A good friend of mine, Joy Leach, tells the story of a childhood memory that has shaped her life as a working mom and wife.
Her Dad, every week, would pull out seven one-dollar bills and give them to her mom, and this was her allowance for the week. They were not in poverty, though in the ’50s wealth levels were nowhere near today’s. For Joy, traveling and doing her work as a happily married mom of two adult children, as she contemplates her years of delivering training in corporations across America, this image of one-dollar bills is the big memory. It is the charged symbol that instructed her on how not to be. She decided not to ever be dependent on a husband for the weekly doling out of an allowance. She moved into a career, big time.
Where and how did you learn about your gender-related identity and energy? From a variety of sources surely: your family, your decade, your role models, your own thinking, the media. And you also had a body doing its thing. No matter where and when you were raised, the gender molding process was going on. How much estrogen did you have, how much of an analytical brain, how much access to your feelings was fostered? Nature and nurture were duking it out and blending inside your little being as you were becoming the man or woman you are.
Here is a question to ask yourself, as the fully-bloomed adult woman or man that you have become: do you like how you are now in your gender? This is a subset of the big question—do you like the person you are now, and what do you want to change? Gender is one of the fundamental subset questions.
Read my latest Psychology Today blog post for an expanded version of this post and some questions you can ask yourself to get started on your own gender review.