Where Is Your Compassionate Warrior Hiding?

(The Official New Horizons' Small "Zones Of Peace" Peace Activists Inventory)
Copyright, 1985 by Marcia E. Rosen, Excerpted from "Surviving Addictions" and "Exploring Your Dark Side: The Adventure Of A Lifetime (1998)."

Answer the following questions by marking the appropriate number score in the space to the right of the question that reflects your feelings or behaviors MOST accurately in this present moment.

Please use the following scoring:

Always True - 5, Often True - 4, Sometimes True - 3, Seldom True - 2, Never True - 1

1. Do you need to seek out excitement in your life? ____
Alternate question: Do you find yourself driven by urgency? ___

2. Do you angrily, defiantly or hopelessly tell yourself or others "I will do it myself? ____

3. Do you experience yourself as controlling and/or fearful of being controlled? ____

4. Do you ever create enemies? ____

5. Do you seek out excitement when it might hurt others that you care about? ____

6. Do you act rebellious or defiant in a way that hurts you? ____

7. Do you feel that anyone has "abandoned " you? ____

8. Do you avoid experiencing some feelings because "they are too painful"? ____

9. Do you have difficulty following other peoples/organizations rules? ____

10. Do you feel isolated or separate from others? ____

11. Do you find yourself trying to avoid feeling lonely? ____

12. Do you have any excessive or compulsive behaviors, feelings or attitudes? ____

13. Do you feel sensitive to rejection? ____

14. Do you have difficulty sustaining intimate relationships that are long lasting? ____

15. Do you blame yourself or others for negative outcomes in your life? ____

16. Do you find that your compulsive behaviors create chaos or disruption for others? ____

17. Do you experience yourself as determined to fight for what you want, "no matter what"? ____

18. Do you work until you are exhausted or burned-out? ____

19. Do you avoid having complete faith in God and/or a Higher Power and/or your Inner Self /being? _____

20. Do you avoid thinking about issues of death and/or limitations? ____

21. Do you find that your behaviors become expensive in money, time or relationships? ____

22. Do you feel angry or disappointed in your parent’s parenting of you ? ____

23. Are you suspicious of others? ____

24. Do you believe your survival depends on certain of your behaviors/possessions? ____

25. Do you indulge in behaviors or feelings you attempt to hide from others? ____

Any one or more of the following questions can be used instead of the above to give you a truer picture of your Dark Side Warrior, if the above questions are not ample for your assessment. If you use any of these, however, be sure to check to see that your scoring is still based on only twenty-five questions.

Alternate questions:

1. Do you find it difficult to think clearly about some of your behaviors or feelings ? ____

2. Do you leave relationships without coming to full closure with the other person (saying good-bye in a loving, caring way) and/or fully grieving the loss. ____

3. Do you find yourself acting like a grown-up while still feeling like a child inside? ____

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Add up your total score for exactly 25 questions. Your total score is: _____

Once you have completed this quiz, add up your score. WHAT YOUR SCORE TELLS YOU
If You Scored: 96 - 125, your inner warrior energy is currently being channeled into the Dark Side path in ways that are seriously damaging to yourself and others.
This means that your inner warrior energy is collected within your psyche in a manner that is not only robbing you of optimum health, joy, peace and overall well-being but is also harmful to others.

This Dark Side Warrior energy is high and aggressive within you. Your score suggests that you are intensely driven by what appears to you as survival-determined necessities, many of which, in reality, are only exaggerated wants (not needs). You are self-absorbed and, no doubt, discount others constantly as you do not know and understand the very basics of your own humanity or that of others. If you scored: 60 - 95, the amount of Dark Side energy you carry appears to be moderate.

However, your discounting of yourself and others may still remain high. Pay close attention to the ways in which you protect yourself from your emotions, particularly around current and past losses. Your emotional and physical health further requires that you monitor yourself and your relationships for signs of discounting, even subtle abuse.

If you scored: 36 - 59, you may still be carrying active Dark Side energies but you are moving in the direction of personal transformation. You have one of two basic modes if you scored in this group; Mode A or Mode B.

Mode A individuals may often be gentle, yet sometimes rather passive. There can often be a fine line between these two; gentle and passive. Careful scrutiny is necessary here. This person is often someone who has been deliberately moving in the direction of increasing well-being, body, mind and spirit.

Mode B denotes an individual who may have their Dark Side energy repressed. Individuals with Mode A will generally experience a great deal of peace, joy and calm while Mode B people will typically experience anger or resentment or depression.

Mode B individuals often use the Dark Side to maintain the status quo, meaning that their Dark Side is often buried or hidden beneath what may be a highly over-adaptive manner.

