Burn Out and Archetypes, Continued

Posted on | September 27, 2009 |

Several people have been kind enough to contact me about my previous blog.  In it I described how living in the Warrior-Lover archetype can lead to a condition of exhaustion, and how to deal with that.

I’d like to go deeper, now.

The Warrior who fights for an honorable, sane, cause he or she truly believes in is a compassionate fighter, a Lover in the highest sense.  Ask any over-burdened mother who works two jobs to support her kids. If we are to avoid burn out, exhaustion, and collapse, it will be necessary to learn to turn that compassionate aspect back to oneself. In effect, one has to become one’s own parent, and care for oneself. Someone has to take care of the caretaker, and it’ll usually be that person, herself.

Now, consider the archetype in a different way.  The first time the Warrior-Lover goes to fight the good fight he or she will be scared, hesitant, and reluctant to do damage to the opposition.  What every fighter soon learns, though, is how to be absolutely firm.  Like a surgeon treating a wound this person does not hesitate to cause pain if it is for the greater good. And the fighter, like the surgeon, faces death and discovers it is only death - a necessary  transition.

Unfortunately, when once we’ve seen death in that way it becomes very hard for us to keep applying the compassionate lover aspect of the archetype to ourselves. Our shell-shocked troops coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq have seen death, dealt with it, and then when they get back home they find that they cannot accept how traumatized they feel, and they often speak about how hard it is to take civilian life seriously.  In part this is because they do not treat themselves with compassion, and think they shouldn’t need it.  So drugs and alcohol and crime are often their preferred ways of proclaiming that nothing phases them, thank you very much.

So let’s spell this out: the first time we meet death (that sense that we’ll never make it one our own) we do so in fear, and we learn courage from that.  The second time we meet death we learn stoicism.  That’s when we see friends and comrades falling by the wayside. This lesson also endures, and we find we have more strength than we thought. But the third time we meet death is when we discover that stoicism and fear aren’t enough to keep us believing in what we do - we need to have something in life to keep believing in; we need love to believe in, but we don’t seem to be able to find it.

So many of our veterans feel this loss of belief and blame themselves for being ‘weak’. They beat themselves up for it. What we may want to do is regard it as a real opportunity.  So: you don’t believe in much?  Now you have to choose something you can believe in. That’s your task.

Piecing one’s beliefs together after a major trauma is as painful as rebuilding your home after the place has burned down.  Standing in the smoking ashes it doesn’t seem possible to do anything ever again. Yet we have to have compassion on ourselves, mourn, weep, and slowly build up strength for the task ahead.  We need to have compassion for ourselves, and as a culture we’re not very good at that.

The overworked mother we referred to earlier may struggle to raise the kids and still find there are enormous set-backs.  At such a time giving up is not an option, although some parents do exactly that. The solution might be as simple as to recognize that we are often very hard on ourselves, and that if we seek to believe in ourselves again, and in our future, we can rebuild a psyche on the point of collapse. Today is just one battle that has perhaps been lost, and there will be other losses.  The campaign will continue for a long time.

‘Success is going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm’  (W. Churchill)

He could have a point.

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