Trickster Energy Comes in Many Forms (w/ edit)

Today I am thankful for my religion.

I think I know why I kept putting up with Steve's shit. 


At first I thought it was because my sister was diagnosed with BPD.  I thought it was familiar.


No...my sister and I were practically raised apart.  That could actually be the trauma that caused the diagnosis within her.  I'm not sure.  My mother was abused by our father.  He stalked her.  I remember being in pre-school and having him visit me on the playground asking me where my mother was and where her boyfriend lived.  I remember pointing east and saying "that way."


I was four or five.  I couldn't really give directions.  Heck, I'm 45 and I still can't give directions!

One day, my father came to my grandfather's house with a gun.  I was five.  My grandfather took me, my sister, and my mother to a hotel on the other side of town.  As my sister and I lay on a bed by a window, we awoke to glass shattering all over our bodies and a bloody fist coming within inches of my sister's face.


I remember cop cars.  I remember blood.  I remember hugging my baby sister.  She must have been barely one year old. 


I used to be closer to my grandparents than my mother and father.  The first few years of my life, my mother lived in the basement of my grandparent's home.  I tended to live with my grandparents.  I actually remember sleeping in my grandparent's spare bedroom upstairs.


We called it 'the little room'.  It was a tiny, dusty room with a corduroy fold out cot.  It was filled with musical instruments and art supplies.

When my mother and father would fight, I would run upstairs to be held by my grandmother.  I will always remember her voice.  She'd hold me and say 'tell me your troubles.'  When my mother and father became terribly violent, my grandmother would set me upon her lap and call the police.


This is probably why I don't put up with shit. 


Quite literally, I think my grandmother saved my life.  My sister was not so lucky.  My mother forbade her from going upstairs.  I think this started the split. 


I also remember my aunt, who was ten years old at the time, pointing at my parents and telling me 'don't grow up like those people!'  


Sharon and I grew up together.  To this very day, everyone calls her my 'sister-aunt.'

That's a life story....in a nutshell.  I think my sister had the worst of it.  When it came to the violence in my family of origin, I was always the outsider.  I was always being held by my grandparents.  My sister, on the other hand, was usually in the thick of the chaos.  She was right there.  No one would save her!


I think that was the difference.  It only became worse as we aged.  By the time my sister was twelve, she was homeless.  I lived with a rich uncle.


I think social support makes all the difference in the world.  So, if you know a troubled family, being there can make all the difference in the world in the life of a child.


Oh, my sister was offered a book deal a few years ago.  Maybe she will have her happy ending.  I would hope she could complete that task.  Imagine all the people her story can help!  Just think of the message....there is life after a BPD diagnosis. 

******

There is a lesson in this.  I think I put up with Steve's baloney not because I was familiar with my sister's crap.  I put up with it because I am a believer in Carl Jung.


I see the world as energy.


When I was a little girl, I always thought that when my mother drank, she had monster energy and monster breath.  She did.  When she smelled and acted badly, I knew to run to grandma.  I didn't want that energy to touch me.  


My grandmother, had peppermint breath and smelled of roses.  She was always full of love.  She had cookies and Dr. Pepper and hugs and kisses.  She was safe.  She could take that love and neutralize the monster energy of my mother. 

As I aged, my ideas about monster energy changed a little.  In my psyche, I seemed to view it as more of a toxic radiation sludge, the kind that creates the Batman villains on TV.    Negative people were toxic!  I did my best to stay away!!


Then, the social workers decided to send me back home to my mother and her husband.  She had married the paramedic who always seemed to respond to the 911 calls.  We lived in a small town.  If I or my sister got lost, the same guy would show up.  If we broke an arm, busted our chins or needed stitches, this smiling Native American guy would show up and take us to the hospital. 

I remember him telling me that he needed to stay with my mother to make sure her kids stayed safe.



Things were pretty weird in that house, too.  They were both alcoholics.  There would be times when they'd get mad at me and lock me in paradise.  Yes, they'd lock me in a room filled with books on hypnosis and psychology.  I had two favorite books: I really enjoyed the pictures of the blue people in an illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra.  My favorite illustrated book was Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols.  The pictures spoke to me years before I would understand them. 

That was when I became hooked on the metaphysical and this idea of archetypes.  As I aged, I read more.  My ideas about toxic energy had changed.


Now this post is getting super long.  I'll try to edit this down to only give you good stuff.


Let's see....


As a child, I had a more sociological perspective on toxic energy.  I thought of it as a dark, energy sludge and that passed from person to person giving them a negative outlook on life.  A father could have it and hit his wife, thus passing the negative energy on to her.  This mother, in turn, could pass it town to her child by spanking him or her.  That child, in turn, could transmit it to the dog or friends by bullying them.  If there were no intervention, the child would grow up with that toxic energy and continue hurting other people. 


