Loy Young

Senior Hero Takes on Villains Disguised as Heroes

Villains often pretend to be great philanthropists. That means actually giving money to the poor, the oppressed, but just enough to get into entrusted with positions to siphon off even more money. Villains disguised as heroes are usually the smartest of them all. They may raise lots of money for the poor, but so little of it ever finds its way to where it is needed. The senior hero has to follow the money trail, sometimes through many layers of corporations, offshore banks, and trusts; it is quite an undertaking to discover the real culprit.

At times the heroine has been hired to make the villain posing as a hero look good. In this case the heroine requires co-workers, as that kind of villain is far too sophisticated for any one person to catch. The senior heroine must learn not to be reckless and put her family at risk because villains love to terrorize heroes by going after members of their family. Often senior heroes require a witness protection program for themselves and their families.

What is important is stopping the villain posing as a hero, that is what it takes to be a winner in the Soul Game. A senior hero cannot be bought because he has passed the tests of greed and fame, and prefers to remain anonymous. You cannot even threaten him with death because he would rather die than live in a world made up of villains posing as heroes. And that way he becomes a winner.

Last but not least

The most challenging route to senior heroine is discovering and triumphing over your own villain nature. We have all three, the victim, villain and hero, within us. Discovering and saving your own victim self makes your stint in the villain role so much shorter. Why? Because you are learning how to triumph over adversity in a good way that puts you on the heroine path. Triumphing over adversity in your own victim situations using villain methods puts you on the villain path, which is one of its justifications.

I encourage you to not increase your life style beyond your ability to problem solve it with good heroine methods. I cannot tell you how many clients who wanted fame and high living standards, did not have the ability to achieve both without resorting to villain methods. If that is you, contract to the life style to a scale you can deal with as a heroine, then increase your abilities to the style you really want. Besides all life styles can truly be joyous if you engage with an open heart with those around you.

Wars

Remember, in the Soul Game heroes may not to hurt the innocent, yet, on the battlefield as well as in the family room, this rule is often violated. Breaking the rule destroys heroes emotionally. Long after they are relieved of duty, the faces of the innocent victims haunt them, reminding them that they lost that round of the Soul Game in which everyone is accountable for their actions.

Religious wars, always with God on each of the sides, send naïve gullible heroes to die for an idea. But their reckless aggression is fueled by prejudiced and arrogant hatred and rage, blowing up innocent bystanders as young as school children, even of their own faith. Since their triumph is not fueled by passion and compassion, they fail the Soul Game. That is not goodness triumphing but evil destroying evil. Two evils do not make a good.

I found it very interesting that in a video aired just some weeks ago the second in command of Al Qaida claimed that they never killed the innocent, just their enemy. Of course, in the Soul Game, a hero must first prove that the enemy is evil. Only then can you kill and kill and kill, all in the name of goodness.

Villains obviously have no such constraints; that is the rule of the game. Whatever they can get away with, they will do, it is all part of the game. A hero must often use overwhelming force to stop the villain. But what if that is not allowed?

Final Test of Senior Hero

Many of our laws treat the villain as a victim whom the hero cannot hurt. If the villains put their arsenal in churches, schools or hospitals, using the elderly, disabled or children as shields, our senior hero is in a quandary. If he does not take out the stockpiles of weapons, bombs, missiles, many more innocent will be hurt. Eventually every senior hero is faced with the decision of killing innocent people or allowing the villain to get away this time so that he may hurt and kill many more victims hereafter.

What should the hero do? Some justify a bloody intervention with the good of the greater number, bypassing their feelings. But that is another trap, since feelings fuel all our deeds. Often the hero will sacrifice himself, to punish himself for killing the innocent. But doing so he did not triumph over evil but failed the test and died a victim.

It is crucial at that stage to include the feelings. Yes, the heroine probably need to kill some innocent people for the greatest good, but she may not isolate a part of herself in doing so.

