Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who was once Freud's closest disciple before the two went their separate ways, built much of his life's work around the idea that every human being carries two inner forces within them, regardless of gender. He called them anima and animus. Anima is the receptive, feeling, relationship building force, the one that listens, senses, holds space for what is difficult without needing to fix it right away. Animus is the driving, structuring, boundary setting force, the one that makes decisions, sets limits, acts quickly when something calls for action. Jung believed a whole, healthy psyche needs both, working together. The problem isn't that one force exists. It's when one is allowed to expand at the expense of the other, or when a person is forced to live mostly in the force that isn't their natural home.
I've carried these ideas with me for a long time, in how I think, in how I write, in how I try to understand both people and systems. And the more time I spend in healthcare, the more it strikes me that the entire profession, maybe more than most others, is built around exactly that tension between the two forces, even though no one usually names it that way.
Care itself, the core of why most people chose this work in the first place, rests at its heart on anima. Staying with someone who's afraid. Listening all the way through without interrupting. Sensing a room, a person, an atmosphere, before ever needing to understand it intellectually. That's the force that makes a patient feel truly seen, the one that lets a hand holding another hand say something words never could. Most people who choose to care do it because that force already lives strongly in them, an ability to feel with someone, to want to ease their pain, to put another person's needs ahead of their own for a while.
But everything around the care itself, everything that allows the care to actually happen within a functioning system, demands something else entirely. Prioritizing between ten patients on a single shift is animus. Making a fast decision when someone's condition worsens is animus. Setting a boundary with a family member asking for more than can possibly be given right now is animus. Documenting precisely, following protocol, keeping to schedules, leading a team through a crisis, all of that is animus, structuring, boundary setting, decisive. Healthcare would collapse without either force. But most people who chose this work chose it for the anima side, and end up living in both anyway, again and again, often several times within a single hour.
Picture a shift where you've just sat with a dying patient, held their hand, let the silence exist, been fully present in that emotional space. And two minutes later you're running to an alarm, making a quick call about who needs help first, speaking clearly and with authority to a colleague, holding an entirely different register in your voice and your body. Then back again, to the next patient who just needs to be heard. That shift isn't small. It's a complete change in which inner force is steering, over and over, without anyone really noticing how demanding that switch is in itself, on top of everything medical and practical it also involves.
I think a large part of the exhaustion so common in healthcare, in nearly everyone who works closely with patients, comes from exactly that. It's about the constant, demanding movement between the two forces. Someone who gets to live mostly in their natural force often does fine even under heavy load. But someone who's constantly forced to tear themselves out of one force and throw themselves into the other, without training, without support, without anyone acknowledging that it's even happening, burns out in a different way than someone who simply works hard within a single, consistent force.
Here I think gender plays a role worth naming specifically. Many of the women who go into healthcare do it precisely because they carry anima strongly, a deeply feminine coded way of caring that already feels like home before they've even set foot on a ward. The stronger that force already is, the further the journey every time the system demands they step into animus, the fast decision, the sharp prioritization, the firm boundary. The strain isn't just about switching between two forces. It's about switching between a force that feels like your true self and a force that feels imposed from the outside, over and over. I wonder if this specific strain, between a strong, chosen anima and a necessary but foreign animus, is part of what we're seeing as burnout in so many women in healthcare. Not exhaustion from caring, but from never getting to rest in the force they chose this work for in the first place.
The men who work in healthcare often carry a similar strength in anima, a genuine desire to listen, to sense, to stay present in what's hard, otherwise they'd hardly have chosen this work, since pay and status have rarely been the draw. But I think they carry an added layer of the same strain, one women don't have to navigate in quite the same way. A woman strong in her anima meets a society that already expects that of her, in line with her gender role, even as the profession's demand for animus still wears on her. A man strong in his anima often meets the opposite expectation from the outside, a society that still, consciously or not, links masculinity to animus, to strength, distance, decisiveness, rather than to softness and presence. So he's not only carrying the strain between care's anima and the system's animus. He's also carrying an outer strain between who he actually is at his core and who the world expects a man to be, before he's even walked onto the ward. That may explain the particular kind of invisibility or loneliness some men in healthcare describe, not because they dislike the caregiving itself, but because they rarely get language or recognition for exactly the side of themselves that drew them to this work in the first place. And when he, too, has to step into animus to handle whatever's urgent, he's met by a world that applauds the very part it already expected of him, while anima, the part he actually came for, rarely gets to be seen or valued out loud.
That also explains why so many describe healthcare as harder than the workload alone should account for. It's rarely just about the number of patients or the length of the shift. It's about how every shift demands an inner flexibility, an ability to be both fully receptive and fully decisive, often only seconds apart, in the same body, with the same nervous system carrying both.
Healthcare is, for that reason, an unusually complex arena for exactly the balance Jung once described. It requires anima to exist with meaning, and animus to exist in practice, and the people who work there carry, day in and day out, the full human tension between the two forces, rarely given the time, the tools, or even the language to understand what's actually wearing them down, whether the one carrying it is a woman or a man.
The first step is maybe just naming it, so that anyone feeling worn down can understand why. It's about carrying two of the most fundamental human forces at once, within a system rarely built to support that balance.