Shadow work

 

Perspective

This writing explores my shadow archetypes, and how they have been playing themselves out in my life. I explore the victim, the child, the prostitute and the saboteur, as described in the work of Carolyn Myss. There are a lot of similarities to the voice dialogue technique used in the work of Hal and Sidra Stone, and in the Big Mind process with Ken Wilber and Genpo Roshi, in that the personality is recognized to consist of several sub-personalities, each of which has a separate identity and which plays itself out in our lives. Shadow work involves finding the lost fragments of my soul, or my unconscious, and so shadow work is an absolutely essential aspect of my spiritual practice. Shadow work takes me beyond my egoic ideals of myself, and gets me to confront the reality of what is, and the reality of what I am. In that movement of love, of agape, in which the present truth is embraced in whatever form it presents itself, I become unblocked, and I find my liberation and my movement. My life energy is freed up, and I can begin to move forward again in my life.

The type of shadow work I use here is simply to use my relationships as mirrors for aspects of myself, and to ask why I am being drawn into these relationships. Then, I associate with the qualities that I identify in those relationships, finding them within myself. In this way, I find the parts of myself that I am not recognizing, and be freeing them in the light of loving truth, I can let go of the locks which are frustrating my life energy.

Introduction.

The last few weeks, I have continued to undergo a lot of inner change and development. I had several dream series where I had landed on a beautiful island, and was learning to inhabit it. In several of the dreams, I was rejecting poor and hungry people. Along with the dreams, there has been a lot of physical release and change. Energetic currents continue to run continuously through my body as my subtle energetic body opens. There are often dreams of waves washing onto the land and of rain falling into the house as my body becomes more and more filled with Spirit. My muscles continue to twitch, and somedays I am exhausted by the process. I have a continuous pressure in my head which increases through the day, and which I am tired of. In effect, I have energy blockages in my body which somehow need to be released so that I can accommodate the increased energetics that I am experiencing.  This process has been ongoing for over a year and a half, during which time I had returned to South Africa, unsuccessfully tried to start a coaching business, used up all my savings in the process, and have returned to Taiwan to continue working as an English teacher. I have encountered shadow repeatedly in this journey, and each time, I begin to feel blocked, tired and frustrated, and then I have to begin the search again into my soul to find what needs to be let go. It's an exhausting and relentless process, but ultimately liberating and energizing. My process has been rapid the last 18 months since kundalini has been continuously active in me, and these pages are just another step in the letting go process as my life continues to move forwards.

I have been feeling alone, isolated, and feeling as though I do not have the resources that I need to continue to go forward with my life. I have felt blocked and frustrated, powerless and tired, alienated and confused. I have a dream to be financially independent; to be able to live where I choose; to add value and to be of service to others; and to have a meaningful and healthy relationship. So far, not much of this is happening. Every day I say my affirmations and set my intentions, yet I have not seemed to be making much process. It's frustrating because I am going through a long and painful transformation, which seems to be nothing but a series of difficult steps of letting go of dreams, ideals and attachments I may have. The process hurts, as unconscious blockages need to come into awareness, to be identified and recognized, and then the body has to undergo a physiological transformation as the blockages are released. As the blocks emerge into awareness, they are felt as tension, headaches, tiredness, and a desire to avoid being present.   I have continued on the path because deep down, I desire a great life. I desire to live up to my full potential, I desire to be healthy and happy, and most important, I desire to follow Spirit and surrender to Spirit. This is easier said than done; I have made so many mistakes and screwed up so many times, and following what I perceive to be the voice of Spirit seems to have lead me into so much loss and pain that its difficult to know if I have the ability to listen and to act anymore.

I come from a fairly stoical family, where even if the situations are not good, a brave face is put on and the severity of the pain is covered up. I feel a little uncomfortable writing this, as I do not want to appear self-indulgent and self-obsessed, dramatizing my situation and wallowing in my past and pain. However, I feel that this is necessary for me, to be as honest as I can in this process, purely so I can integrate my past emotional experience, and then move on from my past and embrace the future that I desire. There are no guarantees in this process of healing. There may be more and more steps in the healing process. I also know that I can never be healed; there will always be the memories and experience of pain and of hurt and the aspect of my self that carries the damage. I am just trusting that this writing is the next step I need to take. It's seems the only option that I have at the moment; it's the only way forward that I can see. To create what you desire in life, to live to your fullest potential, you need to heal first. Maybe healing is the wrong word; perhaps it is better to describe the process as a liberation from the conditioning of your personal past.

