Caroline Myss on the Saboteur Archetype

We're sorry, the feature you were looking for is no longer available on Beliefnet. This may be the most difficult of all the archetypes to understand by virtue of its name--saboteur--a name associated with betrayal. But, in truth, the purpose of this archetype is not to sabotage you, but to help you learn the many ways in which you sabotage yourself--and there are so many ways we do this to ourselves. We get a new set of plans operating in our lives only to end up standing in our own way because of the fears that come up and shift the quality of our decisions. Or we begin a new relationship and then destroy it because we begin to imagine a painful outcome. Or we begin a working relationship with another person and find ourselves once again in a power struggle that could be settled peacefully, but we fall into the same destructive pattern because we fear the talented qualities of the other person. Examples are endless. But the purpose of the saboteur is to guide us both into and out of these situations by allowing us to create situations in which we feel incredibly creative and incredibly vulnerable at the same time. It is the combination of these two energies that activates our potential to rise out of our own pattern of self-destructive behavior and into all that we can be creatively. Once that maturity is accomplished, the saboteur becomes an ally that alerts us to when we are falling into a vulnerable state of mind, thereby allowing us to consciously make another--and more empowered--choice. This ally is a friend, not a foe. back to Health and Archetypes main -->