The traditional way of raising children in Bali involves the whole family including aunties, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews, and even the more distant family members. Men, women and children of all ages adore babies. Parents let complete strangers pick up and hold their babies. The effect this has is quite extraordinary: Balinese children appear to be some of the most secure anywhere in the world. How many of us in the West would even consider raising our kids like this? We tend to see baby-care as more about what is possible for us than what our babies might need.
We saw earlier how the Lover wound is a primal wound: a baby emerges from its mother’s body to be greeted either with complete love and acceptance or with something different, something less. Sure, nothing in life is 100% one way or the other, and so it is for the Lover wound: there are degrees of acceptance, love and connection.
Perhaps the extreme is where a baby is both unplanned and unwanted when it arrives, a state of being which must inevitably be communicated to the child by the mother’s and father’s energy. And even for a baby who is wanted, cherished and adored there will be times when the Lover connection with mother or father (or someone else) fractures or breaks. After all, parents are incapable of meeting the unbounded demands of their children all of the time in all the ways that the child needs.
No matter that a wounding disconnection may be caused by the parents’ tiredness or exhaustion, lack of emotional intelligence, or simple incapacity to love. Any lack of love, any break in connection, is something the child will most often believe is his or her fault. The pain of such loss can be intense; so intense it may seem to be life-threatening. If it is not grieved appropriately, the pain remains unprocessed, shoved away in the shadow bag perhaps, waiting to strike with any future loss which evokes the memory.
And so the Lover wound becomes part of a boy’s self-image. Possibly consciously, more likely unconsciously, he comes to believe certain things about himself. “I can’t love right.” “I’m not lovable.” “Nobody loves me.” “There’s something wrong with the way I love.”
These self-beliefs may keep him away from deep connection and the joy of loving truly, madly, deeply in the future. After all, why risk a repetition of the pain of the loss of connection with someone you loved so dearly? Better even, to find a reason to break a relationship off before getting too deeply involved. And so every failed relationship, every broken romance, and every lost opportunity to truly connect with others later in life may be the result of the Lover wound in childhood.
Remember, too, that the Lover wound can stem from any significant loss: losing a parent to death or divorce, grandparents dying, close friends moving away, pets dying, moving house, moving to a new home, being sent away to school, a new baby brother or sister arriving and the loss of the parents’ love and attention which may follow… all these losses, and many more, may leave a child wondering “What did I do to cause this?” Each and every loss may wound him again in the Lover quarter. How much better, then, never to trust in love again than to experience the pain of loss once more.
Lover wounds produce grief at the very least. And grief is a burden that weighs a man or woman down, destroying vitality and preventing access to joy, until floods of tears are shed to relieve that burden. Even in adulthood a loss of any kind can have a major impact on a man who was wounded in the quarter of the Lover as a child, for such loss can evoke the energy of an earlier wound and reconnect a man to his repressed pain and unexpressed grief.
There are many reasons to grieve, but some are subtle. Tangible losses are easy to understand. Less obvious is the pain associated with something you never had, for this can be a powerful loss too: the loss of innocence in a childhood afflicted by abuse, the loss of the chance to be a parent, the loss of good health, the loss of youth, the loss of virility as age advances… yes, losses come in many forms. Fortunately for us all, bringing grief out of shadow and shedding tears for your losses is possible no matter how long ago you were wounded.
When lover energy goes into shadow it can either inflate or deflate.
The Inflated Shadow: The Addict, The Needy One
Because it is so primal and powerful, when lover energy goes into shadow it can be very destructive.
Inflated, shadow lover energy generates many types of addictions. These addictions include drugs, porn, alcohol, sex, food, emotional neediness and dependency – all intense emotional experiences for the wounded part of a man. These experiences can be a way of “feeling alive”, of soothing the pain of the Lover wound, or a route to numbing the pain of the loss which lies at the core of that wound.
A man in the grip of his addicted Lover may become lost in the overwhelming experience of sensations, impressions and information coming at him from the outside world.
Anything that hints at his wound can trigger an emotional reaction which absorbs him completely. He can get drawn into a reaction to almost any event in his life. An angry word from a lover can send him into despair. A seductive look from a woman he happens to chance across in a bar can seem like salvation. The scent or beauty of a flower can overwhelm him. Hearing a chance word or a line of a song evocative of something he lost (or never had) may plunge him into a waterfall of tears.
This loss of awareness about the limits of his own emotionality, this loss of boundaries, is very clear in the way that the inflated Lover craves the next high, the next drink, the next cigarette, the next orgasm. These are the things which the addict loves, oblivious of balance, oblivious of his own needs, and oblivious of his own power to extract himself from this situation.
Even men who constantly return to situations which are harmful – for example, a relationship which oscillates between harmony and violence – are displaying some sort of addiction to this experience. The emotionality of such experiences seems to somehow fulfil their expectations of life, or perhaps gives them a sense of being alive.
