MY Savior Complex???????????????????

This post’s title has lots of question marks because I have a lot of questions about the topic, how it relates to me, and what I should do about it.

The idea of a “savior complex”—sometimes called the messiah complex, hero syndrome, or white knight syndrome--got a lot of play in the decade before Trump’s second term pu6 lots of DEI efforts in doubt.

It gotta lot of coverage in the media mainstream as part of a critique of white liberals who seemed to assume that they (more or less alone) could solve the country’s racial problems, often approaching them in a rather tone-deaf kind of way. Critics called out what they often referred to as performative or symbolic actions that accomplished next to nothing. And sometimes were counterproductive. And I’m being charitable here.

While that remains an important issue for progressives like myself to take seriously, that’s not the version of the savior complex I want to treat (pun intended) here.

It has another meaning in an earlier version (Savior Complex 1.0 if you will) that overlaps some with its widespread use in the first half of this decade.

The 1.0 variant applies to a lot of us social change activists, even those of us who realize that we cannot realistically hope to reach what are frankly laudable but grandiose goals.. That’s the version I want to take on here, because it is the one that I have to address.

While there’s nothing wrong with having wide-ranging goals (after all, I talk about paradigm shifts at the drop of a clichéd hat), my version of the savior complex can paralyze you and/or send you off on quixotic quests that don’t maximize the real impact that you could have in nudging the system that you want to change in meaningful ways toward a distant goal like mine of creating a country in which most of the people solve most of their problems cooperatively most of the time.

As I hope you see, my “case” of Savior Complex 1.0 is far from severe. Yet, to the degree that it exists, it limits my effectiveness at a time when events at home and abroad demand the best activists like me have to offer.

And although I’ll limit this piece to my own situation, I also know that I am not alone.

Some Background

The issue came up in last week’s session with Dr. Whohasnoname, my brilliant and delightful therapist. She, of course, has a name, but we both respect the confidentiality of our relationship. Besides, knowing it wouldn’t do you any good because she isn’t taking any new patients.

That particular discussion, in fact, didn’t focus on my mental health. Over the years, we’ve discovered that we agree on most issues and she usually nods approvingly when I lay out what I refer to as my inside-out strategy that will be at the heart of my book that will come out in September, Peacebuilding Starts at Home.

So, in what was a typical session, we slid more or less seamlessly between my personal issues and the obstacles my colleagues and I expect to encounter as we put the goals in my book and the like into action. As part of that discussions, she mentioned the fact that she and the people she associates with are all looking for hope-inducing things they can do, at which point I mentioned David Byrne’s whimsical and powerful initiative, Reasons to be Cheerful.

At about that point, for reasons that I don’t remember, one of us mentioned the savior complex. And since it isn’t a is not a recognized disorder in the psychiatrists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), I assume it was me.

As I spun it out, I realized that I often go down a rabbit hole in which starts with my unspoken assumption that it is my personal responsibility to save the world.

Even though I know better.

I’m a trained political science and peacebuilder with a gazillion years of experience.

So, I know that no single individual is going to save the world.

Certainly not me. I don’t have a lot of formal leadership experience; in fact, I avoided leadership roles like the plague until I was into my sixties. I also don’t have the money, contacts, and other resources I would need to lead a movement that could realistically produce a paradigm shift.

No one does.

That doesn’t keep me from having delusions of leadership grandeur. Which when they don’t happen, both keep me in the clouds.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with thinking big.

Unless it keeps you from taking concrete (if small) steps that can move the systems you are a part of closer to your overarching goals—in my case, the paradigm shift I’ve been ranting about since the 1960s.

Bottom line. Even though I know better, I judge myself far too often against an absurd standard, which I jokingly (or is it jokingly?) refer to as changing the world by the end of the month. Well, it’s June 25 today, so I’ll cut myself some slack and set my deadline at the end of July.

That puts me in a curious bind. I dream big and come up with dreams of what a big beautiful movement for social change would look like.

Yet, when I think big in ways that magnifies my (perceived and delusional) sense of responsibility but does not lead to concrete things I could do doesn’t help me reach the people I want to serve (including Dr. Whohasnoname and people like her for whom the book and the movement we plan to spawn with it are aimed).

Then, I kick myself in the emotional rear end for not having met my (supposed) responsibility.

Rather than taking tangible steps that would get us closer to my paradigm shift and does so in ways that we could build on to take us even farther and even faster.

Even though I have tons of experience doing just that.

Do I hear a vicious cycle developing here?

One that I better break out of as social and political conditions continue to deteriorate?

Diagnosis

In the week after that session, I did a fair amount of reading my Savior Complex 1.0 which she and I talked about at my appointment on Monday. I’ll spare you the personal therapeutic sides of what I learned and focus on how I now see ways of addressing my “case” going forward.

Like most psychological conditions, the savior complex exists on a spectrum. People suffer from it to varying degrees. In my case given my now sixty years as an activist and educator, my version of it cannot have been all that severe. Still, it slows me down at a time when the news is telling me that I should be speeding things up.

From what I read in the week between our appointments, Dr. Whohasnoname’s peers tend to think of my version of it as including thoughts and behaviors that have dozens of causes which may help explain why they don’t list it as a disorder on its own.

The ones that resonate with me grow out of patients’ perceived need to “save” or “rescue” others, even if it comes at the expense of their own well-being. In extreme cases (not mine, I hasten to point out), it can accompany serious disorders. In the most (not mine) severe cases, it has been linked to serious disorders including narcissism, schizophrenia, and the like which Dr. Whohasnoname hasn’t raised with me.