Mode A scores in this range can indicate excessive or inappropriate care taking. Often allowing others to abuse them emotionally or psychologically plays a significant role in relationships. Both Modes need to monitor an inclination to discount
others or allow others to discount them, even subtly.

Also, monitor an inclination to be inactive to avoid conflict and disharmony when it may be injurious to your well-being and keep a check on your current state of stability and balance. You may require more harmony than other types. Your personal level of internalized, unconscious Dark Side functioning can readily increase if you do not have fairly consistent harmony. You particularly need to be conscious of the impact on you from the Dark Side toxicity of others close to and around you.

Intimacy is a great need of yours and you need to pay close attention to getting this need met regularly to maintain your health.

If your score is: 25 - 35, your Dark Side may be sufficiently transformed so that you no longer are actively at the affect of its destructiveness. You may have come through the tempering process of a journey similar to mine and returned a Compassionate Warrior whose strength is combined with gentleness except in extreme emergencies.

Original copyright Marcia E. Rosen, 1985, formerly "Do You Have A Survivor/Addict Personality?"
Developed out of research for Exploring Your Dark Side: The Adventure Of A Lifetime and other books in the Women's Studies Department, University of Maryland, College Park, 1985.

I'll tell you a story about the night I discovered the first Hidden Purpose of my irresponsible self (my Gremlin). It may not seem like a highpoint in the telling, but it was a step that needed to be taken if I was to provide people with anything of value. And it was an integral part of my personal initiation into authentic adulthood.

I was living in France, co-managing a spiritual retreat center with my wife at the time. It was Sunday night, about nine-thirty, early winter, December, 1998, a chilly drizzly night. Ordinarily it was time for bed, but I received some feedback just then about an aspect of my behavior that had not changed even after repeated revelations. It struck me suddenly that change was absolutely hopeless so long as I remained ignorant of the root cause of my behavior.

My ignorance was driving me crazy. I was so frustrated I could not stay inside the old French farmhouse. I grabbed my jacket and a sleeping bag and thought I would sleep out in the barn, but even there I could not stop moving. I dropped the sleeping bag and kept walking, out the long stony driveway in the moonless night, then up the winding paved road past little farmhouses, cold drizzle dripping from the leafless trees and hitting my face.

Some invisible purpose had been at work all my life producing results from behind a curtain I could not open, and I needed it open. Until I could make that purpose conscious I could not be accountable for my actions. The conflict was that opening that curtain would destroy a part of my life, a part that was heretofore functioning unconsciously. I could never return to my ordinary life if I gained that knowledge, but I vowed not to end this hike without it. I would rather spend the rest of my days begging in some far away French village, nameless and penniless, than to continue being a marionette buffoon.

A furnace churned inside me, pumping my legs onward. Most of the night passed while I trudged furiously, wet, cold and thirsty, with huge blisters on my heels. My hips ached and each step became torturous. Village after village passed by, until I finally sat down on the guard rail at a fork in the road unable to decide which way to continue, completely drained. I lapsed into utter futility. Then the curtain parted. I saw in this moment, exhausted, alone in the dark night, that I was fulfilling the very purpose that I had been searching for. The unconscious machinations of this purpose had been relentlessly twisting my every action into fulfilling its specifications, because this was the one purpose that was normal for me, ever since I was one year old, and left alone in my crib, I thought, to die.

I had screamed and screamed in that crib and nobody came, nobody cared. If I was to survive past that moment in the crib, then many subtle systems had to shut down. I had to abandon softer wishes, needs for abundance of heart and nearness of soul. If I was to survive that moment in the crib, then it would only be by exerting my own efforts alone. Surviving became the underlying purpose of my life, the thing that I could do, the thing that secretly defined my standard of normal, the outcome of my every effort. I intended to stay forever in a mode of survival. I became a survival hero. This was my Hidden Purpose. My life was about surviving. Anything different from mere survival could not be my life.

I slowly rose back onto my aching, blistered feet and hobbled towards the nearest village, a few kilometers further on. Behind a monastery I found a small brick building that housed their central heating furnace. Mercifully the door was unlocked. I let myself in and by the light of the furnace collapsed onto the dusty cement floor. An hour or so later the sun lightened the grey sky enough that I could call my friend Thomas Bormann to come pick me up.

It took months to digest this experience. I could not explain to anyone what had happened. I could not figure it out in any linear fashion. But through this fierce internal underworld struggle I was able to distinguish between Low Drama and High Drama, to define Gremlin and its Hidden Purpose, to reveal the entire Thoughtmap of Possibility - the central map of Possibility Management, and to experientially and intellectually distinguish ordinary, extraordinary and archetypal relationship, the basis of the book: Building Love That Lasts.