This entire journey of self discovery and transformation is a big game of hide and seek, of never really knowing where to look or how the answers will come. What I have learned is that Spirit seems to speak to us through the events, experiences, situations and relationships that we find ourselves in, and if we can just commit to being present to what we are and what is happening around us, with a curious, loving mind, then that will provide the key to learn what is necessary for movement. It seems to be that that first movement, the intention to be present, is the most fundamental step to be taken. It implies that I have to give up my ideas of what should and shouldn't be happening, I give up my judgments, I  give up my sense of control. To do that, I need to trust in the goodness of life, to provide me with what I need to create the movement and growth which I desire. The trust and surrender is difficult, as I so badly want to be in control.

The last week I have committed to being present, and to observing with a curious mind what is happening. I have been listening to Carolyn Myss' ‘Advanced Energy Anatomy', which has given me a structure of interpretation to work with. As mentioned above, I have also been feeling blocked and frustrated.  The last couple of days, my key themes have been aloneness, ice-olation, and the miser. Aloneness represents following your own light without others with you; ice-olation represents that beneath the cold, blocked surface there are tears that need to be shed to melt the ice, and the miser represents someone who is holding their inner wealth inside, and not releasing it. There have also been some prominent people in my life the last month. There is Rachel, the beautiful model who embodies the playful, innocent, caring child; Gary, the engineer who takes lot of anti-depressants, is obsessive compulsive, and drinks and smokes heavily; Charlotte, the English lady who is a victim of everything and suffers multiple health problems; Jessica, my boss who has been through a divorce, been the victim, and who trusts me to talk to, and who is trying to form a closer relationship with me.

Each person is an important reflection of some aspect of me. So, What I am trying to do is to step back, get some perspective, and explore through my relationships and through shadow character archetypes, in an attempt to find blockages. I do not know what will emerge from this process: I just know that I am committed to moving forwards.

The Child

In many ways, I need to grow up and mature. I am 35 years old, yet I am behaving like a teenager or young adult. I still feel I am traveling and without a place called home, and I desire to have my own home, where I can live in peace. I am living in a small single room in a travelers hostel in downtown Taipei at the time of writing. I do not feel capable of adequately supporting myself, or buying a house, or supporting a family. My salary has always felt like pocket money, to be used for my own pursuits or fun purposes. My salaries have typically been low, with just enough to get by on. I have worked for free in the past before, trusting that I would get paid sometime in the future, yet it never happened. I tried to start a business last year in South Africa, but I was unable to make a success of it, and I was unable to support myself. As such, I had to face another disempowering failure in life, and revert back to a dependency on a job, on a company and on having a boss. I have never really felt capable of supporting myself, and its something that I desire. I think it comes from my childhood, where my father was a successful business owner for the first 12 years of my life, and I have that imprint to want to have my own organization. My mother is very childlike, in her relationship to God, to authority figures, and also in relation to my father (when he was still alive). She has been an important influence on my life, and I think I have absorbed much of her character. There have been times when I have stood up against powerful figures, and I do feel a sense of inner power and strength. However, I find it difficult to embody the self-supporting adult, particularly in supporting myself in the way that I wish to.

My childhood carries a lot of pain. My family was dysfunctional in many ways, and as I child, I was alone in the house. My father didn't really connect with me or do things with me, although he loved me and gave me money. He eventually drank himself to death, and there were times I hated him, and wished that he would die, because of the suffering that his behaviour bought into our family. It seemed like all our suffering, particulary in my teenage years, was his fault, and at the time I felt powerless to do anything about it. We lost our family house, I struggled financially though university, and I left home when I was 20 years old. My sisters were unfriendly to me, and so I was very much alone in our family, spending my time reading and playing sports. My closest relationships were with my friends and my cousins. Looking back, I realize how emotionally deprived my childhood was. I have felt as though I have been homeless for many years as I have wandered through cities and countries, and I desire that place to go, of warmth, love and care, where I can rest. My happiest living time was with the Ibbetson family in Cape Town, where I stayed for six months. I loved that house; it was filled with abundance, love, support, friends, food, music, dinners, art. I have never felt happier living in a house than there, and there was a benevolent, wise loving maternal figure, Jenny, who I had a great respect and love for. Jenny appears often in my dreams, and she is the wise, successful parental figure that I needed. The other happy place I lived in was with Troy, but I was always worried about my rent and about survival needs.

