Maybe a man in the grip of the weak Shadow Warrior never learned how to be a man. Perhaps his father was absent. Perhaps his mother was invasive. Perhaps he was bullied mercilessly by older siblings while he was growing up. Somehow his power was taken away from him, that’s for sure.
Whatever the cause, a man’s move into the weakling Masochist renders him unable to defend himself psychologically or physically. Others are able to walk all over him. Weakling, wimp, coward, pussy, call this shadow what you will, it is a distinctive archetype where a man has no boundaries. He does not know what he stands for, or even where he stands.
He may allow others to push him beyond the limits of his tolerance, sometimes to the point where the repressed energy of his Warrior erupts as rage. His rage, when it comes, is usually expressed by breaking inanimate objects, not people.
Men in this situation may accept what is unacceptable in ways that astound those around them. They have few boundaries or clear opinions of their own. They are swayed by the opinions and actions of others. They are weak and easily influenced by the tyrannical and abusive, whom they may gladly serve. After all, if they cannot set their own boundaries they can at least conform to someone else’s. They can get a taste of power by standing in the reflection of another’s tyranny.
The deflation of anger in shadow can look like passivity and indecisiveness. It may lead to a man’s inability to decide what he stands for, or his inability to resist the invasion of his emotional or physical boundaries by other people. And since anger is simply one expression of the most basic masculine energy, a repression of anger into shadow is naturally linked to an absence of the energy to get anything done in the real world.
There’s often an inability to stand up to the feminine, too. This man may be unable to stand firm in the face of his woman’s anger and incapable of providing her with the clear, firm boundaries that would make her feel safe.
Deflated anger can also appear as depression, anger turned against the self. No wonder, really, because the Warrior who sees no hope or possibility of going out into the world and having any impact on anything may well feel pointless, hopeless and even self-destructive.
In fact I suspect many suicides come from a deep wound in the Warrior quarter, from either an absence of clear self-identity or a profound sense of having no real right to exist. The inability to make any kind of impact on the world must be a devastating blow to a man’s self-esteem. It’s not hard to see how this might be linked with suicide. If you don’t have any sense of having the right to occupy the space you’re in, well, why would you value your life very highly?
A man with a weak Warrior archetype often projects his own warrior energy out onto those around him and accepts the bullying or tyranny of others willingly because it represents some twisted form of safety and certainty. Rather than set his own boundaries he absorbs the Warrior power of those around him. This is a man who stands for nothing and falls for everything.
Yet although he has little mastery of either his own boundaries or his own warrior energy, the Masochist or weakling may switch polarities into the Sadist or bully without warning. This is the source of the unexpected eruption of rage or violence in a man who has been pushed beyond his limits.
By contrast, the mature, balanced Warrior archetype is a state of mind achieved by discipline and the practice of self-control. This healthy Warrior archetype lives under the direction of the Sovereign archetype, the King who is in control and running the show.
You see, your Sovereign is – or at least should be – the part of your psychological and emotional system which issues orders to your Warrior, keeps him in check, ensures that his needs are met, and gives him constructive and purposeful projects to fulfil.
I’ve noticed that without such attention and support Warriors tend to find a way of doing their own thing, usually to the detriment of the men in whom they reside. In fact, in such circumstances they often create chaos. Are you experiencing the chaos of an out-of-control Warrior in your life?
If you pause and look around your inner world for a moment, how is your Warrior doing? More to the point, perhaps, what is he doing?
Is he running amok, doing his own thing without the control, restriction or influence of your Sovereign? Is he rampaging around the boundaries of your Kingdom with no clear purpose? Or is he invading other people’s territory and space without regard for their feelings or boundaries? Is he trying to start a war?
Or is your Warrior passive, resigned, feeling abandoned and unwanted, sitting idly somewhere in your Kingdom waiting for orders or even attention from your King? And leaving you feeling demotivated, deactivated, de-energized and lacking in any sense of achievement, power and purpose?
A final thought on the repression of anger: sometimes you may meet a man (or woman) who seems too nice to be true. Often you sense that something is missing from their personality. It feels like you are dealing with someone who has a part of them missing. And often they do – their anger, which is totally repressed, replaced by niceness and perhaps a kind of charming yet manipulative ability to get what they want or need through being agreeable and pleasant. This may be a person whose anger or assertiveness is deeply in shadow, lodged in the darkest recesses of the far corners of their shadow bag.
How To Be A Powerful Warrior
No matter what your Warrior is like right now, no matter what kind of relationship you have with him, you can make it better. You can develop a healthy, mature Warrior – a Warrior in his fullness.
1 Make Friends With Your Anger
A lot of men in the world now seem to be afraid of their anger and hide it behind their fear. Other men hide their anger behind their sadness, so their tears flow more easily than their anger.
Your experience in childhood made you the person you are now, but you certainly don’t have to stay the same way for the rest of your life. If you really want to embody the full power of your mature masculinity you easily can bring your Warrior online.
