The Archetype of the Innocent - And What It Can Show Us About Our Darker Side

A short while ago I was running a workshop in a wealthy coastal town - and the participants were all obviously well-heeled, and almost all women. Men in such places either seem to be earning money or playing golf, but not, it appears, taking a look at their souls. Perhaps they have other ways of doing that.

So I asked my group to do a brief visualization exercise in which they were to meet a person who appeared before them as they walked around a corner or an obstacle.

After they were finished writing I asked my group if they’d like to share their visualizations. Several participants described how they'd met long lost relatives, and some had met old friends, with whom they wanted to heal their relationships. Then, with a trembling voice, one woman described meeting herself, aged about eight, and promptly burst into tears. Whereupon another woman said she’d also met herself as a child and also began to weep.

I’m fairly practised at this by now, and tears are moving, but not derailing. I expect them when participants allow themselves to go deep.

So I prodded, gently, and made sure that neither woman was the victim of any kind of abuse. What emerged, though, was that they were mou
ing something they’d lost, something that the child still had at nine years old that they felt they’d lost forever.

They were missing the Innocent that was in themselves, that authentic fun-loving and spontaneous self that had got pushed out of the way by all sorts of daily requirements that the suburban mother has to respond to.

Which led me to a thought. Child abuse is a problem in our world. But it might just be an extreme offshoot of what we, all of us, do already: we abuse and neglect the Innocent, the child within ourselves. We degrade and disregard our rather unruly and spontaneous self. The problem of child abuse is not ‘out there’, it’s actually in each of us because that’s the way we already treat ourselves. From there it can be a very small step to enacting that behavior on another.

We can change that. And when we change that we help to change our world.