Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions.
Some women reject their feminine to stay safe. For most of my adult life, I was one of them. People called me an alpha female and I took it as a compliment.
It wasn’t.
It was a description of a survival pattern I’d built so thoroughly into my personality that I couldn’t see it from the inside. The hardness, the “I’ll sort it out” energy, the resistance to anything that looked like feminine softness, the discomfort with women’s groups, the preference for working with male executives – I thought all of that was me. It wasn’t. It was a compensation. A long, sophisticated, well-defended response to a set of wounds I hadn’t yet cleared.
What follows is what was actually underneath the alpha. Because if you’re a woman who’s spent years quietly rejecting your feminine, suspecting your competence is keeping something else at bay, or wondering why “softer” women feel slightly threatening – this might be the post.
In this post:
What I thought was strength
From my early twenties through my late thirties, I was unmistakably alpha. I built businesses, climbed corporate ladders, worked almost exclusively with male executives, found female networking events patronising, and prided myself on being treated as an equal. I wasn’t going to be coddled. I wasn’t going to be patronised. I wasn’t going to be taken advantage of.
I told myself I was just a no-nonsense person. That I’d been raised by a single mother and had to be self-sufficient. That this was simply who I was.
What I couldn’t see was that the entire structure – the alpha persona, the resistance to anything coded as feminine, the small flinch when women got too close, the subtle contempt for “softer” women – was being held in place by two specific wounds I hadn’t yet cleared.
Both of them traced back to childhood. Both of them were doing exactly what wounds do: generating a compensation pattern that looked like a personality, but was actually a survival response.
The first wound: watching my mother
My parents divorced when I was young. I grew up with just my mum, no male presence in the house, and a clear sense that I was supposed to be observing how women navigate the world.
What I observed was that my mum was – and is – lovely. Easy on people. Kind. Generous. The trouble was that this kindness made her, in my child-eyes, vulnerable. I have crisp memories of her being taken advantage of. Ripped off. Trodden on. People underestimating her, then exploiting her decency.
I didn’t articulate it consciously at the time. I was a kid. But the message my system was filing was clear: this is what happens to soft women. They get used. Soft equals exposed. Soft equals unsafe.
And the corollary, equally clear: I will not let that happen to me.
That’s how the pattern began. Not as a personality choice. As a child looking at her mother and quietly making a vow: I’m going to be different. I’m going to be the one who doesn’t get treated that way.
The way I made sure of that was to start ramping up the masculine – the “I’ll sort it out” energy, the unwillingness to be naive, the harder edges. I was eight or nine years old, beginning to construct the alpha. Not because anyone taught me to. Because I’d seen what the alternative looked like, and I’d decided I wasn’t doing that.
This is what we now call a witness wound – what gets imprinted from watching what happens to people you love. And like all wounds, it sat in my system unprocessed, generating its compensation pattern, for the next thirty years.
The second wound: being female and unsafe
The second wound came later, in young adulthood. The standard catalogue of unwanted male attention that most women carry without ever fully naming it. The street harassment. The men who didn’t take no for an answer. The situations where being visibly female meant being visibly available, and being visibly available meant being unsafe.
I’m not going to detail the incidents. They aren’t unusual. That’s part of the point – this isn’t a story about something exceptional that happened to me. It’s about the everyday ambient threat that shapes how a lot of women learn to occupy space in the world.
What I want to name is what the system did with those experiences. Each one reinforced the same lesson: showing femininity is dangerous. The safer move is to be coded as not-female. Or at least not-feminine. Hard, sharp, no-nonsense, masculine – those are the qualities that don’t attract the predator’s attention.
So the alpha pattern that started with watching my mother got reinforced and extended. By the time I was twenty-something, the structure was complete. I had built an identity around being the woman who couldn’t be exploited, couldn’t be patronised, couldn’t be taken advantage of. The performance had become me.
The belief that formed underneath both
Wounds always generate beliefs. The beliefs are the compressed version of the wound, packaged in a form the conscious mind can carry around.
My beliefs, formed from those two wound clusters, looked like this:
- Women are weak.
- Women get taken advantage of.
- It’s not safe to be feminine.
- Strength is masculine. Weakness is feminine. Pick a side.
I didn’t walk around announcing these beliefs. I would have argued against them on a feminist level. But the system underneath was operating from them constantly. Every time I declined a women’s networking event because it felt “patronising”. Every time I felt vague contempt for women I considered too nice. Every time I instinctively preferred the company of men. The beliefs were running the show.
This is the bit that’s worth sitting with: most of what we call our personality is wounds, beliefs, and the compensation patterns that result. The “real us” – whatever that is – is sitting underneath, often inaccessible, until the wounds clear and the compensation patterns drop away.
Not sure what’s running yours?
The free Head Trash Quiz maps where your emotional weight is concentrated and which wound clusters are most active. A useful place to start if any of this is landing.
Take the free Head Trash Quiz →
Why women reject their feminine: the pattern doing its job
Here’s the bit most people miss about compensation patterns: they aren’t bad. They’re working.
The alpha persona did genuinely keep me safer in the world I was navigating. It probably did stop some predatory men in their tracks. It almost certainly helped me build a career in a male-dominated industry without being overlooked. The pattern wasn’t dysfunctional. It was the most adaptive response available to my system at the time.
