Decentering Men Part I: Diagnosis

If a man’s mood can flip your whole day, that’s not love or loyalty, that’s your nervous system getting outsourced. We go deep on “decentering men” as a practical mindset shift that helps Muslim women reclaim self-worth, emotional stability, and spiritual clarity without hating men or pushing them away. I explain why orbiting a husband, father, colleague, or even an ex can feel like intimacy while quietly creating anxious, performative connection and constant self-editing.

We break down the core idea of centering as the reference point your mind returns to, then map how male centrism forms through lifelong socialization and patriarchal messaging. From there, we explore a painful but common pattern: what looks like a faith crisis can actually be a fracture of trust in men who were placed at the center of your spiritual imagination. When a man’s leadership becomes confused with divine guidance, his hypocrisy can shake your structure. Decentering restores a direct relationship with Allah, separating Creator from creation so your iman is no longer mediated by someone else’s ego or behavior.

We also name the hidden drain: cognitive bandwidth. Tracking his reactions, replaying arguments, and “inverted fixation” through resentment keep you tethered even when you say you’re done. The goal isn’t removing men from your life. It’s removing them from the throne of your subconscious so you can love with sincerity and relate with calm strength. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend who needs steadiness, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

I invite you to join The Ummi Collective. It is a weekly coaching program for Muslim mothers raising children on the autism spectrum.

Inside, you learn how to support your child’s development in a way that builds independence, confidence, and long-term success... without losing yourself in the process.

