The Villain

A narrative is driven by the behavior of the villain. The villain defines the nature of the conflict. Every story has a villain. When you can identify your villain, this nasty character who tricks you into being less than yourself, then you can begin to defeat him.

I was going to write about the Trickster archetype. But when I did some research I found that he is an anti-hero who wins the day by using wise deception. The prominent example is Prometheus. Prometheus is the Greek God who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to human kind. Much good came from his actions.

So I am not talking about Tricksters, I am talking about villains. Villains mean you no good. We have all had interactions with a bully and some have met with the Devil. This guy is charming and gives people what he thinks they deserve. There are also outcasts and others with malevolent motivations.

To write your story using traditional stories as a template. You can make your Villain be anything you want. He or she can be a dragon, troll, queen or black wizard. The important thing to remember is that the motivation of your villain is key to his power and your struggle. The Villains motivation is part if the concerto that is your narrative. Villains are motivated by feelings of being outcast. This is often combined with a fervent belief in a cause. Many times villains are just mean because they are mean.

If for example, your story was about a struggle with drug abuse, the villain might be a dark magician who a skilled at slight of hand. He offers glitter and joy but delivers only smoke and mirrors. Often a villain will begin by providing a needed service and end up trying to take your most precious possessions. Just as Rumplestiltskin help the hero spin straw into gold but then demanded her first-born child in payment. Sometimes he villain is just greedy and wants what the hero has.

Bringing the Villain into your story brings the narrative to life and provides you with the chance to identify the problem without identifying with the problem.

The next challenge then is to identify and develop the tools that the hero needs to overcome the villain.

The Hero Enters

As you enter the circle of your own true story, Take a moment and notice who you are and where you are and how you perceive yourself in this moment. Stand and face East. This is the direction of the rising sun. Close your eyes and picture the light of the rising sun, orange and warm entering your heart and honor this opportunity to begin a new experience.

Your first step in the circle is to identify who you are in your story.

You know that you are the hero of your own story, but traditional tales provide you with a way to see you as the hero anew.

Let’s learn a little about who the hero is. Heroes begin as themselves and become more than they were. Here are some of the ways that Heroes begin.

The Hero often lives, initially, in paradise. She is cared for and loved until an event occurs that shatters her world, The ship sinks, the mother dies, something in life breaks and must be mended. The ego is asked to reevaluate everything it ever knew.

One of the most interesting categorizations of the hero archetype can be found in the Tarot. The Tarot begins with the fool. The fool has set out on a journey and is about to step off the edge of a cliff. This is how the journey begins. The first several Major Arcana cards represent steps in the hero’s journey. The fool is at the beginning representing a state of innocence. The next archetypes are the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, and the Hierophant and they represent the development of personal power. The next Major Arcana card is the Lovers and this represents the development of relationship power. The Chariot and Justice represent power that is responsible to the larger community.

Another way to experience the hero is as an innocent. The hero is often young or at least untested. At first she is easily tricked and naively reacts to whatever is thrown her way without being a proactive agent in her own life experience. This newborn hero is unaware that she is experiencing anything out of the ordinary. She flits through life unaware that the precipice is all too near.

In the beginning the role of the hero is reactive. She has an experience and then reacts to it, or she has an experience and is victimized by the experience because she has no power at this point in her life. She has not developed the life skills needed to cope with the experience.

Sometimes the Hero is defined by her lack of something. Something has been lost. This is usually wealth, health or a parent. Sometimes, something needs to be found. This can be a sibling or a magical elixir. It must be found for the sake of the kingdom, family or the community. Needing to seek the water of life, for example, to heal the ailing king.

Sometimes the hero is an innocent victim of circumstances. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The people around her made the wrong decisions or told lies as if she could perform magic.

The hero is a dynamic force in the story. From beginning to end the story is her story to tell.

Next I plan to talk about the antagonist in the story. The Trickster.