People in the grip of addiction are unable to escape the agony and ecstasy of the circular path between addiction and release. They cannot extract themselves from the Lover complex. The Sovereign is off-line, the Warrior has gone to sleep, and the Magician has lost his power to reason with them.
At its heart this is all about the experience of sensuality, the desire to experience the next amazing high at the expense of anything in the longer term.
This is not the mania of the grandiosity and sense of unlimited power of the inflated Sovereign. The inflated Lover is much more about something that was lost or something that never was, and the resulting need, narcissism and confusion.
The root of that narcissism is a search for anything that will ease the pain of the unfelt and unexpressed grief that eats away at a man’s soul. The paradox here is that grieving, allowing the tears to fall, is not painful; quite the opposite – it is relieving, in fact. In fact, as far as I’m aware, there is no other way to deal with the pain of unexpressed grief than to allow the tears to fall. The impact of doing so is remarkable, for tears almost always open the way to joy.
Yet people avoid shedding their tears because they think the process will be painful beyond measure, that they will fall into their ocean of grief and drown. So the addictive cycle continues: anything which offers apparent relief, no matter how temporary, is seized upon, only to be inevitably followed by an even clearer and perhaps even heightened experience of grief. That in turn requires some form of consolation, of relief, and so the cycle continues.
The inflated Lover appears to be seeking a resolution of his addiction to sensuality by searching continuously, as Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette put it, for “the ultimate and continuous high”. This is why “he rides from village to village, from adventure to adventure, and from one woman to another.” Yet each time he’s confronted with mortality, weakness and limitations; then his dream is shattered, and so once again “he saddles his horse and rides out looking for a renewal of his ecstasy.”
At the root of all such addictions is the Lover wound
– a belief that you are not worthy of receiving love, perhaps, or that somehow you are unlovable, or there’s something wrong with the way you love, or love is something you can’t understand or will never receive. As we’ve seen, this wound stems from disrupted connections at an early age: a connection never formed with mother, or a connection formed and broken, perhaps. A family which broke up, or a loved one who died. All of those possibilities, and more.
Maybe the addiction is an attempt to soothe the unexpressed pain, or perhaps it represents an attempt to return to the unboundaried state of connection with something loved and lost. In either case, it can be all-absorbing. The world becomes a stage on which the inflated Lover can act out his needs. Everything is about him and his needs. Unfortunately, the audience often fails to appreciate the wounded Lover’s performance, especially when they’ve seen it day after day.
Lover wounds can show themselves at any stage of life. I recently worked with a man who’d made a choice between two women, and later came to believe he’d married the wrong one. He tormented himself with thoughts of the ecstasy that might have followed had he only made the correct choice.
Such pain. Such pain. Yet all he needed to resolve his pain was to find a place where he could grieve the choice he didn’t make and so let go of the possibilities about what may have followed if he had made that choice – all of which were, of course, mere fantasy in his mind. His grieving slayed the demon of over-connectedness to the lost loved one and restored the man’s own boundary.
In doing this work in the safety of the “container” created in an emotional process work workshop he also reached his original wound – absence of connection with his mother, an unstable and angry woman whom he believed had never wanted him. His inner little boy’s ardent desire to connect with Mother and receive her love was manifested in his idealized vision of this woman in his adult life. When he let go of her, he went a long way to healing his mother wound, too.
Many adult men find themselves overwhelmed in the presence of strong feminine energy. Some of these men are still invested in their childhood attachment to mother. Others have never let go of the feminine so they can identify with the masculine. And some haven’t yet developed masculine ego structures which form an internal boundary around the feminine. Men in these situations can all too easily be overwhelmed by the unconscious forces of the inner and outer feminine all too easily.
A man may carry an unconscious desire to return to the state of connectedness with mother that he once experienced as bliss, where mother was like the Almighty. Underlying this is a lack of clear boundaries around his sense of self. This induces a kind of worship of women, a dependency on having connection with them, a despair when each relationship ends and an elation when the next one forms.
Addiction to repeated emotional entanglement with the feminine characterized by loss of a sense of self and emotional neediness then follows naturally. Addiction thrives when a man does not have clear internal boundaries which define who he is.
Sex addiction, porn addiction, compulsive or inappropriate sexual behaviour – all of these can be an expression of lover energy which was put into shadow and has since emerged in a darker, more shadowy form. (Robrt Bly memorably suggested that what is put into shadow “de-evolves towards barbarism”.)
Sexual kinks such as bondage and sexual humiliation may originate in a psychic need to try and control the power of the feminine. Men who enjoy these pastimes report how satisfying they feel. It’s all about their ability to control, to feel power. Such power may indeed feel like poetic justice for those who were powerless against the force of the feminine during childhood.
