. This isn't theory. It's lived ground.

The Mirror: How Wounded Polarity Works

Polarity in a relationship means that one person holds the masculine pole and the other holds the feminine. The masculine is the initiator, the one who leads, decides, holds ground, takes action. The feminine is the one who receives, flows, opens, responds.

When we're operating out of our childhood wounds, we invert those poles.

The wounded masculine, the nice guy, the people-pleaser, the conflict-avoider, stops initiating and starts accommodating. He plays a wounded version of the natural feminine role. Because he's driven by fear, he makes himself small, unthreatening, easy to be around. He scans everything and everyone and tries to avoid anyone feeling anything that would upset him. He's trying to stay safe by never rocking the boat.

And the wounded feminine? She does the exact opposite. She takes control. Of the relationship, of the environment, of herself. She manages, plans, pushes, perfects. She picks up the masculine role because someone has to, and the man in her life has abdicated it. 

This is the inversion. The wounded masculine operates like a healthy feminine. The wounded feminine operates like a healthy masculine. And they lock each other into those patterns, each one's wound feeding and confirming the other's. 

This never leads to true satisfaction on either person's part, because both people are functioning in a pure survival mode, in complete contrast to and opposite of, their nature as a masculine or feminine being.

In our relationship, the absence of my genuine masculine presence left a vacuum. And Dawn, being Dawn, filled it. She controlled everything she could because that's how she kept herself safe when there was nothing solid to lean on. The lack of real presence taught her she had to be in charge. Not because she wanted to be. Because it felt like she had to be. 

Why Her Healing Is Harder Than His

There's something I've noticed about the asymmetry of healing between men and women, and I think it's one of the most important things I've ever understood about this work.

When a man heals, when he comes out of the nice guy pattern and into his genuine masculine nature, what he's moving toward is more agency. More initiative. More calm, grounded action. He's moving toward sovereignty over his own choices and his own life. His healed state feels like standing up straighter. Like finally being the one who decides.

There's a kind of Wu Wei to it, effortless action that comes from a place of freedom rather than fear. It's still action. It still involves having agency and moving through the world with intention. The healed masculine is a doer. And that, for a man, feels like coming home to something solid.

A woman's healed state is the opposite of all of that.

Her natural polarity is receptive. She is, at her core, a being who opens, receives, flows, and responds. So when she heals, when she comes out of control and into her true feminine nature, she is moving toward existential vulnerability. She is moving toward a state of radical openness where she MUST trust and surrender to life. In this state, she cannot control what happens to her. She never could...life is inherently uncertain. But now she is acutely aware of the fact that she doesn't control life, because in her healed state, her walls and defense mechanisms have been set down. 

Let that sink in.

His healing means more control over his own life. Her healing means less. His healing feels like gaining something. Hers feels, at least at first, like losing everything she built to keep herself safe.

This is why I sometimes say that a healed woman doesn't exist without a healed man. That statement tends to land wrong for some people, but this is not codependency or some kind of misogyny. I'm not saying she can't heal unless he heals first. I'm saying something more structural than that.

A woman cannot surrender into a void. She cannot open into nothing. For her to move into the radical vulnerability that her full feminine nature requires, there has to be something there to catch her. A real, grounded, solid masculine presence that she can actually feel, not just a man who says the right things or has good intentions, but a man whose presence communicates safety at a level that bypasses her rational mind and speaks directly to her nervous system.

Without that, asking her to let go isn't just a big ask. It's an irrational one. It's asking her to fall with no one there to catch her.

This is why my biggest role in Dawn's healing has never been helping her heal. Every time I've tried to help her heal directly, it has backfired. I'm too tangled up in her patterns for that, and she's too tangled up in mine. What I can do, what I have to do, is heal myself. Become more solid. More present. More genuinely unshakeable. Because the more solid I become, the more she has something real to lean into, and the more possible it becomes for her to start loosening her grip.

Surrender Is Not Weakness

Surrender for a woman does not mean losing herself. It does not mean becoming incapable. It does not mean handing over the keys to her life and becoming dependent in some dysfunctional way.

She doesn't lose her ability to take care of herself by choosing to open. If everything falls apart tomorrow, she can still stand on her own two feet. That capacity doesn't go anywhere.

What changes is that she stops white-knuckling every moment of her life from behind a wall of control. She makes an active, courageous choice to live openly, even when she's afraid of getting hurt, even when she has been hurt. She chooses not to collapse back into controlling behavior every time something feels unsafe, because she knows that the open state is more valuable than the defended one, even when it costs her something.

That's some of the most profound courage I've ever watched a human being demonstrate.

The fear will tell her she needs to keep it. The fear will convince her that if she lets go of the control, everything will fall apart. But the fear is running a very old program, one that made complete sense for the version of her that needed it and has long since outlived its usefulness.

The Practical Reality That Put Her Here

There's also a layer of this that has nothing to do with childhood wounds and everything to do with the world she was raised in.