I have always known that before I can have a family or commit to the relationship I want, I need to grow up. I need to overcome the child and find my adult, find my worth, find my ability to provide and create and receive value. Its time to grow up, and part of that is learning  to recognize my value. I have tried before and failed, yet looking back, I have often been drawn into relationships where I have been searching for a parental figure to take responsibility for me, to show me the way, and to provide for me. It has happened twice in working relationships, and in both those relationships, I emerged financially broke, yet with a strong determination to break the pattern. I still sometimes want  a teacher or parent, and I wish for someone to arrive and to give me a opportunity to do something, offering the support that I think I need. In this way, I project my power onto others, and I project my self-responsibility onto others, and disempower myself. I am looking for someone to provide me with an opportunity where they will nurture me and develop me. I have failed before from not being able to effectively develop myself and make the correct decisions, and that has reinforced my belief that I am a child and cannot suppory myself, or make the correct choices. It scares me to be an adult, because I don't have the history of success or the models of success to help me, and there is a lot of fear in moving into the adult mode. My past failures are strong in my memory, and I just don't know if I am capable.

I wish to preserve the qualities of openness, trust, curiosity and love which the child gives me, yet I also desire to make the transition into full adulthood, supporting myself and a relationship. Its time for that rite of passage, and to do that, I need to find my inner authority, my inner value, and my inner guide.

However, I am afraid of the hurt from love. I have loved Cathy Fletcher, my best friend, and she went to university, got a boyfriend, and ignored me. I fell madly in love with Sarah Ibbetson, but didn't feel worthy to be with her. She left South Africa and married Rodney. I remember saying goodbye to her one time in Durban, and then being driven to Pietermaritizburg by Sonja, who I was having an affair with. I cried and cried; it felt as though sandpaper was being rubbed across my chest and my heart. I fell madly in love with Claire Mills, who I was convinced I would marry. We had the most beautiful friendship, and spent many days together, walking and hiking. Then, she met a model and ignored me, and again I felt the loss of love and the pain of losing a friend. I always loved and lost; I never seemed to be worthy, and they always abandoned me when they found someone else.

The victim.

My character is naturally trusting and open, and from following that trust, I have been a victim many times. I was a victim of my family; my older sisters didn't like me or play with me, and I can count the conversations on my hand which I have had with my sisters. I was a victim of my father; his alcoholism and his failure. I blamed him for all our family's pain and loss, and I spent many years hating him and avoiding him. I was a victim of our family losing its wealth. I was a victim of my family's behaviour, and their conditioning on me. I was a victim of love, where people broke the unspoken trust of my friendships with them. I was a victim of Lauren, where she used me for her own gains and I ended up broke and alone from trusting her. I have also hurt others; I hurt Frances when I left her to go traveling and she was devastated. I broke Troy's trust in me with the car deal, and left him in a difficult situation. I had an affair with Sonja, and her husband was the victim. I remember the day I left for Taiwan. Sonja was going to take me to the airport. However, an intruder and entered her house and stabled Werner in the chest, narrowly missing his heart. I looked at that as a sign of the heartbreak that I had caused the man through having an affair with his wife.

The victim and child go hand in hand. The child, being powerless and open and trusting, is easily made into a victim. As a child, I was disappointed so many times by my father, as I trusted that things would work out, or he would make a promise and not follow through on it. I always trusted and I got hurt and deeply disappointed. As a I go through my current change, I feel that same fear. I have tried so many things. I have written a few books which no one seems interested in. I have believed that things would work out, and I have tried my best, and I have been disappointed. I feel all my spiritual growth and meditation has bought nothing but pain and confusion. My book I was inspired to write earlier this year has lead to nothing, and I feel a sadness from that. I have recently done some personal growth emails at work which no-one responds to, and I feel like a failure. I need some success; I need some positive results, yet I keep on failing. I want to fulfill my potential, yet am also afraid of failure, and that is blocking me, because I don't know how to do it.

