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The real world we all live in is not a perfect place.  Our species knows this.  We have evolved to be able to respond appropriately to threat when at all possible, using any means possible.  I know this.  Yet today something new and different seems to be entering my thinking – through reactions I can feel throughout my entire body.  Surviving malevolent and threatening conditions means that we are able to rescue ourselves.  Because we are a social species, we are perhaps equally prepared through our physiological makeup to rescue someone else.

Nature wants each one of us to survive so that we can reproduce offspring in order than our species endures.  First and foremost our instinct is probably to preserve our own life.  But perhaps preserving the life of another member of our species is also so engrained within us that we cannot – truly – separate the two.

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We have a tendency in today’s modern American culture to separate and divide everything into its proper container.  Doing so, however, is not always best for us.  Often we ‘cut off our nose to spite our face’.  Being the abused daughter of a severe Borderline taught me this.  My mother’s brain-mind could not tolerate either ambiguity.  In her ‘either-or’ universe good was always separated from bad.  Godly was separated from evil.  No opposite or duality could exist in the home of her Borderline mind – and because of this ‘all hell broke loose’ in our home, and I paid the highest price.

We often speak of abuse in terms of victim and perpetrator.  Those are among the ‘split archetypes’ where one single whole become split in two, causing serious imbalances of power.  We can also think in terms of the one who wounds and the one who heals the wounds.  Those concepts also reflect a broken archetype of wholeness.  I believe that a split can also occur between one who rescues and one who needs rescuing, a split that can easily occur in homes where violence, abuse and unresolved trauma reign supreme.

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Nature has designed our species so that some members are naturally more than others to be able to protect, defend and rescue.  It is under malevolent, threatening, endangering and traumatic conditions that the widest difference between the two can be seen.  Nature does not intend that threat remains a chronic, persistent condition.  That would wear out even the toughest of us – and does, as chronic stress responses tell us even in our modern culture.

The trauma of severe, early and chronic child abuse creates a situation where the most abused child becomes the least able to rescue their self or anyone else.  The lesser abused, or non-abused siblings are left in a chronic state of needing to be rescuers – whether they know it or not.  This ‘split archetype’ of rescuer and one needing rescue will most likely follow all child abuse survivors into adulthood, and will play itself out over and over again in the unresolved trauma dramas of our lives.

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How do I heal that split within my self today?  How do I recognize and begin to change this fundamental trauma-related archetypal split within myself?

It struck me today that being cut off from contact with the man I love leaves me without reprieve from my fundamental overwhelming sadness.  Although neither he nor I realized at the time what was happening when I was with him and experienced peace and joy in his presence, I am beginning today to realize that when I was with him, he rescued me.

The overwhelming pain and sadness within me was put there as a result of early, severe and chronic child abuse.  It has remained an essential part of my deepest physiological body and being ever since.  I felt peace and joy I had never felt before when I was with that man.  Being with him banished my pain.  But if I wasn’t split within myself between the ‘one who needs rescuing’ and the ‘one who rescues’, I know I would not have experienced that relationship with that man in exactly this same way.

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How do I achieve a balance between these two aspects of the archetype of being ‘O.K. in the world’?  Where is the confidence, and the competence I need to rescue myself?  How do I find my place in a safe and secure world, as a safely and securely attached person, so that I no longer carry the traumas of a malevolent, dangerous world of threat and deprivation within me?

Quite frankly, I don’t think I can possibly ever achieve a full balance such as I am describing, because the trauma not only built my body, but built itself into me.  The best I can hope for is probably to be able to recognize what is happening to me as it is happening.  I see that someone who has always been in the rescuer role is probably equally as split off from being weak, needy, vulnerable and NOT confident and competent.  So the healing must be to aim for the balance between these two extremes – no matter where and how they originated in our bodies, brains and lives in the first place.

We CAN become more consciously aware of being in the kind of a world that makes ‘being rescued’ even an issue.  Living in a primarily safe and secure world means that the need to be rescued or to be a rescuer can remain mostly invisible, to be called upon only in time of current crisis.  I suspect that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder keeps the archetype present in the first place, and then contributes to its fundamental split in the second place.  To know this, I believe, is an important step in finding ways to alter these powerful patterns.

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