Apply for a Commitment Rate today

https://www.islamiclifecoachschool.com/offers/RRn2EBEC/chec

Transcript

Why Decentering Men Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Kamal Abdar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. I'm about to elaborate on a topic that comes up very, very frequently in my coaching, and that has to do with the topic of decentering men. This is also another one of those topics that's been a very long time in the making and now has finally found its way into my podcast. And I will try to do it justice, but it is possible that I will not be able to, despite of my highest intentions, and it is possible that you will see future podcasts that reference this topic when I expand on it. So don't be surprised. This series is gonna have three parts, and this conversation is not about hating men or pushing them away, which might be the biggest misconception around this topic. Decentering men does not mean that you stop loving them or you stop respecting them or you stop valuing your relationships with them. It means the exact opposite. Decentering men means that a man no longer serves as an axis to your nervous system. And when that happens when your worth, stability, and your identity are no longer dependent on a man, you finally relate to him very clearly and calmly, and you end up developing a very strong relationship with men in your life. In that case, your love stops being anxious and performative. It is very honest and respectful, especially on both sides. So decentering men does not weaken your relationship with them. It removes the pressure and the distortion that was otherwise suffocating your relationships, and then when that pressure lifts, the same relationships become extremely strong and genuine. So trust me when I tell you, no matter how counterintuitive it seems from the title, decentering men, it helps you create healthier and stronger and more loving relationships with them. So please do keep an open mind and inshallah you will start to see healthier alternatives through this podcast series. Let me first start with a definition like I love to do, because things are often left for misinterpretation and misunderstanding if you don't understand clear definitions. And before I can explain to you what it means to decenter men, let me tell you what I mean by decentering. When something is centered, it means it becomes the reference point of your inner world. Your thoughts return to it over and over again. And it's not just positive thoughts, negative thoughts also. Whatever you find referencing the most with your thoughts during your day is your center. Your nervous system is tracking it. If something is centered, it's the standard against which you measure and filter most of your thoughts in your life. And this is what creates the outcomes. Another word that might be appropriate for centering is orbiting. Orbiting is what happens when something is centered, and you're constantly referencing it, then you're automatically orbiting around it through the gravity of your thoughts. So in the metaphor of orbiting, there's space, there's the sun, there's the axis, and the earth that has the gravitational pull on it from the sun. And in this case, the earth being you and the sun being the object that you orbit with your mind. So centrism technically means a moderate political position, but in this case I'm going to be using it around the reference of male centrism. Because we are all centering something to reference. Human mind is created to think in references. So by definition, the center that your mind orbits cannot stay empty. When you center something psychologically, you're referencing it with your thoughts. All of your gravitational pull is coming from that object, with or without your conscious agreement. So coming back to centering men, which looks like the object of the orbit is the man. It can be one man, it could be several men, it could be your spouse alone, it could be a son, a father, a colleague, it could be a cousin, a friend, a competitor in your business, or it could be all of the men. So it could be that you're orbiting one man or many men at the same time through your thoughts at any given time. So like I said, I do see a lot of examples of this in my coaching, but I also tell you this because women are socialized from a very young age to make their entire life's purpose about serving men, about obeying them, about putting them on the pedestal, about following the leaders that are naturally men, which of course is not based on facts. So when I'm inviting you to decenter men, I'm asking you to do a lot of desocialization. And this socialization didn't just happen to you in the past as a child. It is still happening to you actively. It is still a major part of the patriarchal world that continues to feed its beliefs to women that their lives should revolve around men, otherwise their lives are not worth living. Patriarchy tells you that if you are not being productive to a level of a man the way he defines it, then you're not working hard enough. Even though you might be working very hard to raise children, or if you don't have children to measure that against, then you might not be working on improving yourself to a level of a man otherwise. A man centered world can very easily say what you're doing for yourself is not enough because it is not for a man, or if you're not doing it like a man. Another very important area that this happens in is a woman's faith and spirituality. Many women come to my coaching thinking they're having a faith crisis. When what is actually happening is that there is a crisis of their faith in men, and your faith in Allah and your faith in men are not the same thing. But when a man has been sitting at the center of your spiritual imagination as a protector, as the only interpreter, as the moral authority, as the representative of religion, if there is a fall in a trust for this man, then that might feel like a fall of faith in itself for you. This is one of the most telltale signs that you're living a male centered life. If you are subconsciously equating a man's leadership with divine guidance, or a man's approval with Allah's pleasure, or if you're equating that a man's religiosity is the right way to be religious, then of course disappointment in a man is going to feel like disappointment in God, a Stakfarullah. So if your idea of faith was embodied primarily through a husband, father, a male scholar, or a male community leader, then a betrayal from any of them or a hypocrisy from any of these men who are human can then have a tendency to destabilize your faith structure, which of course we don't want because our faith should be reliant only on Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. When the fog of male centrism lifts, you realize that your faith in Allah has always been there, you just weren't able to recognize it. And that actually it was your faith in men that fractured, not your faith in Allah. Once you realize that there is a clearing and a healing that follows, and you begin to separate the creator from the creation, and you begin to realize that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's mercy didn't disappear just because a husband or an imam or a father failed to do their job. Allah's justice does not evaporate because a man disappointed you. From this place of healing and decentering men, your faith becomes stronger. It becomes more direct and less mediated. In that case you will begin to relate to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala without a male intermediary, without an ego in between, even though it's yours or somebody else's. And this is a very high level of refinement. And this is heavy, I know, but inshallah with this series it will become obvious to you why this decentering is important and how it can be done. Male centrism all it does is create an unnecessary cognitive load. When your mind as a woman tracks constantly a man's reaction before you choose any of your own actions, your mental resources are being consumed. And this is literally theft of your cognitive bandwidth. It reduces your capacity of creativity, strategic thinking, spiritual and personal development. This is why I'm also going to claim that decentering men is not just about your relationships, it is also going to help you reclaim your intellectual and spiritual bandwidth. Centering something means that a large part of your thought process is dedicated to referencing, analyzing, and contributing to that object. When you center people, then their opinion matters to you, and any level of mistreatment for them is going to hold a lot more weight for you, especially for your ruminative mind. And this is going to have a much larger effect compared to let's say a mistreatment from a complete stranger. When something is in the center of your nervous system, it is the center of your subconscious mind. It means that you're relating to it with both negative and positive thoughts. Orbiting someone creates an illusion of a strong relationship with them. When orbiting itself does not mean intimacy or even a healthy relationship. Orbiting feels like closeness and it feels like a strong relationship, but it does not necessarily mean a healthy relationship. Because relationships are defined by the thoughts you have about a person. You can have negative thoughts about a person and claim that you're not in a relationship with them, when in reality you're in a very strong relationship with them. So orbiting means that someone has become the gravitational center of your inner world because that's what feels like connection, and they're just at the center