A Story Template

Everyone has a story to tell. In fact everyone has many stories to tell of their journey. One of the many wonderful things about traditional stories is that they all follow a pattern. It is a wonderful pattern that lets us know that we are participating in our journey.

They begin with a scripted invitation to enter a world of change and growth. Here are some of the words we recognize as that invitation.

1. Once upon a time
2. Back in the days when animals could talk and the people could understand them
3. In a certain kingdom there lived
4. Way back in the old days when the creatures were all people
5. Once there lived…
6. In the beginning...

The word “once” is often the word that pulls our imaginations into the old world of stories and victory.

Once the invitation is out there, we get to meet the hero of the story. She is often a character that is not her self but is told in relation to others. In this story, she is the daughter and the person who quickly finds herself in a situation.

Once upon a time there was a young girl who was the daughter of a miller. One day the miller had to go in front of the king and in order to make himself appear important, he told the king, “I have a daughter who can spin straw in to gold.”

The King told the miller that he would like to see that and told him to bring his daughter to the castle the very next day. When the daughter was brought before the king, he showed her a room filled with straw and told her she must spin the straw into gold by morning or he would have her killed.

Now this is definitely a situation! The girl did not ask for a lying self-important father who would put her at risk. She isn’t portrayed as doing harm in the world but she finds herself in a room asked to do the impossible or die.

At this point of the story she has not developed skills or strengths to help her survive so she falls into a hopeless depression. This is the part of the template that works on the level of struggle. She must struggle with being tricked and trapped and tested. And how can she know who is helping her when all she has ever known is harm?

Since the girl knew of no way to spin straw into gold she grew miserable and began to weep.

But suddenly into the room came a very little man who said he could spin straw into gold and would do it for the girl. He would do it for a price. The girl gives him her necklace. After all, it is a small price to pay for her life. He quickly spins the straw into gold but the girls’ troubles have only just begun.

The struggle part if the template continues as tricksters take control of the story. In life we take many small steps toward disaster. The hero of this story had very few resources and abused by her father, she finds herself allying with awful characters. The little man is little in the story because he is not fully developed morally. His greed will become devastating. The king is just another version of the father. The repetitive behaviors so common in traditional tales hold true to this one as well. Our hero ends up giving away more and more of her power until she gives away her power of motherhood itself and risks losing her firstborn child.

After the king discovered the room filled with straw, he took the girl to a second room and demanded that she spin this room full of straw into gold as well. When the king left the room, the weeping began again, and again the little man entered the room. This time the girl gave the man her ring and he quickly spun the straw into gold. Of course the king was overcome with greed. He took the girl to yet another room. This room was filled with more straw that the other two rooms put together but the king offered her the reward of becoming his wife if she could spin this straw into gold. When she began to weep again, the little man appeared again. Unfortunately the girl had no more jewelry and now the little man asked for the child she would have with the king. The girl thought it was unlikely that she would actually have a child with the king and she agreed to the tiny man’s terms.

When the king found the third room filled with gold, he took the girl for his wife and she became queen. Some time later, she gave birth to a beautiful child who she loved more than anything in the world.

When the little man returned for the child she begged him to take all the gold the wealth of the kingdom instead but he told her that a living child is worth more than all the treasures of the world. She began to weep and the little man agreed to give her three days to find out his name. If she could find out his name in three days, then he would let her keep the child. He H

This particular story is a good template for a person who is victim of spousal abuse. Often the parents are abusive and women escape that abuse by marrying another abusive person. They lose their dignity, self-respect, strength, trust and hope. Many often lose their children to the abuse even while learning that a living child is more important than all the riches in the world. Climbing your way out of abuse means being able to name it, identify it and pool the resources of the larger community to find your true self and save your child. The hero is challenged to identify the truth of her situation and the truth of her will to change the situation. She needs to

1. Change her perception of her ego
2. Have the courage to redefine herself
3. Change her relationship to the problem
4. Have the will to sacrifice an unhealthy relationship for the sake of those she loves.

The queen thought of many names and sent her messengers out over the land to help her discover the miniature person's name. Each day the little man came to her and the queen recited many names but each time he would say, “No, that is not my name.”