Best of Good – Best of Evil

Does she kill with compassion, with love for the victims that now are becoming the sacrificial heroes, the martyrs for the cause? She will have to find her own balance, be willing to take the best of evil, which is to destroy, and the best of goodness, which is to build. She will have to destroy with love, with passion to build a better world where victims are not used as human shields. Imagine, killing with love, for a better tomorrow!

The heroine has already triumphed over evil but not falling into the trap that the villain set up for her. Now she has to deal with her enemy. Neither sitting down for a good heart-to-heart nor putting the villain behind bars solves the problem. On the contrary, it only paves the way for the villain to strike again, once well-meaning people take pity on him and release him.

These supposedly good people are exhibiting the evil in goodness. They will often sacrifice the hero, so that the villain can flourish. They protest that villains may not be killed; instead we must house them, feed them, and take care of them as if they were victims. And we become victim taxpayers ourselves, as our prisons fill up with even more murderers.

Taking a villain out of the game gets harder all along. Often the villains kill each other in jail, but not before they rape and torture each other. Villains have no problem killing anyone – victim, villain or hero. Perhaps a hero should hire villains to kill others, just as some movies have suggested.

But in reality, the senior heroine must pass this test, and stop outright villains, using superior force. One of my favorite heroes on a radio show I had in North Carolina was a lawyer in Alabama, a member of a non-profit organization, who literally stripped the Ku Klux Klan of its power. The organization took the Klan to court one at a time, and did not stop suing until the Klan’s members lost their farms and their money and had no means left to continue their hatred. The hero lawyer was fully passionate about his cause, and yet talked about his pity for the Klan members although he also was concerned about possible retaliations.

Frequently the hero sees that his hands are tied if he tries to triumph over villains in the open. At that point he or she may join secret services like the FBI or CIA that allow the hero to put on disguises just like the villain does. Often you cannot tell a hero from a villain, especially if he is infiltrating a villain’s gang.

A hero must learn to triumph over the villain who squeezes the life out of her victim under the pretext of loving attention that he gives her willingly all that he has. Obviously a hero does not learn how to do this all at once.

Dealing with Villains Posing as Victims

A beginning hero is often deceived by villains posing as victims. As villains never change, the hero feels like a failure as he is unable to save the supposed victim. Even worse, villains posing as victims often sue naive heroes who then withdraw, and stop their efforts to help others. They then of course become the losers of the Soul Game and regress back into the victim stage. Several of my clients spent their lives as well as their life savings trying to prove their innocence and competence. One high profile psychologist had been in the papers daily for alleged fraud and incompetence. Two years later with her life’s savings depleted, the lady was able to prove her innocence, but that notice never even made the front page. Her reputation remained stained, as most people only remembered the front-page scandal. The strain on her almost brought her to her knees. When she did triumph over the villain, she never even received a penny to compensate for her legal fees and lost income as her adversary had hid his money too well to be found. Still, the virtues this woman gained were worth the money and the time. Once her innocence was proven, she wanted to help others and became an expert witness for similar law cases, with villains posing as victims trying to fleece other professionals.

The clues

A villain’s story is always convincing, but his actions do not add up. Once she learns to feel the entrapment in those stories, telling friend from foe becomes a lot easier. The hero must not allow herself to become mesmerized by the words, but to pay close attention to the action. They will not be congruent with the words.

Dealing with Outright Villains

Quite often our senior hero grew up championing the underdog and triumphing over bullies as a child and teenager and just continued, taking up vocations that deal with outright villains such as the police, the armed forces, or the fire brigade.

These heroes are well trained and armed for their job. They employ good strength to overcome harmful strength.

However, before the hero wins the Soul Game, there are plenty of traps along the way.

Often the victims feel that the only way to support themselves financially is by continuing to play the victim role and even risk getting killed. Occasionally these people apply for the most dangerous jobs. Putting strong hero tools in their hands usually just leads to sabotage unless they can change their victim mentality. And some can!

