Defeminence: Men, Addiction, and the Fear of the Feminine: Healing the Root of Compulsion

 I’ve come to see addiction less as a disease and more as a form of inner violence — a war against the feminine within myself.

  The feminine, to me, isn’t about gender. It’s the part of the soul that feels. The part that listens, receives, surrenders. The part that’s soft enough to care. Somewhere along the way, I learned that softness was weakness. That feeling meant danger. That the only way to survive was to dominate, control, and keep moving.

  But repression has consequences. What isn’t allowed to be felt turns into hunger. The hunger becomes restless energy — a low hum of dissatisfaction that never stops buzzing. Eventually, it finds an outlet. For me, that outlet became compulsion. Addiction.

  The more I pushed away the feminine inside me, the more I projected that rejection outward. The feminine became something to chase or control, not something to honor. Women became mirrors for everything I refused to see in myself. Desire turned into conquest. Connection turned into consumption.

  And beneath it all was a quiet hatred of my own tenderness — a deep mistrust of my ability to feel and survive it.

  I see now that the same dynamic plays out culturally. Men are taught to despise what’s soft, to fear what’s vulnerable, and to sexualize what they can’t integrate. Every message of “man up” or “don’t feel” becomes another layer of armor, until the armor itself becomes the prison.

 Addiction, in that sense, is a final act of control — a desperate attempt to silence the inner feminine, the one whispering: stop, stay, feel this. 

But control doesn’t heal. It just tightens the noose.

  There’s a parallel I can’t ignore between this and bulimia. Bulimia is often a woman’s way of waging war against herself, of trying to control the body that carries her shame. In both cases, the body becomes the battleground. Whether it’s a man devouring women or a woman devouring herself, the root is the same: the inability to receive love as it is.

It’s an act of self-rejection disguised as self-protection.

  Recovery, then, isn’t just about abstaining from the behavior. It’s about reconciliation — with the parts of me I exiled. The feminine inside me isn’t weak or threatening. It’s the part that knows how to breathe, to create, to stay present when I want to run.

  Letting her back in means letting myself be human again. It means choosing honesty over control, and presence over performance.

   I used to think I was afraid of women. I was really afraid of the part of me that could love them — because that same part could also hurt, could cry, could need.

  Now I see that the feminine was never my enemy. She was my lost home.