At the risk of mixing metaphors, I'd like you to remember "Sleeping Beauty". She was in a state of total vulnerability and helplessness while in a completely passive state waiting for "Prince Charming" to come and rescue her from her deep sleep so she could finally commence her life. She was and felt completely unable to do anything to bring about her own rescue or to make any kind of impact on the environment, and it was her very state of passive helplessness that was expected to bring about her rescue.
This is the dynamic underlying the compulsive rescuer "Red Riding Hood" pattern. They maintain a pattern of accountability-avoidant power-avoiding as they entertain the delusional hope that if they rescue others, they themselves will be rescued. They are a loser-loving rescuer who ends up reproducing their family in an exploitative-abusive symbiotically dependent relationship, and they pass it on to the next generation.
HOW DID THEY GET THS WAY?
What happens here is that two symbiotically dependent and umbilically attached, immature people attempt to set up an independent family unit of an "A-frame" nature, and they find that they don't have what it takes to make it. They are both still umbilically attached to their families, and the grandparents, the grandmothers in particular, play a significant role in setting up, facilitating and maintaining the symbiotic umbilical attachment to themselves, which of course totally sustains all the surrounding and resulting functioning patterns. This blurring of relationship lines in the family totally befuddles all other relationships due to lack of boundaries, rules and roles. Confusion and projection reign supreme.
The parents feel adrift in the world, that they can't trust anyone, and that they are inadequate, overwhelmed and under attack from the world in an "unfairly demanding environment" reaction. They feel powerless and helpless in a nihilistic and pessimistic pattern. They respond with pouting, energy-sucking, "sibling-fighting", exploitation, manipulation, capitulation, care-coercing and oftentimes explosive abuse.
They often live a chaotic lifestyle, with frequent and excessive change, along with high stress and intense pressures, due to their incompetence in living. They are isolated and distant from other people because they don't know how to deal with them. So they are starved for strokes while being unable to get or give them, with the exception of sexual contacts. They have no idea how to meet their own needs, and they are emotional and functional children. They are prone to tyranting, cajoling, rationalizing, sympathy- and loyalty-exploitation, withdrawal and alcoholism/addiction.
Their children become their chattel to use as they see fit, while simultaneously being expected to be their support system. They role-reverse and demand that their children parent them, and they fight with each other over who has to take the responsibilities of living and who gets the prize - the nurturing, gratifying and starved "super-boob" teat-kid.
The mother frequently reacts to the child's needs by purposely staying out of synch with the child's beingness, resulting in the child's learning that they are helpless and powerless, and that they live in a "magical mystery tour" world in which they have no control over their experiences, and that they are powerless pawns of the capricious powers that be. It also frequently results in a lot of learning disability due to the mother's non-responsiveness and lack of cohesive reactions to the child's cues and behaviors. This keeps them under control and away from demanding what the parents can't give.
Another convenience-control pattern is to over-intervene, so that the child never learns how to self-regulate, to trust themselves, or to take personal responsibility for their life. In either case, the child ends up totally dependent on external cues to guide their functioning, never learning the feeling of effectance or the strategies of intervention on their own behalf.
The family forms a "tight little island" sealed off from society and in effect they proceed to suck off of each other, with alternating "clinging vine" and engulfment-escaping forays with the grandparents. They maintain a facade of pseudo-adequacy, togetherness, centeredness and cohesiveness. This sets up a situation where any attempt on the part of the child to "blow the cover" on the situation will be met with total disbelief because everything looks so great. They also utilize their confusion-inducing communication and lifestyle to "trance-induce" the child, and to then implant "hopeless-hapless-helpless" despair-inducing experiences, strategies and attitudes.
In the meantime, there is constant internecine (of or pertaining to conflict, discord, or struggle within a group) warfare going on about who gets to be accountability-, responsibility- and reality-free. This takes one of two patterns: either two "Tyrannosaurus Rexes" tearing at each other or, more typically, a "Tyrannosaurus Rex" stomping all over a "Brontosaurus". In either case, the kid is caught having to duck the "flailing giants" and trying to meet everyone's needs in a terrible situation.
