A Man's Intro To The Anima - How The Woman Inside Is Running Your Life

All right, gentlemen, welcome back to The Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here, and today I'm gonna be doing an introduction to the anima, which is a Jungian archetype that shows up in a lot of his work. And the anima, in a basic version, is the archetype of the universal feminine. Now, there's many different ways that I could go about this. I could probably do a few hours' worth of a workshop on the anima. It's a very complex subject that Jung talks about, endlessly and throughout a lot of his work. But for the sake of today, I'm going to just introduce the concept. I'm gonna give you a couple key factors that I see sort of plaguing a lot of men. And then I'm going to bring it into your relationships because in my book, I put a line that I think summarizes a man's relationship to the anima. And the book, by the way, is called "Men's Work." But in the book, I wrote a line that said, "How you treat women is how you treat your own unconscious." How you treat women is how you treat the feminine within yourself. And so right out the gates, what I want you to know is that the easiest way to begin to understand your own anima, your own relationship with the feminine, because every human being has a relationship to the masculine and to the feminine. We're kind of going through a time right now where many people's relationship to the masculine is that of animosity and hostility, but we'll leave that for maybe another video about the animus. But everybody has a relationship to the anima and the animus, and you can see this throughout basic philosophies and religions throughout the course of human history. Things like alchemy have talked about the principles of duality, the principles of gender, that masculine and feminine exist. And what Jung found was very interesting. He studied countless, countless cultures, across the world and found that there are some basic archetypes that exist throughout human history, throughout human cultures. And one of those is the anima. And so you can think about this as the universal feminine, the archetype of everything that the feminine embodies. And for you as a man, there's a couple of different things that you need to know. First off, the anima represents the, the great mother. It represents everything that feminine and female nature is meant to embody. The connection to emotions, the connection to the physical form. In Jungian and within many different philosophies, the masculine is sort of like the awareness of what is, and the feminine is the energy of what is happening. So all of the vitality, all the emotions that are coming out, all of your feeling and your sensations, everything that you're experiencing in the moment, is the feminine, is the anima, and the awareness of that happening is the masculine. So you can think of sort of consciousness, awareness, presence in its purest form as the masculine, and you can think of everything that you are aware of as the feminine—life, vitality, nature, lust, desire, anger, frustration—all of that. Is the sort of feminine. Now, every man has a different relationship to his own anima, to his own feminine. And Jung had a great quote. He said, if the encounter with the shadow, if the encounter with the shadow is the apprentice piece, so sort of the first stage in the individual's development, then the encounter with the anima is the masterpiece. So Jung is kind of giving us a hint here. He's really saying, in order for you to reconcile, build a relationship with your own anima, you must first go through the initiatory process of dealing with your own shadow. And that the shadow is sort of like the gatekeeper, uh, or the, the first level boss that you have to encounter, that you have to reconcile with before you can go and you can reconcile with the anima. And there's many different reasons for that, one of which is that generally speaking, the encounter with the anima is going to be more complex, it's going to be more layered, and it's going to be a little bit more subtle and hard to see depending on your life, your experience, the culture that you've grown up in, et cetera. So I wanna return to my statement around how you treat women is how you treat your unconscious. How you treat women is how you treat your own feminine. So depending on the upbringing that you have, men will fall into a few different categories with how they relate to the feminine. So the first category is disconnection, and this is the man man that's generally disconnected from his own emotions. He's disconnected from feeling. He's very numbed out, right? If you're in this category, you don't necessarily like your emotions. You don't want to feel your emotions. You don't get close to your emotions. You see your emotions as problematic. And a lot of the times, that sentiment filters into your perspective of, of women. You see women as problematic. You see women as emotional. You see their emotions as problematic. You see them as chaotic, uh, and overbearing or overwhelming. And you view your own emotions in that way as well. And so your only real defense mechanism is to create so much distance from your own emotions, which also causes you to create a tremendous amount of distance within your relationships to women. So generally speaking, attac— avoidant attached-based men that I've worked with over the years, this is their defense strategy. Part of that avoidant attachment is a disconnection and creating space from the anima, from the feminine, from the emotions, from the feeling and the sensation aspect of life and existence. The second thing, which Jung had a