The Warrior in Exile

Taken from Songs from the Mountain by Djohariah Toor

When power has been abused, or when we have no models for authentic strength in childhood, we have to go to the source of that wound for answers. We ask, why is my strength is exile? When did the power in my voice go into hiding? Where do I need that energy now in my life?

The work of transforming our childhood wounds never happens overnight. Most of us don’t even wake up to ask the right questions until mid-life. Once we do, we realise that these problems have been here for a lifetime. Our archaeology will predictably be slow going, but there is always a right time for this deeper work.

When there has been abuse of power in the past, the ego has a number of protective defenses it assumes. In some cases it overcompensates and forms a strong defense against being vulnerable (this is the false warrior, the trickster). Or the ego compensates by hiding, running away from power, going into a passive stance.

A colleague of mind told me a poignant dream that he had when still a student in his early twenties. It seemed a collective dream as he told it because it clearly voices the problem of personal disunity, of a painful severing in the ego that happens to many of us as children.

In the dream he is standing on the top of the student union at a university campus. He is looking out across row after row of cornfields. A narrow dirt road goes through the field, and a man on a motor scooter drives along it. Suddenly the man is struck by a car and in the force of the impact, the bike disintegrates and the rider, still holding the front wheel between his legs and riding on it at breakneck speeds, is ground in two. “I run downstairs and out onto the field, and I run as fast as I can to the scene of the accident. Then just as I’m approaching it, a young woman steps in front of me and looking straight in my eyes, she says, ‘you are about to see the death of a man.’ To my utter horror I see that the man has been cut right up the middle, from his crotch all the way up to his neck. I am horrified. He is still alive and I can hear him moaning in the most incredible pain. I throw myself down on my knees and I screen, No! No! No! No!”

At the time the dreamer was in a difficult period of emotional pain. His relationship to both parents had often been a great source of humiliation. He grew up being ridiculed (in often subtle but degrading ways) by a brilliant but demanding father and he was, he felt, emasculated by his mother (who rejected sexuality and disdained men). “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was fractured. Split apart from myself. It was only later that I realized the man in the accident was me. I’ve never been able to be in my masculine body, to trust it, to feel good about it, or at home in it. Up until these last few years, I’ve had trouble asserting myself or really asking for what I want of life. My whole life I’ve been picking up the pieces.”

Almost invariably when we work with the past (with the intention of changing some present behaviour), we are going to run into a major conflict. On the one hand we are tired of our fears of the blocks to courage we experience, and on the other, we can’t yet move into the new territory because something the past blocks it. The power of the warrior often means the ability to hang on in strong winds like the Buffalo Nation; it means holding the container of the ego together while we go through the business of ‘finding the pieces’. When we can work consciously with the warrior archetype, we look for ways we can transform the original wound inside, in order to release the creative energy trapped there.

One of my clients had worked for quite some time on an issue of sexual abuse. Although he thought he had worked it through, forgiven himself, forgiven the uncle, the abuse had gone deeper than he had imagined. He had been meaning to make some important changes in his life, yet hadn’t been able to get to those changes. He had been meaning to confront his boss at work, and hadn’t done it. He wanted to set some limits with one of his kids (who though he should keep lending her money) and he hadn’t done that. He had been meaning to join a men’s group and hadn’t made the call yet. We were talking about willpower in the healthy masculine, and he said: “I’ve never been afraid to face the outside world, to leap over big mountain, or to go places it was dangerous to go. I’ve had a reckless kind of bravado for years. But where I find my courage lacking is when I have to face the changes I know I need to make. I just don’t have that kind of testosterone. I back down when it comes to saying where I really stand.’

This man had trouble with confrontation because he also had a deep wound to his masculinity as a boy. He knew what the problem was and what he had to do; his warrior simply wasn’t showing up to help him because the energy was trapped in a complex. “What if somebody feels hurt when I say no; what if they get angry? What if I get fired? What if when I say no to one of my kids, they commit suicide or stop loving me? All those things run through my head. But I am afraid of outcomes. I want to change this and I know I need to. But that’s where I get stuck. I know what’s wrong; I just can’t follow through.”

I asked him once where the fear was coming from. He thought for a while and then said, “It goes back to the time my uncle molested me. I was unable to tell anybody, afraid that if I did, he wouldn’t like me anymore. I was afraid my whole family would reject me; maybe I’d be blamed. My whole life I’ve done just about anything to make people happy. Where I need the warrior is to help me confront my fear (that if I speak, a catastrophe will happen). But I don’t even have any men friends.”

The will to change was there, but the power serving the will was locked up in a childhood complex. The sexual abuse, terrible as it had been, was only one of the catastrophes in this family. The fact that he feared rejection and sensed that no one would listen or care, tempts me to think that this family was not only ripe for incest but had all the makings of a toxic environment. The ego in that kind of family has a hard time getting the message that it has the right to be.

The power that sits in the North is indeed, the Grandfather with the cleansing wing. Sometimes when we are caught by a complex and we can’t get to the pure energy in the archetype, we have to do two things. We have to go where there are people who are stronger than we are or who can be good models for us. And we have to pray and wait while the conflict deep inside us has its winter season. It’s purification time. For men who have few or no real male friends (and no strong identification with the masculine), the brotherhood in a good men’s group can be tremendously transforming.