of your orbit because it carries the control of all of your emotional buttons. To me, that is a very disempowered way of living in a relationship. And this is not the same as you being happy at a man's success in your life, you supporting them or making dua for them or being devoted to them. I've told you guys many times that your devotion is what keeps this world functional. Your devotion to your workplace, to your family unit, to the people in your life is what keeps the economies running. Your devotion is gold prime currency, and how you dispense it is up to you. Being devoted to a man or men in your life does not mean that you're orbiting does not mean that you're orbiting them the way I'm defining here. Orbiting through male centrism diminishes you. It undermines you, it undermines your value. It takes away from you without putting anything back. When you are devoted to a man without centering him, it builds you up. There's a huge difference between the two. So through decentering men, I'm not asking you to stop thinking about them altogether. I'm asking you to rewire how you think about them that is not toxic to you as a person. Orbiting or male centrism to a toxic extent includes what I call inverted fixation. You can orbit someone even when you claim you're done with them. You can orbit someone through resentment, through replaying arguments, through fear of them, through anger at them. All of that through building mental files against them. It could show up as you cataloging their failures and creating mental drama around them. What they should have done, what they didn't do, how they should show up, how angry they should feel, how happy they should be. What in this case you're calling distance is not actually distance. Hate, resentment, fear, judgment is not distance. It creates a type of an obsession and a type of a closeness that you don't realize you're creating. Obsession with proving someone wrong is not distance no matter how much you try to prove it to yourself. It is extremely close proximity because it is inverted fixation. Women will come to me and say that they're done with this man in their life. Yet a hundred percent of our conversation that ensues is about that man. You have not truncated your relationship with the man if you're triggered by him, traumatized by the thoughts. You think you've washed your hands off of him, but you've made the relationship stronger in a negative direction. So in your desperation to make me believe that you're not centering him, I know very well that not only you are centering him, you're making the orbiting much stronger despite of your best efforts to do otherwise. If you are rehearsing conversations in your ordinary life situations of what you've told him, of what you want to tell him in the future, if you're narrating their shortcomings to yourself over and over, he is still the axis. Centrism is only the occupation of your thoughts, and that occupation can be through inverted fixation. This is you holding a bunch of negative thoughts about him and trying to convince yourself that you're not in a relationship with that man anymore, or you're trying to break it up. I do hate to break it to you, you are in a relationship with the man, and it's just your thoughts of anger and resentment and guilt. Not only are you in a relationship, you are in a very strong relationship. And on top of that, this level of relating to him is toxic to you. That man might not even know that this exists. He might not be even aware that you're going through this. This is why inverted fixation needs to be healed, and it still counts as orbiting. It still counts as malecentrism. Anger towards him might feel to you that you're doing right by the situation, and right by him by being angry at him for all the wrongs. But this is just you creating illusion of distance in your relationship with him while in reality you're tethering to him even more. It is anchoring you in one spot because this obsession does not create your independence. You are just mistaking your constant negative rumination for decentering. When you orbit someone you do not see them clearly. You see them as a source, a source of your validation, a source of your safety, source of your approval, source of your threat, your disappointment. You are not relating to that person, you're relating to a power structure inside your mind, and because of that, you're either over functioning or overreacting, or you're suppressing, suffocating yourself and under functioning, all at the same time with you creating expectations to punish them through your distance. If your internal dialogue frequently returns to a person, whether it's in longing or resentment or fear or validation seeking, they are the center. And if they're at the center, your psychological energy bends around them, and this type of orbiting shows up as hypervigilance. This is when you downplay yourself and your internal stability rises or falls based on his behavior. In male centrism, you've completely outsourced your regulation. You've handed somebody else the remote control of your nervous system. This level of orbiting suffocates relationship because when someone senses that your peace depends on them, they either feel inflated with importance or crushed by the pressure of the expectation. They may withdraw or they may try to overcompensate which is not true to their true self. No human being was designed to be the emotional axis for another adult. This is a huge responsibility. Male centrism also destroys your own self respect. When your identity bends around someone else's approval, you start to edit yourself and you dilute your ambition, and you try not to speak of your discomfort. Over time, when this happens enough, you cannot tell the difference between your true desire and your adaptive, fond response. This level of response becomes natural to you that it looks like your personality. This level of orbiting feels like closeness because it creates constant motion around that person. You're always thinking about them, adjusting to them, referencing them. It feels intimate because it occupies your mental space. Decentering men does not mean you stop loving them or respecting them. By this I do not mean that you hate men or you cut ties with them. Decentering men just means that the majority of your thoughts, conscious or subconscious, do not relate to them and their opinions and their treatments towards you, even and especially if they're in a close relationship with you. And this is one of the most counterintuitive truths you will ever learn. You decenter men to get close to them, and most women will resist this idea because it sounds backwards. You were taught the opposite. You were trained to believe that closeness comes from his attention, your accommodation of his demands, your anticipation of his emotions, your constant sacrifice. You were told intimacy grows when you revolve around him. But this revolution around a person does not create closeness, it only creates the illusion of closeness. Male centrism also very importantly shows up in your spiritual decision making. If your understanding of obedience and modesty is filtered through how it will be received by men rather than through your own direct relationship with Allah, then your faith structure is male referenced. If you fear displeasing your husband or a man in your life more than you fear misaligning with Allah's commands, this is classic male centrism in faith. Male centrism also shows up in ambition. If you scale back your career not because you choose to, but because you fear outgrowing him, this is centering. If you succeed in your career but you crave the acknowledgement from him just to feel legitimate and validated, this is male centering. If you feel guilty for investing in yourself unless he approves it, this is male centering. This level of orbiting will feel like love, will feel like closeness because it creates constant mental engagement, but it is not true closeness. If you're constantly referencing another person and adjusting yourself accordingly, and this constant mental motion feels like intimacy, but it is not true intimacy. Real intimacy happens when two people can stand face to face in their own truths and choose to be with each other. Identifying male centrism is not about blaming men. It's not about men at all. It's about you mapping your internal hierarchy, who has power within you to destabilize you, who has power to inflate you, who has the power to silence you. Whoever holds that power holds your psychological center. And as always, I want you to come to this awareness not as an accusation, but as a reclamation of yourself. The moment you recognize what your attention orbits around, you can start to take control of it. The goal is not to remove men from your life. The goal is to get closer to them, the goal is to remove them from the throne of your subconscious mind. And once you start to see where men in your life actually sit, you can decide whether they belong there or not. And that decision is the beginning of your sovereignty. With that I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, Ya Allah, remove from my heart any attachment that places your creation above you. Anchor my worth and my peace in your dedication alone. Grant me a clear sense of self that reflects only your intention for me. Free me from seeking validation from anybody else. Allow me to love others with sincerity and without dependence. O Allah, allow me to decenter men in a healthy way, so that only you occupy that central space in my mind and my heart. Amin Ya Rabul Amin. Please keep me in your daras. I will talk to you guys next time.