The Little Girl Who Wanted to Save the World

When your Sense of Purpose is shaped by a Childhood Survival Strategy

This year, much of my inner work has centred around exploring my own shadow in relation to leadership, work and purpose.

How much of what I understand leadership to be is still shaped by patriarchal values: domination, hierarchy, control and subordination.

And how much of what I call my “purpose” was actually formed by a wounded part of me?

Would I still do the work I do if that wound were no longer driving it? Or would my purpose express itself very differently through me?

Before I teach something, I usually go looking for where it lives in me first. And through that inquiry, I came into contact with a young part of myself that still wanted to “save the world.”

And knowing that the Rescuer or Saviour can be a shadow expression of the Healer Archetype, I knew this needed deeper exploration.

In the early 90s, I grew up with war playing across the television. My mother watched the news constantly: devastation, dead bodies, grieving mothers, sons being carried home.

As a child I didn’t understand that this was happening somewhere else, far away from me.

I experienced the images on TV as if they were happening right here around me. I felt the terror of living in an unsafe and violent world.

And my mother was absorbed in the suffering on the screen, so there was nobody turning toward me to help me make sense of what I was seeing.

As a little girl I felt: The world is a bad place. Bigger people are killing and hurting and destroying life. And I am so small I can’t do anything about it.

And somewhere inside all that helplessness, she made a decision:

“Maybe I can make the world better. Maybe if I help people heal, they will stop hurting each other.”

What an enormous task for a tiny human being.

She should have been playing. Feeling protected, being held. Developing a Self.

Instead, my helplessness at human cruelty became responsibility.

Because the alternative was much harder to tolerate: “I am too small. I cannot stop human suffering.”

And beneath all of it was the most innocent wish: “I just want everyone to be happy, free, safe and well.”

How could I enjoy my life when others are suffering? Crazy how as a small child I felt such intense connection to all of humanity. Another being in pain somewhere else in the world felt like my pain.

And I believe that we are all like this when we are little, but that trauma and oppression strips that humanity away. We stop feeling another’s pain or hunger as our own.

And although differentiation matters, although we cannot carry the fate of the whole world - I don’t want to pathologise the capacity that once existed: The ability to feel the thread within your being that binds you to the being of others.

I believe there are forces in this world that seek to strip us of that humanity. And one of the ways this happens is through teaching us to dehumanise another because of their religion, gender, race, sexuality, or whatever distinction can be used to justify our separation.

But I don’t believe the answer to the suffering of the world is to become less feeling.

Nor do I believe that being deeply connected to humanity means we must carry responsibility for its fate.

And perhaps this is where my inquiry into leadership and purpose has brought me.

Once I relieved the wounded part of me of the burden and responsibility of human suffering, what remained was Love for humanity, and the DRIVE to do something good... for others.

That’s it. No compulsive urge to dedicate my life to making the world a better place!

When we heal the shadow expression of something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the thing itself disappears. What changes is WHERE that desire comes from, and how it expresses itself when it is no longer driven by the need to compensate for earlier pain.

Whereas before, my desire to help came with guilt, urgency, fixation and a strong sense of responsibility. Making the world a better place felt like something I owed humanity.

And even the thought of stepping away from my work felt like abandoning people who needed my help, my knowledge, my skills.

And so much of my identity had become organised around my work.

This is something that happens when our profession becomes a vehicle through which we unconsciously attempt to meet unresolved emotional needs or compensate for earlier painful experiences.

We begin organising our identity around that function, and our sense of Self becomes increasingly defined by what we do, what we provide, or who we are for others.

And sometimes, we become so identified with our professional role that we no longer know who we are outside of it.

Now, the desire to contribute is still here. But it no longer demands my entire existence.

I can devote myself to meaningful work without making my life an instrument of that work. I can love humanity without taking responsibility for saving it.

I no longer have to save the world to be able to live in it. I can enjoy this extraordinary experience of being alive simply for me.

And perhaps that’s another thing I’ve come to understand:

Purpose isn’t necessarily what we DO. It’s a way of BEING. It’s not a mission we have to fulfil, or something we must dedicate our existence to accomplishing.

Purpose is simply what naturally expresses itself through us when we are free to BE who we are.

Handan Darici