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Frank B Kermit
writes:Battling The Savior ComplexBy Frank Kermit, RelationshipsAs children, many of us grew up on stories about the hero that saves a person, and in the process, earned the undying love and loyalty of the person saved so that the hero and that saved person live happily ever after. The message that some people got was that being a hero is a way (and for some people, they learned it is the ONLY way) to earn a love that will never experience abandonment. Others learned from those stories that you are only worthy of love if you save someone.This has led to something I call “The Savior Complex” which I see in my practice. It is the concept that some people seek out relationship partners who they feel need to be saved. Both men and women do this. The “saved” person could be a person with low self esteem that makes poor choices for their own lives, a recovering addict, a person that has given up on some part of their life, a person that is always short on money, or a person that is unable to accept and express love and compliments. The “savior” in this case finds a person that needs help in an area that the savior feels they have some talent in and attaches to that person-in-need-of-help, usually very quickly. This often has dire consequences. Sometimes the savior puts his or her resources into helping someone change, who is neither actually interested nor capable of change. The savior might end up either putting too much pressure on their partner, or end up stuck with the savior’s own frustration of not being able to feel any “earned” love. Other times, a savior might even become an enabler to someone NOT healing a personal issue. For example, out of a fear of abandonment, a would-be savior will actually sabotage a person’s progress of healing so that the person is forever dependant on the savior. Lastly, a savior might also be a victim of someone that preys on the overly nice nature that some saviors exhibit, which results in the savior eventually needing to be saved from the manipulative puppet master.On the odd chance that the savior is actually able to help the distressed person overcome their issue (or if the person fixes the issues him or her self), the newly healed person and the savior find themselves in a quagmire. The savior may lose attraction, as there is nothing left about the person to be saved from that would trigger the savior to feel attachment. Another scenario is that once a person has healed, he or she becomes a different person, and the new person would not have ever sought to date a savior type to begin with, and the healed party moves on to find a new life partner that they can be on more equal footing.A life partner cannot be someone that a person needs to save in order to earn love. Your life partner will love you regardless if you have the power to save them or not. If a potential life partner seeks you out to solve all of his or her problems, or if you are the one that feels obligated to save your partner from him or her self as a means to stay importantly relevant in their lives, it is all one big Red Flag. At best, a life partner is something that you can be equal too, in the sense that neither one of you is required to save the other, especially saving a partner from themselves. As partners, people can grow together, and explore the world together, and support each other through hard times, all the while making the mistakes we all make being human beings. However, if you keep finding yourself only attracted to people that evoke some kind of savior complex in you, because you deem that their love will be easier to earn if you are a hero, and save that person, then you would be sadly mistaken. Hero worship is not love. It may be a combination of emotions including lust, admiration, awe, excitement, and fantasy fueling energy…but it is not love. When someone, that you can do nothing for, has those same feelings for you without the requirement of you having to save them from life, THAT has more of a chance of being real love. Beware of online profiles and single dating ads that start with: “Rescue Me” or something of that nature. Fairy tales might make damsels in distress seem like a romantic notion, but the real world is no place to have a life partner that does not have the inner capacity to be their own hero.
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