When we go through great challenges in life, mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually we need to activate the warrior within in order to find our way through. But what does it mean to really be the warrior?
A warrior is typically someone who fights, who goes to war for a cause and that war is typically a physical fight, most often to the death.
What we are talking about here is the spiritual warrior. The fight is truly with the demons within us, and not any person or thing outside of ourselves.
Now when coming out of abusive relationships and situations, it may very well seem we are fighting people outside of ourselves. We may even find ourselves fighting for a cause in our lives, which also seems to be outside of ourselves, still the real fight is within. Even when we fight for a cause, we are pulling from our inner strength and determination. We are standing for what we believe in, even if we are standing with or for others.
A true warrior learns how to access their inner strength, their inner determination and also accesses something greater than themselves, a higher power. In the twelve-step program, we turn our lives over to a higher power, recognizing that we, in and of ourselves can’t fight the battle. We need to recognize there is a power greater than ourselves that will restore us to sanity, and help us to fight the good fight.
So the true warrior is one who learns how to call upon that higher power. Even if you are not religious, you can still call upon a higher power. Many people in the twelve step program are not religious and don’t even have a spiritual foundation, but they can still find within themselves a higher power. We simply need to be careful not to make any person or organization our higher power.
The first thing we need to recognize when we step into our warrior is that no person or organization outside of ourselves has power over us. So many of us coming out of narcissistically abusive relationships feel that the narcissist is the powerful one, who has taken our power and won the war.
But this is far from the truth. The narcissist is like the Wizard of OZ. He or she has a big presence and seems to have all this power and influence, but it is all smoke and mirrors. When the curtain is pulled back, by a little dog named Toto, the Great Oz is exposed as a frightened little man who was attempting to con the masses into believing he was all powerful.
So, the first part of being a spiritual warrior is to learn to see through the illusion. Those who try and present themselves as “all powerful,” are typically trying to compensate for deep feelings of powerlessness. People who try and get others to believe ideas about you that are not true, are trying to make you look small in order to boost themselves up and make themselves look big. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