specific term for— the second version of this is what we see with a lot of nice guys. This is where a lot of nice guys will— or people pleasers, if you're, if you're one of those individuals— where you really get captured by the anima, you're captured by the emotions. And so Jung called this anima possession. And in another video, I'm going to go much deeper on this because it is a huge thing that I see in a lot of men in modern-day society. But anima possession is essentially that your emotions rule your life, your emotions dominate your life. You have very little emotional control. You get reactive. You're extremely sensitive. You can be very volatile. You can go through stages of shutting down to blowing up to feeling okay to very happy to very sad. There's a bit of like a roller coaster that's constantly going on inside of you. And so the anima possession in Jungian terms— and again, I'm simplifying some of this for the sake of brevity— but the anima possession is really that your emotions have you. Your emotions are in control of you. You don't have emotions, your emotions have you. And so, when you feel something, it's sometimes outsized or really big. What I've seen in some men is that as they start to do therapeutic work or personal work, if they have moved from stage 1 or that first phase of being really disconnected from their emotional bodies and disconnected from their feminine, some men will go through this other phase. They'll go through a kind of version of anima possession where it feels like your emotions are just all over the place. You're messy, you're crying sometimes, you're pissed off, and you feel a little bit emotionally volatile. But anima possession in its truest form is a byproduct of a mother wound, okay? The anima possession in its truest form is a byproduct of a mother wound. So you maybe had an extremely overbearing mother, you maybe had what Jung talked about, and Jordan Peterson has talked about, as the devouring mother, right? The person that was constantly over your shoulder, telling you what to wear, telling you what to do, telling you who you should be. And so you had this really overbearing feminine energy that encroached on your sense of identity. And so your identity really became sort of infringed on or trapped inside of the feminine. And so you can think of these types of men, and maybe this is you, as very feminine forward-facing. So there's a lot of emotions that you're dealing with inside of yourself. Maybe you are disconnected from your own animus, your own masculine nature. You don't have a lot of edge to you. You don't have very good boundaries. You say yes when you really mean no. You're kind of a little bit of a pushover. You don't stand up for yourself. And specifically with women, for a lot of men that have the anima possessed, obsession, and this second category of the anima really being dominant within your psyche, women feel threatening, women feel scary, women can feel like they're overbearing or they're too much. And a lot of the times your emotions track in the exact same way, like you feel as though you are at the whim of your emotions. All right, my friend, exciting announcement: I have free monthly office hours or community calls that you can join now. So once a month, I'm going to be bringing people together like you to support you. I'll be teaching, I'll be leading some presentations and doing some workshops. I will be answering your questions. So wherever you are, whatever it is that you're going through, whatever you are working on in your life, this is an opportunity for you to come and get some free support. So you can go to mantalks.com/office. Again, it's mantalks.com/office to sign up and to join me. The first call is going to be on July 28th. I look forward to seeing you there. The third version of the relationship with the anima that I have seen a lot of is a man who has some— who's gaining some semblance of balance with his emotions, with his anima, but it's through domination. And so this is your sort of quintessential warrior maybe not even warrior, but overly dominant versions. So how you deal with your emotions is through dominance, is trying to get your emotions, your grief, your sadness, your disappointment, your frustration, it's by getting those things to submit to you. And you can never be in full relationship with your own anima. You can't be in relationship with your own feminine through dominance. This is kind of what's happening in our modern culture right now, is the feminine is really rising up and pushing back on a lot of the, the masculine attempt to dominate, to control, to take charge of, to submit the feminine. And what Jung really talked about was that the end goal is about being on equal footing with the anima. It's about understanding the power of beauty in itself. It's about understanding the power of experience and the energetic expression of emotions. And those things might sound esoteric or whimsical or whatever to you, but it's really about finding a type of harmonious relationship with your emotions so that as you become aware of them, you're not possessed by them. As you become aware of them, you don't disconnect and disassociate from them altogether. As you become aware of them, you don't try and dominate them and push them back down or dull them out, but that actually you're able to be a kind of masculine witness, a force, if you will, a consciousness, a presence to the emotions that are constantly rising up inside of you. And Jung did a great job of exploring this theme in many of his different books, especially notably within the Red Book, where he talks about different encounters with different