The "Tyrannosaurus" parent is usually an accountability-addict just as long as it's always someone else's. They use intimidation and coercive tactics, and they are very interested in image-preservation. They see the family as being in debt to them, and they operate like an explosively demanding infant, with much paranoid possessiveness and sexploitation. Some are totally conscienceless and unremittingly pleasure- and excitement-seeking, with no regard for their ecological impact. They learned this pattern in a chaotic environment where they found that coercive control was the only way to have an impact.
The "Brontosaurus" parent usually has a poor relationship with their mother, low self-esteem, and a "hope-hooked" pattern of trying to win over the rejecting parent. They are affection- and attention-starved, and they are placating, pleasing and appeasing. They are intensely abandonment-anxious and security-mad. They were subjected to continuous messaging that they could do no right and they experienced that they had no capacity to impact on anything.
They offer themselves as a substitute victim to the "Tyrannosaurus", rescuing in order to meet their own needs in the only way allowed to them in their experience. They feel utterly helpless, and they are playing out their own "Red Riding Hood" script. They reverse roles with the child, they can't be adult or maturely sexual, they keep themselves worn out with super-service, and they are weak, submissive and non-assertive.
Some take a different tack because they are "church mouse" sneaky sadist professional victim and subtle persecutor types who are using the "Tyrannosaurus" in a "sadomasochistic minuet" in which they are the "masked sadist" masochist mastermind of all the mayhem by directing the "well-guided missile". In this situation, in addition to being seemingly trustworthy while being dangerously destructive, they set the child up with their role-reversing and learned helplessness-induction to go into the world insufficiently prepared so as to precipitate forced rescuings, and so as to be "eaten by the wolves" in the process. This arises from an underlying virulent viciousness and an accompanying unconscious hatred of the child.
The child who is "artfully dodging" the "fighting monsters" faces the situation where siding with one of them means supporting and abetting the other one who is hurting the one they are siding with. Since they don't have the equipment to do this effectively, they end up in effect refugees in a war. Any attempt to improve the situation or to escape it makes it all the worse because of the resulting utter accountability-avoidance and enraged abandonment/betrayal reactions by the parents.
They often find themselves being the "lightening rod" in an irrational-irresponsible dangerous battering environment. The parents sometimes batter the child out of a fear of being sucked into "waiting on the child hand and foot" (their experience of normal childhood needs). The parents, especially the "Tyrannosaurus", blame the child as a face-saving accountability/responsibility-avoidant strategy, and out of their underlying feeling of being "at the mercy" of uncontrollable and often malevolent external forces themselves. It also alleviates guilt feelings, and it gives them a spurious feeling of power.
The result of all this is a "magical misery tour" complete lack of predictability and control of their life experiences. There is in effect no stroking, just serving and sexuality for survival and for a substitute for closeness. And in the frantic accountability-, responsibility- and reality-avoidant family, the individual can do no right, and they experience shoring up a sick system and feeling responsible for it because everyone makes them feel that way. The individual comes to feel that they caused all the anger and fighting, out of their belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of the parents, and out of the death potential for themselves, their loved ones, and their parents that inheres (to be inherent or innate) in challenging the parents.
The "Red Riding Hood" assumes responsibility for everything that happens out of the delusion that they are the cause, and out of the hope that maybe they can help themselves and their parents by rescue efforts. They mistake being needed for being loved, and in a funny sort of way, they like "causing world wars" because it means that their parents - the world powers - are fighting over THEM. It also means that the father isn't really absentee and that their parents care, at least at some level. On the other hand, their feeling is that they are causing world-destruction potential, and they are afraid that one parent will kill the other. This drives them to re-double their rescue efforts in the ironic hope that if they can "save the world", they can prove that they aren't powerless after all.
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
The "Red Riding Hood" operates out of the bottom line feeling of helplessness, and they assume that the world is out of control. They learned that the "giants" can't be stopped, even though their life depends on it, so they learn to make the best of a bad situation. They try to minimize pain rather than to maximize gain as their fundamental approach to life. They have a chronic fearfulness and intimidation by the world, out of a conviction that improvement efforts make it worse, and that they have to sit there and take it if they know what's good for them.