Dealing with Villains Posing as Heroes

If a hero justifies his deeds with contempt and anger, he is still full of addictions and becomes an easy prey for other villains who can spot him from a mile away. They will entice him with money, fame, and sex, depending on his whim and fancy. Then down goes hero for the count. He may get up again, but until he expels his toxins of hate and anger, he will always be toppled again. That is the trap that goads heroes into misusing their power.

The Soul Game is an interactive, virtual reality game to train heroes by developing and appealing to our emotional nature. The players in the Soul Game behave much like the avatars in very sophisticated environments such as www.secondlife.com. The value of these games has also been discovered by real-life enterprises. SAP Labs in Palo Alto for instance are currently developing 3-D virtual world simulations to train oilrig workers for evacuation procedures.

In a similar vein the Soul Game is a world simulation. The storyline or plot of the game, Goodness Triumphs Over Evil, make for an interesting and often risky adventure trip into many different scenarios until the winners are finally rewarded with all the virtues necessary for a heroine.

It is easy to see how virtues are developed by helping victims; but maintaining integrity in a confrontation with villains takes some real emotional skills.

The Soul Game is played in an environment of dualities. The Core Duality is Power and Love, and by now our heroine has indeed developed these two virtues. Keeping them while triumphing over villains who personify evil in the Soul Game can be quite a challenge.

The emotional key is in the words “triumphs over”. In one dictionary definition, triumph means to be ecstatic with joy. Passion is a great word for me, triumphing or conquering with passion.

Beware Anger

Beware of anger. Of course, like everything else, anger also is a duality; it has positive and negative aspects. Passion is the positive aspect of anger and is the emotional fuel to bring about change for the better. If there is one quality that separates our senior heroine other players in the Soul Game, it is her accountability. Long ago she left blame behind, finding blame was a trap. Finding her accountability in any situation is what frees her.

Negative anger is based on blame. Destruction with anger and hate leads to death, the greatest emotional threat hanging over the Soul Game. But our heroine has already developed the virtue of courage, which means she had to overcome her fear of death before taking on the heroine role.

But she has no intention of behaving in a reckless, out-of-control manner. Life and death are other aspects of the Soul Game’s core duality: Life belongs to Love and Death to Power.

Our senior heroine is truly excited about triumphing over villains, which means exposing their action and stopping them. She is not about to succumb to anger and hate as her emotional energy to triumph.

The villain justifies all his actions on the premise that life is unfair but our heroine will have compassion for his faulty thinking. Although compassion is a virtue there is nothing weak about it. Passion and Compassion is our senior hero’s cry.  Passion to bring about change! And compassion for the villain, who is but an intermediate player in the Soul Game and a loser.

Fallen Heroes

Most overly strong heroes are temporarily thrown back to the vulnerable victim stage as they try to deal with their shame and shock of being overthrown with ensuing scandals.

At this point the former leader wisely usually turns to seek help himself in order to triumph over his own destructive patterns.

Read the rest…

As our junior heroine embarks on his journey to triumph over evil, she often  mistakes an unbalanced hero for a villain. It is often hard to tell the difference because most heroes are strong and when they are out of control prone to domineer others, just like villains. Their overwhelming strength may wreck havoc and hurt those who are weaker.

The difference between such a hero and a villain lies in the intention.

Read the rest…

THE JUNIOR HEROINE

The third player is the winner of the Soul Game, an interactive educational game with the storyline Goodness Triumphs over Evil. The role of heroes and heroines is the most demanding of all, their path is full of pitfalls, but promises plenty of adventure.

Since it takes so much time to become a hero there are always more victims in the Soul Game as theirs is the beginner’s role. The world is also populated by many more villains than heroes as that role requires a little more skill than the victim’s part but not as much as the hero’s. The sheer numbers of victims and villains in relation to the heroes often gives the impression that life is indeed unfair and that all efforts of heroes and heroines are never enough to save them all.

