Since 2021, I have been working with four inner masculine and feminine shadow archetypes that play out collectively and undermine us in our love life, our money, and our work life, whether we work for someone else or own our own business.
These are parts of ourselves that we created as defense, protection, and survival mechanisms to survive the painful experiences in our lives that we don’t always readily remember.
It doesn’t have to be trauma with a capital T
Most people tend to think that because they don’t remember trauma with a capital T, they must not be traumatized. But this isn’t actually true, first of all, in many cases, trauma with a big T can be so traumatic that we repress the memory of it or tell ourselves that others have had it worse, minimizing our own traumatic experiences, which of course is a coping mechanism too.
But there’s also trauma with a little t that can manifest in very different ways. Recently, I had a new client in a Soulology session whose young daughter, five or six years old, came to cuddle with her mom during the session. Her mother was processing a difficult breakup and at some point shared that she had lost the will to live after her boyfriend left her, with her little girl wrapped in her arms listening to our conversation.
I interrupted her and asked her if her daughter could be moved to another room, watch TV, or something else because this had not been a conversation she should have been able to listen to anyway but being so little and hearing your mother wanted to die because her boyfriend left her can be terrifying and make you feel very unsafe. Especially if there is no contact with the biological father, as was the case here. This little girl only had her mother to depend on.
Trauma with a little t can also create BIG consequences
This is a perfect example of no one hurting you on purpose, yet potentially being scarred for life because of the internal unsafety such a situation triggers for a child and the decisions a child will make because of it. For example, the decision to take care of the mother (parentification/reversing the mother-child role) and suppressing her own needs to fulfill her mother’s needs as a way to ensure her own survival.
The child cannot survive without the mother and will, despite her young age, step in energetically and emotionally to fill the vacuum the mother creates through the mental health crisis she is in, and that she is not getting treated for. Sadly, the mother wasn’t even willing to seek treatment, although she had booked a session with me; all she basically wanted was a way to get this man to come back rather than deal with her own disproportionate reaction to his leaving her.
The mother has narcissistic tendencies, which was also why the boyfriend left her, so ‘she wasn’t the problem, he was’ she told me. Obviously, no one is a problem, but we can contribute to certain dynamics based on our wounding that we can take responsibility for to heal for ourselves. Finding fault or someone to blame is not the path to healing, it’s an attempt to bypass our own subconscious wounding.
How our childhood survival strategies limit us
But let’s look at the potential impact on this little girl:
This little girl is likely to grow up with huge father and mother wounding because her father is completely out of the picture and her mother is emotionally unstable.
This is enough to trigger deep protection and survival mechanisms in her that will make her grow up to be a rescuer because that is the pattern that was created through the parentification she experienced as a child., She will most likely be a single parent as well because even though she wants a man to step up and be her equal partner, she attracts men who need guess what?
Fixing and rescuing.
Her choice of men will bring her partners with Peter Pan syndrome, struggling to take responsibility and being emotionally immature and unavailable. This is because she has a pattern of both taking responsibility and control in order to feel safe, which makes her a perfect match for men struggling to step into their masculinity because she has being the masculine down pat.
Even if her partner does stick around, she is left carrying the relationship, having to make all the tough decisions, and over time has to either endure her partner rejecting her sexually or having affairs because he blames her for emasculating him.
Professionally, she will have to work hard to make money, get ahead, or make a name for herself. Nothing comes easy to her, and this is because she finds it difficult to be vulnerable, which makes it tricky to receive anything: money, love, or support.
Plus, her need for control in order to feel safe will make her the bottleneck to her own success, keeping her small, invisible, and stuck under a certain income ceiling – even if she makes good money, she knows she is not making what she is truly capable of.
We might not even remember the experiences that have changed us
And when she looks back on her childhood, she might not even consciously remember this moment, and perhaps this wasn’t even the first time she heard her mother say this. Most likely, it wasn’t the first time she felt deeply unsafe. It’s also not that her mother is a bad mother per se; she is a deeply wounded mother, and chances are that her mother’s mother was wounded too. These are often patterns that we pass down from generation to generation.
Looking back on her childhood she probably won’t have experienced any traumatic abuse, or at least let’s hope not, she will have fond memories of her mom and she won’t quite be able to figure out why she feels so unsafe because she can’t remember any big traumatic events that would explain it…..
Yet, that uneventful experience changed her to the core of her being and created a protection mechanism (technically it was already there through her ancestral and past life programming) that she will have on rinse and repeat until she takes ownership and heals it.
While her mother’s behavior was caused by the Insatiable Inner Feminine archetype that was playing out in her life, although she also had the Rigid Inner Feminine playing out as well as the Collapsed and Overbearing Inner Masculine, this little girl will grow up embodying the Rigid Inner Feminine left to fend for her own, creating an impenetrable suit of armor around herself to protect the vulnerable little girl inside of her who had no one to protect her.
Growing up, this was an absolutely ingenious way of protecting herself, helping her psychologically get through this period of her life where the people who were supposed to protect her and make her feel safe couldn’t. But as with all coping mechanisms, there comes a time when we outgrow them, and rather than protecting us, they start to limit us in the expression of our true selves. They become a prison that we become trapped in, keeping us forever stuck in our unresolved childhood past. Even though we can’t actually pinpoint its origins.
How to break these vicious cycles that sabotage us
But this does not have to be your fate or destiny…..
You can heal these childhood and Soul path wounds….
You can be the person you know deep down that you are meant to be…..
And you can have the life you have always dreamed of……
When you finally take the step to deal with your past and set yourself free.
Do you want to know which shadow archetypes are playing out in your life?
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With my deepest love,
