Psychological Patriarchy

I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. Since 1997, I've been coaching powerful, purpose driven, world changing leaders who are ambitious in every area of their lives. My Sex Love Power podcast and my YouTube channel are the go to resources for couples and individuals who want the vision of love they see in their hearts to manifest every day in the ways they collaborate, communicate love and make love. Let's go. In this episode, I will teach you how our sense of ourselves as humans has been artificially bifurcated into masculine traits on the one hand, and feminine on the other. With the masculine traits overvalued and the feminine traits undervalued. We'll look at the painful consequences of that way of thinking which my mentor, Terry Real calls psychological patriarchy. And I'll show you how legacy love takes couples through five levels of recovery from this deadening way of looking at ourselves and at one another. Let's get going. It's not just a political construct, it's a psychological notion. And it's really relevant in male female relationships. If you're in a marriage with one man and one woman, or even if you're not inside relationships, the notion of psychological patriarchy has deep implications for both partners. Regardless of your gender identity or how you express it, how traditional or how progressive your roles are, psychological patriarchy has far reaching implications. I want to share with you the three rings of psychological patriarchy that I learned from my mentor, Terry Real. So the first ring of psychological patriarchy is the great dividend. This takes all of human function and capacity and divides it in two. Half of who we are as people. Our agency, our outward power, our ability to express outwardly and make things happen is coded as masculine, even as male. This is what it is to be a man, is to be these things and not be the other half of what it is to be human. Those are the things that are more receptive, more affiliative, more inward or yin, more flowing. So if we think in terms, and we do, numerous studies have shown that many, many groups of people do think in these ways, including probably most of the relationship therapists you may have seen. We say, oh, men are this way and women are this way. And as people are socialized as male, they're taught you are granted privilege if you affiliate with these yang kind of characteristics. If you present as strong, as logical, as rational, as aggressive, as focused, these things will get you the rewards of male privilege. And if you, on the other hand, present as emotional, as empathetic, experiencing fear or sorrow instead of more masculine coded emotions, which are just as natural, but things like anger or aggression, then you lose some of that privilege. And as my husband says, you know, the worst thing you could say about him when he was growing up would be to say, you're a girl. That was the biggest insult there was. Not you're a bad person or you're a worm, but are you a girl? So in this sense, in this first ring in the great divide, we take the male qualities and the female qualities, split them out and we put the male ones on top. We say, these are good, these are what we want to aim for. And these ones are, as I think of it, and how many women have been taught these feminine qualities? Yeah, you're a girl, so those are probably intrinsic to you, but they're either luxuries or liabilities, particularly in the work world. In commercial society, you know, hide your tenderness, hide your fear, your vulnerability, your emotionality, your relationality, or enjoy it after you've achieved the goal. They might be luxuries you can afford at some point. And many men demonstrate those qualities if they have enough clout from having demonstrated enough masculine quality. But there's a risk to it when we're coming from within this circle of psychological patriarchy. And the implication, when we've divided humanity in that way and placed masculine ahead of feminine in terms of its value, comes to bear in the second circle. In the second circle of psychological patriarchy, we recognize the dance of contempt where patriarchy itself, and then by extension, because we're enculturated into it, people of all genders tend to overvalue over, over index for those qualities we've coded as these ones are masculine, and we tend to under index on, devalue the qualities coded as feminine. So, for instance, what is more professional? Is it more professional to be empathetic or to be driven? If you achieve results but leave dead bodies in your wake, is that an acceptable side effect as opposed to if you are very affiliative and everyone's happy to work with you, but you don't always hit your goals, that's less valued. So in this overvaluing of masculine qualities and undervaluing of feminine, we set up an intrinsic imbalance in any male female relationship, or any relationship where one person is more the masculine pole and the other is more the feminine pole. In same sex relationships or even gender reversed polarities, where maybe a female identifying person carries more of that masculine energy, that person will have more power in the relationship. And both people tend to either overtly subscribe to this sense that Those qualities are more valuable than those qualities or there will be ongoing tension around it. This is the dance of contempt. And this is something that's been poignant. For me to see my husband acknowledge that having been trained, that the worst thing you could say about him would be that he was a girl makes it pretty hard to really deeply empathize with honor and be open to deeply receiving a girl, me as his wife. He was trained, I was a second class citizen, someone he would have to fight to not be like. So