Sovereign Love: The Evolution of Intimate Relationships

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript is provided in its raw, unedited form and may contain errors. We have not proofread this transcript, so it may include typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this rough transcript as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.

 

Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. 

I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an aftershow community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. 

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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dené Logan. Dené is a marriage and family therapist, a group facilitator, author, and wisdom seeker living in Los Angeles. Getting to know her a little bit, I would also say she is a brave and direct truth-teller. I really appreciate Dené Logan. She has a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and is the mentee of acclaimed psychotherapist Esther Perel. She’s also the cohost of the Cheaper Than Therapy podcast that looks to demystify and destigmatize what goes on both in the therapy room and in daily life. Finally, I’m thrilled to let you know that Dené Logan is the author of the new book Sovereign Love, which acts as a guide to help us better understand and embrace the feminine and masculine energetics within us so that we can create healthier relationships. Dené, welcome.

 

Dené Logan: Hi, Tami. I’m just so excited to have this opportunity to sit down with you. Thank you.

 

TS: At the very beginning of Sovereign Love, you say being a couples therapist is not something that all therapists are drawn to. In fact, it’s an area of specialization. A lot of therapists are like, no way. I don’t want to touch that. Tell me, for you, why it’s an area of practice that you’ve been drawn to.

 

DL: Yeah, I think most of us are fairly conflict averse, even if we are trained to deal with conflict or to support others in how to be in the space of conflict resolution. And I don’t necessarily know why I felt so drawn when I was in my practicum, which is the training that you do while you’re still in the midst of graduate school to become a therapist. But when we got to the portion of our training where we started working with couples, I loved it and it just felt so natural and so easy and I feel like so many of the other therapists that I was training with were just not enjoying it. And they were like, I don’t want the couples. And I was like, I’ll take the couples, give me all the couples. But beyond that, I think I’ve always been fascinated by love and relationships and what makes it challenging and when we love someone, how that starts to shift over time.

And I kind of used to think to myself all the time, where does the love go when you loved someone enough to marry them and then eventually you don’t feel that way anymore and all of a sudden people are hating each other. And I think that’s a lot of times what people think couples therapy is. I find a lot of times, especially nowadays when people come to couples therapy, it’s because they really want to deepen their connection more than they’re in extreme conflict. But I’ve just been fascinated by the attempt to share your life with another person and love one another well.

 

TS: So I shared that a lot of therapists shy away from couples therapy and I’ve also heard from a lot of people in relationships when their relationships become rocky that they’ve gone to therapy, couples therapy and it has been often unsuccessful. So I’ll say something like, have you tried therapy? And they’re like, do you want to know how many therapists? I’ve been to Tami couples therapists and it’s not helping. So I’m curious, what do you think makes the work you do with couples effective to the degree that it is effective and how effective is it? Do you know?

 

DL: I think I’m pretty effective, but I think a lot of times people think couples therapy doesn’t work. And I hear people voice that quite often in the way you’re speaking to. And from my perspective it’s that because up to now it really hasn’t been super effective in that there are a lot of things we haven’t been talking about when we talk about couples work and relationships that we’ve sort of just swept under the rug and haven’t had really transparent conversations about that. All of a sudden when I was sitting with couples and my particular makeup of a human being, which is a woman of color, a woman in general living in a patriarchal society, there were things about my experience as a woman in relationships that I inevitably brought into the room. And so those things impacted my perspective, but also that I’ve always been a spiritual seeker.

I was yoga teacher for, I don’t know, like 15 years before I became a therapist. And so I also brought the perspective of the soul work and what it means to really honor what we came into these lives to do. And I thought nobody’s really talking about that when we talk about couples work or even relationships in general, what it is to be sharing your life with someone in alignment with whatever the soul’s dharma was or whatever our purpose was for coming into this life. That was never a conversation that I even heard anyone touch on. But I started to think about how much in my own relationships I’d never considered that really holding with a level of reverence what this person came into this life to do and how much Carl Jung talks about the individuation process. And that’s sort of where I start off the book in terms of the way I frame the different stages of development that I think we are all meant to go through and a lot of the work of individuation is that I am meant to go through this process of development and challenges throughout this life to support me in becoming the person I’m meant to become.

And I started to see in my own life, and also certainly with so many of the couples that I was working with, that there are a lot of things about the way that we’re holding relationship models and dynamics that are not in support of that, and in a lot of ways actually are sort of hindering our growth process.

 

TS: Can you be more specific about that? And let me know when you’re talking about what have we inherited that seems not to support individuation and soul actualization?

 

DL: Yeah, well I’m so glad you asked me. So I think if we go back and really look at the dawn of patriarchy and what that means, and I always like to be really clear when I talk about patriarchy, I’m not talking about men or even masculinity, I’m talking about systems of dominance. And there are ways that at the dawn of patriarchy, there are ways that we had to frame a societal structure that was really rooted in dominance. And for women, a lot of what that was we had to put women in a space of fear and really reconfigure how we were living our lives. And that the goal became to create structures that this is the externalized authority telling you what it is to live a good life and how to create something that will keep you safe. And for women that was sort of pulling women out of ways of being that were really organized around our more feminine ways of being, which are sort of our collaborative ways of being women, sort of being in touch with the cycles of the moon and our intuitive wisdom and nature and all of these ways that we used to be together in more collectivist ways of being.

And then at the dawn of patriarchy, we sort of had to reconfigure that and women out of those ways of being collectively and put them in these structural boxes. And the patriarchal model was sort of this nuclear family thing of you got a woman and you got a plot of land like she was an object. And that was a lot of times what was the promise of a good life. But in doing that, there were a lot of ways that women were harmed or there was fear placed in women and sometimes women were burned alive in order to make these structures solidified and that you needed to do this for survival, you needed to buy into this structural way of being to keep yourself safe. And what no one was talking about was how much, we’ve never had a reckoning with that. We talk about the research that has been done around couples work and successful marriages and thriving, and a lot of that research was still rooted when I looked back in the seventies.