Many of these dynamics hint at an inadequate separation from the feminine and a lack of identification with the masculine. This can leave a man in a state of confusion, if not fear, in the face of the feminine: fear of being absorbed, fear of not knowing who he is, fear of co-dependency. And at the same time, he may feel (or more likely not even be aware of) an unconscious attraction to the feminine because of his innate knowledge of how delicious and sensual unification with the feminine can be. The baby at the breast is indeed in unity with mother... safe, warm, blissful.
This confusion, this fear, is repressed into the unconscious so a man can attempt to live life as a seemingly independent adult in the world. But as always with the shadow, repressed thoughts and feelings do not lose their energy; they simply leak out in unexpected and unwanted forms which continue to influence a man’s sexuality, masculinity, and ability to love cleanly.
Make no mistake about it, any loss can produce grief, and sometimes this can inflate to unreasonable levels. Regrettably the needs expressed by a man in the grip of the Shadow Lover are, quite literally, inexhaustible and impossible to meet.
Anyone – man or woman – who is rash enough to try and meet them will quickly discover that what they offer can never be enough, nor good enough, to fill the void which lies inside the inflated Lover. Co-dependency is a natural result, and will continue until one or other party realizes there is a better way of life than to be trapped in this dynamic.
This is the extreme form of the inflation in this quarter, but there are many other ways in which the inflated Lover will make himself felt. Emotional neediness, clinginess, the sense you may have of being in a relationship with a child rather than an adult, the endless demands for time and attention, the narcissism of someone whose needs occupy all the space in a conversation or relationship, the sense that you don’t matter: these are the signs you’re around an inflated Lover with an insatiable need for connection.
The Deflated Shadow: The Stoic
The opposite pole of the shadow is the deflated Lover. Since this archetype is all about the energy of life and vitality, it’s probably not going to surprise you to read that when the Lover deflates, life may become dull, unemotional, perhaps even tedious.
There is a monotony and flatness in the emotional experience of a man in this place. He simply can’t feel his joy. Mind you, he can’t feel much at all. But this is different to the lack of feeling and emotional detachment of the Magician.
The Lover’s lack of feeling is a symptom of him stepping out of the flow of life. Chronic depression and a sense of being cut off from himself is the defence against feeling of the deflated Lover. The defence is against feeling anything real, which seems to be so painful that even lack of vitality may be more appealing than the pain of feeling.
This deflation can also manifest as stoicism: a lack of emotion, a lack of sexual interest, a lack of sensual awareness and sensitivity. This stoicism can grow into withdrawal, depression, and even a loss of interest in life itself.
Sometimes, of course, the poles switch, and the Lover shadow can take a man from this place into a kind of maniacal search for feeling, for something to live for, for something which satisfies his need to feel sensual.
How To Be Truly Alive In Your Lover Energy
In their book King Warrior Magician Lover Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette stated that the Lover archetype was the most inadequate, most repressed archetype in men. They wrote that in 1990. They were almost certainly wrong then. They are definitely wrong now. The most stunted and undeveloped archetype in men today is the Sovereign.
In fact the 1980s was a decade which saw the development of considerably more lover energy in men, albeit in an unbalanced form. For that was the decade of the “New Man”, a popular concept among both men and women. For a while, anyway.
The New Man was a man who rejected sexist attitudes and traditional male roles (whatever those may have been!) in favour of a caring, sensitive and non-aggressive nature and a willingness to meet women on their own ground. This was a popular concept in the 1980s, particularly with women, perhaps because new men were supposed to take responsibility for their share of childcare, cooking, and cleaning.
Nowadays parents who naturally split childcare between them might find this idea strange. Many strongly masculine fathers expect to look after their kids these
days. But back in the 1980s male roles had been defined along the lines of “provider” and “worker” for a long while. Then in the 1990s traditional heavy-duty male jobs such as mining, shipbuilding and construction declined rapidly in the western world with jobs being exported to developing countries in very large numbers. Traditional male roles were very much in flux, perhaps even under attack.
Many men found themselves disempowered and lacking a clear sense of identity because of this shift. So perhaps becoming more Lover oriented, or if you prefer softer and more feminine, was a natural response. Or perhaps what was really happening was simply the disempowerment of men. Whatever the origins of the shift in male identity which gave birth to the idea – and the reality – of the New Man, the end point certainly wasn’t popular with women, who very quickly found that “New Men” didn’t match up to what they really wanted in the masculine.
What went wrong was not the development of the Lover archetype in men but the weakness or even absence of Warrior and Sovereign. Certainly a lot of the territory men were exploring in those days – childcare, sensitivity, awareness of feelings and such like – is now widely accepted as part of a man’s life and relationship.
What seems to be the real problem around masculinity, a problem we still face today, is a decline in the energy of Warrior and Sovereign. While there’s nothing wrong with Lover energy in men, it needs to be matched by a capacity to be firm (i.e. to form boundaries and be resolute) when that’s what is needed.
Should you feel the need to develop your Lover energy, here are some suggestions. Remember that your Lover is both the source of your ability to connect with others and your access point to the expression of grief. And that, strange as it may seem, is the route to joy.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 12