The problem isn’t that compensation patterns don’t work. The problem is that they keep working long after the threat has passed – and they cost you access to whatever they’re compensating for.
In my case, the alpha kept me safe but cut me off from significant parts of myself. The capacity for softness. The capacity to be supported rather than always doing the supporting. The capacity to receive. The capacity to connect with other women without low-grade suspicion. The capacity to be feminine without flinching.
For thirty years I’d believed those parts of me didn’t really exist. They were always there. They were just being suppressed by a wound-driven survival pattern I couldn’t see.
What cracked it open
Pregnancy did it. Specifically, the way pregnancy obliterated my ability to maintain the alpha posture.
I had tokophobia – a severe fear of pregnancy and birth. When I got pregnant, the fear was so total I had to find a way to clear it or I wasn’t going to make it through. I figured out a method that worked. Cleared the fears in weeks. Had a calm pregnancy and a much better birth than my system had been bracing for.
And then something I hadn’t planned for happened: women started contacting me. Strangers. Lots of them. They’d heard about the work somehow, and they wanted to know how I’d done it.
I was on my second maternity leave, drafting a book on Head Trash for business, when my aunt suggested I write a book for women facing pregnancy fears instead. My internal reaction was immediate and disproportionate: women?? why would I want to write for them??
That reaction is the data. That was the alpha pattern, surfacing.
I almost dismissed it. But the emails kept coming. Underneath the alpha’s resistance, something quieter was saying: this is the work. Stop fighting it.
I followed that quieter voice. I wrote the book for women. I started working with pregnant women on their fears. And I walked into a world I had spent decades avoiding – the world of women supporting women through one of the most vulnerable, powerful, undefended experiences a human can have.
What I learned there blew the alpha pattern apart.
The women who go through pregnancy and birth aren’t weak. The midwives and doulas who hold space for them aren’t weak. The capacity to surrender, to let go, to be held, to be undefended in service of something bigger than yourself – that isn’t the absence of strength. It’s a different kind of strength entirely. One I hadn’t known existed because I’d been trained, by my wounds, not to look for it.
What clearing the wounds actually changed
The pregnancy work cracked me open, but cracking open isn’t the same as healing. The wounds were still there. The beliefs were still there. The compensation pattern was loosened but not gone.
What actually shifted things was going back and clearing the wounds at the source. Both of them. The witness wound from my mother. The accumulated material around men and safety. Layer by layer, with the same clearance method I’d used for the tokophobia.
Every time a layer of those wounds cleared, the beliefs underneath them lost their grip. Women are weak stopped feeling true at the cellular level. It’s not safe to be feminine dissolved as the survival code that had embedded it dissolved. The compensation pattern – the alpha, the hardness, the resistance – softened because there was no longer anything driving it.
What’s left, when the compensation pattern drops away, is the actual person underneath. Not a different person. The same person, with access to the parts that were being suppressed by the survival response.
I’m still direct. Still no-nonsense. Still allergic to being patronised. But the hardness is gone. The contempt for softer women is gone. The flinch at female energy is gone. I run programmes for women now – lots of them – and I’m warmed by being in those rooms in a way that would have been impossible a decade ago.
The alpha wasn’t me. It was a thirty-year-old survival pattern wearing my face. Once the wounds cleared, the pattern had nowhere to live.
If this is you
If you’ve recognised yourself in any of this – the suspicion that your “strength” might be hiding something, the discomfort with women’s groups, the small flinch when other women get too close, the resistance to anything coded as feminine, the sense that you’ve been performing a version of yourself for so long you’ve forgotten what’s underneath – the work is real. The compensation pattern that makes women reject their feminine doesn’t shift through deciding to be different. It shifts through clearing the wounds underneath it.
It isn’t about deciding to be more feminine. That’s surface work. It rarely sticks because the wounds are still active underneath, still generating the compensation pattern.
The work is going after the wounds themselves. The witness material. The safety wounds. The inherited beliefs about women that often pass down the maternal line. The early imprints from watching the women in your family navigate a world that wasn’t safe for them.
When those clear, the pattern drops. Not because you’ve worked on becoming more feminine. Because you’ve stopped paying the energy cost of suppressing what was always there.
Where to go deeper
If you’re carrying compensation patterns that have started to feel more like a cage than a strategy, here are the ways to take this further.
- Heal Your Hidden Wounds (£4,750) – 1:1 wound healing for women who already know themselves well and want to clear the structural material – including witness wounds and inherited material – that’s been driving their patterns. The premium 1:1 path for this work.
- Heal Your Childhood Wounds (£495) – self-paced wound programme covering the universal wound clusters, including the imprints we carry from watching our parents. The right entry point if 1:1 isn’t where you want to start.
- The Emotional Architecture Scan (£1,650) – a one-off diagnostic. I map your internal architecture and tell you which wounds are most active, which compensation patterns are running, and what would shift if you cleared them.
If you’re not sure where to start, the free Head Trash Quiz identifies where your emotional weight is concentrated and points you in the right direction.
By Alexia Leachman · Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions
About the author: Alexia Leachman is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method. Her wound healing work goes after the structural material that talk-based therapy can’t reach – the foundation underneath the patterns. More about Alexia
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