And if you think about women couldn’t even have their own bank accounts or credit cards until 1974. So a lot of the reasons that women were staying in marriages or what would constitute relational fulfillment wasn’t really based on what might’ve been their authentic truth versus this is just what was passed down generationally from our mothers and our grandmothers in order to keep ourselves safe and thriving within whatever we’ve been taught is what it is to thrive as a woman. But there was a low level certainly, yes, I started to say resentment, but I will even say there was a way that there was sort of a battle going on in so many of the couples that I saw and I was thinking about how much growing up as a woman of color, there were things that I was really conditioned to know. You don’t say to white people about what your authentic experience is of growing up in society in order to keep yourself safe and not rock the boat.

But I realized these same dynamics were happening for women in heteronormative dynamics within their marriages. And there were certain things that they didn’t say to the men that they were married to. And that I noticed that I certainly did things in my relationships with men where I would sort of early in the relationship do things to keep their ego structure safe and sort of stroke their ego maybe. But then once I was in a relationship and it felt solidified, I had no interest in doing that anymore. And it was sort of like what happened? Where did all of that go? And then there was a shift in the energy between us and that wasn’t unique to me. It was something that I saw playing out in so many couples. There were power dynamics and things that we’d never talked about and what I love to call intimacy without actually having intimacy.

And so I was like, well, I’m going to talk about it. Nobody’s talking about this or writing about this. And I feel like it was a battle the sexes. But certainly there are all of these ways that we’ve all been socialized around gender to keep ourselves safe and to attempt to cultivate safety. But those structures of safety are really, if we think about it from the masculine feminine perspective, these are these wounded masculine paradigms and that’s our ego. That’s the physical world, but the feminine is the structure that is the soul, that is the eternal, and that is the part of us that we have all been conditioned to really reject and not hold with a lot of reverence. And so I started to think about if we think about what was lost at the beginning of this patriarchal model in terms of the feminine wisdom, what does it look like to start to integrate that back into our relationship dynamics? And then it just started to come together from there.

 

TS: Now you mentioned masculine and feminine energies, and we’re going to talk a lot about that. It’s a lens that you use throughout Sovereign Love to point out various forms of woundedness and also various forms of healing and flourishing, healthy, masculine, healthy feminine. But before we do, I want to make sure I’m tracking with you in that what I hear you saying is that what you haven’t heard, addressed and highlighted as much as you feel is really what’s needed right now in this time of the evolution of we could say couples or marriage or partnering or intimate relationships is what it could be like if we weren’t being so modeling our partnership after patriarchal norms that we’ve inherited. Is that true? Did I understand that correctly?

 

DL: Exactly. That I feel like we are living through a time where these structures are shifting, and the patriarchal model was sort of that in this nuclear family structure, excuse me, men will sort of look for the woman in their life for meaning and for emotional stability. And that will be the role that a woman will play within a man’s life and a woman will depend upon a man for her financial stability. And so that sort of safety in terms of making sure that she has that protection. And so what has happened as the structures of our society are shifting, excuse me, is that women are looking to men in heteronormative dynamics a lot less for that financial stability, the beautiful aspects of feminism and certainly women being able to take care of themselves financially is a little bit that there has been this reality of some of that has shifted, but what we haven’t given a lot of support to men in the collective around is how to integrate that aspect of themselves that I can’t be looking to a woman for my meaning and the deeper connection to my soul and my heart and my emotions and all of those feminine aspects of myself.

It’s really my work to be in touch with those things for myself. But I still feel like even right now we’re a little bit of in a reckoning moment with that and what does it look like to relate to one another, not needing one another, but really in this space of being an authentic desire and how that reframes how we do these relationships.

 

TS: Now, you’ve been pointing out heteronormative relationships and I’m listening to this conversation and I read sovereign love as someone who’s been in a long-term lesbian relationship, and yet I could feel within myself the internalization of patriarchal norms very seriously. And your book was very confrontative. It brought me into, in a good way, it brought me into a lot of deep inner questioning. There’s a section about this whole notion of you belong to me as a form of possession. And I thought, yeah, I feel possessive. Heck yeah, and I have every right to feel possessive and blah, blah, blah. And then at the same time I’m like, no, I want us to feel this sense of we’re coming to be with each other, not just I’m afraid that I’m going to lose you like a possession, but because this is a free choice we’re making, but that possessiveness feels like it’s part of the patriarchal inheritance. So I wonder if you can comment a couple things here, the notion of same-sex couples inheriting patriarchal norms and then also this notion of yes, I want to possess you.

 

DL: Yeah, well absolutely. I think regardless of sexual orientation, we have all been impacted by our socialization around gender norms and around what a successful family and the nuclear family structure is. A lot of times what all of us have been conditioned to believe healthy relating and relationships look like. But to the point that you were just making, I really started to realize this is all rooted in an ownership template. And there was so much about that that I couldn’t see until I had a little distance from being in one of these relationship dynamics for myself. But there’s so much about when we own something over time, how it starts to bring a level of complacency and a little bit of entitlement sometimes to this person and their energy and the way that I almost demand that they show up for me. And there’s a way that it certainly shifted for me when I had a child, and I think if you’ve ever seen the way a child feels about their parent, it’s very much with a level of entitlement.

