Wound Need
The biggest unmet need of this wound is to feel personal power – being free to express yourself, and to move toward what you desire
With this wound, you have a deep seated fear of being invaded, punished, controlled and humiliated. You hide from others and hold yourself back from taking action or expressing yourself.
Wound Pattern
As a result of traumas from early childhood, individuals with this wound experience feel powerless and repressed. But underneath this, they have powerful feelings of anger, range, and a sense of injustice.
There is a deep, ingrained fear of being stifled, manipulated and exploited. Such a person has been humiliated and not allowed to express or assert themselves the way they want. So they retreat deep inside themselves, and guard their true expression.
Individuals with this wound are often known has hardworking, persistent, and good team players. However, at some level they feel like a victim, with a level of unhappiness or frustration about their lot in life. There is always plenty to complain and whine about, which can lead to bitterness and occasional violent outbursts.
This unconscious discontent is constantly being projected on everything: one’s relationship partner, friends, colleagues at work, one’s boss, or clients — just as long as one has something to complain about, criticize, and make someone or something responsible for one’s troubles.
Whatever the circumstances, you will always find something that prevents you from doing what you want to do and being who you want to be, or something that isn’t going right. One manages to make life difficult for oneself so as to justify one’s inner anger and frustration.
The passive version of this wound structure lives in submission, out of fear of being stifled and further humiliated. They are people pleasers, full of obedience, niceness and passivity. They manipulate through meekness and niceness. But underneath, there is a deeply repressed anger, and fear dominates.
The active version of this wound structure brings out anger and aggressiveness towards others ‐ because the other person is always to blame! This version expresses permanent discontent and openly‐expressed moodiness, based on anger. They manipulate through blame, criticism and complaints, generally openly. The anger comes to the surface, and the underlying fear is repressed.
Since the dynamic of this wound is to make life difficult, when an individual feels like a victim, s/he will tend to be drawn into a relationship with a perpetrator. This can be a genuine perpetrator, i.e. someone who behaves in mean or violent ways, or a “false” perpetrator, i.e. someone who behaves in ordinary ways, but on whom he will project all his complaints and expectations in order to be able to suffer and to blame.
Generally speaking, with this wound, one accuses others of bullying us, abusing us, causing us harm, preventing us from living.
The body of this wound type is often thick, muscular and heavyset. Being sick is of real interest to this type, because one suffers ‐ and so has grounds for complaining and looking pathetic. This type tries to force others to take care of them, and then complains if they don’t. The digestive system is prone to all manner of illnesses and malfunctions. And the deep sense of powerlessness generates an unconscious hopelessness that readily manifests as anxiety or depression.
Unwinnable Game
As children, people with this wound had an experience of being invaded, controlled and humiliated, as they were beginning to assert their independence and individuality. This left the child stuck at the stage of child development of feeling perpetually stifled and repressed, and with a challenging relationship to power.
Living a life rebelling against power will not heal the sense of powerless, as it springs from a basic wound that needs to be healed rather than from an actual external source of repression that must be overthrown.
The only resolution is to heal the wound and restore an inner sense of power — that allows one to be free to take action and express oneself. This is what the Inner Freedom Process is designed to accomplish.
Until the wound is healed, you’ll continue to attract people and situations that trigger the wound, and you’ll feel the “ouch” of this wound over and over.