We raise girls to be self-sufficient. Same school, same career paths, same expectation that you will build an independent life and support yourself before, and maybe instead of, relying on anyone else. This is practical and largely unavoidable in the modern world. A woman has bills to pay. She has a life to build. She can't wait around for a man to provide for her, and the cultural messaging she receives from the time she's old enough to absorb it is that depending on a man is either foolish or beneath her.

So by the time she arrives at a committed relationship, she has usually spent years, sometimes decades, living entirely in an inverted polarity. She has been the one in charge of her own life, by necessity. Those neural pathways are deeply grooved.

And then there's the other reality. Women are raised in a world where they are taught, explicitly and by example, that men are not trustworthy.

Chris Bale, who I spoke with on the podcast last year, made a point that has stayed with me: it's no wonder most women don't trust men, because most of them have never met one. Not in the sense of an adult male, but a man who has done enough inner work that he is genuinely solid, genuinely present, genuinely safe to lean on.

Most women have not only never met a man like that. They've never even met another woman who has met a man like that. So the idea of depending on one, of actually opening and trusting and surrendering to a man, has no reference point. It's not just scary. It's almost conceptually impossible.

Letting her guard down, in her experience, has meant getting hurt. Has meant being abandoned, dismissed, used, or controlled. The practicality of modern life gives those self-protective patterns a place to take root, and her history with men waters them.

So when she comes into your relationship, even if you are genuinely different, even if you are doing the work, she is carrying all of that evidence. And she is, at some level, waiting for you to confirm it. Not because she's broken. Because she's been trained by years of experience to expect exactly that.

Dawn came into our relationship from a place like this. From day one I was willing and wanting to provide for her, to be the one who held things. And she couldn't receive it. Even when I was paying all the bills, she felt guilty. She felt like she should be doing more. She found ways to stay in control of things because that's all she knew. Not because she didn't love me. Because her nervous system didn't know how to do anything else.

The Root: Self-Abandonment and the Lie

To really understand the feminine control pattern, you have to go all the way down to where it starts. And for Dawn, and for most of the women I've worked with, it starts with self-abandonment.

Dawn grew up in a family that loved her. I want to be clear about that because it matters. Her family genuinely cared about her and wanted the best for her. And also, she grew up inside a world that was completely closed. A farm in the country. A church-based school. A social circle made up entirely of people who shared the same beliefs, the same values, the same rules about what was good and bad, right and wrong, acceptable and damnable.

In her early years, everything had to be classified. Everything fit somewhere on the scale of approved or forbidden. And the consequences of being on the wrong side of that scale were not mild. Be good and you go to heaven. Be bad and you burn in hell forever. And here is the list of what good looks like. We'll spend the first 18 years of your life making sure you know it.

In that environment, Dawn never got to learn who she was. She never got to develop her own voice, listen to her own intuition, connect to her own body, or live as her own self. She adapted. She became who she needed to be to survive in that world, to belong, to be loved, to stay safe.

Because not only would doing the wrong things get her burned in a firey furnace forever (what a terrifying thing to teach a child). Doing the wrong things meant she'd be outcast from this entire close-kint circle that made up her entire world. It was practically unsafe to that child to be anything other than who she was expected to be. 

And every time she did what was expected, every time she performed the role perfectly, she got praised. She got love and attention and validation. The message was clear: abandon yourself and you are good. Be who we tell you to be and you are loved. By us AND God. 

That's the root of the inversion. That's the moment the pattern locked in.

Kanye West, of all people, said something that I think about in this context. He talked about how exhausting it is to go through life treating everything like a test, like there's a right and wrong answer you have to get right or you fail. That's exactly what Dawn was doing. Every decision, every choice, every action, all of it was oriented around getting it right, being good, avoiding the wrong answer.

And every single one of those choices took her one more step away from herself.

The farther we get from our authentic selves, the more fragile we become. Because then the whole life is built on a lie. The lie being that who you really are is not enough, not safe, not acceptable, and that your survival depends on performing a version of yourself that meets someone else's standard of good.

And when your whole life is built on a lie, you have to defend that lie with everything you have. Because if you stop defending it, you have to face the reality that there's no real you in there at all. That every choice you made, every relationship you entered, every direction you pointed your life, was coming from a performed self rather than a real one.

That is the most terrifying thing a human being can face. And it's the thing that sits at the bottom of the feminine control pattern. The control is not just about keeping the outside world safe. It's about keeping the lie intact. Because without the lie, the whole structure of the self collapses.

This is why you cannot simply ask her to let go. She's not holding on because she's stubborn or difficult or doesn't trust you enough. She's holding on because letting go means the lie comes down with it. And she doesn't yet know who she is on the other side of that.

The Cost of the Lie

When Dawn started to let go of the lie, when she started to listen to herself and leave the structure she'd been built around, and follow the deeper truth of her own soul, the cost was real and it was high.

Her family judged her. People she had known her whole life ostracized her. Her best friend at the time stopped speaking to her entirely when we left the church. Almost all of our friends disappeared at that time.

After that came YEARS of grief as she came to terms with how completely she had abandoned herself, and all the ways that abandonment had been taken advantage of by others, myself included in certain seasons.

