Some a-ha moments are so profound that they change the way you look at yourself in an instant, and forever. Today, I had an earth-shocking insight into my own psyche. These last weeks, I have been asking myself: what is inhibiting my natural joy. What I have come to realize is that I want to feel lust for life again. I want to inhabit my passionate self again. Somehow I lost it. Today, I discovered where I lost it.
No matter how hard I worked these past years to release what wasn’t Me and embrace what is, no matter how much responsibility I learned to take for my life, I was still playing out the victim archetype. Everyone around me probably noticed, but I was blind to it. Today, I ‘accidentally’ stumbled on Susanna Barlow’s articles on archetypes. I was googling the Martyr, but my eye fell on the Victim. I thought I had conquered the Victim, but it simply went out the front door and snuck back in through the back door, and hid in the rooms of my psyche I was too afraid to explore. It was quite happy there, weaving stories so exquisitely they fooled me with ease.
An archetype is a universal energy pattern. It always has two aspects, a negative and a positive aspect. When an archetype is strongly present within us, and we are not aware of it, we are living the negative aspect, the shadow side. In my life, the negative aspect of the Victim expresses itself as loss of energy, frustration, perceived helplessness, shaming and blaming. The two latter took some time to discover within myself, but I do it stealthily. Once we become aware of the archetype, we can transform it and live the positive aspect, or the enlightened side. Transforming the Victim into a Victor is all about owning our true power. It is about feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
I can see why this pattern emerges now. Perfect timing. Further untethering. It is time to step into my power. It is time to live NOW. To be fearlessly in love with live, NOW. After a first, rather yukky, release this morning, I feel my energy soar. I feel empowered and strong. Not in the mood to take any more BS from myself. There is a determination like I have not felt in a long, long, long time. Victim or Victor, that’s the question. Well, at least, for me.
photo by Gayle Lindgren