The prostitute.

The prostitute is that part of me which sells my higher purpose for survival and security. I did this with Lauren, where I was too afraid to leave working with her because I was afraid of what would happen, and I did not feel strong enough to support myself. My prostitute is not as strong as the others, yet it could become strong. I am afraid of another failure, and I do not know if I will have the courage to follow my truth yet again. I feel myself approaching that point. I have  a comfortable job in Taiwan, and consider just settling down and accepting this role. I know, though, that there will come another time to jump, and I just don't know if I can do it. I keep thinking back to South Africa last year. My dream is to live a successful life in Cape Town, and about May, I received four phone calls from friends in Cape Town, all independently one morning. They all asked when I was moving to Cape Town. I had a strong motivation to pack my stuff immediately and drive to Cape Town. Howver, I listen to my rational mind. I felt I was committed to the business relationship with Leon. I only had R30 000 in the bank. There were projects that I was waiting to hear on. Even though things were not working out in Johannesburg, I believed that they would. I couldn't see any options in Cape Town; there was no certainty, only trust. I worried that my car would not make it to Cape Town. I was convinced I should go, yet I was too afraid to leave what I was trying to do in Johannesburg. Needless to say, everything ended up failing in Johannesburg, and I left to go Taiwan again. Who knows what was waiting for me in Cape Town? Yet, I didn't trust, and I didn't follow, and I sold myself for false security. I regret that decision; I often think about it, and wonder what would have been different. I will never know, and I do not hold onto the regret. I just trust that there will be more chances.

I wish I was perfect. It would be great if I wasn't so human and didn't display cowardice, failure, indecision and recklessness so much. I wish we could know for sure. Again, I am afraid, because there have been times when I thought that I knew, and when synchronicity had set up situations, only for everything to go badly wrong for me. The reality of life is, that trust and risk and love has bought me suffering and hurt. I am trying to learn from all this, to grow and to free myself from the past. I believe I can; it may take a little work, that's all.

The saboteur.

This is a big one for me. So many times I have thrown away my opportunities and wasted my chances. I have failed a year at university. I have lost scholarships through fooling around. I possibly lost love opportunities from drinking and doing drugs. I have left someone (Francis) who I loved, to go traveling, leaving her hanging. I will get fit, and watch my diet, and go to the gym, and then I will get drunk on the weekend or smoke cigarettes and throw away all my hard work, dissipating my energy, and setting myself back again, having to recover for another day. I will have opportunities to study and do projects, and I will wait until the last minute, procrastinating and putting it off. Actually, I have improved a lot, and I can regularly maintain my focus and do what is important. Recently, with all the changes, I wonder if I am sabotaging my emerging character. Do I really want to fulfill my potential? If I want to be all I can be, I need to become an adult, and that means not being a powerless homeless child anymore. That will mean responsibility and a change in lifestyle and priorities, and I don't know if I am capable of doing that. It will mean risking failiure again, and living up to my own standards, which I don't know if I can. All my memories of failure, of being the victim, of being the wounded child, of missing opportunities in the past, of not being responsible and mature, come into memory, and I want to avoid that pain, I don't know if I trust myself enough to be who I desire to be, and I am afraid of the new, unknown life and role which is trying to emerge. So, I can see how I am deeply afraid of both my success, not knowing if I will be able to handle it and live up to it, and I am afraid of the pain of failure if I reach again for my dreams and my highest possibilities, and then suffer disappointment and loss. In so many ways, it's a lot safer to stay where I am and not accept the new and unknown future. I am caught between a rock and a hard place though, as my spirit deeply desires to unfold itself in my life. The kundalini, the energy that's awakened in me, the changes that are happening, mean that the pressure is building up inside me, and I have to be prepared to trust it and to let it express itself through me. I have no choice actually, because if I deny this call, I will end up torturing myself and suffering further.

My attempt to understand how these archetypes are playing themselves out in my life is my attempt to facilitate this passage, and to release the blocks  that are currently causing my daily pain and tension and headaches.