On third day one of her messengers returned and told a tale of the little man living far away and high in the mountains and dancing and chanting around a fire. The man said, “Today I bake, tomorrow I brew, the next I’ll have the queens child. Glad I am that no one knows that Rumpelstiltskin is my name.”

The queen was happy to know the name and when the tiny man returned on the third day. She said, “ Is your name Rumpelstiltskin?”

The angry man yelled at her, “The devil told you that!” He was so angry that he plunged his right leg into the earth and grabbed his left leg and tore himself in two.

In order to find the true name of things, we need to find our true self. The final part of the template teaches that real changes in behavior create new outcomes. This means regaining our self-respect and our connection with our authentic self. This means watching while others tear themselves asunder because you changed your behavior.

This story is an example of a template for losing ourselves through no fault of our own and then finding ourselves by connecting with our resources and seeking to know real growth. Next I will show how you can use a traditional template to write your own story of growth and healing.

repetitive behaviors

I was thinking about the many ways we get trapped into repetitive behaviors that do not serve us. Traditional stories address this theme again and again. It seems that everything the hero does is done three times. “Three” in folk tale terms just means that the character is stuck.

Sometimes it doesn’t appear to be the same character but it is actually just different aspects of the same character. He has not yet shown his worth to begin the journey. In one story the eldest son goes off to find the water of life. He meets a man on the road and refuses to share his bread with him. The eldest son finds himself on his horse walking into a ravine which becomes a cleft in the mountain and eventually becomes such a tight squeeze that the rider can’t turn his horse around or even back up. He is stuck and suffers a cruel death. This happens all over again with the second son who also ends up stuck on his horse in a cleft on a mountain.

The youngest son goes out and he is able to break the chain of repetitive behaviors. He shares his food and the adventure begins! Breaking the chains of repetitive behaviors is challenging. It means that you are ready for the adventure that comes from interacting from a place of generosity of spirit. It shows the hero’s willingness to trust in the universe. Giving away a piece of your bread in a fairy tale is synonymous with giving away a piece of your ego. This is a big step.

For writing our own story, it is essential to recognize and name the ego part that has held you back and created repetitive negative events in your life.

Here are some examples of common ego stuck places.

People get stuck in

1. Needing to be right
2. Needing to win
3. Needing the other person to recognize that they’re wrong
4. Needing to be in control of what happens

But all of these motivations are about needing to escape scary feelings. We have volumes of scary feelings. Some of them are feeling humiliated, vulnerable or isolated. Everyone wants to feel validated. When I work with people on identifying their feelings, they easily recognize the big three, happy, sad and angry. It is always challenging to sit with those surface feelings and allow the underlying emotions as they rise to the surface. This challenge is the trick to having the insight needed to actually change our relationship with those fears and move forward with our story.

If you were, for example, and alcoholic, giving away your bread would be synonymous with the first of the 12 steps of Alcoholics anonymous. This is admitting that you have become powerless over alcohol and that your life has become unmanageable.

The hero needs to cement this new relationship with the ego because we easily slip back into old comfortable patterns. The hero needs to gift herself with recognition of the new pattern on a physical, emotional and spiritual level. This is where a personal ritual is effective. Alcoholics do this by attending a meeting and making a patterned statement. “Hello, my name is Mary and I am an alcoholic.” There are physical reminders of sobriety, a key chain, something a person will touch several times a day. There is a recognition of a “higher power” The pattern of the meetings are about engaging in the ritual. Thirty meetings in thirty days is the saying. The ritual needs to be repeated in order to stick in the mind, emotions and spirit of the hero.

Using traditional stories as a template for writing your own story provides clear examples of places in your story where the rituals are needed so that you can cement the physical, emotional and spiritual parts of your hero’s growth.

Hero

Hero

The hero archetype is the main character of all traditional stories. Historically, the hero is often a man or a boy but for the purposes of the project I plan to refer to the hero as female. This is because my current vision of the project begins with groups of women working on writing and telling their story.