If you have a toddler, they don’t care that you have to up at 8:00 AM for a meeting, they’re entitled to your energy and your time. But there’s a way that in relationship dynamics, I started to see that we interact with one another once we are partnered in a sort of you belong to me energetic that is very similar, I have needs, you’re not meeting my needs. There’s a way that everyone who comes into couples therapy is sort of fighting to get their needs met. And rather than really looking at what’s happening within me in this dynamic, it’s sort of pointing the finger at the other person and saying all of the ways that you’re not loving me well. And I started to think, God so much about this just doesn’t feel loving. It doesn’t feel really like what I believe it somehow should feel like to attempt to love another person.

But I think there’s this core belief that we’re sort of operating from that I need someone else outside of me to be whole. And what I realized once my 12 year marriage ended was that that was never true. I was sort of operating under the assumption and certainly a lot of times operating with a lot of entitlement to my child’s father and a lot of that complacency that I’m talking about. But once that relationship ended and I really had to challenge myself first of all to think about how I wanted to be in relationship with him outside of that dynamic and what I felt entitled to that maybe was never the case, but that I wanted to bring as much love and some of the spiritual principles that I held to be true. I wanted to bring that into my relationship dynamic with him because I really wanted our child to experience our relationship as something that was, he was the origination of origination.

The origin of him coming was love. And that even though the love changed form, there was still so much love between his father and I, but it was different. And it really just started to reframe the way that I thought about what I was ever entitled to from him, and certainly what I was seeing in some of the couples that I was working with. But what I realized once I could see how much I wasn’t entitled to what I thought I was entitled to was that not only was it possible to meet a lot of those needs for myself in a way that I hadn’t previously believed I could, but that when I met those needs for myself, I was able to meet him in a different way and take responsibility for the energy I was bringing into our relationship dynamic in a way that I hadn’t previously because all of a sudden I didn’t have a choice but to do that.

 

TS: So I think I have an appreciation of what you’re saying in terms of questioning an ownership mindset and the entitlement that comes with that. But you took this a little further and it’s OK, I want to just push a little bit on it. Dené, you seem up for that. And also it’s helpful because I realize in hosting all of these interviews, it helps me uncover certain biases that I have and are they really true or are they just ways that I’ve come to think or believe without questioning them? And one of them is this notion that pair bonding two people getting together, that this is somehow a very effective unit to deal with a world that is very unpredictable, lots of threats, and it’s really good to have somebody around who cares a lot about you, especially when you need to go to the doctor and when you’re ill and for all these other reasons and to help do the laundry. And God knows the list goes on and on, and here you are saying, well, OK, maybe that’s an inherited patriarchal possessive notion and that you’d be by yourself, be with a group of people, be with some friends, lots of other configurations, Tami, open up, get out of this kind of pair bonding fixation. So maybe you could speak to that a bit.

 

DL: Certainly, and not only is that a really rooted or a patriarchal framework, but that’s also not the way that so many indigenous cultures and more collectivist societies tend to meet what it is to be in relationship with one another. I think there are so many ways, and especially over the last five years, we’ve seen what are some of the challenges around the nuclear family paradigm and that when all of a sudden there’s a global pandemic and I have work that I have to do, but I have kids at home and there’s no way for me to sustain a living and take care of my children and all of these things that we at one point would’ve had an entire village of people supporting us in doing what I saw with clients was all of a sudden it was like, wait, those neighbors that I’ve never met and never had a conversation with, they have kids too.

So what if we asked if our kids could play together all day and we split the day in half and I work for half of the day and they work for half of the day and the other half we watch each other’s kids. But there’s a lot about what it is to be in relationship with just one other person doing this with me that isn’t sustainable and nobody’s really getting honest about what is actually a solution to the problem. I think the number one thing that couples come in in terms of presenting issues is there’s a lack of S and life force and just that it feels like we’re roommates and it feels like either one person has a completely different level of desire than the other, and there’s struggles around that or there’s been a rupture in fidelity because of that. But so much of that is because again, if we have the structure that you’re talking about, the safety, which is the masculine containment of the relationship, that’s where all of the emphasis in a patriarchal culture has been placed.

But the aliveness, the eros life force, the sensuality, the feminine is something that we’ve sort of disregarded as you can go on a date night, but it’s not actually that important to continue to cultivate that. And one ends up happening is it creates imbalance in our relationship. So we feel pretty safe that you’re not going anywhere in your mind at this point, but there’s not a lot of aliveness. And so when something happens that really sort of reminds me of that lack of aliveness, either some other person sees my partner and has desire for them, and it reminds them like, oh, I’m alive. I haven’t felt this in so long or there’s a loss and this death somehow reminds me that I’m not going to be in this body forever in a way that sort of jolts my system into that remembrance. All of a sudden we start to remember why we need that connection to our soul and the deeper layers of meaning that we’ve sort of put away for a long time.

So I believe there’s a lot that’s actually not that natural about the nuclear family structure. Now, that’s not me saying that everyone needs to be polyamorous or sort of like an ethical non-monogamous dynamic. I don’t think that’s true for many of us. But I do think that there are ways that feeling like I don’t need an entire village of people to meet the needs that I inevitably will have. It’s like this one person is meant to be my best friend, my travel buddy, my therapist, my confidant, all the things, and it’s just too much. Nobody has the capacity to be that for us. And so we’re feeling really shortchanged and a lack of fulfillment in our relationships, but I believe it’s because we’re looking for too much from this one other person.

 

TS: Now, you mentioned, Dené, that a lot of people come into therapy because they’re saying the eros, the erotic aliveness in our relationship, it’s not there. We’ve flatlined, erotic, flatline, or maybe the affair is the manifestation or the expression of that erotic flat line. How do you help people untangle that and restore the aliveness? What are the principles you’re using, if you will, or the lens you’re using to help recreate the fire?

 

DL: Yeah. Well, first of all, it is the idea that we need to challenge this idea that “this is my person,” right?

 

TS: What? You’re challenging “this is my person”!? 

