When we make ourselves our own savior, a few things can happen:
We become hypervigilant about our worth and safety. We start believing our survival, healing, and redemption depend entirely on our OWN effort, willpower, or performance. We find we canโt truly REST. We stop ourselves from fully receiving gracious gifts. Weโre always โonโ: managing, fixing, optimizing, proving. When we make ourselves our own savior, we internalize the belief that we are responsible for our own rescue. Which can sound empowering, until we realize it quietly expands into a second burden. โIf I must save myself, then I must also help everyone else learn how to save themselves, too.โ We inadvertently make OURSELVES responsible for the health and healing of others. E.g. โIf I can do it, I should be able to do it for them, too.โ This is where the rescuer impulse is born. Itโs the projection of our self-savior โYou Can Do it!โ narrative onto others. Itโs a weight that is impossible for any ONE to carry alone. We lose access to grace, surrender, and genuine interdependence. We become isolated in our own self-sufficiency. We canโt ask for help without feeling weak. We canโt receive without feeling indebted. We canโt be vulnerable without feeling like weโre failing, and that unconsciously puts us at a disadvantage. We create a fragmented sense of self-ideation. Part of us becomes the savior-self: the protector who fixes, manages, and knows. While the other part of us becomes the one needing saving: the vulnerable, emotional, tender places we label as broken or unworthy and try to keep hidden in the dark. These parts canโt step into the Light because the savior-self is busy preventing the very thing that would heal them; being TRULY seen, heard, and understood in the LIGHT of truth and love. Even with the things we carry from within the deepest and Darkest Places of our Watery HEARTS. We humans can sometimes confuse spiritual maturity with self-reliance. We think enlightenment means weโve transcended needing anyone - even GOD. But in my experience, true spiritual maturity, in what I can describe as aย Christ-like-Sophia consciousness; is truly bearing the capacity to BE HELD while holding others; to RECEIVE while giving; and to be SEEN while, in turn, witnessing the WORLD with the Spirit of Compassion in Truth and Love in Jesus name.