They avoid direct power-expression as being too dangerous, due to abandonment and betrayal/destruction concerns, and out of fear of being wiped out by an out of control "giant". They feel that incompetence is or leads to rejection-prevention, that powerlessness is commitment, that self-undermining and passivity is survival, and that rescuing is their duty and lifeline. Incidentally, "rescuing" refers to situations where they are doing more than 50% of the work in relationships or when they are doing things for people that the person should be doing for themselves.
They do much rationalizing and external situation-blaming out of their sense of helplessness and being "at effect", rather than being "at cause". They are reality-avoidant and denying, out of fear of the consequences of knowing and blowing covers - it's better than ending up with nothing and/or effectively betraying their loved ones and "God" figures. Their powerlessness also is motivated by the fear of the release of their unconscious often-homicidal rage at their whole situation. Their "lightening rod" experiential history leads to annihilation-anticipation prevention by means of their not attempting to do anything out of cataclysmic expectations. It results in a lot of "mind-reading" and immobilization as they do a lot of vicarious living.
They give power away constantly, and their primary pleasure is pleasing people - particularly parents and partners - in an atonement attempt and in the hope of love and rescue coming from it. They focus heavily on people's needs and to their rescue efforts, as they seek love-connectedness and as they nurture rescue fantasy implications. They tend to be quite sheltered and naive, due to the "tight little island effect", so they are gullible and familiar only with their family's patterns, conceptions and values.
Rescuing and serving to survive is a means of not feeling quite so helpless - at least they are doing something. This adds to the love-starved desperate need to be needed, which is all they had as a kid in the way of survival-sustaining "scraps". So they are magnetized and galvanized by needy people. They are in effect an "accountability-addict" and a messiah complex who is trying to "make it all better" for others and for themselves. They also have the conviction that no one could want them, that they can only need them.
They tend to get into "magnificent obsession" projects, as they try to get a "reprieve" from their rejecting parent figures. Their sense of worth rests on the other person's changing or getting better, and they therefore suffer a lot as they experience that they are a failure at rescue. "Serve and suffer" becomes the nature of their lifestyle as a result. They have the delusion that they'll die if they don't rescue their "parental lifeline", and they are terrified of aloneness. And they have the gut conviction that they have to "bleed" to help people. They even feel guilty and defensive if they are able to heal or ameliorate situations and people without effort. They tend to be oblivious to their pain due to their denial, distortion, distraction and despair-deflecting processes.
"Red Riding Hoods" are super-dependent and super-sucks in disguise who feel that they can't connect with a peer on a reciprocal and equality basis because they don't deserve it, because they can't attract it, and because they can't keep it, out of the self-rejecting and helplessness feeling generated by their formative history. So they tend strongly to go for "inferior" and child-like people who they wish could "wet nurse" them but with whom they reaction formation "role-reverse" "wet nurse". At the same time, they unconsciously and directly or indirectly condemn them, as they do unto others what was done unto them, and as they project their parent-rage, self-hatred and worth-anxiety onto the targets of their rescue efforts. They only feel safe when the other person is too weak or needy to threaten or hurt them like their "first (and only) love" did. And of course, underneath, they desperately want to be rescued and taken care of themselves.
The "Red Riding Hood" also rescues out of a guilt trip arising from feeling responsible for all that has happened to them, as children always do. "Red Riding Hoods" also feel terrifically guilty about their helplessness, passivity and non-use of their power. Their subconscious feeling is, "I'm so mad at me for my weakness!". So they are prone to become involved in abusive relationships as an atonement strategy, and they then identify with the aggressor like they did with their parents. They assume that they "wanted it" (sexual abuse), that they are "asking for it" (physical abuse), that they "need it" (for punishment), and that they "deserve it". They are unable to feel resentment and they feel despair instead out of anticipation of pain about which they feel powerless to do anything. It is another aspect of learned helplessness and self-hatred.