 

DL: I’m going to challenge it, Tami.

 

TS: Oh my God!

 

DL: Yeah, that if you think about what makes you fall in love with someone initially, for most of us it’s that feeling of discovery. It’s like, oh, this person makes me feel so seen and understood, and I’m not alone in the world because all of a sudden someone gets me. But start to lose that when we’ve been with someone in a partnership for a long time. So often with couples it’s like I know what they’re going to say before they even finish their sentence. I’m finishing their sentence for them. We start to feel just really annoyed with them. All of these are very human things, but if we really challenge ourselves almost like a mindfulness practice to really remember that not only is this person not mine, they’re a gift that I’m not promised, but to have someone in my life that loves me as a privilege, and it’s a privilege that not everyone has.

I work with people who are in their forties and have never had someone to share their life with or love. And so I think if I hold that as something that I remember, it certainly impacts the energy that I bring to our relationship dynamic. But also what cultivates eros are often some of the counterintuitive things. Then what again, we’re conditioned in terms of safety, and that is when someone else sees my partner and is a little bit like look at Tami, that can elicit a little bit of that aliveness in me. If I see someone else seeing you when you’re doing something that surprises me and all of a sudden I see you in a different light, then I see you every day. If you take up a new hobby or you’re in something novel that brings it up when you travel and I haven’t seen you in a while and I start to miss you, or just when I remember that you are that erotic other, that person that is other than me, that differentiation of you versus me actually cultivates that eros. And so much of what brings that back in is challenging all of the things that we have thought is what makes healthy relationships, which from my perspective ends up being a lot of enmeshment and really sort of us not knowing where one person ends and the other person begins.

 

TS: Now, tell me a little bit about the use of the terms masculine and feminine, because in Sovereign Love you defend your reason for using those terms. And I think I have a little bit like, well, God, it maps masculinity onto men, just starts with the letter M and femininity onto the females, and yet of course women can have a more dominant masculine energy. But why is it important for you to use those terms and also what do you really mean by masculine energy and feminine energy?

 

DL: Yeah, I’m so glad you asked because I think this for me was when I started really digging into and kind of becoming a little bit obsessed with these energetics and really there the polarities, these dualities that exist within all of us. And there’s so many different ways to talk about the way they show up. We’ve been talking about it in terms of safety versus aliveness, but you can also explore dualities in terms of a lot of times people are talking about the avoidant attachment versus the more anxiously attached. There’s all of the ways we talk about polarity in terms of sun, moon, yin yang, linear, circular. So I really sort of went back and forth because as you’re speaking to, there is a lot of loaded energy in the terms masculine and feminine. A lot of our original pain points have to do with those terms.

And a lot of the ways that we’ve been socialized to minimize the complexity of who we are has to do withholding gender in these binaries. And so I really went back and forth, do I want to do that? Because I don’t want this to be exclusionary to anyone because I do see these energetics and the dual energies of these polarities and how we navigate that alive in all of us. And now I can’t not see them. I see them in everything. But where I landed was there has just been so much diminishment and contempt held for the feminine aspects of who we are when I’m working in heterosexual dynamics, if I suggest to a man in that dynamic that he is in his feminine energy, there’s a visceral response of what we defend against. But that started to be information for me in the ways that we’ve all been conditioned to hold our feminine with a little bit of contempt.

Don’t be a girl, don’t throw like a girl, man up. All of these ways that we are conditioned to hold masculinity and maybe wounded masculinity with more reverence than we hold the feminine, but these energetics are alive and they’re complex. And I think there’s a lot about our culture that doesn’t do well with ambiguity and nuance, and this is challenging to talk about, but can we stay in the conversation about it? But to say we can’t even discuss the feminine and masculine because it’s hard to me sort of feels like saying, well, I don’t see color when I look at you today. And to me, there is so much about my experience as a human being that has been informed by me being a black woman moving through the world. And so when you say I don’t see color, to me, that actually feels really negating of my experience. And so I felt like how do we name that this is hard to talk about? And that there has been a lot that’s been really painful around these gender binaries and that it is so much more complex than that. And we got to be able to talk about what our socialization and pain points have been in order for us to heal.

 

TS: Alright, and now describe for me—we’ll use the terms “masculine”; we could say young or we could say other words, but we’ll say masculine—what you see as the masculine energy, its qualities, and then how you define “feminine” energy. And really what I want to get to is the definition both in a healthy and what you call “wounded” form for both the masculine and feminine. If that’s all right, if we can do that.

 

DL: I love it.

 

TS: You’re the one that’s going to have to do all the work here, but go for it, Dené.

 

DL: It’s my favorite thing to do, Tami. So I’m going to start with the wounded because I think that that has been where we’ve been culturally for so long. From my perspective, we’ve been living in a wounded masculine paradigm. The patriarchal paradigm is a wounded masculine paradigm for centuries now. And so the wounded masculine energy is the energy of competition and that John Wayne energy of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, afraid of failure, really sort of performative how things look from the outside versus how they feel from the inside. That’s so much of what wounded masculine energy is. Its control, it’s sort of dominance. But then when we think about feminine energy, we’ve really been conditioned to think about a distortion or a more wounded energetic of feminine energy. And so that’s the anxious energy, that’s the energy of people pleasing, needing something outside of me to be whole, going along to get along.

Those are all qualities that we will embody all of us from time to time. But those are things that we think of being feminine, weak, not a strong sense of self. All of those things, the healthy energetics. And from my perspective, we’re learning what those energetics can look like within all of us, but we haven’t had a ton of models of what healthy masculinity or feminine energetics look like. And so the healthy, masculine, energetic, from my perspective is mission. It is action. It is a sense of confidence and knowing who I am and really sort of being in that space of facing some of this existential questioning and facing death, knowing myself well, and seeking guidance and mentorship, not feeling like I need to know all the answers. I’m open to learning and wisdom. And then the healthy, feminine, energetic, which I sort of laid up even talking about because I think it’s so much of what we are all reclaiming and integrating regardless of gender is the energetic of our intuition.