So when I talk about the cost-benefit analysis of letting go, I'm not being abstract. Her reward for starting to become herself was losing nearly everyone she had ever known, and the entire "self" that she thought that she was.

On top of all of that, the direction she is moving towards, and continues to move toward to this very day, isn't some new version of that old life that's just somehow the same but better. 

No, the point on the horizon she continues to move toward looks like infinite vulnerability. Complete openness. No walls. 

Just think about that tradeoff. Where does a woman sign up for that deal? Why would she?

And honestly, I don't blame any woman who looks at all of this and decides to stay in charge. From the outside, the math doesn't work. The surrender asks for everything and offers something that feels, from inside the defended state, completely intangible and entirely unsafe. 

But here's what I know from watching Dawn and from working with women in this territory for years. There is a level of freedom available on the other side of all that fear and control that most women never get to touch in their entire lives. A freedom that is only accessible underneath it all. A connection to her own body, her own desire, her own voice, her own aliveness that the defended state simply cannot reach.

And in order to get there, she needs to be held.

What Holding Her Actually Means

If you're a man who wants to experience your woman living in a free and alive state, she needs to be held by something extremely solid. It's the only way she'll ever be able to truly let go and live in a surrendered state of existence.

Not held with promises. Not held with good intentions. Not held because you want something from her (this one's for you, guys who think her surrender, submission, or opening are just going to get you laid more). If you only want her to open so you can get something from her when she does...she'll never actually feel safe enough to open. Because you'll be looking for the first opportunity to swipe in and get her to do the thing you're trying to manipulate her into. Her nervous system reads this (accurately) as danger. And you'll never even leave the starting gate. 

No, I mean held in a way she can feel.

She doesn't have to be told she's safe. She will know when she's safe. Her nervous system will tell her before her mind catches up. And if there are cracks in your armor, she will find them, not because she's looking for a reason to distrust you, but because her threat-detection system has been calibrated by decades of experience to notice exactly that. You are going to have to be extraordinarily solid to become someone she can begin to trust at that level.

And solid means more than being consistent or reliable, though it includes those things. It means you have dealt with your own wounds deeply enough that her vulnerability doesn't trigger your neediness. That when she starts to open, you don't immediately move to take from her. That you can hold her in her grief, in her anger, in her fear, without collapsing, defending yourself, or trying to fix it.

If you are not healed enough that her opening doesn't become your opportunity to finally get what you want, don't try to lead her there. You will confirm every belief she already has about men. You will reinforce the pattern more deeply than it was before. You are better off leaving her alone and working on yourself.

Because she can feel the difference. She knows. Better than you do.

The Timeline Is Not What You Want It to Be

This is the part that will drive you crazy, and you'll probably not believe me. 

This process is slow. Genuinely, uncomfortably, sometimes maddeningly slow.

Her guard doesn't come down all at once. It comes down a little, and then something happens, maybe something you did, maybe just a memory, maybe nothing she can name, and it goes back up. Higher than before, sometimes. And then it comes down again. And then back up. And you catch her every single time, and gradually the radius of her trust expands.

But you are going to be doing this for years. Not years before you get to experience any of the beauty of it, the early signs of her opening are profound and worth everything. But years before it feels like the new normal, before the openness is her default rather than the exception.

Dawn and I have been doing this really deep work together, every day, over the last 6+ years. And this isn't an all at once thing where she's "done" and I'm "done" and now we're "free".

Even now, even this week as I'm writing this, she is still going through times when I hold her while she cries for hours, grieving layers of self-abandonment that go all the way back to childhood, sometimes grieving the ways I hurt her or the ways she silenced herself in response to me. 

That's the God honest truth about this process. And I know that the fact that we don't share the specifics of those moments can make part of what we DO share seem like a highlight reel of the "good parts".  But frankly, it's too personal. But it's exactly those moments, the ones in the dark, the ones nobody sees, that make everything else possible.

The aliveness. The freedom. The silliness. The sexual openness. The depth of intimacy that I genuinely believe most people have given up on ever experiencing. That's what lives on the other side of all of it. And it's worth every single moment of everything it takes.

We Have to Go Together

I said earlier on in this piece that a fully healed woman doesn't exist outside the presence of a fully healed man. And a fully healed man doesn't really get there without his woman reflecting his weakness back to him, using her voice, not tolerating his childish behavior.

We have to do this together.

I would not be the man I am without Dawn. She would not be where she is without me. We could not have each gotten ourselves to a healed place separately and then come together and had this relationship. That's a fantasy.

The only way this relationship exists is that we grew into it together, through years of being each other's mirror, each other's teacher, each other's most confronting presence.

Two people who are deeply committed to going the distance. Through what will feel like absolute hell at times, for both of you. But on the other side of it is something I can only describe as heaven right here on earth. Not heaven when you die. Heaven in your actual life. In your body, in your bed, in the ordinary moments of a Tuesday afternoon.

That's what's possible. That's what I'm here to point toward.

That's what all of this is for.

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