The hero travels an arc through the story that provides insight for her so she can link to and embrace her strengths while she becomes a leader of her own life.

The hero begins as an innocent and leaves the story as a wise leader who has solved the challenges presented during the story and can succeed again and again if she needs to.

Everyone knows the story of Cinderella. So I will use it as one example of the arc of the hero. In the version presented by the brothers Grimm, the story follows this basic outline.

The hero lives with her mother and father and all is well until her mother dies. Life limps along until a year later when her father marries another woman. This archetypal character is the evil stepmother and she has two selfish daughters who take after her. (Archetypal adversaries will be the subject of other posts.)The hero is quickly demoted to servant and renamed Cinderella. The false family throws Cinderella’s lentils into the ashes and she is forced to pick them out of the ashes or starve The greed of the step daughters is highlighted when the father asks each child what she would like him to bring her when he goes on a trip. The stepdaughters ask for expensive gifts but Cinderella asks for a tree branch. Upon the fathers return, Cinderella plants the hazel tree branch and waters it with her tears. Over time the branch grows into tree and Cinderella develops a daily ritual of going to the tree and praying. The tree is magic and a magic bird lives in its branches. When Cinderella has a need, the bird lets fall gifts from the tree branches. During these daily rituals, Cinderella befriends the bird living in the tree and this in turn creates allies for her of all the local birds.

Then the prince enters the picture. He is looking for a wife and holds a series of parties so he can meet potential wives. Cinderella asks to go to the three-day festival and is told that she can only go if she picks a bowl of lentils out of the ashes in two hours. With the help of the birds, she completes the task in one hour. But the stepmother is evil and instead of allowing Cinderella to go to the festival, she forces her to separate two bowls of lentils out of the ashes in one hour. Cinderella receives help from the birds again and retrieves the lentils in plenty of time but the stepmother still refuses her.

After everyone leaves for the first day of the party, Cinderella goes to her tree and the bird tosses down a dress. Cinderella cleans up well and when she goes to the festival, the prince has eyes for no one but Cinderella. But she runs away when the prince attempts to find out who she is. This goes on for three days and on the last night of the festival, Cinderella loses her shoe and the shoe is the only clue the prince has to find her.

The prince searches the land for the woman whose foot will fit into the shoe. When he comes to the home were Cinderella lives, the stepdaughters hide her and try the shoe on for themselves. The shoe does not fit but the first stepdaughter takes a butcher knife and cuts off her heal. Now the shoe fits! The prince is easily duped and rides off past Cinderella’s tree with the false bride. The bird has to tell him that blood is seeping out of the shoe and at last the prince realizes the deception. He returns to the home of Cinderella and repeats the process with the other stepsister who cuts off her toes to make her foot fit into the shoe. Again the prince is easily duped and the bird flies down to point out the bloody shoe. The prince returns a third time and Cinderella is produced. The shoe fits Cinderella and as the stepdaughters try to take their place as family along side the true bride, the birds come and peck their eyes out so tat they are punished with blindness all the days of their lives.

In the beginning, the hero is innocent. She lives an Eden-like existence with her mother and father in a happy state. This happy state quickly unravels as the drama of life takes over. The hero’s mother dies leaving her lost with a father who remarries and then fails to even notice that she needs protection during the rest of the story. She develops allies and strengths by being good, persistent and hard working as she works her way through the dark part of her story. When the time comes for her to break the pattern, she is ready.

It is no wonder that the prince she finally marries reflects the father’s role by being unable to recognize the shoe imposters not once but twice. He is not the point of the story. The prince is just a symbol of becoming connected to accomplishment. Cinderella struggled with her grief and loss and made powerful allies that helped her throughout the story. She now has access to her inner strengths and the necessities required in culture to function as a producer rather than a consumer. She can now create her place in society instead of begging for scraps. She has in fact matured emotionally physically and sexually and is ready to leave her troubled existence behind her in favor of a world where in she controls the outcomes.