My grandmother taught me how to fight the sludge.  She showed me how to get away from it and spend time taking care of myself.  I just wish she didn't give me so many cookies!

As I aged, I learned to consider this type of energy as trickster energy.  It is the energy of subconscious self-sabotage due to a mind-trick. 

Enter Jung and the idea of archetypes

We are all in a story of our own creation.  Each of us are the lead in our own stories but the subconscious role we play determines how we behave. 

Let me try to explain......


Carl Jung wrote about the collective unconscious.  The collective unconscious is a collection of ancestral experiences, history, learning, and behavioral patterns that are shared by humankind.  On an unconscious level, we tend to take on certain behavioral patterns and experience archetypal problems.  This is why many of us are prone to the same types of behaviors and experience the same types of crisis throughout our lives.  This is primal and unconscious experience.  We take on primal roles (e.g. the hero, the child, the sage, the trickster, the fool, the villain, the high chair tyrant....and so on).  The only way to change the archetypal role we play is to become conscious of it, examine it and move beyond it. 

Let me describe a couple of them.  We have the hero who always has an obstacle to overcome, always striving to be as good as possible while fighting evil so that justice prevails.  The lover is a affectionate.  The fool always undertakes a journey without proper preparation and tends to become wiser for it.  The mother is a caretaker, comforting and empathic.  The sage is wise and insightful. 


Now....we all have a shadow side.  One can be a hero but in times of severe stress and temptation, his shadow side may emerge.  The shadow of this would be anger and apathy and impulsiveness.  A good example of this would be Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.  In fact, the Anakin/Vader character would be a decent personification of BPD (maybe that could be another blog post). 

This is a split. This is how I view people with BPD traits that have yet to be healed.  Everything is split into good and bad.  They see no black and white. 


They will judge other people as perfect or absolutely horrid.  They will either see you as a hero or a villain.  They cannot see good and bad in people and existing simultaneously.  We are one or the other.

Sadly, my take is that they tend to view themselves in much the same way.  They haven't integrated themselves. 

It is as if they are so busy staring at their thorns that they forget they are roses.   

They have trickster energy all over them.  I don't know where it came.  It most likely came from times before their adult memory formed.  It most likely occurred before the age of three. 

The trickster energy is there.  It tricks them into thinking they are all good or all evil.  It tricks them into feeling pain.  It tricks them into acting impulsively and playing games with others to force them to prove their love and loyalty.  Trickster energy creates wars where there should be none.  It is like Loki, always tricking, always creating misunderstanding, always hiding in the shadows in a cloak of deceit.  It tricks them into not believing in who they really are. It tricks them into thinking they have to hide who they are.  It makes them behave in sneaky and dishonest ways.  It is impulsive.  It is manipulative.  It fails to understand that honesty can meet their needs better than dishonesty. 

They will show their goodness and easily gain the trust of others -but- the moment they fear the loss of that which they desire, whether or not such loss is a true threat, the shadow side comes out.  This is the trick of the mind.  They long to be unconditionally accepted, not understanding that most of the world would accept them for who they truly are if they were not tricked into acting out.  Their early experiences are not indicative of the truth of the world.

When this happens, they show their shadow side.  They become impulsive and act without thought or consideration for the consequences of their actions.  They may not have all the facts....they act on feelings.  Feelings are their facts.  They fail to understand that it is their impulsiveness....their trickiness that keeps them from that which they truly desire. 

I share this because the only way past this trickster energy is self-care.  One has to get it out in the open, examine it, and move beyond the archetype.   Even Darth Vader became the hero in the end. 

I never, ever have shared the emails from Steve which would talk about his pain.  In the beginning, he would write that I took away his pain.  I think I bored him.  He'd chase me away and the pain would come back.  This, my friends, is the pain of borderline personality disorder.  It is the pain of having trickster energy mess with the way you view the world. 

It is like they are fighting an invisible energy that winds up taking away all that they want to have.

How do you know who the tricksters are? 

Well....first, they are pushy.  They will push themselves into your world.  They will push your buttons.  They will push you into doing things you don't want to do.  The moment you set a boundary, they become animated. Then in the most hurtful ways possible, they will push you away.

Secondly, they use pity to hook you.  They do what they can to get you to feel sorry for them.  This is how the tricksters suck you in.  This is how they control. 

Don't fall for it. 

People who expose themselves to too much trickster energy risk becoming tricksters themselves.  It is not up to us to move people out of their roles. 

It is their story.  It is their journey. They have to make that choice.  They have to shine light upon their own psyches and decide what role they want to play. 

We can only take responsibility for ourselves.

Love ya,

S.