We had a greet meeting this morning in which "savior behavior" was brought up. I know I do it a lot when I try to take care of someone else's stuff , that is theirs to take care of, enabling if you will. But I've also had it done to me. This is what I what to talk about and in a sense warn others of.

After my divorce from my third husband I was in pretty sad shape emotionally and physically. I had had a horse fall on me and break my shoulder and I lived on a farm at the time and could do little to help myself.

My emotional statis made me vulerable to a preacher that I had that was going though a divorce at the same time that I was. He called on me all the time to see if I was doing ok and was also put in charge of being the person to supervise visitations between my husband and our daughter. My husband had been caught watching child porn and had voluntarily signed over his rights to see her unsupervised. This was handled by a lawyer. The catch was I had to come up with the person to supervise the visitations and that person became my pastor, the only one I knew to turn to at the time.

This put the pastor into a savior complex kind of mode, I later learned from my counselor. He was trying to protect me and my daughter and we grew close and although nothing happened physically between us, it ended up in a huge arguement in the end that effected my spiritual life greatly, and still does to this day to some extent.

I don't blame the pastor completely for this action, although he was the professional and shouldn't have been calling me at home so often (many times at 7 a.m. before I went to work) and should have kept a professional distance from me since we were going through divorces at the same time. I also had a responsiblility to detach from him when I recognized that it wasn't healthy for me to have this relationship and ended it myself. Which to my credit, I tried at one point, but he talked me out of leaving the church (which was my way of dealing with it) and persuaded me to stay. The calls continued until the argument over a girl answering his phone "hello" at the parsonage got me angered and I called to ask him why there was a girl answering the parsonage phone "hello". It's a small rural church in a small country town and people will talk, I said. You should have at least had her say "This is so-and so Methodist church" and not just hello. Well I was brought before the pastor-parish relationsions chairperson and the church administrator for accusing him of what I was accusing him of. I don't know what he thought I was accusing him of other than this was inappropriate. Anyway I got linched and left the church feeling very much like this was all my fault, when he had initiated the contact between us.

I am responsible for taking care of myself and the lesson I learned from this is don't put yourself in a vulnerable position, or allow others to take care of you when you can take care of yourself. I now have my daughter in a program called Project Safe that monitors her visitations with her dad and I'm in control of the situation and a policeman is present, so I feel much better about that.

The second experience I had with Savior Behavior was when I had my shoulder broke which also happended on the heals of the incident with the pastor. I had a cowboy come in and start helping me with my farm stuff, much beyond his responsiblility to help. He to had 'savior behavior' in that he wanted to help me pull out of the rut that I had found myself in and crowned himself as the savior that would make that happen.

Well I had a problem with him because he drank, and I let him know of the previous relationships I'd had with drinkers and I couldn't get in another one, so he quit drinking cold turkey. No program, no AA, just quit. He stayed sober for a year, so I married him. He is still sober today (3 years later) but very much a dry drunk. He feels responsible for everything I do and that my mother does and tries to be our 'savior' in so many ways. I guess this is also the equivilent to co-dependent behavior.

My Cowboy husband that wanted to ride in on his white horse and save the day, has not been able to. We lost the farm and are now living in town. Not that it is his fault, it's just that I fed into the same lie of denial that he could save my farm that he believed and didn't trust myself to handle the problems that the farm had. I turned the decisions over to him and now I have resentments. I could have lost the farm anyway, whether I was running it or him, but he didnt' let me have any say in things and I lost my control of my family's farm and the knowledge that I did my best to perserve it for the next generation. Now that is my shortcoming to deal with, I can't blame him for it.

So in conclusion, my attempt to let "other's" come in and play the "savior role" for me has proved to be disasterous in practice. I would have served myself better to let my HP be my "savior" and turned my life and will over to him, instead of another person. I have learned my lesson today and turn my life and my will over to the care of my HP, whom I still chose to call God, despite the bad influences the experience with my church had created. I am now responsible for my relationship with my HP, not someone else. I have changed churches and have made new spiritual insights to this dilema.

Thanks for listening to me ramble about my experiences with "Savior Behavior" hope it helps someone else, not to fall into the same "pit" when they are feeling vulnerable.

Java