then to love me as a full partner, a full equal. There's an obstacle there that he has worked to dismantle and that we believe every man who wants true intimacy will need to deliberately dismantle. This creates several difficult implications for a relationship. I just mentioned. One that to really let a woman in, you gotta write your inner rules about her value, to put her on the same level as you, and to really accept her influence as the Gottmans advocate. You have to value her perspective, even though it may be different than yours, even though it may have a more feminine cant to it. She may appear more emotional, which we sometimes will call like irrational or hysterical even. And you learn to listen even when she talks in ways you would never have talked. And why wouldn't you talk that way? Why wouldn't you express that fully? We have a lot to lose, right? There's a lot of privilege on the line for persons socialized as male. They would lose a lot if they were that expressive. The stakes are higher for boy children and people growing up with access to masculine privilege. They can lose it by in the eyes of others with that privilege being too feminine in their behaviors and attitudes. So that attention has been pretty high stakes, that enculturation has been pretty thorough and maybe downright invisible. So when couples come to meet, this is something that we start to try to dismantle, to make visible first so that it can be seen. Because then we can see where there are choices that have just been implicit and we can make them explicit. And this is what allows us to recognize where someone can subtly go one up on their partner, you know, thinking not we're two equals who are different and have different, equally valid access to reality, but where my reality is just a little bit more real than yours, a little bit more true, I'm a little bit more right. And that can happen in both directions. For instance, if one person is more rational or logical, they might think, oh, we should go with my thought on this because you're hysterical. The other way that this often cuts is, well, I'm a lot more emotionally in tune. I'm speaking for the relationship because I'm more relational than you are. I know more about what it's like to be close, and that might be accurate. But if we use that fact to go one up, to think that we're superior and that we can talk down to our partner and tell them how to do it, then we're behaving in a counter relational way that's not going to build that very relationship that we're envisioning and hoping for. This is where that dance of contempt is kept secret. No one takes the risk of exposure by naming it. And here we have a story that the masculine is fragile, that the patriarch has to be propped up, has to be held in high esteem by himself as well as others, lest he completely crumble. You know, this myth of male fragility has many wives not wanting to name. Yeah, I could experience more pleasure in bed if you could do things differently. Not wanting to pinpoint. These are the places where I feel like you're insensitive. My needs and feelings. Or perhaps rather than giving herself a grounded voice, she buries and then goes hostile, thus reinforcing the narrative that she's the one who's hysterical and overwrought and asks too much and is impossible to please. And he's rational and a good guy and kind and nice, and what's she complaining about? So we continue in this dance of contempt for as long as we maintain the core collusion. And the problem is that many of the institutions in our culture and much of the training that therapists have received reinforces this core collusion that your therapist may be the latest to participate in. The collusion that says you gotta be happy with what you've got, that says the person who's more emotional needs to tamp it down, that says relationality is valuable, but we have to accept each other as we are, even if we're not bringing our whole selves to the relationship. So that's why we take into account all of these circles in the work that I do, because we can't build deeper, sweeter relationships than we've had, than our parents have had, than all the ones we've seen around us, without dismantling some of the structures that have been invisible to us, that have stopped us from having true partnership, true equality, true intimacy. So I have more respect for my clients than to think that hearing truth and naming, the hidden dynamics going on, speaking truth to power, is going to cause them to either erupt or collapse. And certainly there are people who get angry in their work with me. There are people who start to feel like, oh, I can't do anything right. I can't see my way through this. In certain moments, it can be an adventure, it can be a confrontation of long, cherished old beliefs, but it's always in service to and well structured inside. A devotion to creating a love like no other, to going deeper in love and intimacy, to creating a legacy that is truly what you want to leave to your children and future generations and to the world. We're on a mission. I am, my partner is. The couples I work with are to create a world where love, true closeness, deep community and intergenerational patterns are all healthy. Where we pass down what we want to pass down instead of what we couldn't help but pass down because we couldn't even see it until we were just recapitulating the pain from prior generations. We get to rewrite how love is done and happens right here every day as we expose, name and dismantle the three rings of psychological patriarchy. There are five levels of development that I take couples through, and I'm working with myself in legacy love. The first level, before we get there, before we've mastered this skill set, we might feel frustrated, angry