The Heroine’s Journey By Maureen Murdock Book Review
“The task for today’s woman is to heal the wounding of the feminine that exists deep within herself and the culture.”- Maureen Murdock
Have you ever felt like healing isn’t a straight line, but a spiral? Like your growth isn’t about slaying dragons, but about surviving the descent, facing your shadows, and returning with your soul intact?
If you’ve struggled to see yourself in the traditional “Hero’s Journey,” you’re not alone. That’s why The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock is such a vital book for women, witches, and spiritual seekers. It offers a deeply validating alternative, one that honours feminine healing, spiritual disconnection, and the inner split so many of us carry between “doing” and “being.”
As a therapist for witchy souls, this is one of the books I return to again and again, because it names what many of us have always felt but couldn’t quite articulate.
About the Author
Maureen Murdock is a psychotherapist, mythologist, and long-time student of Joseph Campbell. After working closely with Campbell, she recognised that his world-famous “Hero’s Journey” didn’t account for the unique psychological and spiritual path of women.
So she wrote The Heroine’s Journey, a framework born not from theory alone, but from clinical insight, archetypal wisdom, and decades of therapeutic work with women reclaiming their power.
How the Heroine’s Journey Differs from the Hero’s Journey
Where the classic Hero’s Journey is linear and focused on outer achievement, Murdock’s model is inward, relational, and cyclical. It’s not about conquering something outside of you, it’s about healing the internal rift between your feminine and masculine energies, often created by patriarchal conditioning and generational wounds.
This book speaks directly to the experience of:
Losing touch with your inner knowing
Burning out while chasing validation or “success”
Feeling spiritually disconnected or emotionally flat
Yearning for softness, slowness, and self-trust
Healing your relationship with the Feminine and yourself
Key Stages in the Heroine’s Journey
Here’s a brief overview of Murdock’s 10 stages:
Separation from the Feminine – Feeling the need to reject softness, emotion, or your feminine values.
Identification with the Masculine – Seeking external achievement or control.
Road of Trials – Proving yourself, often to the point of burnout.
Illusion of Success – Realising you still feel empty or fragmented.
Spiritual Aridity – Entering a dark night of the soul.
Descent to the Goddess – Facing grief, rage, and the parts of you you’ve buried.
Yearning to Reconnect with the Feminine – Feeling the deep call to return to intuition, sensuality, and self-nourishment.
Healing the Mother Wound – Making peace with the feminine within oneself and in the external world.
Healing the Wounded Masculine – Reclaiming healthy direction and boundaries.
Integration of Masculine and Feminine – Living in wholeness without betraying either side of yourself.
Importantly, this isn’t a one-time path, it’s a spiral. You may return to these stages again and again, each time deeper than before.
Why This Book Resonates with Witchy Women
My clients often tell me things like:
“I’m doing all the ‘right’ things but still feel empty.”
“I can’t push myself the way I used to, but I don’t know who I am without that.”
“I miss the intuitive, creative part of me I left behind to survive.”
This book makes it clear: those feelings are not wrong. They are signposts on the journey home.
For women healing from perfectionism, people-pleasing, spiritual bypassing, or emotional burnout, The Heroine’s Journey offers a map back to wholeness. It names the grief of disconnecting from the feminine, and the sacred work of restoring it.
The wisdom in this book also helps reframe the healing process itself. So often in therapy or spiritual work, people come in expecting clarity and quick change, but what’s really happening is deeper. The heroine’s journey gives language to that complexity. It reminds us that losing our way can be part of the path. That grief, confusion, and even numbness aren’t signs we’re broken, they’re invitations to slow down, listen inward, and reorient toward soul. For clients who feel like their healing isn’t “working,” this reframe can be profoundly relieving. It lets them exhale and trust that their process, however messy, is meaningful.
How I Use This Framework in Session
As a spiritually oriented therapist, I often reference Murdock’s model to help clients locate where they are in their healing process. Whether it’s the descent, the spiritual void, or the longing to reconnect with the sacred feminine, it helps name something that’s hard to put into words.
It’s especially supportive for:
Clients healing the mother wound
Those recovering from spiritual burnout
People navigating identity shifts or dark nights of the soul
Women who’ve been taught their softness is weakness
What I love most is that it doesn’t frame the “messy” middle as failure, it honours it as part of becoming whole.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is especially powerful for:
Spiritual seekers feeling lost
Women and femmes tired of hustle culture
Anyone healing from patriarchal wounds or generational trauma
Therapists, coaches, and healers who work with identity and archetypes
Anyone craving a soulful, cyclical approach to personal growth
Ready to Begin Your Own Heroine’s Journey?
If The Heroine’s Journey resonated with you, if you see parts of your own story reflected in its pages, you’re not alone. Many of us find ourselves somewhere along this spiral path: questioning what once defined us, longing for something deeper, softer, more real. Maybe you’re in the burnout phase, the spiritual dry spell, or the slow return to your own body. Maybe you’ve done the mindset work, the rituals, the reading, but still feel stuck in a place you can’t quite name.
This is sacred terrain. And you don’t have to walk it alone.
I offer spiritually oriented therapy for witchy souls and spiritual seekers navigating the depths of healing. Book a free 30-minute intro call to see if working together feels like the right fit. We’ll gently explore what’s been coming up for you and whether this work feels supportive for the road ahead.
