The Heroine’s Journey: Stage 2 — Identification with the Masculine

This blog is part of an ongoing series exploring The Heroine’s Journey, a psychological and developmental framework articulated by depth psychologist Maureen Murdock in her book The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness (1990).

While the traditional Hero’s Journey emphasizes outward achievement, conquest, and recognition, the Heroine’s Journey describes a different psychological movement—one that turns inward. It explores the experience many women have of adapting to achievement-oriented, masculine-dominant cultures, and the later process of reclaiming emotional life, intuition, embodiment, and relational depth.

Rather than focusing on external success, the Heroine’s Journey is ultimately a path toward integration and wholeness—bringing together both feminine and masculine dimensions of the self.

This series explores each stage of the journey slowly and thoughtfully, honoring the developmental nature of psychological growth. Each stage will be explored in its own blog.

Stages of the Heroine’s Journey

Stage 1 — Separation from the Feminine

Stage 2 — Identification with the Masculine

Stage 3 — Road of Trials

Stage 4 — Illusion of Success

Stage 5 — Awakening to Spiritual Aridity

Stage 6 — Initiation and Descent to the Goddess

Stage 7 — Urgent Yearning to Reconnect with the Feminine

Stage 8 — Healing the Mother/Daughter Split

Stage 9 — Healing the Wounded Masculine

Stage 10 — Integration of the Masculine and Feminine

After Separation Comes Identification

In the previous blog, we explored how many women gradually separate from feminine qualities such as emotional sensitivity, intuition, receptivity, and relational depth in order to adapt to the environments around them.

Once this separation occurs, many women begin building their identity around the traits most valued and rewarded by the external world.

Competence, achievement, independence, productivity, rationality, and self-sufficiency become central markers of worth and belonging.

Maureen Murdock describes this next movement as Identification with the Masculine.

Identification with the Masculine in Heroine's Journey

In Murdock’s model, the masculine represents qualities such as agency, direction, discipline, logic, structure, achievement, and outward accomplishment.

These qualities are not inherently harmful. In many ways, they are deeply valuable.

The ability to think critically, pursue goals, create stability, and navigate complex systems can empower women professionally, financially, and psychologically.

The difficulty emerges when identity becomes overly organized around external performance and achievement, while inward life becomes increasingly disconnected or devalued.

The heroine often learns—explicitly or implicitly—that being respected, successful, safe, or valued requires embodying these masculine-oriented traits.

How This Identification Develops

Identification with the masculine rarely develops in isolation.

It is often reinforced through:

• family praise for achievement

• school systems that reward performance

• cultural admiration of productivity

• professional environments that prioritize measurable success

• gender expectations surrounding competence and strength

• survival within highly competitive systems

In highly achievement-oriented environments like Silicon Valley, women may feel ongoing pressure to continuously prove competence in order to belong.

Over time, productivity and performance can become deeply tied to self-worth. Many women begin feeling valuable primarily when they are accomplishing, solving, producing, or excelling.

The Appeal of the Masculine

It is important to understand why this stage can feel deeply empowering.

The masculine offers structure, direction, agency, confidence, and the ability to move effectively through the external world.

For many women, these qualities create real opportunities, independence, recognition, financial stability, and freedom.

In environments where vulnerability may feel unsafe or unsupported, competence and achievement can also become forms of psychological protection.

This is why identification with the masculine should not be understood simply as a problem.

It is often a highly intelligent developmental adaptation.

When Identification Becomes Over-Identification

Over time, however, identification with the masculine can gradually become over-identification.

The issue is not strength itself.

The difficulty emerges when achievement becomes the primary source of identity, worth, safety, and belonging.

Many women become extraordinarily capable while simultaneously feeling increasingly disconnected from their emotional life, body, intuition, or deeper sense of self.

This may appear through:

• chronic striving

• perfectionism

• overfunctioning

• difficulty resting

• discomfort receiving support

• emotional numbness

• burnout and exhaustion

Externally, life may appear successful.

Internally, however, there may be a growing sense that constant performance can no longer sustain psychological wellbeing.

A Clinical Perspective

In my clinical work, I often meet women who are highly respected professionally while privately feeling exhausted from constantly holding themselves together.

Many struggle to feel “enough” outside of achievement.

Rest may trigger guilt. Emotional needs may feel uncomfortable, inefficient, or even shameful.

Some women describe feeling unsure who they are when they are no longer producing, accomplishing, helping, or performing.

On a personal level, this stage also resonates with me.

Like many women navigating achievement-oriented environments, I understand the pull toward competence, productivity, and self-sufficiency—and how easily these qualities can become intertwined with identity.

A Developmental Perspective

From a developmental perspective, identification with the masculine often develops because it works.

It creates recognition, belonging, stability, achievement, and protection. Children and young adults naturally strengthen the qualities most rewarded by their environments.

For many women, masculine-oriented traits become essential tools for navigating academic systems, professional life, cultural expectations, and social survival.

This is not failure. It is adaptation.

But what helps someone survive one stage of development may eventually become psychologically limiting later in life.

Healing often involves expanding beyond identities built entirely around performance and rediscovering neglected dimensions of the self.

Why This Stage Matters in the Heroine’s Journey

Identification with the masculine forms a critical stage in the heroine’s journey because it shapes how many women organize identity, worth, and belonging.

Without this stage, the later experiences of burnout, spiritual emptiness, emotional disconnection, or longing for reconnection would not emerge in the same way.

The heroine eventually begins discovering that external success alone cannot fully answer the deeper needs of the psyche.

This realization becomes the foundation for the stages that follow.

Gentle Reflection

• When did achievement first become connected to self-worth for me?

• What emotions emerge when I slow down or stop producing?

• Which parts of myself feel hardest to value without accomplishment?

• What would remain if performance was no longer my primary identity?

Looking Ahead

Once identity becomes increasingly organized around achievement and external validation, the heroine enters a demanding period of striving, pressure, testing, and endurance.

Maureen Murdock calls this next stage Road of Trials.

In the next blog, we will explore the psychological cost of relentless striving—and why external success often requires sacrifices that remain invisible for many years.

The Heroine’s Journey enters stage 2 - Identification with the Masculine when achievement becomes identity, and outward success begins shaping the sense of self.