The Archetype of the Necessary Hero
Are you Living for Yourself or for Others? The Importance of Meeting Your Own Needs
As humans, we have an innate need to connect with others, to feel a sense of belonging and significance. We often prioritize the needs of others above our own, whether it be our family, friends, or even our business. But what happens when we continuously pour all our energy into others, leaving nothing for ourselves?
When we neglect our own needs and focus solely on others, we give up control of our lives. We become the supporting cast in our own story, and everyone else takes center stage. We lose sight of who we are and what we truly want. In short, we stop living for ourselves.
The archetype of the Necessary Hero is a powerful and universal symbol that strikes a chord with those who have faced trauma or adversity in their early lives. It's a heroic figure that we don't often see portrayed in popular media, for it's not about a hero who willingly steps forward to fight for good. Instead, it's about someone who is forced to bear the burden of the world while struggling with the scars of a turbulent childhood and unmet needs. But what if that wounded child is also the necessary hero that can lead us to our greatest potential?
The Driver to Be a Hero: Becoming the True Hero of Your Life
In every hero story, there's a pivotal moment when the hero must decide whether to step into their power or remain a bystander. The driver to be a hero doesn't always come from external rewards or validation, but often from a deep internal calling—one that's birthed out of adversity. Becoming the hero of your own life is about harnessing that calling and stepping into a new version of yourself.
How Trauma Creates the Desire to Save
For those who’ve endured trauma, the desire to protect and shield others often becomes the driving force behind their actions. This desire, while noble, can sometimes become entangled in unhealthy patterns of self-neglect or overachievement. The "hero" archetype emerges, not as a person choosing greatness, but as someone who feels obligated to it. They step into roles they never asked for, and the battle becomes one of balancing service to others and service to self.
The Shift: From Martyrdom to Empowerment
For many Necessary Heroes, their story has been one of sacrifice—giving more of themselves than is healthy in the name of love, duty, or survival. But to truly become a hero, one must transition from being the martyr to the empowered. This means recognizing that while it’s noble to serve others, it’s essential to serve oneself as well. When the hero prioritizes their well-being, they move from survival to thriving, from obligation to purpose.
The Hero’s Evolution: Writing a New Story
The real hero's journey involves evolving beyond the patterns of the past. Rather than carrying the burden of being "everything for everyone," the hero learns to set boundaries, heal past wounds, and take charge of their own narrative. This is where they transition from being the "Necessary Hero" to being the empowered leader of their own story, shaping their destiny with intention rather than obligation.
IN THIS ARTICLE WE WILL COVER:
The Role of the Necessary Hero
A Fight Response and a need to Control
Circumstances leading to the Role of the Necessary Hero
How does this Behaviour Affect your Life and Business
The Importance of Reparenting Ourselves
A Thought Experiment
Podcast
Conclusion
The Role of the Necessary Hero
The Role is one that is thrust upon them, carrying a heavy burden with few means of escape. Often, it is the oldest child who takes on this role, and it forces them to compensate in ways that exhaust and deny their true selves. They are constantly striving to present a flawless facade to the world, sacrificing their own needs and desires in order to make their family look good. This creates a cycle of overachievement and a belief that external validation is the key to inner peace.
The Necessary Hero is characterized by an inability to say "no" to others and a deep-seated need to please those around them. They prioritize the happiness of others over their own, and they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders to feel worthy of love. However, this is an unhealthy way to live, and it requires the Necessary Hero to sacrifice their own well-being to maintain their image.
In order to break free from this pattern of behaviour, the Necessary Hero must acknowledge the reasons why they sell themselves out and take intentional steps to align with their core needs and values. It's important to honour oneself as much as others and to recognize that true validation comes from within, not from external sources.
The Necessary Hero archetype often stems from childhood experiences of neglect or overachievement, which create a need to prove oneself and take on excessive responsibility. It's important to understand the roots of this behaviour in order to break free from it and live a more authentic life.
A Fight Response and a need to Control
Fight types avoid any sense of real intimacy by unconsciously isolating themselves and pushing others away by alienation with their anger and controlling demands as a way to meet their unmet need of unconditional love. Someone stuck also avoids vulnerable relating because his past makes him believe that he will be attacked or abandoned as he was in childhood. This is why showing vulnerability often triggers painful emotional flashbacks. With having this unrealistic demand of the unmet childhood need it also cancels out the possibility of any real intimacy. It can seem narcissistic but fight types will convince themselves that there is nothing wrong with them and everyone else is the problem. Eventually showing up as super defensive reactions and responses in relationships and never feeling as if you can switch off and actually let your guard down. It’s this me against the world thing that can eventually lead to perpetuating your own burnout cycle.
Fight types believe that they can create safety, avoid abandonment and create a secure healthy love through power and control, it is deeply subconscious.
