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What’s your (stress) archetype?

Dear Creatrix,

How did you enjoy familiarizing yourself with the Occupational Archetypes in the last lesson?

What did you learn about yourself and others?

And what did you learn about how to build strong and powerful communities?

I’ve played many of these roles or embodied different archetypes of the ones we looked at, in my past. How about you?

I’ve been the visionary and CEO and creative director and communicator and designer for the Transnational Queer Underground, a queer cultural organization, for many years, for example.

But I’ve also been an artist or a server or a musician (DJ) and a teacher in other organizations and communities.

Knowing the roles you like to be in, helps to find your place confidently in any community, to know what you’re good at, and to tell other people, or even better, show them so that they can count on you and you on them.

Today, we are going to look at the more temporary archetypes, the ones we can fall into when we’re stressed or overwhelmed or in a situation where more of us is needed than we could give over a longer period of time.

Some are more empowering than others, but all are necessary at times.

While some of these, like the tyrant, thief or saboteur are often seen as negative (even though they can also serve a necessary function, that will lead to the best outcome) others, like the hero_ine, martyr or guide are often idolized, even though they might also have a shadow aspect and need to be balanced.

And because of that, I’d also like to ask you to practice looking at these archetypes as they are, without judgement, so that when you encounter them in your life, in yourself or others, you can also just notice and not judge them – and then figure out what function they might serve in a particular moment.

Or judge them in the way we learned in this chapter, to decide what you want or don’t want, but not to condemn other people.

We’ll go through the 39 Occasional Archetypes now, one by one, but you can also see all 110 archetypes here, if you like.

In this lesson, I’ll give you a short description of each of the archetypes, that is relevant to our topic – working in and building strong communities.

Communities are made up of people and people are growing, changing, learning and rising to the occasions – and sometimes we, or other people, need support to get back on track.

In the process of finding our position and helping solve a problem, we often take on these archetypes.

Knowing this, and bringing that to our awareness, can help us to embody them wisely and to come back into balance when we need to or feel ready to – and to help others do the same.

Occasional Archetypes

Alchemist

Now, alchemy is a funny thing, transforming one thing into something else.

It can be incredibly useful, but we can’t do it all the time because it takes a lot of energy to alchemize something.

The inventor, artist, storyteller and many more of the archetypes we looked at in the last lesson can also be alchemists at times – and that’s great – just remember that it’s important to transform AND to take the time to use, enjoy and integrate what has been changed and alchemized.

Knight

Labradors are such a good representation of knights. Sitting for hours protecting something without letting anyone come near. 🙂

There’s nothing wrong with a knight in shiny armour, a protector, someone who gracefully shields others away, fights enemies and does whatever else knights do – but a knight, just like anyone else, needs to rest, have opinions and develop their unique selfness, and not just make protecting others their identity.

Guide

It’s wonderful to help others, to share what we know, and to guide other people through terrain we’ve already explored. For a while.

Then we also need to learn new things again, to keep ourselves happy and growing.

If we’re called to guide others through that as well – all good, as long as we don’t circle around the same place forever.

Liberator

Like the knight, the liberator is someone who steps into a role when it is called for.

We’re all caught in the same predicament? The liberator is the one who leads the way forward into freedom. Which is fantastic and so needed – you just can’t keep doing that forever and sometimes, it’s OK to let others lead as well.

Samaritan

The samaritan helps someone in need, and that is great as well. Again, as long as it doesn’t become an identity.

Because other people also need to learn how to help themselves, and the inbreathe shall always be followed by an out breath, we give and we receive. If we catch ourselves just doing one, we need to recentre and find our balance again.