and hurt. You might be having conflict or stalemate with one another. You might be repeating patterns without being able to break out of the cycle. But in this level, you learn to know yourself and handle yourself, and you know you've cleared this level. When you understand yourself, your needs and your patterns well enough to not repeat them in a futile way. You're able to take responsibility for your own experience inside your relationships and to choose which situations you're going to engage in and how you're going to engage the investments that you make at this level. Level one, where you're learning to know yourself and handle yourself are to stop investing in resentment, coping, or trying to change your partner, and you begin investing in your own capacity. At this level, your emotional tasks are to know your story, your attachment, your needs, your desires, your style, your values, what's reasonable to expect in a relationship, what's reasonable to expect of yourself and of others in terms of cognition and action. You learn to settle down, to self regulate, to have relational mindfulness, healthy self esteem, and healthy boundaries in terms of pleasure. Your tasks are to develop erotic intelligence. You begin to understand and appropriately value sexuality, sexual energy and sexual connections and the role they play in your life and relationships, neither too large nor too small. With regard to power, this is the level where you come to understand the 12 elements of power. You learn the framework and the language for understanding how power works, how power goes haywacky and dysfunctions, and how it over functions in our lives. You learn to see challenges in your relationship and in your individual life through the lens of power. And when it comes to culture, you come to understand gender conditioning and gender roles. You learn the messages that you received about boys, girls and beyond. You decode all of the messages that you received implicitly so that you can choose a story that serves you better. You learn about relationships, gender roles and the truth underneath the conditioning you received at the second level of legacy, love. You're learning to handle your life and handle your partner. Before you've cleared this level, you may notice that life is smooth, love is comfortable and yet you crave more heat or more depth or more passion. You crave to know and be known, to have more adventures together, or to feel really handled and ravished. You know you've cleared this level when you begin to integrate a lot of those experiences into your everyday life. You're feeling like your love burns bright. To get to this level, you begin to make investments. You invest the dividends that you got from investing in your own capacity to receive into the relationship itself. This is where you learn to pour energy into the relationship in a way that actually nourishes it. At this level, your emotional task is to learn to communicate and resolve conflicts effectively without spending undue energy in terms of your thinking and your action. You learn to align the logistics with your partner. You create a well oiled machine that ensures that your environment, your activities, your money, your health, your calendar and your brain work well. On the pleasure level, you learn to create erotic synergy. You're building on both your and your partner's erotic intelligence and learn to co create mutually satisfying, thrilling and renewing erotic experiences. Together. You understand and build skill in creating polarity, play space and intrigue inside your intimacy. When it comes to power, you begin to learn to play with it. You learn how to use the right tool for the job. Having understood in level one what each of the tools are in the 12 elements of power. Now you're learning to master switching gears, playing with roles, overcoming changes in your roles and circumstances. For instance, the loss of a job or an increase in pay by one of you, a change in health status. You're learning about respect, attraction, affection, vulnerability, and how these all interplay with power. When it comes to culture. At this level, you're coming to Understand the roles of patriarchy, media oppression and privilege in our culture and in your own relationships. At level three of legacy love, the upward spiral begins to accelerate. You've taken the dividends you got from investing in your own capacity. You invested those into the relationship and created more of the kind of love you're hungry for. Now the relationship is paying dividends, and you can invest those into the people in it. You can each begin to become more capacious, more powerful together. So before you've gotten to this level, you're experiencing more passion, more connection, but perhaps you still really push each other's buttons. Or there may still not be consistency between the two of you, or you may not yet have crossed the line of really dismantling the structural imbalances between the two of you when it comes to power. So we clear this level by integrating a revolution into our marriage and coming to see that this is not for me, I am for it. This is not a place just for my needs to get met, although it's that too. It's a place for me to become who I am here to become. And this marriage exists in service of something larger than itself. So at this level, we invest together into one another's well being and power. We begin to think in terms of truly, deeply supporting the evolution of each of these people emotionally. We are creating earned attachment at this level. Not the insecure attachment or the avoidant attachment that we may have learned as children in our families of origin, but the kind we work for and create and draw deep satisfaction from having built together in terms