The Forgotten Sister: Supporting Men’s Healing Through Sacred Feminine Witness

How Sitting with Men in Ceremony Helped Me Understand the Power of the Sister Archetype, the Healing of the Anima, and the Wholeness We’re All Remembering

By Alexa Iya Soro

I. Honoring the Women’s Circles—and Hearing a Different Call

In this era of feminine reclamation, I have watched in awe as women gather in sacred circles, healing wombs and restoring sisterhood. I bow to these spaces; I love these spaces. They are necessary, urgent, and holy.

And at the same time my path is calling me elsewhere, beyond what I expected.

While many of my sisters tend to the feminine within women, I’ve found myself recently drawn to sit with men. To walk beside them through grief and remembrance. To become—not their teacher, not their lover—but something else entirely.

A sister.

“While many of my sisters gather in circles of feminine reclamation, I’ve found myself sitting at the fire with my brothers. Not to fix them, but to witness them—and to remind them of their goodness.”

II. The Sister: An Invisible Archetype in Men’s Healing

In most archetypal frameworks, we meet the mother, the lover, the daughter. Sometimes the maiden or the crone. But the sister?

She is rarely spoken of—especially not in the context of men’s healing.

And yet the sister holds something essential.

She is not the one who birthed him. Not the one he seeks to win. Not the child he must protect. She is the one who grew beside him. Who remembers him—not in performance or posturing, but in tenderness.

“The sister archetype carries the medicine of equal regard and relational mirroring without projection. She offers reflection without demand.”

This archetypal omission—the forgetting of the sister—is itself a cultural loss. The wounds of the mother have taken center stage, rightly so. But without the sister, many men are left without a non-erotic feminine mirror. One that honors the sacred feminine without stirring the charged confusion of sexuality.

As John Sanford wrote in The Invisible Partners, the anima within a man is not merely a psychological function, but a symbolic doorway to inner wholeness. And yet in our culture, the anima has been so entangled with sexual longing that the feminine within men is often distorted by desire rather than intimacy.

In ceremonial work, I’ve seen what happens when men are met by the sister—not by seduction or critique, but through sacred witness. A softening occurs. A sense of being seen without being needed. And in that safety, the feminine within him begins to stir.

This is not just theory for me—it’s personal.

When my brother Aaron died at a young age of 24, I then 20, something in me fractured. I not only lost a sibling, I lost the living mirror of my sisterhood. The grief was made even more complex by what psychologists call “invisible grief”—when a surviving sibling becomes emotionally responsible for holding the grief of the parents. The one who remains must become strong, composed, resilient—often at the cost of her own mourning.

That experience ignited something archetypal in me. It awakened the wounded healer: the one whose wound becomes the source of her service. In losing my brother, I lost the space where my own sacred sisterhood could simply be. And so, in a way I could never have planned, it returned through my work with men—through holding space not as mother or lover, but as sister...its also no surprise I have been having more memories of my childhood resurfacing.

And so perhaps it’s no surprise that this is where my gift now lives. That in this particular human experience, the absence birthed the insight. The wound became the invitation. The forgetting of the brother called forth the remembering of the sister.

III. Healing the Anima Without Erotic Confusion

When men begin to heal their relationship with the feminine—particularly through integration of the anima—something ancient and tender reawakens. They begin to love themselves, not as a performance, but as an unfolding.

And often, I am there. Not as a therapist. Not as a lover. But as a sister—a living embodiment of the feminine that does not require performance, domination, or possession.

“The female spirits who do not need you, who will not leave you, who do not see you as a thing to be improved—but a being to be remembered—those are the ones who bring men back to the river of their soul.”— Inspired by Martín Prechtel

Marion Woodman spoke of the sacred inner marriage not as a psychological achievement, but as an alchemical process. A deep integration of masculine and feminine energies that allows for authentic, embodied living. But for that marriage to be true, it must not be built upon projection. As Woodman wrote, “The feminine cannot be integrated by conquering her, nor the masculine by fleeing from him. Each must be met with reverence.”

And James Hillman, in his critique of Jungian polarity, reminds us that sexuality has too often been mistaken as the primary expression of anima/animus dynamics. In The Myth of Analysis, he argues that our fixation on sexual opposites overshadows subtler forms of relational repair. In his words, “To love is not to dissolve into another, nor to possess—but to imagine, to see the soul.”

We are living in a time when sexuality has been so displaced and commodified that it clouds the emergence of other archetypes. The sister—precisely because she is not eroticized—offers a clarity and safety that many men have never known.

She honors the boy within the man—not to infantilize him, but to remember his original innocence. His playfulness. His longing to be seen as enough.

“The feminine in a man is the ocean he was trained to forget. And when he remembers, the shorelines of the world soften.”

IV. Beyond Gender, Toward Wholeness: The Sacred Inner Union

This work is not about fixed roles or gender binaries. It is about polarity, presence, and integration. It’s about returning to the inner dance of soul and psyche. Of yin and yang. Of Eros and Logos. And of creating space for the sacred marriage within.

“Only when we know the masculine and the feminine in ourselves will we be ready for community.”— Marion Woodman

Whether we identify as male, female, both, or neither, each of us carries this dance. Our healing accelerates when we stop externalizing the other and start reclaiming the lost parts of ourselves.

The sister archetype provides a bridge—not just for men, but for the collective. She helps dissolve the false dualities. She embodies love without longing, intimacy without expectation, presence without pretense.

This is the world I want to live in.

And this is why I sit with my brothers—not to teach or tame, but to honor. Because when the brother is met by the sister, the inner union begins. And when the sacred marriage happens within, it ripples outward in ways no curriculum or ceremony could ever contain.

Alexa Iya Soro is a somatically oriented transpersonal psychotherapist and psychedelic integration guide weaving Internal Family Systems, Daoism, ritual practice, and mythic storytelling into trauma-informed healing work. With deep reverence for ceremony, nature, and the sacred masculine/feminine dance, she supports clients in reconnecting with their inner archetypes through body, breath, and soul. She lives between the highlands of Mexico and the forests of New England.