Working With Our Nature, Not Against It

How can a woman find herself when she is always at odds with herself?

Women live in a conundrum, pulled in different directions by societal expectations, internal desires, and external pressures that often feel impossible to reconcile.

For men, society has long defined manhood through initiation, survival, and war—a man must fight, endure, and belong to his tribe. While many are challenging this rigid framework, its foundations remain deeply embedded. Women, however, face a different and more tangled narrative.

Like it or not, women have a biologically innate inclination to care, to nurture, to build and sustain life. This is not a prescription but an observation—a biological and psychological reality. Yet, in the modern age, this natural role has become fraught with conflict. To embrace it, women risk being labeled as falling into a “pre-liberation trap.” They are accused of conforming to outdated norms, and of submitting to the patriarchal paradigm. To reject nurture and prioritize a career, they risk being told they are “unnatural” or “less maternal.”

I’ve worked with clients who feel paralyzed by this divide. They can’t act. A woman who longs to stay home and raise her children wonders if she’s betraying her independence. Another who thrives in a high-powered career questions whether there’s something broken inside her because she doesn’t desire motherhood. This psychological tug-of-war is exhausting, and it runs deeper for women because the stakes are so high—personal identity, societal judgment, and systemic pressures all intertwine.

The Power We Abandoned

Historically, women’s work—child-rearing, caregiving, home-building—was essential to humanity’s survival. It still is. But it was never honored in the way it should have been. Equality could only be achieved by claiming a place in a male-defined world. We implicitly accepted the idea that what we were already doing wasn’t enough, wasn’t economically worthwhile, didn’t require skill or knowledge.?

This is where the real heartbreak lies. It isn’t that women shouldn’t have fought for equal opportunities—they absolutely had to. It’s that the work they were already doing was never recognized as equal in value. We played by the rules rather than creatively defining success, contribution, and fulfillment on our own terms.

The Modern Dilemma: Caught Between Roles

Now, the stakes feel even higher. Traditional inclinations, like wanting a family or prioritizing care, often come with guilt or fear. In a world where women’s rights are dangerously under attack, anything less than full, visible resistance can feel like enabling a system that seeks to undermine hard-won progress. If you focus on family, are you abandoning the cause? If you prioritize work, are you abandoning yourself? And so the cycle continues.

No matter what women choose, they feel they sacrifice something fundamental—their autonomy, their nature, or their voice. Caught between roles, unable to focus on one thing without feeling the risk of losing another, women suffer.

The Path Inward: Telling Our Own Truth

What’s the way out of this loop? Mediations and productivity hacks won’t help. No external solution will reconcile what is, at its core, an internal conflict.

The real work is to go inward—to cultivate the self-awareness to ask hard questions and listen to the answers that emerge:

• What parts of me are truly mine, and what parts were given to me by society?
• What do I want, apart from what I’ve been told I should want?
• Who am I supposed to be… and who am I really?

These questions demand courage. They require us to face truths that may not align with the expectations of others, or even with the narratives we’ve internalized about ourselves.?

When a woman honors her own truth—whether that truth is building a family, leading a company, or carving out a path that blends both—she reclaims her power. The courage to live the life you want comes from knowing yourself deeply enough to stop living in contradiction, and to hold a shield of serenity up to the judgements of others.

It takes courage to go inward and find yourself. But the alternative—a life spent at war with yourself—is far costlier. The world has long asked women to live in a more enlightened way than the society around them. This has never been more true than it is now. We must live ahead of our time.?

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