This is just one example of the way that traditional stories can provide a template for working through ones own story from innocence to struggle and finally to a strong healthy outcome.

Ritual and Narrative

A good friend of mine, Greg Griffey mentioned the relationship between our narrated lives and ritual. One of the many ways that our culture works to help us to satisfy our need for order and understanding is by providing moments of ritual. We are all aware of the large rituals of our lives like christening our children or getting married. We also have many less noticed rituals. For many this is a small daily ritual that helps a person to feel on track and solid for the day. The ritual I like in the morning after waking up, is brushing my teeth and having a cup of tea from my favorite mug while I feed my cat Morgan.

What I have noticed is that our culture is full of missed opportunities for ritual and because we miss them, our brain does not solidify the event and we often lose it. Missed opportunities for ritual cause us to lose our moments of insight and understanding. Their are times when we realize that we are moving into a new awareness of the way we think about our learning but we cannot grasp the moment because rituals are not available.

In learning to tell your story, there are several places that call for moments of ritual. If the ritual is missed, then the story gets stuck.

The story can get stuck in the beginning and never get told.

It can get stuck in the place where you acknowledge the tricksters that you struggle with, but fail to follow through because your deep understanding was not solidified with ritual.

It can get stuck if you are prepared to give up the struggle and embrace being in relationship with the moment, but forget to let the ritual bind your mind to the new you.

Rituals need to have personal meaning and personal power. Some of the big rituals like a graduation tend to feel like an overwhelming experience being imposed on the graduate. It seeds real change in self-perception from outside the self.

Rituals can be personally meaningful and empowering even when they are small family rituals. For me, when I was a child, each year, late in august, my mother and I went out and bought new pencils and notebooks and paper and a few new outfits too. This ritual provided me with a fresh clean slate for a new school year where anything can happen. This was a wonderful ritual of beginning. The smell of the new paper in those fresh spotless notebooks filled me with images of a year filled with bright clean new ideas and numbers. Even the other children would be washed anew after a summer full of sunshine and vacation.

As adults we often don’t honor a new idea or mindset with enough ritual to keep it from fading into old habits and into a sea of no change. Ritual helps us to grasp the awesomeness of a new adventure. Ritual helps us to be empowered to act on our new agency.

The final ritual from learning to write your story is the telling of it.

More about this later.

We Are a Storied People

We all need to make sense of our lived experience. from the earliest days of human development, we have told each other stories of what happened and what will happen. This process organizes our reality and links us with our concept of who we are. It links us to our place in space and time and in our community. A healthy story helps us to be our authentic self and grow through our trials with resilience and strength.

When we narrate our story, we can sometimes get stuck in patterns that create unhealthy self concepts. Sometimes our personal stories turn into a deep loss of our authentic self. Sometimes they become a testament to a perception of self that is dictated by a larger story. This kind of story is imposed into the psyche by families or cultures.

A common example of an imposed story is the one that tells (mostly girls) that their bodies are abnormal because they don't fit the privileged form of modern advertisers and media stars. people become compelled to fit into a skewed image and employ all kinds of unhealthy tactics that can end in death.

An unhealthy story comes from a couple of different places. Sometimes a person life experience is confusing and so chaotic that the story patterns and organization get lost in the chaos. Sometimes things happen to people during a time in their life when they are at a loss for words to describe the experience.

This holds true if the experience happened when the person was a child. As a child a trauma can be especially difficult to overcome because the youngster does not know what words to use to describe most encounters let alone chaotic and traumatizing ones.

This also happens with adult when the experience is so out of the ordinary that forming words around the situation seems impossible. An example of this might be living through the tornados that recently ran through my little county in Southwest Virginia. The devastation of so many homes and businesses is difficult to organize mentally because the sights and sounds feel otherworldly.

I use a system of templates to help people rewrite and organize their story. This helps them move forward and grow while identifying with healthy perceptions.

I plan to use this blog to describe the templates and patterns as I tweak and improve them throughout the next few months.