Read the rest…

Being raised a hero

A few fortunate children grow up with hero parents whom they learn to mimic quite young. Being a hero and taking care of others just seems a natural way of life to them. John’s father was a doctor whom he greatly admired. Sure enough, John grew up and became a physician just like his dad. In this case, John was driven by positive energy, and he therefore did not experience the ups and downs in business that other people do when the emotional energy is derived from pain. Read the rest…

The star in every Western epic, every family saga and Jurassic Park is, of course, the hero. In the Broadway play Goodness Triumphs Over Evil the heroine rescues the victim and goes on to defeat the villain. Both, hero and victim know the script well. No matter how long it takes, in the end the good guys win.
True heroes believe in the drama of the victim’s lot, or the villain’s. The suffering is what our emotions relate to, and the better the plot the more our feelings become involved. Especially hard-luck stories appeal to the heroines as they share the characteristic purity and gullibility with the victim.
Both, victim and hero also know that the final act ends with ‘They Lived Happily Ever After’. Did you ever notice that the happy end is always very short, and then the curtain comes down fast?

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THE VILLAIN

The Soul Game is an interactive game that you must participate in to become a winner. It is also an emotional game and the more you develop your sensitivity, the easier it gets to recognize and triumph over the villain. You need to be able to feel when you are being conned into submission or teased into a gilded cage. Your emotions must recognize an abusive villain by the energy he or she emits. The common denominator of all villains is a distinct lack of heart, leaving you shivering with cold rather than enjoying the warmth. Their energy pulls you in quickly so they can take whatever they want from you. It does not flow outward with generosity. Whatever villains do give is tainted with the same in-pulling energy. Once your sensitivity develops more, you will feel that any gifts are only given to set you up for a bigger take while a hero’s gifts are full of outward energy, and the act of giving to you is an end in itself. Read the rest…

Villains want to conquer and need strong sex,intimacy is way too soft, too giving.

A woman I will call Simone was a high-class hooker. She appealed to strong men who wanted to be dealt with in a rough manner. That was how Simone found her power, by literally beating men. She took money for using whips, handcuffing her clients and making them bark like dogs before she would have sex with them. Read the rest…

In the Soul game, the villain enjoys triumphing over those that are weaker.

Misuse of Power - Outright Villain

Initially, the villain because of his strength and weapons’ arsenal threatens the life of the victims. Pure misuse of power in the form of abuse is the primary tool of the villain in this stage. Read the rest…

It all goes back to the beginning. At birth, we all start out as victims since we cannot take care of ourselves. The path to either hero or villain leads all young children to a situation in which they themselves or their loved ones are victimized, which has a deep and lasting impact on their life.

The victim is full of good faith no matter what happens. He or she believes that a hero will come to the rescue, and screams for help. However, if the call is not answered the victim begins to lose faith. Read the rest…

The second starring role of players in the Soul Game is the Villain

Game: A competitive activity in which players contend with each other according to a set of rules providing entertainment or amusement.

Indeed, the villain is the most active contender in the game and frequently has the most fun of all, or so it seems.

Since the days of Greek tragedies, the early Hollywood movies and modern thrillers, the bad guys were moving in the half shadows, scheming, cunning, cleverly plotting, and doing whatever they pleased, undeterred by public opinion. Read the rest…

In the Soul Game, emotions are the fuel for all of the player’s actions. Looking at the emotions that are part of the victim role. It is no wonder that true victims need and cry for help! And also why without help they sabotage most things they start.

Read the rest…

1. Sabotage

There is a dark side to all of us. Victims are usually too afraid to confront a person directly about any problem. If you are waiting for words from the victim to know if everything is okay or not, you are in trouble. They pretend that everything is okay, as they are too afraid of saying ‘no’. Their way of saying ‘no’ is to withhold their emotional energy from whatever they dislike which sabotages the project or person every time. Read the rest…

One of the most common stage-settings for future victims are alcoholic parents. A couple from Darwin, Australia, came to me for sexual intimacy counseling. Peter could only get aroused in a drunken stupor. Then he literally wanted to be brutally beaten. Carol, his wife, could only comply whenever she in turn was completely intoxicated. If the partners tried to make love in a sober state, she couldn’t bring herself to hurt him and Peter was impotent without the beatings.
Peter had been regularly beaten badly as a child when his father got drunk and took out his anger and frustration on the boy. The mother, instead of protecting her son, abused him verbally and emotionally. Occasionally, she also indulged in too much alcohol and hit Peter as well.