Failure.

I have written a few times about the failures and disappointments that I have experienced, and I want to do that again to bring them to the surface, feel them, and to not be afraid of them. If I don't feel them and acknowledge them, then they will continue to haunt me. As a focus my attention on them, they are starting to rise in awareness. Perhaps one thing has characterized all my failures, and that has been that I have tried to use my egoic, personal power to be successful. I was not connected and surrendered to Sprit at any of those times, and I wanted Spirit to satisfy my ideas as to how life should be. I didn't have the trust or the belief or the ability to live an surrendered life, and so the failures have illustrated the limitations of my ways. On reflection, they have served the greater purpose of making me realize that my power is limited as an individual, and without a firm grounding in Spirt and a surrender to Spirit, what I can achieve in my life is limited. So, the difficulty has forced me to finally surrender and to trust, because I realize that there is no other way. My life has not only been about failure; there has been immeasurable beauty and light and laughter and success. Its just that I need to acknowledge the impact of failure on my life, as a step in moving forwards.

• I wrote a short story about an animal waking up and going through different levels of cognitive development, and sent it to a teacher I admire, hoping that I would get a scholarship to study with him. I went on a retreat just after sending it, and thought about the response all ten days. I never got a reply, I was depressed and disappointed as I was so eager to study with him.
• I wrote a 200 page book this year about my journey where I worked with bioenergetics in my body, and which no one really wants to read. I put a lot of energy and time into writing, and was hoping that it would lead somewhere.
• I have done a personal growth series at work, and there has been little response.
• I saved up for five years in Taiwan, and then returned to South Africa to start a business doing coaching and teaching transformational practice. In a year, I failed financially, and lost everything, returning to Taiwan to start again.
• I have had unrequited love with Claire, Cathy and Sarah.
• I failed a year at university, and had to leave my dream of being an engineer and switch to Chemistry, because I couldn't afford to go back and redo the full year. That failure really hurt, and as I write this, I can feel the flushed feeling on my cheeks, the loss of the dream, and the hurt and embarrassment. I badly wanted to be an engineer and have felt the loss ever since. Whenever I see or meet engineers, I feel envy towards them and a sense of loss and regret at my failure.
• I didn't get a job with a consulting company after I completed my masters degree in Environmental Geochemistry, and didn't feel confidant or competent in my profession. Instead, I fulfilled my scholarship obligations working with the government environmental protection agency.
• I wasn't successful as a computer programmer. The working relationship with Lauren broke down, and I was left broke and emotionally exhausted. Even though I did some private work as a programmer to get some money after I left her, I never felt fully competent. I can see the influence of my child running through my life. Even though I have had good results when I apply myself, I have had an underlying feeling of not being capable of doing it myself, of not being competent, of being a fraud or an imposter. This has always driven me to look for parental figures who I can rely on for guidance, authority, and who can accept responsibility for me, because I havnt felt that I could do it myself.

Compromise.

I have compromised so much in my life. All the things  that are most important to me, such as love and a home and a meaningful career which I want, I have lost or sabotaged or given up. I am not living the life I dreamt that I would. I find myself at 35 living as a traveler in another country where I don't speak the language, without a home, without any money, and without love. Everything that I ever imagined that I would have is absent, and I live a life of compromise, of letting go, of aloneness. Perhaps all this has been necessary, as my sense of power has been pulled back from the world, and it now resides in Spirit and in me. I have continued the path of spiritual growth and meditation the last 7 years, and that's has been a remarkable journey. However, I have a deep desire now for my vocation, for love, for service and for a home, and I know that I need to bridge this passage into adulthood before these things are available to me. I have to be ready.  Still, sometimes I am tired of compromise; I am tired of living a partial life. I know that this passage of transformation that I am on is a key to the next stage of my life. Ironically, I am complaining about compromise, yet I have been uncompromising and relentless in following this journey of self-discovery and awakening for the last 7 years. In that sense I am proud of myself, and I have done my highest self justice. I have compromised the world, and reclaimed my power back from the world, and found my power in Spirit, and in Love.

Mirrors.

