The Woman Who Forgot to Rest
There’s a type of woman many people recognize—the one who has everything under control, who always gets the job done, who rarely admits she’s tired until her body finally tells her so. Psychiatrist Carl Jung called this imbalance an overactive animus—the inner masculine principle present in every woman: thought, logic, structure—which sometimes takes over so completely that the other side—emotion, intuition, the ability to rest—barely has room left.
What happens when one side of us is allowed to take the lead for decades while the other falls silent?
The body usually responds first. Tension that can’t be massaged away, exhaustion that rest doesn’t quite resolve, hormonal fluctuations, migraines that strike for no apparent reason. Mentally, there’s often a sense of inadequacy even though everything seems to be working on the surface—a loneliness hidden behind a facade that appears strong to everyone else. It’s rarely laziness or weakness that lies behind it—rather the opposite: a woman who learned very early on that worth comes through achievement, that being good enough is the same as being able to fend for herself.
This imbalance rarely arises out of nowhere. It usually emerges as a form of compensation—a response to a time or a context where there wasn’t really room for emotions, where it felt safer to perform than to feel. Perhaps it was a childhood where calm had to be earned through achievements. Perhaps it was a workplace, a relationship, or an entire culture that rewarded those who managed on their own and rarely asked how she was really doing beneath the surface. The mask she wears to function in the world has become so ingrained that she herself has forgotten what lies behind it.
And what about rest? It’s easy to say she should rest more, but for this woman, rest is rarely just about time or opportunity. Many of them have been given both permission and space to rest and yet have been unable to do so, because the body doesn’t relax just because the calendar says so. True rest is about balance—about allowing the nervous system to truly settle deep down, not just lying still on the surface. It requires a trust that you still have value even when you’re not performing, and it is precisely that trust that is often missing the most.
Where exactly is the line between being strong and never being allowed to be weak?
In their pursuit of equality, many women have unconsciously begun to emulate a harsher form of strength rather than finding their own. Perhaps it’s not equality itself that’s the problem, but what we believe it demands of us. Being seen as strong has somehow become synonymous with never showing vulnerability, and that equation rarely holds up in the long run—neither for the body nor for the relationships around us.
Because it’s rarely just the woman herself who bears the imbalance. In a relationship where she lives entirely in her animus—in control, taking responsibility, solving everything—it’s not uncommon for the man beside her to gradually become more passive, letting decisions slip over to her without really noticing it himself. Neither of them chose this consciously. Yet both lose, step by step, touch with their full potential—she with her gentleness, he with his initiative—until they both find themselves a little further removed from their true selves than they were at the beginning.
There is an ancient image for this woman: Athena, the Greek goddess who was born fully grown and fully equipped with strategy, reason, and strength, without ever having emerged from a mother’s womb. She knows how to win a battle, how to build something that lasts, how to think clearly when everything else is chaos. What she never got to learn—since she was never born the way a human being is actually born—is how to rest in someone else’s arms, how to receive rather than perform. Many of us carry more of Athena within us than we realize.
What would happen if she dared to let go of some of that control—not because she has to, but because she’s allowed to?
Balance is rarely the same as giving up strength. It’s about allowing the other side—her feelings, her body’s signals, her ability to rest without guilt—to exist alongside her strength, rather than being pushed aside. A woman in balance doesn’t need to prove her worth through performance. She can stand in her authority while listening to her body when it asks for rest; she can be decisive without losing her sensitivity; she can set boundaries without sacrificing her connection to herself. It isn’t softer. It’s more whole.
What happens within an individual woman rarely occurs in a vacuum. If you zoom out, you see the same pattern on a larger scale—a society where performance, control, and efficiency still carry more weight than rest, feeling, and presence, and where perhaps all of us, regardless of gender, carry a bit of that same imbalance without truly seeing it. The question is rarely whether we can perform more. Rather, it’s what we would dare to feel if we no longer had to prove it.
This text is a revised version based on my paper “Anima and Animus in Modern Society,” which I wrote about Carl Jung’s ideas regarding our inner feminine and masculine aspects, and how an imbalance between them affects the body, relationships, and society. More on this topic—and on the path back to balance—can be found in my book There’s Nothing Wrong with You, You’re Just Out of Balance, which builds on these same themes.