continued

The Red Knight

Here is the developmental archetype that is the male energetic counterpart of the Maiden.  Here is the teenage angst and testosterone fueled rage.  This is the relationship between the developing young adult and the world.  And the cry is; “The world is mean to me!”

There is so much self pity, pain and plain old whining that goes on with this state.  The energy is red anger, and the fight is very much within themselves, outside themselves and engaged in fighting what they see as the authors of great injustice to themselves.

The Red Knight rebels against any and all restraints to his movements. Meanwhile he fiercely resists any kind of productive work.  They protest everything

From the outside it looks like parents and authorities do their best to prevent the Red Knights from severely injuring themselves. From the inside nobody cares that they want their freedom to self destruct.  Here again, no steering wheel, and no brakes.  They seem to be charging the fences that prevent them from sailing right into the abyss.

A red knight needs Mothering with hands off and at a distance so that they crash in a limited manner and don’t get rescued when they do.  Even more than Crone Mothering, they need the attentions of the Wounded Healer, The White Knight who has come out on the other side.

Should the Red Knights find their way through the morass of self pity often they find themselves discovering that “The world is mean to a lot of people.”  Then the energetic rage heats up to white hot. They develop into the White Knight, don their armor, climb up on the white horse and are off to the (ta daa) rescue. 

Riding With Mr. Toad

Toad of Toad Hall is a marvelous character from The Wind in the Willows.  He is a pompous blowhard that is addicted to fast cars and driving them until they crash.  To me, coping with someone’s emotional rollercoaster, (particularly the emotional rollercoaster of the Red Knight or the Maiden) is like taking a ride in a car when Mr. Toad is driving.    There is no way to control the speed or steer away from danger.  Off you go in the whirlwind of emotion up and down and into places that you hope you get out of alive.

Then the ride ends and you sit, dizzy and sick with exhaustion, wondering what happened until the next very unpredictable time when off you go again.

Abusive relationships and Chicken Little syndrome participants are some of the adults that will drive their emotional car in this crazy way, often as a form of control.  If you are constantly exhausted and dizzy from the ride you can’t see that the emotional ground stays the same.  There’s no growth there. 

The problem with riding along with whoever is playing Mr. Toad is that you have no way to change the process from inside the car.

You have to bail out, and usually you have to bail in the middle of the ride.  To really see what is going on, you can’t get in the car.  Then you see them drive off on their crazy way and you can get a handle on what is really driving them.  

Romantic Love

We all marry toads imagining the princes and princesses that they might potentially be. 

After a while we have to acknowledge their toadlieness and come to some kind of appreciation for their good qualities. 

Then we need to come to terms with how and why we chose that particular sort of toad. 

After that we need to understand that we have our own toad qualities and why we might be some sort of toad ourselves. 

Then we need to decide what to do about it. 

Often at that point the best thing to do is enter into a mutual toad admiration process and get on in life with your own particular toad.

The truth that we tend to forget is that we are all toads, somewhere along the way.

Check out Teaching Pigs to Sing.

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 The Big Bad Wolf

When we are children we have the right to be protected.  We need to learn that we are safe in the world, and we need to learn who is and isn’t a safe person to be around and how to take evasive action when a predator shows up.  We need to know that “No “is a safe word to say. And that you can make No stick.

The horrible and sad fact is that many of us were subject to predators as children. That in being subjected to predation we lost the ability to tell who was and who was not a safe person to be around. In fact we will move towards dangerous people because there is a resonance and a familiarity there.

There are people who don’t have the slightest idea what danger looks like. They can wander into the worst situations in a kind of blindness that can get them killed, raped or otherwise badly injured.

It isn’t just that little red riding hood went into the forest.  It is that she didn’t know what the wolf looked like that makes the story a horror.

The Tin Man

The tin man is someone who has lost heart and is acting from rote and mourning his lost feelings.

The original story of the tin man is telling.  This is how it goes:

Once there was a man who was a wood chopper.  He fell in love with a girl who was a serving maid to a witch.  The witch didn’t want to lose her maid, so she enchanted the woodchopper’s axe. 

Out in the woods as the man was working his axe slipped and cut off his leg.  He took the leg to a tinsmith and the tinsmith made him a tin leg instead.  He continued cutting wood and found that the tin leg worked even better than his regular leg because he didn’t get tired.

Well the axe slipped again and cut off the other leg, and then an arm and the other arm and each time the tinsmith made him another one.  So slowly over time, a piece at a time his humanity was carved away until one day the axe slipped and cut through his body.  When the tinsmith made him a new body, it didn’t have a heart.  So the woodman now made all of tin had no heart, and he no longer loved the servant maid. 

However the Tin Man knew that he couldn’t love or feel compassion and so he worried greatly about hurting living things unknowingly.  He often wept about hurting living beings and rusted his jaws shut in the process.

The Starfish

The Story goes like this; on a beach after a high tide lots of animals get washed up.  One day a man could be seen walking along the beach at low tide bending down and tossing something back in the waves.  Another man saw him doing this and asked him what it was that he was doing.

The first man explained that he was tossing starfish that had been beached back into the ocean.  The second man was very discouraging.  He pointed out how many starfish got beached and how little difference throwing them back made in the end.  The first man agreed to this.  Then he picked up the next starfish and turned it over in his hand gently.  He threw it back into the water and said happily,”made a difference to that one” and continued on down the beach.

In reflecting on my life there have been people who were my starfishes.  Out of all that were out there I could make a difference to that one.  So to the best of my ability I did. 

The Wounded Healer

The Wounded Healer has been and done it all.  He has taken off the armor because he understands that all it does to the wearer it is trap himself inside with his greatest enemy, himself.

Wounded Healers are the perfect helpers for the Red Knight because they have told all the lies, and done all the justifications and defensive maneuvers themselves. He can guide the Red Knights, so that with some luck, they don’t fall over the cliff.  Having done it, they know where the cliff edge really lies and which part a young man can charge off of and come up merely bruised rather than dead.

They focus on helping from the pew, with the understanding that the enemy is in pain and needs healing not vanquishing.  They have a sense of humor about themselves, and gentleness for the world.  Often they make a greater difference one person at a time than the White Knight, charging off to right the wrongs of the world, could possibly imagine.