I have mentioned above that people are our mirrors and that we find ourselves in relationship to others. Its useful sometimes to step back, and look at your life as a web of relationships that can shed light on your unconscious. These are the people in my life.

Gary

Gary is an engineer who has been living in Taiwan, studying Chinese. He drinks a lot, smokes a lot, and lives on a diet of anti-depressants. He admires me for the path that I have followed, and seems drawn to undergo a similar journey of transformation. Gary and I have been drinking partners on Saturday nights for about a month. I typically love to go out and have fun on a weekend night, with a few drinks and some laughter and silliness. However, I usually have a headache the next day, sleep all day and don't do too much. In that sense, I sabotage my hard work and my predominantly healthy lifestyle. Gary and I are masters at avoiding the present together. We happily fall into the traps of inoculation and avoidance, instead of staying present and learning how to penetrate reality. This pattern of behavior has been fascinating for me the last month, as I have felt at though the avoidance has become a type of necessity.  I have been going through a difficult transformation, and have been feeling blocked and confused. This has been my saboteur, as I have spoken about above, and my unwillingness to accept the change that is looming in my life. I have not been writing much, and that has also arrested and constricted my life force. I always find it deeply fascinating how we avoid our higher potentials due to a fear of change and an unwillingness to accept responsibility. Without Gary, I may not have had the refection. He also serves the useful purpose to show me how I used to be permanently, and I am able to see how far I have come and how much I have grown.

Rachel

Rachel is my beautiful model friend, who embodies the trusting open child and the caring, nurturing healer. She has a lot of strange friends and strange habits (she can out her entire first into her mouth). I met her on the subway, where she was meditating on her way to a modeling shoot.  I had a crush on her for her beauty; now we are good friends. Rachel shows me innocence and possibility. Her dream is to be magic gatekeeper, leading people into new lands of wonder and enchantment. With her, I am reminded of the possibilities of joy and happiness that exist. She is drawn to healing; my interpretation is that she carries a lot of hurt, which is not integrated. Still, she will awaken to that when the time is right. For now, though, she serves a wonderful role of bringing much beauty and light and innocence into the world, and I reminded to search again for those qualities within me.

Jessica

Jessica is my boss at work; she is an open, radiant woman who has also been betrayed in a marriage, and is now single. She has two children who live with the father. She is healing, and learning to open. I have had many dreams the last couple of months where the feminine has been reintegrated back into my psyche. I have had many sad and painful experiences with woman, having lost love, experienced unrequited love, and I come from a family where emotional affection was not easily physically shown. My pattern of behavior has been to love woman, but not to be with them physically. It's possible that my mother's inability to be physically affectionate was the first incidence where I desired the physical love and touch of a woman, and I was not able to receive that. It's a pattern that has played itself out many times in my life. My perception of the feminine has been filled with pain and suffering, and therefore the feminine image has carried many wounds and unresolved pain. My dreams indicate that in integration and healing of the feminine energy has happened. Still, maybe it's not complete, and looking at Jessica and how she is drawn to me, I see the wounded feminine embodied and once again seeking for wholeness, seeking for my love and acknowledgement and care. Jessica has mentioned a few times that I need to open more and communicate more, and I have resisted that, feeling that I am already open and communicative. However, writing these lines has made me aware that I need to open again to the feminine energies in my life, and to acknowledge the healing and opening that is occurring. I see how the feminine aspect of my psyche desires fullness and wholeness and is attempting to make its way back into my life, so essentially my wounded image of the feminine (as a source of pain and suffering) is seeking to be healed within me. Its my path to communicate with that feminine aspect, and to welcome it into me, giving it the love and fullness and recognition that it desires.

This may seem strange for anyone reading these lines. However, we need to be the change that we want to see in the world. I desire to have a healthy, happy, loving, full relationship with a great woman. To be able to do that, I need to have an image in my psyche of a happy healthy loving woman, and so my old ideas and images of the feminine need to be transformed. The wounded feminine requires the transformation of healing, and Jessica is a reflection of that internal process. Writing these line, I feel gratitude to her, and I feel a sense of awe at how the universe provides us with what we need for our transformation.

