Can I Have Both Masculine and Feminine Sides to My Personality?

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Most of us were raised to believe that someone is either a man or a woman. Discovering unconscious parts of ourselves that are not in line with the simplicity of that belief can be very disconcerting.

The truth about humans is that we are complex creatures. You do not have to have dissociative identity disorder, nor be transgender or bisexual, to have both masculine and feminine aspects to your personality, or even multiple subselves. Many therapists consider this normal and some even practice a type of psychotherapy that is built around this concept.

(Please keep in mind that none of this information about different sex subselves is meant to negate some people’s lived experience that they were born with the wrong body for their gender identity. That too exists. But that is not the issue I am dealing with today.)

Inner Conflicts

If you doubt that you can be normal and have multiple subselves with different priorities, remember the last time you made a New Year’s Resolution that you failed to keep.

The part of you that made the resolution may have been eager to make a positive change, yet another part (or parts) of you managed to stop you from succeeding. The reality is that we could not have an inner conflict unless there were at least two different parts of us that disagreed with each other’s priorities.

Your Subselves Can Be Masculine, Feminine, or Both

Even if you are cisgender and happily identify with the physical sexual characteristics with which you were born, you can still have subselves that seem to be different genders. These different subselves may influence who you are attracted to sexually or may be unrelated to your real-life sexual preferences.

Did you ever wonder why some people are consistently attracted to very masculine men and other people prefer men with a softer, more feminine, vibe? Their subselves may have voted on that topic, as it were, and reached a stable agreement.

This concept is not new. It is an integral part of a variety of different psychotherapies. Here is a sampling of some well-known types of psychotherapy that include the idea that it is normal for males to have female aspects of their personality and females to have male aspects.

Analytical Psychology

Carl G. Jung (1875–1961), the famous Swiss analyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud, called his theory of therapy “analytical psychology” to differentiate it from Freud’s psychoanalysis. Jung hypothesized that every man has an unconscious feminine side to his personality that Jung called the “anima,” and every woman has an unconscious masculine side to her personality called the “animus.” The anima and animus can be thought of as having two aspects:

1. They are archetypes of the feminine and masculine found in the collective unconscious that Jung believed all humans share.
2. They are also part of our personal unconscious.

Jung believed that for people to achieve a balanced personality, it was important for men to acknowledge and accept their inner feminine side and for women to acknowledge and accept their inner masculine side (1959).

None of this necessarily relates to who you prefer to have sex with or what sex you identify with. According to Jung, this is all just a normal part of being human.

Gestalt Therapy

Frederick S. Perls (1893–1970) and his wife Laura Perls (1905–1990) were two psychoanalysts who fled Nazi Germany and eventually came to the United States. They developed a new type of non-analytic psychotherapy called Gestalt therapy.

Gestalt therapy was influenced by Gestalt psychology field theory and research on perception. It is designed to be inventive, egalitarian, present-centered, spontaneous, and much less rigid and structured than psychoanalysis. It utilizes therapeutic experiments that emerge from the client’s work in therapy that are designed to increase awareness.

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Chair Work with Parts

One of these experiments, called “chair work,” became very popular in the 1960s and 1970s. In chair work, a client who is experiencing some form of inner conflict might be asked to experiment with externalizing the conflict and creating a dialogue between the two parts that disagree. The therapist would suggest locating one of the parts in a chair and then having the other part talk to it. Then the client might be asked to switch chairs and answer from the other part’s point of view. The client could continue this dialogue until there was some resolution to the conflict or a new awareness emerged, or the client felt finished for now (Perls, 1969, 1973).

Gestalt therapy chair work can be done with more than two inner parts. These inner parts can be any sex or have no sexual identity. They do not even have to be human.

Gestalt Therapy Dream Work

In Gestalt therapy dream work, each aspect of the dream, including other people, animals, objects, and the weather, is considered to be embodiments of some aspect of the dreamer. Women will sometimes have men in their dreams that represent masculine aspects of themselves, and men will have feminine aspects in their dreams.

For example, one of my meek and super feminine women clients had a dream in which two dirty men were fighting in the street. When I asked her to play the men fighting, she got in touch with her own desire to fight and be messy, all of which she had previously been unaware of.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

This is an interesting and relatively new type of psychotherapy invented by Richard C. Schwartz (b. 1949) in the 1980s. It appears to have many aspects in common with Gestalt therapy.

In the course of his work as a family therapist, Schwartz noticed that many of his clients reported having different parts inside them or discovered different parts during therapy. He termed these parts “sub-personalities” within our mental system. These sub-personalities could be male or female or anything imaginable.

These parts relate to each other in various ways, somewhat like the members of a family do. For example, some sub-personalities were wounded or were very vulnerable and in need of protection, while other sub-personalities emerged to be protectors. Our sub-personalities vary in how well they get along with each other. In addition to our sub-personalities, Schwartz also believes we each have an authentic core "self."

Schwartz’s therapy focuses on discovering and understanding the origin and purposes of our unique inner family system, healing the wounded parts, and restoring balance and harmony to the personality as a whole (1995).

Summary

You do not have to have any form of sexual confusion in order to have both male and female aspects to your personality. This is a normal part of being a complex human being. In fact, many different types of psychotherapy are built around this premise, including Jungian analysis, Gestalt therapy, and internal family systems.

However, some people may be unaware that this is considered normal and become confused or frightened when they discover these parts of themselves on their own. If you want to work with these parts to better harmonize your core self and resolve inner conflicts, any of the above therapies can be of help.