Circumstances leading to the Role of the Necessary Hero
Absentee Caretaker: The Impact on Necessary Heroes
More often than not, a Necessary Hero is followed by an absentee caretaker of some type (Howard, Martin, Berlin & Brooks-Gunn, 2011). This could be a parent or caretaker who is physically or emotionally absent, requiring the child to assume responsibility before they are ready. They may have to take care of younger siblings or physically and emotionally care for an immature parent lost in their own grief, addictions, and poor decision-making.
Premature Maturity: Growing Up Too Soon
The Necessary Hero is defined by their forced inheritance of picking up their caretakers' responsibilities far before they’re ready, creating self-denying habits later on. This premature maturity can create someone who carries an “old soul” because they had to grow up before their time.
Eldest Sibling: The Responsibility of Protection
The Necessary Hero in your life is often the eldest sibling. They can feel that they have to step in and get in the way of danger to protect their younger siblings when things get chaotic or turbulent in a dysfunctional household. This pattern can continue on throughout their lives, preventing them from pursuing their own happiness over time.
Over-Achievement: Proving Responsibility for Love
Over-achievement is another common result of taking on the responsibility of others before their time. The Necessary Hero often feels the need to prove themselves to both their caretakers and others in their environments, creating the idea that exceptional standards must be reached to be loved in adulthood.
Loss of Self: Dissociation and Separation
Because this archetype has to take on so much responsibility so soon, they never get to truly explore who they are or what they want for their own lives. This can lead to dissociation or separation from self, causing conflict in adult life. Necessary Hero archetypes have to be careful not to lose themselves in their pursuit to make others happy.
Personal Exhaustion/Burnout: Sacrificing Self for Others
The Necessary Hero sacrifices themselves for the benefit of others, filling their schedules with other people’s appointments and constantly saying “yes” to anyone who needs them. This archetype doesn’t take care of themselves because they’re always seeing to the needs of others, leading to personal exhaustion, burnout, and a bleak detachment from happiness and self-awareness that can be both numbing and destructive.
The Dangers of Using Busyness as a Mechanism for Healing
It's important to recognize that constantly putting others' needs before our own is not a sustainable way to live. It may feel like we are doing good and making a difference, but in reality, we are only avoiding our own unmet needs. We use busyness as a mechanism for healing, pouring ourselves into work or other people's problems to validate ourselves through external means.
We may climb the ladder of success or help others achieve their goals, but if we do it solely to avoid meeting our own need for validation, we will never truly feel satisfied. We become like a person trying to touch the rainbow they created for everyone else - always coming close, but never close enough.
How does this Behaviour Affect your Life and Business?
Let’s paint a simple picture. You are a human being, not a human doing, and when you are trying to control all aspects of your life and how you express yourself, you end up burnt out. You end up stuck in cycles that may only start becoming noticeable as you age and your body has lost its natural rhythm with life.
You find yourself lost in work, never feeling like you’re down, overwhelmed and functioning at an unstainable space. Moving from work your need to control your health, your diet, your partner, and your kids. If ANYTHING is out of line, you find it exceptionally difficult to not react to the situation, as it did not unfold according to your assumption or expectation.
This may even come across as neurotic, not trusting your partner, not trusting your associates, colleagues, even execs as they ‘cannot do it as good as you can’t or you have so much self-doubt due to this mask you have found yourself living with/as.
Does any of the above seem sustainable? Being unregulated, disconnected and stuck in your head, is a recipe for burnout, stretched relationships and a lot of anger and resentment, directed inwards and outwards.
And to bluntly put this to you, this WILL affect your bottom line in your life in terms of the overall quality, happiness and satisfactory components and actual bottom line in your business.
The Importance of Reparenting Ourselves
To break this cycle, we need to reparent ourselves. We need to learn to validate ourselves and meet our own needs, rather than relying on external sources for validation. It's not easy to change this behaviour, but it's necessary for our own well-being.
We can start by being honest with ourselves about our true desires and needs. We can set boundaries and say no when necessary, and prioritize self-care and self-love. We can learn to be our own heroes, standing firm for what we truly want and need.
The Thought Experiment
To help us understand the importance of meeting our own needs, we can try a thought experiment. Imagine encountering yourself on the street without recognizing that it was you. Would your perception of yourself be different from your internal sense of self? Would you feel like 'that' person would need validation from anyone or anything?
This thought experiment can help us gain perspective on how much we rely on external validation. If we can see ourselves as a complete person, without the need for validation from others, we can start to reparent ourselves and meet our own needs.
Podcast
Conclusion
The archetype of the Necessary Hero resonates with so many because it taps into our collective need for validation, love, and connection. Yet, to truly become the hero of our lives, we must learn to care for ourselves as much as we care for others. We must learn that self-sacrifice is not the path to worthiness.