It’s the connection to our soul, to deeper meaning and to ourselves as eternal beings. It’s the play, it’s the aliveness, it’s the life force, the sensuality. All of these aspects of ourselves that we’ve sort of been conditioned to believe are, yeah, they’re nice to have them, but they’re not the necessities of life. And so if we understand that these energetics are alive in all of us and that they’re not fixed states, we will all sort of move from our wounded energetics and nobody lives in a healthy energetic, we’re not going to arrive and our healthy masculine feminine stay there. But if we understand that when we’re in those wounded spaces of our energetics, it’s really our work to notice and attempt to take inventory of what’s happening for me and where am I energetically. And then attempt to shift into what is the more healthy version of that energetic.

So if we’re in wounded masculine energy, and I get into this in the book, it becomes my work to—so the wounded masculine energy would be me in that space of contempt and just control and needing to fix and having to be right, then I would go into my healthy feminine energy, and that would be me in vulnerability really attempting to connect and collaborate and look for the larger meaning in whatever’s happening. But if I was in that wounded feminine energy where I’m attempting to cling on to someone else for a sense of safety, and I’m just really feeling anxious and unsure of myself, my work is to go into my healthy masculine. And that’s really getting clear about what are some of the tools that I can utilize to bring myself back into a sense of containment and a sense of solid self and believing in who I am. And so I sort of in the book walk through what that looks like and how to bring ourselves back into owning our own energy really.

 

TS: Now, Dené, I want to acknowledge you at this point in the book Sovereign Love, because I thought this was very, very brilliant, and I don’t know if this is something that you came up with, but the notion if I’m in wounded feminine energy that I move to healthy masculine, that that’s the move. Because I think previously someone might’ve thought, and I think I thought if I’m in wounded feminine energy, I should try to develop more healthy feminine energy, not this other that you call diagonal move and you call it diagonal, you have a chart. And so we’re moving diagonally in the chart. So when I started trying this on and I was looking at, oh, I’m in this wounded feminine energy, and I thought, what does my partner want from me? And I was like, she wants me to go into that healthy masculine energy. That’s exactly what she’s asking for. And here Dené has named it. Did you come up with this?

 

DL: I did. I always say I think Source gave it to me. I think something larger than me gave me that insight. As I was watching couples, I could just see this is what’s happening. And a lot of it was understanding how much these dualities are alive in different ways. And so the way that it shows up in couples work is that wounded masculine energy is avoidant energy. That’s where I sort of go inward and pull away from my partner. Whereas the wounded feminine is the anxious energy where I’m trying to clinging on to my partner. And I would see with couples, if the person who was more in their wounded masculine could just go towards, could just be vulnerable, could just take up space with what they’re afraid of. And a lot of times when we’re in avoidant energy, it’s because relationships have been overwhelming and we haven’t felt safe to take up space with my needs, how this feels for me, the truth of what’s happening.

And then if I’m an anxious energy, if I can just come back to myself somehow and see that if I use some of these tools, if I tap into my spiritual resources or something that contains that energy, then it just started to shift the energy between the two people. And I just started to play with it with couples. I would say, take the chart and play with this and let me know how it goes. And it was amazing how I realized we will inevitably create polarity in our relationships and we can do it from a wounded place or a healthy place. But the trick is I have to take 100% responsibility for my own energy, not to shift my partner, but that when I take responsibility for my own energy, inevitably, as you said, it shifts things between my partner and I.

 

TS: I wonder if you could tell us a story. You share lots of stories in Sovereign Love of couples you’ve worked with maybe who are going through under pseudonyms or whatever, but you’re sharing, tell us a story of this diagonal move so it can really feel people can get, it’ll be illustrated for people.

 

DL: Yeah. I think what came up for me, Tami, was that how much that ownership template that we’re talking about really starts to shift the energy between two people once the partnership is solidified. So I remember I was working with this one couple, and I tell this story in the book that she was in their dynamic just living in so much wounded masculine energy. So everything he did was just irritating to her. She had just so much contempt, he was just too needy. And she was like, oh, get off me all the time. And he was so desperate for affection, always asking if they could have more intimacy just in that wounded feminine energy of really attempting to bring her close. And what ended up happening was, as is often the case, she was really hungry for an opportunity to go back into her healthy feminine.

And she ended up having someone in her work environment who saw her and brought a very different energy to her world. And this person was in a lot of initially healthy masculine energy, really seeing her really clear with his desire for her really coming with a lot of that energy of I want you and I’m in pursuit of you. And it really put her in the energy of her healthy feminine and that she felt aroused and seen and alive in ways that she hadn’t felt in her marriage and so many years. But then when she decided that she was all about this person really wanting to solidify their connection, because this person was I think a little bit aroused by the fact that she wasn’t available, he started to really sort of go into wounded masculine energy with her and pull back. And so she tried to create clarity, what are we doing?

Should I leave my marriage? Are we going to do this? All of that stuff. And he sort of pulled back into that avoidant energy, which put her in wounded feminine energy and really needing to make this happen and attempting to bring him back to her, which as I was watching it play out, I was like, this is so fascinating because these energetics are really different based on who we’re relating to. So in her relationship with her husband, she’s sort of been in that wounded masculine energy all the time, but when someone was meeting her with a different energetic, it started to shift for her. So to me, what I realized was if we can just take responsibility for what is this other person evoking within me, and it really reframed how I think of relationships in general and what the point of relationships are, which is really this person is showing me to me, they’re showing me my core wounds.

