The Law of Gender Rigidity
Rigid gender identity can become a prison. When you over-identify with toughness, you lose sensitivity. When you over-identify with pleasing, you lose assertiveness. Extremes make you predictable—and predictability makes you easy to manipulate.
The deeper idea is wholeness: the ability to access a wider range of traits depending on what reality demands. Strength without empathy becomes brutality. Empathy without strength becomes helplessness.
When you integrate what you’ve been taught to reject, you become more complete and less reactive. You stop performing a role and start responding to life as it is. That flexibility is power, because it expands your behavioral options in any situation.