Will I Ever Feel Like a Woman? Understanding Your Journey!
Dr. Z discusses whether that feeling of ever really feeling like a woman is ever going to happen. She works with many clients who ask: "Will I ever really feel like a woman?" Often, what they mean is whether they'll ever stop engaging in thinking patterns, behaviors, or repetitive patterns of navigating the world as a man. This bypasses even feeling impostor syndrome or like you're trespassing—it's simply this feeling of "I feel much more aligned and comfortable, perhaps starting to feel more congruent with my authenticity, and yet I still don't really feel like a woman. I still feel like a man. Why do I still feel like a man even though I know deep down inside I'm not?"
There's definitely a correlation: the longer you've been living with gender dysphoria, the longer you've been living in your assigned gender, the more learned memory you have, the more muscle memory you have of navigating this world. As human beings, we integrate and soak in like a sponge the way people interact with us, the way people behave around us. If people have been relating to you as a man, interacting with you from that worldview, treating you from that worldview, you're going to have habitual muscle memory of how to respond to them in the assigned gender.
You're masking your identity to the point where the mask becomes part of your gender landscape in some way (even though it doesn't belong to you), and you start getting all of this muscle memory integrated within you. Once you start transitioning—even if you've transitioned and feel so much more congruent and aligned and confident—it takes some time to unlearn all of that learning. It takes time for your psyche to shift.
Watch this video as Dr. Z addresses why muscle memory affects body language and movements (squatting to pick up keys, sitting posture, standing posture), speech patterns and emphasis, and thinking patterns, why physically transitioning and psychologically transitioning are two things that don't often happen in sync, and why the indication of still feeling like a man sometimes is not a sign you made a mistake.