A lot of times they become that invitation to do some deeper layers of shadow work and look at if this person is all of a sudden in wounded masculine energy or that avoidant energy with me, what feels historic about that? And in that dynamic, it was like, oh, that was dad. That was a little bit the way that dad used to pull away from me when I long to be close to him. And so that’s what that person is evoking and why it feels so desperate for me to bring him back to me. But if we understand it’s actually not about this person that I’m relating to right now. It’s about a core wound that’s coming to the surface through this relationship dynamic for me to look at and heal. And all of a sudden I don’t need that person so much as I need to tend to the inner kiddo inside of me that’s really feeling like they long to be seen. And that was what I initially felt from that person. But I can see me, I can tend to me and I can contain me. And so that becomes, if I’m in wounded feminine, my work is to be that secure paternal figure. I need to go back and hold myself with I see you. I’m never leaving you that energy. And we can do that for ourselves.

 

TS: So once again, I’m just going to check to see if I’m understanding you correctly. I think sometimes we focus on, I’m going to make this relationship like this. I want to create a relationship that’s has these different qualities and flows and all of this, but that you’re changing the emphasis and saying focus on yourself and how you are relating to yourself, the parts of yourself, how the masculine and feminine within you are relating to each other. And when you do that, yes, there’ll be ripple effects and it will shift your relationship. But that’s kind of the secondary point, not the primary point. Did I hear that correctly?

 

DL: Absolutely. To me, it’s a radical reframing of what we’re doing in relationships. I believe that relationships are divine assignments. I don’t think that we meet anyone by accident. I think we come into these sacred collisions as an opportunity to step into the potential for who we can become if we choose to see it that way. And I think we’ve sort of been conditioned to believe that loving someone means when I love someone, they come into my world and they fill me up with all of the things that I’ve been longing to feel for a lifetime. And they sort of become that person that sees me. And a lot of the models up to this point of relationships have really sort of supported this, that this person becomes that perfect parent. The one will see me in all of the ways that I’ve longed to be seen and heal, all those things that I didn’t get when I was younger.

And I don’t actually think that’s about my love for them. I think that that is about the wounds that are coming to the surface for me to look at and be in relationship with. But I believe we’re starting to understand that becomes my work to do some of that for me. And then when I see what’s being evoked within me and I start to pour into my own cup and take responsibility for my own energy, then loving you means I see you. And because of who you are, I really want to rise to be the highest version of who I have the potential to be to meet you there. And it just becomes more about pouring into the other person from the overflow of our full cup versus feeling like I need this person to energetically pour into me for me to be whole, because I don’t believe our souls ever really intended for that to be the point of relationships.

 

TS: One of the points that you make, I think very brilliantly and sizzling-ly, is that if in any way we’re asking our partner to parent us, that is an erotic death ringer or death bell or inviting the end of eros, because of course sex with a parent, that’s taboo. That’s not what we want. And yet I think so many of us are like, oh, my partner is doing this loving kind of re-parenting of this or that they’re helping me out in this way and it feels so good to get taken care of like this. And I’m wondering if you could point out some of the ways you’ve seen couples come into your office where they’re parenting each other and that that’s part of the problem.

 

DL: Yes. Well, first I want to say that I do think there is a level of intimacy that will organically do some of that re-parenting work for us. What I have found to be a bit about the couples therapy orientations up to this point is that they’ve sort of named that that’s your partner’s job to be that primary attachment figure that you never had to sort of create a secure attachment. And I believe that the secure attachment is to source to something larger than any other human being could ever have the capacity to do or be for us. But to what you were saying about how that ends up showing up in relationship dynamics, and I’m going to speak heteronormative for just a moment here, but because it’s such the consistent theme of, if we go back again to what patriarchal structures taught us, it was really that when women were sort of harmed by men in a way that men, and I know I wasn’t there, but I think that was a way that men were complicit in harm, certainly probably because they were afraid or because they wanted to buy into whatever the benefits of patriarchy were going to be, but they didn’t protect women.

And so there’s sort of been this multigenerational pain point of not trusting men within women. And so it’s like I am partnering with a man, but what I see so often is I really don’t trust him. And this is the big thing that I see comes up so often in couples is I don’t respect him. He feels almost childlike to me. And I think that there’s a way that when the woman has a level of her intuitive wisdom and her ability to tap into her own emotional landscape, and she’s doing that thing that patriarchy has conditioned us to believe it’s a woman’s job to do, which is be that for a man and sort of take over, excuse me, where his mother left off mothering him. What that does is, especially once we have children, it sort of makes her feel like he’s inept or childlike or I constantly have to do things for him.

And it’s so funny, Tami, there’s this phrase that’s sort of circulating around the internet right now called “golden retriever energy” within a man. And I was talking to a friend of mine this weekend who’s another therapist, and we were saying, oh God, it’s amazing how much this is the thing that comes up constantly, that you’re sort of with one of two types of people. You’re either with this golden retriever type of person or you’re with what they call a black cat energy. And so the golden retriever is like, think about a dog sitting there wagging its tail, just looking for your attention and happy wife, happy life. That energy and the black cat energy is the sort of elusive hot and cold. Sometimes they’ll be there and offer you affection, but then they’re off and you can’t touch them. And I was walking around the grocery store after I was having this conversation with my friend, I kept seeing all of these dynamics of women doing their thing going through the list, and their man just standing there like a child a little bit watching as she did her thing.

And it almost looked like he’s there and he’s your companion, but there’s not a real strong sense of self in the energy. There’s not a real sense of this is who I am. And I think there’s so much about what patriarchy has done to men, and this is what we don’t talk about. Bell hooks in her work talked so much about the damage that patriarchy does to men and the natural traumatization of little boys, and how there’s a way that when we teach boys, you should be comfortable at all costs and there’s instant gratification, and you can just follow this blueprint for what a good life is and you’ll be safe. There’s not a real testing of you. And coming into that initiatory process that indigenous cultures, again, really know that a young boy needs to go through to become a man. And we don’t have that in our culture anymore.