If you have a problem with “uncontrollable” or excessive anger, find a workshop where you can get that anger out of shadow and integrate it. (See the resources section of the book for more ideas.) Your work may be to learn how to integrate your raging Shadow Warrior and become its master. That way you will no longer be controlled by the forces of your unconscious.
If you have a problem with too little anger, find a facilitator or coach who works with these archetypal energies and can help you discover what it means to feel the true energy of your balanced Warrior. You can also ask for help in overcoming your fears about expressing anger.
You may find it helpful to experience your own anger in the safe setting of a workshop where you can see other men model healthy anger which is under their conscious control. As you step more confidently into your own Warrior, you will gain more experience of your masculine power and begin to recover the energy of the man you really are, the man you were always meant to be.
Most importantly, make the decision to do something about your unbalanced Warrior energy from a place of Sovereignty or Kingship. After all, your King is the one who should be setting the strategy in your Kingdom. You can do this by symbolically stepping into your Sovereign in your imagination and then giving clear orders to your Warrior so he can go out and make what you want to have happen, happen. This is also something you can practice in a workshop setting.
In one of my recent workshops I asked a man deficient in Warrior energy to symbolically defend “his” territory in the centre of the room by stopping other men coming into that space. He had to do this with only the power of a hand gesture and the word “Stop!” This soon revealed his lack of warrior energy: men were all over his space! He seemed impotent to stop them.
This was a dramatic illustration of how some men can hardly find their genuine Warrior energy. Yet after he’d practiced this for a few minutes something remarkable happened: he began to clearly channel warrior energy in a powerful and balanced way.
Suddenly men stoppe
d invading his space. They seemed to feel his Warrior, and their own internal Warriors instinctively knew not to mess with his boundaries. Of course, his next challenge was to take his Warrior into the world outside our workshop and do the same thing there.
All of this is about “making friends with your anger”. That may mean coming to terms with the reality that you’re a man and your genetic code is programmed so you feel anger when people infringe your boundaries.
You may also need to accept a harder reality: inside you there is a very ancient hunter-killer. The survival of the tribe once depended on him and his fellow Warriors. Most likely he is never going to be required to do the work of killing. So he needs something else to do; he needs to be a different kind of Warrior – one who gets things done in the world. A modern day Warrior.
To sum this up, your anger can manifest however you choose: consciously or unconsciously; in or out of shadow; under your control or out of your control. As genuine masculine power and force; as rage; as impotence; as anger turned against yourself in the form of depression. Decide how you want your anger to show up, and then find a way of making this happen under your control.
2 Control Your Rage
It’s a mistake to think of male rage as a form of anger that’s appropriate to the Warrior archetype. It is not.
There’s a story about a Samurai warrior who went out to fight an enemy. As the Samurai drew his sword ready for battle the enemy spat on him. The Samurai sheathed his sword and walked away. Why?
Because in the moment when his enemy spat on him the Samurai felt rage. Knowing that if he killed his opponent in rage he would not be acting from the place of the Warrior’s self-discipline, he chose not to act at all.
Unlike the Samurai warrior in this story, most men who have rage in their shadow have little or no control over how it emerges. They cannot stop it spilling out over family, friends, innocent passers-by, themselves and inanimate objects.
Some world “leaders” even seem to express their shadow rage by having their armies vicariously act it out by waging ridiculous wars against foreign countries few people have even heard about until those countries are catastrophically wrecked and millions of innocent men, women and children have died.
A simple truth: as men we carry a lot of unexpressed rage inside our bodies. Many of us are barely in connection with this rage, but it can all too easily leak out in verbal, emotional or physical aggression and even violence. This rage is the accumulation of huge amounts of unexpressed male energy – call it anger or aggression if you prefer.
This is the energy you feel but don’t or can’t express when you fail to stop people invading your boundaries. It’s the energy you feel but don’t express when others infringe your boundaries and you don’t protect them. It’s the unexpressed energy which arises in you when you’re faced with threats to your territory or your possessions or something else important to you, and you do nothing about it.
And of course there is a deep part of you which wants to react to these things with violence. This is the instinctual male way: to respond with force to threat and a lack of respect for our boundaries. The problem is, no-one ever taught us how to handle our anger. We were never initiated into manhood in a way that gave us this knowledge and ability. Most of us never had a father who could show us how to control our anger, because our fathers were never taught these things either.
Surely, you don’t deny this urge exists in you?
Over the years many men have told me they never dreamed they were capable of hitting their kids until they found their hand up in the air, ready to strike. They were all surprised and shocked by this. Many other men have told me how they have struck out in rage, either against other people, or by breaking objects to smithereens.
