Our Nervous System Guides the Archetypal & Mythological Shape of our Lives

Me

OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM GUIDES THE ARCHETYPAL AND MYTHOLOGICAL SHAPE OF OUR LIVES.

One of the things I’ve tracked in myself is “over- responsibility” as a form of nervous system regulation.

Like if I just took responsibility for someone else’s response, and helped mitigate it, or created the conditions where there wouldn’t be a response, I could keep myself in that ever so coveted zone of safety.

In the past I have felt very unsafe when people were angry with me, or even disappointed by an outcome I could have influenced.

Or when the belonging that I relied on for co-regulation was suddenly removed.

Or when the structures of my security have been threatened, I would move into over-responsibility mode.

As if I had the power to affect and influence all of the moving pieces of my life.

I had a lot of trouble with chaos.

I prided myself on my “mature, responsible,” ability to keep my shit, and my family’s shit together.

When in reality, I was gripping on for dear life, in an effort to not trip the alarms installed in my nervous system.

The thing is, we can’t avoid chaos and unexpected, even shocking, change.

To think we can always keep life on the rails is arrogant.

To think we can actually manage other people, is actually egotistic, and prideful.

It’s part of the constellation of behaviors that makes up the Rescuer Archetype.

And, Over-responsibility itself is a function of Codependency.

Growing up in a very codependent environment has been something I’ve actively had to unwind.

And it still crops up in oddest places.

I recently found it in an area I censor myself.

I found a story I had invested a ton of energy in.

That “my words had the power to destroy”.

I thought my words destroyed my parents marriage.

More than once my words led to the lack of belonging I relied on as a teenager.

My words led to a well liked woman at our family church being fired.

So eventually, I stopped saying things because I had it, that my words were destructive.

But the thing that links all of the building blocks of this story is that my words had been true.

Somewhere along the way, I had stopped saying some true things. Instead there were areas I still took over-responsibility for other peoples actions.

Audacious. Insidious. Untrue. Codependent.

I have needed to develop the capacity to allow the truth, even awful truths, destructive truths, to carve their path through my life. Regardless of the consequences.

I’m learning that this is what living in alignment with the truth looks like.

And that living with distortions, self-deceptions, and untruths had been a form of nervous system regulation.

I bet it’s this way for a lot of us.

As my nervous system has expanded so has my capacity to allow truth to chisel a new, more aligned form into existence.

I’ve learned that to surrender to the authentic, organic, unfolding of life is the most powerful position to move from.

And when I allow others to walk their own path, have their own challenges and difficulties, rather than having the audacity to intervene, or over-caretake, that is what being in service really is.

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As for how this aspect of my nervous system created the shape of my archetypal and mythological story?

I believe my sense of over-responsibility was a pattern held in place by an out of Balance Saturn. And when this crops up, a Rescuer is erected.

Saturn’s myth is that he ruled over a golden age. An age where fate, “his law” was the only action in that dimension. There was no free will.

So people with this aspect of unbalanced Saturn, believe they can control everything in their realm.

And subsequently, they rob themselves and the people in their lives of the ability to error and have natural consequences; to walk out their own life path, because their nervous system can’t handle the chaos.

Or in other words, we can’t handle “truth initiating the alchemical process in our own lives”. We want conservation, and preservation, at all costs.

But this causes stasis. And stasis is a precursor to death. So working with our nervous system, to cultivate new, larger, less compressed, archetypal and mythological shapes, is one key to rewriting outdated stories,