Read the rest…

Carla had always been a sickly child.  Measles, chicken pox, flu, pneumonia-there was almost no disease she had not had.  As an adult, her illnesses grew increasingly severe, until one day Carla developed symptoms of an illness for which there seemed to be no explanation and no cure.

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Probably one out of every six women who came to me for therapy had been raped as a child. I also worked with some men who were victimized at an early age. These unsuspecting victims had not yet learned how to protect themselves. Read the rest…

Have you forgotten how it felt to swoon over your high school sweetheart? The buckets you cried when she moved away? The agony of a math exam you didn’t study for? And the first time you rebelled against your parent’s control? It seems to me that many people today are so overwhelmed by problems and worries of our adult life that we forget how it felt to be young, and our kids are the ones who loose out. Hosting a radio show for teenagers in the early 90’s in Asheville, North Carolina, I noticed how bitter many young people had become. Read the rest…

See no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil

Most victims I came across were innocent believers in goodness. No matter what the circumstances or situations, they never heard or saw any evil. Because of their own naiveté they hung on the lips of brilliant and colorful villains, taking their every word as gospel while steadfastly ignoring any behavior that belied those eloquent phrases.

Over and over I saw victims who were naive to the point of endangering themselves by sharing with their worst fiends their innermost secrets and their best friends’ as well. Victims give their enemies all the ammunition they need to abuse them later.

It was incomprehensible to me that victims would detect good intentions in anything that happened to them. I had one client in Port Liberte, New Jersey, who considered her husband as a gentle, loving soul even when he regularly plundered her bank account down to the last cent.

Jean believed that her husband took the money for his aging mother, to support the boy scouts, or to help someone whom he had just met but needed the money more than they did. She could find a thousand reasons for what went wrong, and she never once blamed her husband. As a matter of fact, Jean seemed to relish in telling the stories of her kitty being emptied, of defaulting on her mortgage that month and of barely being able to put food on the table. Normally a rather placid and dull person, at such times Jean wallowed in misery, tearfully wailing with a fervor that would have done credit to the best of actresses.

She proved her worth by surviving in the face of such adversity. She found her own goodness in this triumph and in her ability to forgive her husband. I think all the Jeans of the world unconsciously set the stage for themselves to play believable victims. Once the curtain comes down on one deluge, the next and more severe catastrophe is already in the making, allowing for another performance with ever more intense feelings.

Jean is a classic case of a woman who has an image in her mind of the man she wanted to marry. When she met Harold, she simply projected her fantasy on Harold and throughout her marriage never knew her husband. Feelings not facts were the basis of their relationship. When the real-life Harold threatened to deviate from Jean’s figment of imagination, she explained the discrepancy away until, in her mind at least, her husband had again become the man she wanted him to be. Behind her back, Harold squandered her money on his drug addiction. Jean of course denied the fact, even when he was caught. Surely the police had apprehended the wrong man. Abundant quantities of crystal meth the officers had found in his car must have belonged to someone else, probably a poor person her husband had given a ride.

As victims can feel the potential goodness inside the villains, they almost always ignore the obvious misdeeds that everyone else sees. The victim’s sentiments trust that in the end, no matter how long it takes, goodness will triumph. And while the game of Goodness Triumphs Over Evil continues our emotional education, one day or one lifetime, the victim will eventually help a hero triumph over an abuser.

The Victim

No Edgar Wallace, no Agatha Christie and no John Grisham movie can do without a victim, the first star in Goodness Triumphs Over Evil.

Ironically, this is by far the preferred role of the emotions in a conflict, even though it is not a winning role in the Soul Game.  The victim is truly a beginner’s role, as the villain triumphs over the victim.  Only the hero wins in the end, saving the victim, and triumphing over evil, no matter how long it takes.