Their chaotic and incompetent parenting history leads them to the belief that the universe can't be trusted to handle things, so they have to try to do so with rescue efforts. They also tend to have the feeling that the world is full of arbitrary, capricious authority figures due to the experience that much of the parenting pattern did not fit the context at all well. Their intentiality (see footnote) is severely crippled, as they have the feeling that nothing can be done, and they end up passively waiting to be rescued while they "prime the pump".
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
"Red Riding Hoods" always operate in a seemingly helpless, passive and helpful fashion. They seek to avoid seeming powerful because of the dreaded catastrophic outcomes involved. They always try to be helpful in indirect ways, through the elicited mediation and intervention of someone else, for instance, to avoid "tipping the dragon off". They will also use their power in the wrong way to "prove" that they are powerless, via the negativity of the outcomes.
They are super-starved for friendship, and they clutch desperately at the slightest indication of connection with some one. They tend to a "splitting" in their perceptions, where people are seen as either all good or all bad in their eyes. They therefore end up doing a lot of "parent"- and "grandparent"-rescuing, sexploitation-inviting, and "monster-saving". They also tend to play "underdog games", and to get engaged in "save the world" efforts out of the same overall system, and rescue-tripping becomes their total lifestyle.
The trouble is that their whole pattern tends to all-too-often result in their ending up in the "wolf's stomach". They often get "hooked on potential", on the basis of the hoped for release of the love within the other person so they in turn can be rescued. Unfortunately, they are hopelessly pulled to "fatal attraction"-type nemesis figure reruns of the "original cast". By doing the "Let's do the time-warp again!" rescue trip, they are in effect killing themselves and the "victims" they rescue by preserving the whole system in both parties via reinforcement, validation and facilitation. The hope, of course, is to transform the "wolf", to get Dad and Mom to love them and to be decent to them for once. It's their "wall of hope" in action.
Almost anything the "Red Riding Hood" does is a desperate attempt to put a new ending on the old story with the rejecting parents, and it always fails. They are attracted to super-withholders for safety, not getting attacked and security, but they get "nobody's home" because it is a re-run of the "Brontosaurus" parent. Or they go for chaos-courting "platter-slappers" who systematically knock the "golden platters" the universe presents them out of its hands. That is a re-run of the whole family system.
But most frequently, they go for abusive batterers in a misperception that the aggressiveness represents strength to rescue them. Their experience is that the batterer loves them if they are hit by the batterer. This is, of course, a re-run of the "Tyrannosaurus" parent. "Red Riding Hoods" blame themselves for the battering they get, and they buy the batterer's bullshit, thereby keeping themselves hopelessly hooked into the system. When they are nice in response to the assaults, it enrages the "Tyrannosaurus" further due to the guilt it induces.
They do the "Daddy/Mommy-rescue" number because they can't maturely individuate and relate to a real spouse. They are horrified at the prospect of "destroying" the person and themselves by acting and deciding on the basis of the person's performance rather than on the basis of their "promise(s)". They are so self-denigrating that they have a desperate need to be needed, and they will put up with battering as all they deserve, and as the only source of "love" in their life.
As for the "Tyrannosaurus" partner, the batterer, they are infantile, weak, overly dependent and totally unaware. They are fundamentally self-loathing and they hate their spouse for staying with the likes of them. The batterer tries to beat the "Red Riding Hood" into submission and into a possessed resource that they try maniacally to control. They will allow no autonomy, and they are infantilely abandonment-paranoid. Their parents didn't care so who could? They are an emotional corpse to whom all destruction comes easily, and they have homicidal parent-projection rage towards the "Red Riding Hood".
Batterers hate their mothers in particular, and they beat stand-ins to feel some power and to get even for the losses the mother caused. They have to have complete control of the partner and to force them into complete capitulation and validation of the batterer's reality. The "Red Riding Hood" begins to obey because "they are so good to me" (by providing the all-too-familiar familial pattern, and for staying with "such a worthless piece of trash"). The batterer beats the "Red Riding Hood" into the batterer's sense of helplessness, hostile dependence and nothingness. Both partners have fantasies of their death provoking "true love" from the partner finally.
