Every woman is plagued by a plot whether she knows it or not. For it is the natural urge of life moving through her. Learning to know myself the way I do now, I can see what the great plot was in me and how my animus was helping to fulfill it.
When Fantasy Becomes Reality
Charged by the enchantment of returning to school, I could feel my life righting itself. I was exactly where I needed to be when I was in the classroom. Mothering my infant son actually supported the academic endeavour and vice versa. My curiosity about how to grow his life would lead me to the psychology department. I was happy being guided by the instinctive urge to mother and study until one of my college instructors decided to pursue my affections. My inability to respond to his endless infatuation with me resulted in disaster. And I would spend many years trying to answer this question: What was it that cut me off from my own instinct to follow my vital goal, which was to educate myself and build a home of my own for me and my son?
Eventually, the answer came.
A conventional two-fold animus opinion had led me to betray my own feeling as an individual woman. It went something like this: Everything is nothing if you don’t have a man to share your life with and every son needs a father. In other words, I’d landed on the deepest root of disempowerment in the female psyche, the limiting belief that says, You Are Not Enough. This was the weakest link in my mind and led me to doubt my ability to attain my vital goal. Now I was vulnerable to the man pursuing me.
Unconsciously, I started to build a fantasy to repress my instinct. How could I say no to a man who wanted to marry me (he moved fast) and be a father to my child? The fact that the college instructor was an academic made it even easier to imagine this could work. My animus sprung into him so I could see the potential of my own undeveloped scholar (he was a talented writer, too) in the distortion of this fantasy. I wasn’t looking for love and I knew I didn’t love the guy, at least not in the way I’d loved my first husband who still had much of my heart, so I used this to tell myself that I was thinking clearly and choosing wisely. This wasn’t about love. I would never have love again because only my first husband knew how to love me. This would be about building a life with a man who wanted to be my husband, to take care of me and my son. It was the chance to have a normal life.
As I became more passive in the enactment of my fantasy, my unconscious masculine energy empowered the college instructor. He was poised to take over the active role of my animus and I willingly became wife … again. It was a grand seduction of my own making.
In one compartment of my psychology, I knew I was deciding to go overseas with this man so we could earn extra money, save to buy a house, raise my son and one day I’d be free to return to school myself. My vital goal was now secondary. Had I realized the force of this fantasy, I would never have built such an elaborate trap for myself.
Money played a definite role in this deception. I had more than he did. I was paid to go to school through a work-study program. There was money in my savings account from the death benefit I’d received from auto-insurance. It was only a few thousand dollars but it was more money than I’d ever had. So even though there had been no life insurance, it was something. I’d just been approved for a student loan to support my intention to continue my studies beyond the work-study program. And even though I was renting a duplex, all my furnishings were bought and paid for. I carried no financial debt.
Why is any of this important?
Because it’s evidence to prove what I see now was fact. I gave up my fully-supported plan for my future for what? I was lured by my own fantasy of what will be and what could be if I trusted this male pursuit more than my own feeling, which then passed the matter into the hands of my animus. On one hand, in its diabolical aspect, the animus helped me to risk my life for purely egotistical needs and on the other hand, he enticed me into a situation where I would have the chance to realize my greater potential. Never forget, however, that all of this was driven by the belief I am not enough, a fundamental flaw in the collective female psyche that every woman must contend with in her own way.
In the beginning stages of this fiasco, it would have been easier to trust my feeling than it was further into the experience with the man who would become my second husband. My animus had allowed this fantasy to become a reality and the reality was really, really, really hard to live in. Extremely challenging! At some point it became a vicious cycle: I could not anchor in my feeling to live my life because of the plot I’d devised and I could not see the plot any longer because I had lost connection with my instinctual responses. I was fully immersed in a reality that was proving I am not enough, I was never enough, and I will never be enough.
Through that experience I learned there is fear that will lead you astray and there is fear that will keep you alive. And I can say my only saving grace was the desire to live so I could mother my son. My mothering instinct always remained in tact and literally saved my life. What I was unable to do for myself, I could most certainly do for him.
Progression of Animus Roles
The power of my fantasy drained me of life force to the extent that I’d needed to be delivered back to myself by one who had influence enough to free me from the situation. So my animus morphed out of the abuser and into the rescuer. I will tell you that part of the story later. For now, I want to explore this question: What seduced me away from home?
And here’s the answer that only the woman I am today is privileged to know because the me that I was lived through the experience required to learn it. In other words, I earned the answer.
I was called to clear the history I was born into and the process demanded I allow myself to be seduced by the perceived potential before me. For it was the way to let the story living me reveal itself through the experience generated by the seduction. Nothing had ever gone so wrong that I couldn’t get back to my life, on my own road, for all the detours were designed to lead me home to the place that would be all mine as earned through the clearing of the history I’d been assigned to. Every life is a mission. Every mission holds within it assignments to complete. Not every woman is a writer-storyteller. I am. But every woman is on a mission and it is her duty to wake up in her assignment and do the work she came here to complete.
The animus shone his light to show me my path to what I desire. When my confidence wavered, his light flickered to pick up help along the way. I needed support to match the intention I carried unconsciously. So the animus helped me see my own lack of self-trust by calling to me a man who would generate the experience that I could then learn through. Once learned, esteem gleaned, I then had the stamina to walk on on my own and it only required courage to leave, which came from developing self-belief in my original intention. I had to earn my way forward and the animus helped me to do that and every step refined the light of his guidance allowing me to move from shadow into clear light — the light of my own intention, which was the only unchanging element of the entire journey.
So true north was always in me and accessible by me.
The challenge wasn’t located in relationship to men. The challenge was in relationship to myself.
A woman’s greatest contribution to humanity is learning to overcome her own plot.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
