You Have Within You Two Sides To Yourself:
The Masculine And The Feminine
(Yes, this is true regardless of your actual gender and it applies to people of any gender.)
The Feminine is your Queen. The Masculine is your Warrior.
When they are healthy, this is what they look like:
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The Queen – the steward of your inner world. She sits in beautiful robes on a throne in the center of your being, sovereign over herself and her emotions. She is the ruler of her inner world. Fierce and strong, she looks bravely into the recesses of the darkest corners of her castle and roots out any fears, insecurities, and doubts that may be throwing her off balance. Her primary motivation is the search for truth and self.
The Warrior – the protector of the Queen from the outer world. He stands at the gate, watching to be certain that all is well. He doesn’t go looking for a fight. He is aware that battle always holds risk and he doesn’t take unnecessary risks with his Queen’s life. His honor and duty require vigilance, but not paranoia. He has a healthy respect for his opponents, but does not fear them because he knows that this world is just an illusion and that nothing can truly hurt either him or his Queen. He will always endeavor to find a path of non-violence out of a situation because he realizes that people only attack when they are afraid or in pain and he doesn’t wish to add to their pain by engaging the battle. But if that path of non-violence is not allowed to him, he will pack away his compassion and engage with an intent and a resolve that will often stop even the most ardent in their tracks. His primary motivation is commitment to a purpose he can believe in.
When they are not healthy, they can look like this:
| The Queen – perfectionist, controller, and manipulator of people’s perceptions of her. The Queen in this scenario is aware of her dark spaces although she often tries not to look at them. This is both to keep her out of depression at the state of her inner castle and to avoid others inadvertently seeing behind the façade of confidence and strength that she projects. Instead of rooting out her insecurities, she spends her time controlling how others perceive her and establishing her value through acts of service in the outside world. Her high standards make her impossible to please and the only person she is harder on is herself. She gets her sense of her own sovereignty from how well or how poorly she convinces others of it. Her belief: the only way to get people to love her (which she needs because she hasn’t found a way to love herself) is to be better than everyone else so that they need her. | |
| The Warrior under constant perceived threat. Because the Queen is always trying to protect herself from being seen as vulnerable or less than perfect, she feels at risk of being discovered to be a fraud all the time. This puts her warrior on high alert. He will make his powerful warrior abilities known to whoever will listen – as an intended deterrent to attack. He is apt to perceive a threat when none exists and to attack with little provocation out of exhaustion and paranoia. His belief: it is better to attack first than to risk being caught off guard. |
Or Like This:
| The Damsel In Distress – waiting for the knight to save her. The Queen has forgotten her sovereignty altogether. She has left her castle and herself in favor of finding solace in the strong arms of a new defender. She has done this because her warrior has abandoned her and she no longer feels safe inside the walls of her own castle. She is out seeking a new defender to bring her home to her castle and protect her once more. But once out of her castle, she loses her sense of grounding and her sense of self. She often becomes compliant and malleable, twisting herself into the image of what she thinks her knight will want just for the promise of perceived safety. Her motto: safety at any price.If you look back at the role of the Queen as manipulator, you can see that underneath all that control and manipulation is also the very same motto: safety at any price. This is because the manipulator Queen is also feeling undefended since she is constantly perceiving attacks (whether they are there or not). So this Queen can hold up her image as this perfection of strength, but under the surface, she begins to feel like (and sometimes act like) the Damsel in Distress. But she’d never admit that to you. In fact, she barely likes to admit it to herself. | |
| The Deserter who has abandoned his Queen. When the warrior loses too many battles, he loses hope and flees in an attempt to get away from the attacks of those around him. He initially rationalizes this as a retreat to regroup and re-strategize, and occasionally it is, but sometimes he is so bloody and battle scarred and the cause seems so hopeless that he abandons his charge altogether. His motto: enough is enough! |
These roles can take other forms as well, but most people will find themselves in one of these three descriptions. Remember that the masculine and the feminine are always you and so in the case of the last description, when you, the Warrior, abandon your Queen, you are abandoning yourself.
Making The Transition Back To Healthy
How do you get from the unhealthy versions of these archetypes to the healthy versions? Most people think it’s by calling back the warrior. But this is a harder task than it seems. The warrior has lost faith in the Queen and so he will no longer serve her. This means that in order to get out of your dilemma, you have to take on the mantel of the Queen as the steward of your inner world. You have to admit to yourself that you are the root cause of your problems. All of those dark spaces, dusty corners, and dank basements in your castle that you haven’t cleaned out and shed light on are creating this version of your reality. If you don’t look them in the face and deal with them, they will continue to hamstring your life. When your Queen is once again in her power – she will once again be worthy of being served by her warrior and he will return of his own accord.