So there’s a lot of men walking around without a sense of self, but feeling like once I reach that point where I have a wife, all I have to do is keep my wife happy and be a good husband. And that’s enough. But what it is really leading to is I don’t feel confident in who I am. And at some point that creates that rupture we were talking about where someone sees me as a capable man and not the little boy that she has to guide around a child and talk to in a really disrespectful tone sometimes like a child. I mean, hopefully we’re not talking to our children disrespectful, but you know what I mean. But that all of a sudden when someone sees me in that way, I didn’t realize how hungry I was to feel that. And that feels like life force and that brings that feminine aliveness to that person.

 

TS: OK, let me ask you a question. Let’s say someone’s listening and they’re like, oh my God. Let’s say it’s a woman that’s listening for a moment. My partner is like a golden retriever and I do long for the black cat, whether I’m acting on it or not. Let’s just start there. What would you recommend that they at least inquire and investigate into? And if they were going to make a diagonal move, what would that be like?

 

DL: Yeah, so if your partner is in golden retriever energy, then he’s probably in that wounded feminine energy, and you are in that wounded masculine. And so your work is to really take up space with your feminine, get vulnerable around what your fears are, what is overwhelming for you, how you’ve been holding a lot. And that’s been tough. Just because I’ve been holding it doesn’t mean it’s not heavy, and I want to put some of this down and can you help me with that? That’s a big aspect of it, asking for support. Can you help me? Can you hold this? And what I find ends up happening, it’s that thing of when you ask your male partner for that, there’s something that rises within the, and they sort of want to be that protector from you for you, excuse me. And it becomes like, yes, I will contain this.

I’ve got you energy. And the vulnerability can be really easy to say, but I find a lot of times hard to do. So I have to get really honest with myself about what are the fears that come to the surface when I think about letting go of control. Because if I’m in that wounded masculine energy, that means I am finding a lot of safety and controlling our dynamic and being the one who leads and does all of the things and takes things over because I don’t trust him. But if I don’t believe someone is trustworthy, then that’s sort of the way that they will feel around me. But if I say, I trust you enough to be vulnerable about this, I’m asking, would you be willing to help me? Would you be willing to take this off my plate? For me? I just find that inevitably it starts to shift the energy between us.

 

TS: So far, Dené, we’ve been talking about masculine and feminine energy, whether it’s wounded or healthy in situational contexts. And yet at the beginning of Sovereign Love, you talk about how in your experience, each one of us has a core type of energetic that we lead with in our relationship. We lead with the type of masculine or feminine energy. I wanted to hear more about that, especially in light of, I know you were trained at Pacifica Graduate Institute in a depth psychological approach and at a young age. So when I was a teenager, I read a book by June Singer called Androgyny. And when I heard that word, I saw it on the cover of the book. I don’t remember anything about what I read inside the book except the title. And I went around talking about how I was androgynous. I was like, I’m androgynous. There’s a word for it. June Singer called her book Androgyny. And so when I hear there’s a core energetic, masculine or feminine, I think really? Is that really true? And so I’d love to hear more about that.

 

DL: Well, this to me is one of those places, Tami, where it’s holding multiple truths at the same time or that there’s a complexity to this because—

 

TS: I’m OK with that. Bring it on. It’s alright.

 

DL: Yeah, absolutely. Because I think that there’s a way, and I even light up as I hear you talk about the androgyny, because to me, the integrated human is going to be a little bit more in the realm of that because that’s the integration of the masculine and feminine that I think is going to be so much more of how all of us hopefully are moving through our lives and the world. That’s the dream world for my son that I hope we are cultivating. And what I started to realize, and I’ll use myself as an example, is that there were so many ways that in order to create safety, who I was as a little girl, which was really sort of in my core feminine essence, I was that little girl that just loved to play, make believe, and pretending that I was kissing a prince and all of the, I don’t know, just musical theater and super in that space of play and aliveness, really didn’t like sports or anything like that.

That was just very much a lot of my core energetic. And very early on, what I was conditioned to be was to really reject so much of the feminine aspects of who I was. I had a mother that was very much in order to keep me safe. And I think that this is really important to name that so much of us or so much of us embodying these patriarchal frameworks and our mothers teaching that to us was to keep us safe in terms of what they understood about safety in the world. And so it was like, reject your feminine. Don’t ever talk about your moon cycles or the things that are happening for you as a woman because people won’t take you seriously in the workplace. Don’t ever trust a man even though you should marry a man because men will inevitably let you down and hurt you.

And all of these things that really sort of condition me to armor up and really feel like I needed to defend myself at all costs and not feel like the world was safe. And what I realized when my marriage ended was very similar to the way that I was describing with that client. When someone that I was dating all of a sudden held a lot of space in a really healthy masculine containment for me, some part of me came alive that I hadn’t even realized was dormant, and that I was so unbelievably hungry to feel. And it brought forward a sense of arousal that I see so often when we’re sort of in that core energetic of how we long to be in relationship to another person. It comes online. So again, it’s not that I don’t have aspects of myself that are masculine and masculine forward in the way that I do motherhood and the way that I am in my work.

And I’m a Capricorn, so I’m very much like the Capricorn is very much the paternal energy. So I embody a lot of masculine energy. And when I am in relationship dynamics, what feels like I am hungry to feel and most arousing to me is normally me in that core feminine, energetic, but again, it’s not gendered. So we just sort of have to pay attention to what feels good. And I like to encourage people to hold it lightly because I think it can be information and it can be something we can play with, but we don’t want to sort of be in this rigid space of putting ourselves back in another societal box of who we have to be.

