Serving others is a virtue. This we believe.
However, many of us believe we are unlovable unless we are serving others. We are the givers, the doers, the planners, the ones who put everyone else first.
And we lose ourselves in the process.
This inevitably generates feelings of resentment, anger, rage. Yet, we believe that if we put ourselves first, love will be taken from us and this fear is always there, walking with us. So we push the rage down.
Until it won’t stay buried.
The rage rises at the most inconvenient and inappropriate times. Eyes peek above the surface of our consciousness as depression. And then the creature strikes, jaws biting at whoever is in front of us. We create a crisis.
Crises are when we realize that something is wrong, that we need to change something, that we cannot stay on the path we are on. Recovering alcoholics are grateful for their “bottoms”, when their drinking finally destroyed all that they thought they held dear. This is when they seek help. This is where they start on the road to redemption.
It’s the same with suppressed rage.
Our depression, fueled by suppressed rage becomes untenable.
The solution is rather simple. Put ourselves first. Resist the urge to serve others when we can sense that we don’t really want to.
Unfortunately, when we put our serving persona aside, what is left feels selfish, narcissistic, evil. We are staring at our definition of a Villain, and we don’t like it.
To heal, we must not turn away from this vile character in our psyche. We must lean in. Our villain has the key to our health.
If we get comfortable with our villain, we get closer to our authentic self. This is the “us” that will set boundaries, serve ourselves, and — from this place of authenticity — truly serve others from a place of health and strength.
This is the essence of shadow work. C.G. Jung believe that we must look into the part of our psyche he called the “Shadow”, where we put the parts of ourself we don’t want to look at. He found that we must move through our Shadow to integrate it and become our authentic, individuated self.
There is no archetype of the Villain, as there is of the Hero. Yet the villain lives in our stories, our movies, our myths.
I believe we must create a villain archetype and a journey through the shadow. It is path we must take.
We must finally play the Villain to be healthy.