Michael, a highly successful businessman who came on one of my workshops to work on his anger towards his mother, told me how he’d smashed an entire set of bedroom furniture to pieces in a rage. He’d used a heavy table leg to vent his fury after an argument with his girlfriend in which she had innocently “triggered” him. She had somehow “become” his mother during the argument, after which the rest was predictable… fortunately she was not the physical target of his rage, but I guess he had to buy some new furniture afterwards.
After such an event there can be shame or guilt, a sense of relief or release, tears or fears. Such catharsis can in fact be very helpful in reducing your internal tension. But carrying this level of rage isn’t good for anyone, least of all those around you. And what if you don’t know you’re carrying it?
What isn’t expressed is repressed, and it builds up in the body. So if you’re carrying the accumulated energy of a million little invasions of your boundaries throughout your life in situations where you could not or did not know how to respond, then you have a responsibility to find a way of releasing it – before it releases itself.
And that’s not just by playing video games or watching violent films. These play into the Warrior archetype in a powerful way; I imagine that’s why we find the vicarious representation of violence on TV and in the movies so compulsively engaging.
In real life, however, what you need is a place where you can be physically active. A place where you can break, smash, pound, chop, beat, sweat, grunt, feel your strength, howl, break things, throw heavy things about, smash other things, do whatever you need to do, and shout and swear the obscenities you need to express. In short, you need to have a place where you can do anything and everything simply to get this energy out of your system.
And remember this energy needs vocalizing. It’s the scream of the Warrior on a killing rampage inside you trying to make itself heard.
What of those moments where you feel rage coming up? If you have no other recourse, simply drop to the floor and do between 10 and 30 push-ups as hard and fast as you can. See how that makes you feel. (Better, I hope!)
No matter where this potentially violent male warrior energy lives in your body, it needs to be under your control. That means every so often you need to find a space where you can let it out as much as possible, without inhibition, and as loudly as need be, in a safe way.
This approach to Warrior management prevents attacks on your co-workers, kids, wife or friends, stops passive-aggressive behaviours, avoids self-destructive internalized rage, and helps to prevent physical violence.
But to fully integrate your masculinity into your being you need to treat your internal primal spear-throwing hunter-killer with respect. You need to give him something to do that serves you in today’s world. Most likely he cannot go out hunting for food, and he may not be needed to protect your family from warmongers from another tribe, but he still needs something to do, something which serves you in the world today.
To be fully integrated, you need to accept this energy as a part of you and contain it safely. That means expressing it often enough that it does not build up to dangerous levels. People know not to mess with you when it’s safely contained. Your energy is strong but not threatening. It’s an embodied energy that makes women and children and vulnerable people feel safe with you. They feel safe because they know you can – and will – protect them if necessary.
What do you need to do, right now, to make this happen for you?
3 Find A Physical Outlet That Matches Your Warrior’s Needs
You may not want to take up a martial art, although it’s highly recommended for developing the discipline of your inner Warrior.
But you might want to do something else physical: take part in contact sports, or wrestling, or maybe take up some kind of sport which is physically demanding and perhaps has an edge of danger – rock climbing, surfing, parachuting, that kind of thing. Try something that challenges you in a way you’ve never been challenged before, something which makes your blood pump so much you feel the Warrior inside you stirring as he remembers the archetypal energy that brought him into being.
And don’t be a wimp about this. A wimp is a man who’s disowned his Warrior and i
s acting weak or like a coward. You don’t need to do anything dangerous; you just need to find a way to express and embody your masculine strength in all ways – physical, emotional and spiritual.
On a different front, if you’re not moving forward with a vision for your life or if you’re not taking action in the world to get what you want, then one of two things is probably wrong.
First, either your Sovereign doesn’t have a vision that’s powerful enough to motivate him to give orders to your Warrior. Or second, your Warrior isn’t powerful enough to go out into the world and get shit done.
Stop being weak, acting like a wimp, a pushover or a coward, and start being a King and a Warrior. This means forming a vision, living your mission, knowing your purpose, setting your goals, having an intention for every day of your life, and using your masculine power to actually bring these things into your life. If you don’t know how to do that, find a man who can teach you.
4 Stop Being Passive & Get Your Balls Back
Some of the men who come to my emotional process workshops look like someone’s taken their balls away. And strangely enough, that’s exactly what has happened to many of them, metaphorically if not literally.
On the one hand their fathers were absent or simply couldn’t show them how to be a man – not that their fathers had much idea about masculinity either. On the other hand they were over-attached to the world of the feminine (and continue so to be) because mother, sisters or some other feminine influence caught them and never let them go. These men, often soft and gentle, need help in embracing their masculinity.
Nothing represents male softness as clearly as the 1990s vogue of the “new man”. This short-lived fashion was perhaps a response to feminism, whereby men – some men anyway – adapted to become what they thought women wanted of them: nice, sweet, sensitive, and somehow feminized. You may not be surprised to learn that women pretty quickly realized this wasn’t what they wanted at all. They wanted men who were safe, protective, strong, and above all free of repressed anger and resentment towards women.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 5