More often—at least in people like me—it is seen as a symptom of other problems like codependency, anxiety, and other disorders that have found their way into the DSM. People who fall into that category often struggle with setting healthy boundaries, experience burnout, or develop unhealthy relationships due to their overwhelming need to help or “fix” others—traits that have their roots in an upbringing that was short on all of the above.

That hit home. As a professor, I loved working with students who did not live up to their potential, despite putting a lot of time and effort into their studies. In my personal life, until Gretchen and I got together almost forty years ago, I was drawn to troubled partners whom I wanted to “rescue,” something, I realized, the good doctor and I haven’t talked about much because that all happened so long ago. Codependency? It can also grow out of an unmet need for validation and self-worth. Anxiety? Or out of a sense that you need to put the good of others over your own well-being. Burnout (I have managed to largely escape that)?

At the same time, I was never an abject failure.

Far from it.

But I have never done a great job of translating my big goals and dreams into tangible things I could do that would lay the groundwork or scaffolding for a paradigm shift. As a teacher and mentor, I’ve helped plenty of people do that.

But myself?

As Perplexity (my favorite AI tool) put it:

In summary: Wanting to help others is not inherently a sign of a savior complex. It becomes a concern when the helping is compulsive, boundaryless, and tied to your own sense of worth or control

What I Can Do About All This

And, because my appointment came early this week, I took the opportunity to discuss all of this with Dr. Whohasnoname before I put the finishing touches on this post.

I’ll spare you what we plan to do about my personal issues.

That undoubtedly will include increasing my sense of self-awareness, something I’ve already been doing in my years working with her and, indeed, in writing this blog post in the first place. More likely, she will want to reexplore the roots of my own limited self-confidence paired with a desire to rescue others (Perplexity’s term, not mine). She will also probably return to setting boundaries and, with them, reasonable expectations of what I could do between now and the end of July or even in the rest of my lifetime.

Instead, I used the time to further develop a plan I was already working on to tap my personal skill set to not only break out of my looming but low grade vicious cycle but pull a growing number of the people I want to serve along with me.

None of what follows is wholly new or the result of an “aha moment” that just because I thought about the Savior Syndrome 1.0. But it has led me to refocus in a new way on something that has been at the heart of my work both politically and with Dr. Whohasnoname which is best reflected in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer which also serves as the epigraph and organizing principle for chapter 3 of my book:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

How can I find the wisdom to identify and then change the things I can control more often and spend less of my time tilting at peacebuilding windmills which I have no realistic chance of reaching.

In fact, I made a lot of progress in that direction in the week between our two appointments.

I will lay that out in more detail in posts to come once it is more fully fleshed out, but let me end this one with one concrete idea that takes advantage of something I know that I do well—convene and empower diverse groups of people.

In doing the research for Peacebuilding Starts and Home and in everything else I have done in the last few years, I have built a sizeable network of peacebuilders and others who share some core beliefs. Some were drawn to me because of work we’ve done at AfP and beyond. Just as often, I was drawn to others because of the ways that they have expanded my own understanding of the problems facing our country.

I’m going to take concrete steps to build a rapidly growing network of peacebuilders and other change advocates who could help Americans adopt both new cultural norms and policies in both the public and private sectors.

I haven’t fleshed out the details in my own mind. More importantly yet, the people I will be working with have ideas of their own which will help shape mine—in fact, because some of them are in Washington for other reasons, we have been working through some of them in a series of meetings and social events over the last two days.

Still, the most goal of the network I’m creating is already clear. Convene people who can themselves simultaneously convene and inform people to create such a movement. It won’t do everything because no one initiative can do anything. But it can become a hub that brings like-minded people together no matter what specific issue they focus on or tactics they prefer using.

I will be convening about fifteen of the most reliable and creative people I know (alas, not Dr. Whohasnoname because of the limitations that come in therapeutic relationships) who have the capacity to bring new people into this hub or whatever it turns into as it grows. Participants may still focus on climate change or racial justice or some other issue, but they will increasingly think of each other as partners and, more importantly, will seek to take concrete actions together that would bring us closer to the paradigm shift that will include peacebuilding as one of several tools.

I will ask this particular set of people because I know that each of them has the capacity to set the group off on a trajectory of exponential growth which I have been obsessed with ever since I saw this remarkable video, The Power of Ten, which was a) made for IBM by b) the architects/designers Ray and Charles Eames, and c) narrated by Philip Morrison who designed the trigger for the first atomic bombs and who told me about the video when we met in the early 1980s.

To keep the math simple, let’s assume that I only recruit ten other people to join my team. Let’s assume, too, that they each only attract ten people to join us in the rest of 2025. We would have 110 people (the ten of us plus one hundred new ones). And then they each find ten more people in 2026 which gives us 1110. If the same thing happens in 2027, we get to 11,110. We would top ten million before the decade is out. They obviously would not all be professional peacebuilders, but Americans from all walks of life united by their desire to find something like Byrne’s reasons to be cheerful.

But what if we could speed things up to the point that each of us find ten people every six months? Or I start with (as I plan) more like 15 people? In both cases, my numbers grow even faster.

Again, the devil is still in the details, including the fact that I have only shared these ideas with four of the people I hope to recruit (as well as Dr. Whohasnoname). The plans will evolve. Although I won’t succeed in “kissing my savior syndrome good by,” I will have made some progress toward that goal and the world just might end up a little bit better off.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.