Charlotte

Charlotte is a 50 something British lady, who is rather large and overweight. She is intelligent and writes beautiful poetry. She is short on money, and is in Taiwan to try and make a documentary to create some money for herself. Charlotte seems to suffer from multiple heath disorders. Every time I see her, she has bottles of different herbal medicines to treat one of many health disorders. Any conversation seems to rapidly turn to her health, and then she launches into descriptions as to why she is so limited. She is staying with a colleague/employer, who apparently keeps her contained in a little house during the week, and she is unable to leave the house due some dogs which live nearby. Her life seems to be a life filled with limitation, with abuse, with being held back and repressed. Nothing is her fault, and she is a victim of many circumstances of life. Sometimes we are victims of life, and that's just how things are. Charlotte, however, is also very closed. I cannot say anything to her without her already knowing all the answers. When she was complaining about her abusive employer, I suggested that she could take the perspective of her employer, and even though it may not change the situation, at least she could lose some of the emotional tension. Her response was that she has been doing empathy techniques since she was six years old, and she doesn't need to do that. That answer is typical of Charlotte. There is always an excuse not to do anything, because she already knows the result. By following this pattern, Charlotte argues for her own limitations, gets to stay the victim, and avoids ever having to change anything. I have found myself intentionally trying to avoid her, and being uncomfortable in her presence. I know enough now that when I try and avoid someone, then that's when I need to stop and face them for a while, and ask what it is that they have to teach me.

I do agree that she is a difficult situation. However, we all have our limitations, and its how we work with them that defines the success and measure our life. I can connect with Charlotte. So many times I have been locked inside my situation, and I cannot see a creative way forward, not being able to perceive any opportunities. However, that's an attachment to my rational mind and to my shadow qualities, where I lose the belief that change is possible, and I become afraid of even hoping for change. I have argued for my disempowerment many times, and I know how frustrating it is to want change, yet to seem to be unable to get out of a difficult situation. My victim has played an important role repeatedly in my life, so I know what it is to feel limited and restricted.  I also know that my Spirit does not wish to be limited. My Spirit will not lie down for too long, and it will find a way to emerge from its captivity and to find itself again. Each time I do this, I bring my power back from the world, and I find it within myself, within my higher self. In this sense, it's a process of reclamation that go through. I stop giving the world my power, and instead, I find my power in Spirit, in God, When my power is invested in Spirit, then I am open to creative opportunities, to seeing situations in a different light, to being able to create a way forward. The solution to the victim then is God. I have to find a power that is greater than a worldly power, and I need to live from that power. The interesting thing is, that God is within me, and is my Higher Self. So, I have both given up my limited sense of self-control, based on my known experience, and I have surrendered it to my Higher Other, which is actually me in the deepest, most powerful, most unlimited sense.

Conclusion.

From my perspective, each of these archetypes is an attempt by the ego to preserve itself further pain through the avoidance of risk. I believe that we are born disempowered, and our primary journey in life is to find our power, not in our separate egoic selves, but our true power in Spirit. As such, life is about becoming, and the paradox is that we only begin to find our true power, our Spiritual power, when we have strived and reached with all we have, with the utmost determination to succeed in our lives, and then we have failed under our own efforts. The darkness that follows failure is  the coldest hour before the dawn, because its in that moment, when you find yourself to be powerless, and to not know that way, that surrender to a higher power can occur. That authentic surrender is the key, it's the diamond lying in the dirt. It's necessary to face the reality of all your limitations and all the discomfort that they carry, to be present to what you really are, if you want to go forward in life. Again, the theme comes back to being present, and the willingness to face what is. In this situation, the ego has to face the fact that it is powerless, ineffective, incompetent, and that the reality does not in any way match up to the ideal. That is a bitter pill for anybody to swallow, because it means an annihilation of your falsely constructed identity, and it means (at least momentarily) that you have to stare in the abyss of futility and failure and a futureless life. The reality is too much to handle, and so you are forced into breakdown, which is an extremely unpleasant situation. This breakdown, if you allow it to unfold through you, will release you from your old limiting ways, and let you be reborn in something greater, wonderful liberating. But first, you need the courage to face the pain and the truth. Writing these pages has been liberating for me. I feel balanced, and I feel at peace, and I feel that my life has meovement and energy again as I become unblocked. May God be with you.