of action and thought. We are learning that love is a habit. And we're integrating the kinds of practices that day by day make deep, powerful, beautiful love pretty much automatic. Simply because we repeat the kinds of actions that make it easier to love well than not to. When it comes to pleasure. We're engaging at this level in erotic evolution. We're walking to the edge together and discovering new things about ourselves and each other as we do when it comes to power. We're learning about the care and feeding of power, the edges of our fear and our comfort zones, how this relationship can be truly a kingmaker, a queen maker, the kind of crucible in which our greatness can be born. We begin to illuminate in one another the best of what we are and more nobility, deeper character than we might have even known possible. And finally, with regard to culture, this is where we recognize we may have been in bed with the patriarchy. We begin to dismantle male privilege in our house and the other structural oppression that may be baked into our lifestyle for ourselves and for other people, whether that's with regard to race or class or where we live. But we begin to integrate that growing awareness of systemic power imbalances so that we're creating a life more abundant for all and more humanizing for us. The fourth level of legacy love is miracle making love. At this level, we have an interest and delight in making our partner's dreams come true. Plus, we have the experience of our own dreams coming about with increasing ease. There's huge growth and expansion, building on the momentum that we've built through the other layers. We clear this level when investing in one another's dreams and visions is organic and ongoing, and the fruits are piling up, begging to be shared with others. At this level, our investments are in dreams and visions, asking one another, what else do you want to create? What else do you want to become? What else do you want to experience? How far can we go while supporting each other? At this level, we have many tasks. On the emotional level, developing a spiritual perspective on love, sex and life, coming to see that it's all a big game designed to evolve us on the level of thought and action. We're learning about dream tending, how to hold our partner's ambitions, heartfelt desires and spiritual callings as sacred, and becoming a patron of their personal evolution and adventures, even when, and especially when that requires sacrifice or to make sacred something on our part. On the pleasure front, we're dismantling cultural conditioning around sex and bodies. On the power front, we're mastering power, activating all 12 elements of power, not just the ones that have come most naturally to us, and beginning to develop acuity with all of them in tandem and culturally. This is the level at which we cultivate a community of couples who mutually nourish, challenge and nurture us. We're creating intimacy that goes beyond our couple to touch other couples who we can mentor and who can mentor us in turn so that no longer do we have to live in a world where we say, I don't know that I see the kind of love I really want. We've got mirrors all around us for that level. Five of legacy love is the highest level I've discovered so far. That's not to say it's the highest level, but this is what we'll talk about last. This is a love that changes the world. And as we're stepping into this level, it's characterized by our giving back, having a deep, wide perspective on the role of our love in our life, feeling at peace and desiring to contribute. Generosity is the hallmark of this level. You know you've cleared this level when you're no longer on the planet. This level takes you through the end of life, ever renewing your couple and then continuing to feed the surviving partner when one of you is gone. At this level, you invest in the larger vision, drawing from the renewable resources of your individual capacities and your couple's emotional, material, spiritual and relational wealth. At this level, your emotional tasks are to be wise. At this level, the emotional task is wise, loving, dealing with change, loss and grief with equanimity. At the level of cognition and action, you're learning to continue what has worked while releasing that which is no longer available. As your bodies, minds, capacities and families change, you learn to graciously release freedoms, privileges, perhaps capacities that are no longer available and recognize the joy, the wisdom, the spaciousness that flows in as those things flow out. On the level of pleasure, your task here is erotic aging, loving well in a changing body while you're loving a body that is also changing, embracing aging as the accrual of power and tending to an aging body and a changing pleasure terrain on the front of power. Your task is to integrate both sides of each pair of elements to create a fluid sense of integrated power that's active in every area of your life. At this stage, you attain a degree of self mastery. You embody all 12 elements and in terms of culture, you are building legacy love. You're creating a lasting legacy as individuals and as a couple. And you are mentoring other couples and beloveds down through the generations. It's such a privilege to walk with you through this developmental model of legacy love. I love walking this path and I love walking it with other couples. Thank you for taking this time. I'd love to hear what you're going.

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That subscribe button in the app so you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Michelle Lisenberry Christensen and this has been Sex Love Power. I'll see you on the next episode. And until then May the light within you illuminate the world around you.