Safe Men Don't Save
In my experience “safe” men aren’t actually into saving.
That kind of complex requires a victim, which means that my empowerment would be a threat to their identity. People tend to protect their identity at all subconscious cost and will cut the legs out from someone who seeks to threaten it.
Safe men are actually not that into caring about what other people are doing in general.
If you are unable to be ok if someone else is not ok,
…you may be someone with a savior complex and will never feel safe to be around for anyone but a victim who feeds on the validation. If that is who you wish to grow old with, so be it, change nothing. People will also learn to hide their negative feelings around you because sharing them would mean caretaking you alongside their pain. The depth of this kind of relationship is always hamstringed and exhausting for anyone who wishes they could share more of themselves.
I’m not saying I never wanted to be saved. I’ve played the victim. I’m sure I have parts of me that would loooovee for everything to be someone else’s fault besides my own. (More on the Drama Triangle here). But like Kelly Brogan says on her podcast intro, I’m searching for all the hidden places where my inner victim is still waiting to be liberated. Getting into relationships with men/people (I’m talking mostly about men bc a conversation with one inspired this post) who are into saving would be antithetical to that ideal.
Savior complexes are as bad as victim ones and just as righteous and certain they are right. Wait that’s the same thing, isn’t it?
You can feel it when a guy is scared to examine the things he’s hidden from himself. The way he thinks or the things he extolls loudly as virtues can’t be questioned. It feels like asking about them would be dangerous.
In order to be strong, one has to have the ability to examine whether things that feel threatening are actually true about him or herself without reacting. It is this cultivation of curiosity that begins a path to safety once more.
We might call everything that you’re afraid to touch about yourself your shadow. Your shadow is simply the aspect of yourself in which you’ve hidden the truth.
And whether you approach learning what you’ve put there from Carl Jung’s methodologies, Internal Family Systems, talk therapy, Somatic Experiencing, or shamanic journeying, you will never find your shadow (what’s true) from a place of judgement or ideology.
Beware frameworks that paint an aspect within yourself as bad.
You may be threatened with eternal damnation for accepting those aspects, but peace in this lifetime and beyond lies squarely through the pursuit and acceptance of total honesty. You contain polarities. We all do. There’s a bit of you and me in everything we hate.
It’s not like you got to this black and white place with its promises of peace on purpose.
There are always good root reasons for wanting to save people, or hide things. It probably does feel actually dangerous to even question sore subjects. It is also freeing in ways you cannot fathom until you try.
But you can work with someone to help you find those places and reintegrate them into your conscious psyche. It is absolutely necessary for the health of your relationships to seek out all the parts you’ve hidden or vilified about yourself and bring them home.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung
A safe person is one who has fewer trapdoors to step through internally and who takes responsibility for their own feelings and emotions. It helps to know it’s possible and there’s help.
Examine the places and subjects people can’t ask about around you or about you without you getting upset. Behind those clues lie pieces of your shadow that you’ve developed shame or fear around which keep you from being fully honest with yourself.
Become skillful enough to be able to navigate at least some of your internal conflicts on your own, probably after someone walks you through it for a few months or years first. Become able to be your own mediator, a strong third party that sits and hears out the many sides of your own argument. Some people do this already a bit when they sit down and make a pro and con list that is honest. You have to assume that something in you gains from everything that you do, no matter how vehemently you may feel against it.
Free search terms:
Carl Jung shadow
Richard Schwartz Internal Family Systems
Carolyn Elliott Existential Kink
on YouTube or podcasts everywhere will get you started.