versions of the anima. And they sort of came in different forms and his relationship to them. And you'll notice this as well. You'll notice that there's two big ways to start to understand your relationship to the anima. So the first way is, and this is how you really start to get a hold of like, what is my relationship to the anima? The first way is to look at your projections onto women. So remember, the way you treat women is the way you treat your own feminine. It's the way you treat your own anima. This is my personal framework. This is how I have really— this is, this is how I sort of simplified something that's very, very complex. But the main way is through projection. The main way you begin to understand your own feminine nature is what are you projecting out onto women? And that might be your mother, it might be your sister, it might be a friend of yours, it might be colleagues at work or a female boss, it might be your girlfriend, or your wife, and you start to notice, how do I view them? Do I think that they're threatening? Do I think that they're unbearable? Do I view them as chaotic and volatile and emotional? What can you not stand about women? And then being able to look at yourself in that projection. So you might ask yourself, okay, number one, what can I not stand in some of the women in my life? What really triggers and activates me? And then number 2 is, where is that in me? Where do I find that within myself? Or where am I rejecting that truth within myself? And then you can start to explore the sort of lighter side, right? Like, what do I love about women? What do I, what do I view them as holding or possessing that I don't? And then secondly, how can I begin to cultivate that within myself? So as a perfect example, A lot of the times I see nice guys end up with, you know, women that are more boundary. They know what they want. They're more direct, you know, more direct, more assertive. And so a lot of nice guys, a lot of people-pleasing men will end up dating women or marrying women that inhabit the qualities that they feel like they are lacking within their own masculine nature. And so they're trying to find that masculine core within the woman. So that woman sort of embodies leadership and direction and assertiveness and boundaries and all the pieces that usually the nice guy or the people pleaser is lacking. He's missing those traits within himself. And so a lot of the times, and I'm gonna give you this little hint, a lot of the times a man who is more anima possessed, who is more of the nice guy, the people pleaser, his emotions run the show, that man will almost always find a woman who is more masculine forward. So she's more animus possessed, she's more masculine forward. So she is very direct, she's very assertive, she's more dominant, she's more direction-oriented, she's calling the shots, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Jung would have a heyday with our modern society. But how the first stage, the first way we really start, that you really start to understand your own anima and your own animus, is notice what am I projecting out onto women? What am I projecting out onto the woman, the women that I date, or that you're married to? What am I projecting out on the women that I go, that I'm at work with, that I'm friends with? What judgments, what fears, uh, what elevations? So anytime that you're pedestaling a woman, it's generally that she inhabits or embodies a quality, right? Maybe you are enamored with a woman because she's She's so sensual, or she's so beautiful, or she really embodies ease and grace. She's very, very compassionate, and you just lack compassion altogether. So men that are very disconnected from their anima, they're very disassociated from their own feminine nature, they generally speaking lack compassion. And same thing with men who are more dominating of their emotions. Men that are more dominating of their emotions, they generally lack compassion, specifically with themselves. They specifically lack compassion with themselves. So the first way to figure it out is through projection. The second way to start to understand your relationship with your feminine, with your anima, is to begin to watch your dreams and to look at the women that show up in your dreams. It can be a mother figure or your mom. It can be a family member. It can be a coworker. It can be your partner. And starting to look at what— how do you feel in relationship to that woman in your dream? Don't focus so much on what is the woman doing in my dream, but start to pay attention to how do you feel in relationship to the woman in your dream. Do you feel inferior? Do you feel threatened? Do you feel like she's always out of reach? Do you feel like you're chasing her constantly, you can't ever reach her? That will give you a sense of understanding of what's happening within your own psyche and how you relate to your own feminine nature. So those are the two ways. Look at what you're projecting and then begin to look inside with your dreams, with reflections of those dreams, and see how do you feel in reference to the women that show up in your dreams, and focus again less on what they are specifically doing in your dreams. All right, comment below. Let me know how you enjoyed this quick little intro. What questions would you have? And again, I'm going to do do a man's guide, a very deep dive to the enema. This is just sort of scratching the surface. But let me know what you got from this, and let me know what questions you have so that I can form the longer version for you and cover all the basis points. All right, until next time, Connor Beaton signing off.