The Warrior Inside – Iron Man by Robert Bly
The warriors inside American men have been weak in recent years, and their weakness contributes to the lack of boundaries, a condition which earlier in this book we spoke of as naiveté. A man six feet tall will allow another person to cross his boundaries, enter his psychic house, verbally abuse him, carry away his treasures, and slam the door behind; the invaded man will stand there with an ingratiating, confused smile on his face.
When a boy grows up in a ‘dysfunctional’ family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early. Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king. The King in a child stands for and stands up for a child’s mood. But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent. We can say that when the warrior inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, or go into a trance, or die.
The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model. The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in.
But a typical child has no such protection. If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense, – it happens. If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens. Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included.
Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside the house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Sham is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings. Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work.
When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overflowing proof of our inadequacy. The slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated. If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as child can do about it. Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame. What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again.
When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept in the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver. The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.
The snow geese, treading, blowing Dakotah snows,
Over the fence stairs of the small farms come,
Slipping through cries flung up into the night,
And setting, ah, between them, shifting wings,
Light down at last in bare snowy fields.
The drunken father pulls the boy inside.
The boy breaks free, turns and leaves the house.
He spends that night out eating with the geese.
Where, alert and balancing on wide feet,
Crossing rows, they walk through the broken stalks.
Robert Bly
It is no wonder that such a child, when a teenager, looks for single rooms, maternal women, gurus, systems, withdrawals, “nonattachment.” When he is older, thirty or thirty-five, he will still feel unprotected, and be unable to defend himself from other people enraged at their own unprotection.
Every Adult or older sibling who wants to enter the child’s psychic room does so, because it is as if there is no doorknob at all on the inside of the door. The door moves freely in, opening us to improper intimacies that the mother may insist on, to improper belittling the father may insist on, to sexual fondling any older child or baby-sitter may insist on, to incest, physical or psychic. The door moves freely, we could say, because the doorknob is on the outside.
I think it’s likely that the early death of a man’s warriors keeps the boy in him from growing up. It’s possible that it also prevents the female in the boy from developing. We know that Dickens for example, endured a horrendous childhood, and we also notice that his female characters tend to be sentimental and girlish. It’s possible that these girlish beings are projections of his stunted interior woman, whom his warriors could not protect from the violence all around him.
The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. “I am a victim,” he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most
American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors look like, or feel like.
Robert Bly
This is wonderful for me to read, especially when I now have a doorknob on the inside, that I revived my inner warriors, that by having boundaries it means you have a warrior manning the line.
As I wrote the word ‘line’ it came to me that my husband accused me of drawing a line in cement, not in the sand, that once that line was there, I was adamant about it, there was no moving that line.
Guess my inner warriors stood guard.
Imagine I have a knob on the inside, and I can ask ‘who is there and what do you want?’
My warrior is front and center as my sister ambles up to the door. I am comforted knowing I have warriors once again.
A door on my inner psychic room, or my soul’s castle, how awesome to be the keeper of the door!
I M Perfect lady 