The "Tyrannosaurus replacement" is so terrified of losing the "Red Riding Hood" that they utilize the only ways they know to make things happen, and they become extortionistic and insanely jealous frequently. A "battering cycle" of tension-build-up, explosive mindless release of rage and contrite respites occurs. The contrite kindness feeds the "wall of hope" and the starvation-based affection-addiction in the "Red Riding Hood". The desperate and self-deluding promises of the partner are believed because the alternative is abandonment, either by the partner's leaving or by the partner's probable total deterioration and suicide or other death-out. They become trapped in relief-power and intermittent reward effects getting connected up with the learned helplessness and rescue fantasies.
The batterer (sometimes known as the "souse-louse-spouse") is so fearful and ragefully dependent on their "parent" that they can never directly confront their fears. So they let their "Mr. Hyde" (referring to "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of good and evil ) out via alcoholic disinhibition, (loss of inhibition) self-justification and/or self-provocation. They can then attack the "parent" with impunity and non-accountability. When they "click back in" and realize what they have done, they put on their best behavior for a while to win "Mommy/Daddy's" trust. They then return to the usual pattern, and the homicidal hostility builds to another "Hyde-breakout" episode. The batterer's primal fear is of losing their "parent" (often "Mommy"). They also get the rageful, abandoning and assultive "Mommy" they deserve, especially if they happen to elicit the "cornered rabbit" reaction from the "Red Riding Hood" (where they come out of the corner with teeth and hind feet going a mile a minute in blind destructiveness as they do unto others what was done unto them).
Meanwhile, they tend to set up a "tight little island" with a good facade repetition of the home front, while pretending not to know what is going on. And of course, the whole pattern is being thoroughly imprinted on the next generation as they "pass it on" by doing unto others what was done unto them.
HOW CAN THEY BE HELPED?
Reachability of the inner essence, the soul, is the key to change in the "Red Riding Hood". Intervention should therefore target the development of self-love and self-validation, along with the induction of invalidations of the delusion of powerlessness and helplessness. Self-competence and self-commitment is the bottom line to their out-route. Any form of learned helplessness, victimhood and non-accountability can simply not be tolerated due to its totally destructive impact.
They need insight-induction around how it all came about and how their current patterns replay their history. They need to learn that it in no way relects their self-worth, nor is it in any way what they "deserve". They need realistic feedback on their personal resources, assets and value. They also need training in the exercise of personal power, such as assertiveness training and self-competence development. Finally, they need experiences that succeed in providing them powerful positive reality-based feedback when they are accountable, responsible, real and personally potent while not rescuing or hoping for rescue.
WHAT IS THEIR PURPOSE?
Before embarking on their cosmic purpose, we need to examine what the "red riding hood" myth is talking about. In the myth, the grand-mother is the "goddess" (the "Grand Mother"), the wolf is a "Shamanic Teacher", the woodsman is the "Earth Father", and mother is the "powerless role" sending "Red Riding Hood" (the soul) into the woods to learn the Truth and to be "swallowed" by the wolf to put her through the "dark night of the soul" that leads to transformation to the Goddess connection capacity, so that vulnerability and surrender become the access to Goddess powers rather than capitulations.
Translating that into more practical terms, the "red riding hood" trip is in effect the generator of a "wounded healer" who is able after healing themselves to lead others out of the forest. They do so with well-chosen and powerful non-rescuing interventions that tap into the deep feminine and the "Earth Mother" and "Earth Father" capacities of the healing powers of the soul. They become in effect a cosmically guided and aided therapist.
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INTENTIALITY: There are three requirements of intentiality that must be met by a purposeful-action cue: involvement cues (the target was the cause of the behavior); foreknowledge cues (cues that suggest the target had prior knowledge of the actions required before the behavior); and choice cues (signal that the target might have had other choices in addition to the target's behavior).
Franz Brentano is an influential thinker on the philosophy of mind and the inventor of the concept of "intentiality."
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