Still, for a beginning player in the Soul Game the victim role is important.  The victim can triumph in a watered down version of the storyline of Goodness Triumphs Over Evil  called Goodness Triumphs Over Adversity.

Read the rest…

All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances

And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare

Let us first review the definition of the game that I am using for the Soul Game.

GAME: A competitive activity in which players contend with each other according to a set of rules, providing entertainment or amusement.

Now we come to discuss the players in the game, the way they contend with each other, and the rules they abide by. Get ready; no longer can you stay in your head, looking at everything through your mind’s eye, in a comfortable, detached way. The players in the Soul Game are the people in your life, your friends and family, and you are dealing with feelings. Read the rest…

We all once thought that one far-off day we would die glamorously before old age struck: racing down the track in an F1 Ferrari, heli-skiing in the Alps, sailing single-handedly the Seven Seas, or orbiting the earth in a NASA capsule. Alas, it did not happen, and now we are more than mature. We still doubt our mirrors when we see these old people peering back at us. How did that happen?

And we’re not the only ones, now the vast majority of humanity in the Western world now lives to a ripe old age, eventually dying in bed. How glamorous is that?

Since we are never going to leave Planet Earth alive, we decided to make the best of it and treat aging as an adventure. If we could do just that, then we would be able to live life to its fullest. Thus inspired, we just had to figure out how to go about it.

There is no getting around it, as Bette Davis said – Old age ain’t for no sissies.

It took us some years to find a way to fully come to terms with our waning years. And like many great truths, the answer turned out to be simple.!

To find out the ultimate anti-ager for me, http://www.loyyoung.com/winter.ppt

For sure my life has been one great adventure! I’m having one great time laughing at myself as I put up these power points.

http://www.loyyoung.com/fall.ppt

Imagine, I still think I’m in the long hot summer of my life in my mind, although my body says it’s long gone.

http://www.loyyoung.com/summer.ppt

And while I’m reviewing my writings, I’m also reflecting on my life. Here’s a power point about the Spring of my Life.

And as Spring is all about new beginnings, I’m also in the spring of blogging. As yet, I don’t how to put the power point on this blog, so it’s on a page on my website.

http://www.loyyoung.com/spring.ppt

One Big Puzzle

Although Grandmother’s Sunday dinner was as delicious as usual, I wasn’t hungry and could only push the fried chicken and cornbread around my plate. Today’s sermon was one big puzzle buzzing around inside my head.

What excitement I had felt being in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The questions poured out. “Why did He leave so suddenly, right in the middle of Pastor Johnson’s sermon?” Grand mother would never have let ME do that. “Do they have different manners in heaven?” Read the rest…

Catching the Holy Spirit

To zero in on the Holy Spirit, Pastor Johnson seemed my best bet. He was always claiming to be speaking the word of the Holy Spirit. Besides that, he was the tallest man in town, probably so he could be closer to heaven.

His dark hair was always combed neat and laid down flat, except for a clump in the back that stood straight up, resisting all attempts to grease it down. Every Sunday, he wore the same tired brown suit, pressed with creases in his pants which went down into his brown spit polished cowboy boots. When he really got to talking about the Lord, he’d throw his jacket on the chair dramatically and yank at his tie. He seemed to work up a fever from the passion of the Lord. Read the rest…

Would I Explode?

My earliest spiritual influence came from Grandmother Washburn. One of the original, God-fearing pioneers, she played her part in settling the Oklahoma Territory. Toward the end of the 19th century, she and my grandfather crossed the country in a covered wagon to carve a homestead from previously occupied Comanche Territory.

They settled on the Texas-Oklahoma border, close to the Red River. An early task was to help build the church; and they were the first ones there each time the doors opened.

Life was often difficult for these pioneers. Grandmother needed simple answers on how best to live her life and raise her family. The New Testament scriptures were the ultimate authority on any of life’s issues. Whenever she had a problem, she simply turned to the appropriate scripture, and it told her right from wrong. Read the rest…