Often, we project the feelings, sensations, images, and perceptions we have of our father or our mother onto others. We unconsciously react to others as if they were our mother or our father (or other people close to us). The sea of our implicit memories floods forth in the moment, and we think it is an accurate perception of the other person. We see our boss, our date, or our spouse through the lens of our past. It is like we have a ‘father-lens’ or a ‘mother-lens’ through which we perceive the other.

When we were children early in our lives, we were influenced by the beliefs of our families, and we learned and took on certain responses, judgments, and opinions toward the “opposite sex.” How you treat people of different genders now has developed from being in your family and the world around you. You learned how to value, and what to expect of, the “opposite sex” — whether valid or not. You weren’t trained to consider that there might be many ways to see the world, let alone sex and gender.

For example, how many people feel that raising children is “a woman’s job”? While it may be true that women are more socialized in this way, it doesn’t mean that they have all the answers, or that they are the ones to be solely responsible for child-rearing. It may mean men need to be coached and supported on what to do. Women can be perceived to develop an edge or a tone in their voice as they intervene with men on parenting. Women may dismiss men; men may ignore women. Even our dismissals reveal our beliefs about the “opposite sex!” Our “myth-conceptions” are at play until we decide to become aware of them, reclaim our projections, and change our beliefs.

You continuously fall into “myth-conceptions” about the “opposite sex” throughout the day without even being aware of it. Your actions and thoughts reflect your unconscious, mistaken beliefs. If a female-presenting driver does something that annoys you, how many times have you justified your beliefs with thoughts like “typical woman driver”? If your man forgets to bring home something you asked for—“just like a guy”—how do you reinforce your belief?

There are behaviors that we define as more “womanly” or “manly” which shape our beliefs and attitudes about men and women—and about ourselves in our own gender identities. Historically, the garbage, the car, and fixing things in the house fall into the manly category, and dishes, cooking, and housecleaning fall into the womanly category. Or maybe there were other gendered roles or tasks in your family. Even though these are stereotypical beliefs, we learned them somewhere and place value on them without really evaluating them. For the most part, as a society, we don’t equally value the full continuum of masculine and feminine values—the yin and the yang. Both have their importance within ourselves and within our families, workplaces, and world. One is not more or less important—they are both necessary. However, our society tends to value masculine/yang more than feminine/yin.