 

TS: And just use a baseball metaphor for a moment, you encounter some people who are switch-hitters.

 

DL: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that’s exactly it. And I think that that’s beautiful and the aliveness and the feminine is that it’s unknown and it isn’t rigid and it doesn’t have to be something that we contain and put in a box in order for it to be true. It can be ever shifting and changing and alive and it’s beautiful.

 

TS: OK, just a couple more questions for you, Dené. One of the challenging parts, and I have to say reading Sovereign Love, I felt like I entered Dream states, and this happens to me sometimes, often it doesn’t when I read books, but it happened to me in reading Sovereign Love, and I think that was a sign that my unconscious was getting stirred up because I wasn’t quite in my normal, I was in this sort of dreamy trancey. I had to go back and reread certain paragraphs. I’m just curious, first of all what you think about that, the dreaminess that can happen sometimes when we’re hearing things that are challenging us.

 

DL: Wow, that’s really interesting. I guess what came up initially as I was hearing you say that Tami, is that there’s so much of this that I will go back and read and be like, huh, I love that. Did I write that? And what ended up happening so often when I wrote that book was I would be like, OK, I know what chapter six is going to be about, but I have no idea what I’m going to say for that and then or what I’m going to write. And I would go to sleep and it was like something larger than me in my dream state. And I would be in a lucid dream and I would just get such a complete configuration of what to write. And I would wake up and go straight to the computer and just start jotting it down. And so I know for sure I was getting downloads from something larger as I was writing this book.

And I think that there’s something about the exploration of the soul space and some of these truths that we’ve just been hungry to return to. I think there have been points in my life—and I’ve heard you talk about this in interviews a little bit, just in terms of what you were doing when you were getting, I guess, downloads to start Sounds True—but that it’s just like there’s a knowing all of a sudden from something bigger. And I didn’t understand why these energetics felt so important to understand. But now as I go back, having had the downloads that I had, I looked and saw the Aquarian Age, which started in 2023, was sort of like back in the Thoth prophecies and other places. They said this was going to be the time that society was going to have a reckoning around how out of balance it had become in its masculine energy and in these societal structures that were really void of deeper meaning and the connection to our soul. And there was going to be a reemergence of the feminine energy within all of us. And I had no context for why that came to me, except that I felt hungry to understand what was happening in our relationships. And something larger said, this is how we need to start reframing what we’re doing in terms of relating to one another. So maybe that’s why I don’t know.

 

TS: And one of the challenging sections had to do with this notion about longevity in relationships. And that often it’s the silver anniversary. Oh my God, you made it to 50 years. This would be the crowning achievement in a lifetime to be in a relationship that long. And you wrote, what if defines success is not longevity, but the amount of authenticity and respect that exists between the people involved. And I wonder if you can comment on that and then we’re going to bring our conversation to a close with one final question.

 

DL: Yeah. I think I have to give a shout-out to my mentor, Esther Perel, on that one. I’ve heard her in talks, people will say, oh, you’ve been married to your husband so long, what’s the successful or what’s the secret to a happy marriage? And she’s like, how do you know I’m happy? You don’t know anything about my marriage except that we’ve been married a very long time. And she also says that if you’re married to one person for a lifetime, you’re going to be married to four to five different people because there are just ways that we are all meant to evolve and shift within our lives. And her saying that to me was such a reconfiguration of anything that I had ever thought about because all of us are really conditioned to think of longevity as the goal in our relationship dynamics. And that a successful marriage is a long marriage or a long partnership, and nobody really asks those people at the silver anniversary or at the wedding when everybody sits down according to the number of years they’ve been married.

What’s it been like? Have you guys had a fulfilling ride? Have you grown? Has there been essence of development and truth? And those things matter? I think if we’ve been unhappy for a lifetime, is that what we want to strive for really? And I think there’s all these ways that even my own marriage changing form, and I like to say changing form instead of ending because my child’s father is absolutely one of my life’s soulmates. The container needed to change. We were not meant to be in a romantic partnership anymore, but he is still one of the best friends that I’ve ever had. And I think there’s a way that if we make the relationship container being the goal, like staying in this container, we really miss out on the opportunities for growth. And I know for sure for me, I have grown in exponential ways outside of that marital container that I just wouldn’t have for me in that container. Now, I think if couples can do that and stay within the confines of the relationship, that’s beautiful. And there’s so many amazing aspects of partnership for that. But I think I’m more concerned with what is true with the couples that I work with than I am keeping the container intact if that’s no longer in alignment with what each person needs to become in order to be their fullest, most embodied self.

 

TS: And then finally, tell us about this word “sovereign” and what you mean by the term “sovereign love.”

 

DL: Yeah. So I think that if we think about a country that is a sovereign country, it is sort of defining its own rules for itself. And I think we are shifting collectively to a time where there’s sort of been an external authority telling us what makes up a good relationship and a healthy relationship dynamic. And that to me is the structure of some of these wounded masculine paradigms that are dying off. And the rise of the feminine principle within all of us is sort of the inner authority. If we think about what it is to tap into our feminine energy, it’s really that space of going inward and asking those questions for ourselves. So if it’s sovereign love, it’s the people involved in the dynamic really forever and ever in that space of co-creating something that feels beautiful and true for us. And we get to do that. And that’s the dance of relationships. But it’s defined by us, not society telling us what is true.

 

TS: Dené Logan, an evolutionary force in the world of our relationships. Author of the new book, Sovereign Love: A Guide to Healing Relationships by Reclaiming the Masculine and Feminine Within.

 

DL: Thank you so much, Tami.

 

TS: Thank you, Dené. Great to talk to you.

 

DL: Oh my gosh. Such a gift.

 

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