Archetypes of Doubt

How Conditioning Sabotages the Truth

Hello all and welcome to this week’s Soul’s Journey at The LifeWalk!

This week we are celebrating 1 year of moving to this wonderful platform and 52 straight weeks of publishing, and I’m simultaneously excited and relieved.

A year ago I had just a handful of subscribers and a blog that might get my attention once every couple of months. I hadn't ever entertained the idea of making a living at it, until a friend and business mentor told me about Substack.

Long story short, I fell in love. My musings had a new home and a new found interest by many new subscribers, some of whom I would even dare to call new friends.

I had a few doubts along the way, so of course, it’s the doubts around my writing projects that drive this week’s commentary, and that brings us back to the wonderful world Archetypes.

Explore with me!

~Suzanne

Doubt is one of those feelings that originates in our mind. When we allow our mind, in its amazingly unreliable state, to take over and make decisions for us, we are using very limited and unreliable data to base our decisions on. I discussed this in depth in a recent post about the Head Center in Human Design.

Essentially, the mind is designed to create or take in ideas. It’s not designed to make decisions. When we don’t follow our strategy and authority our prior conditioning can influence how we respond and make decisions, often not in a good way.

What is Doubt?

Doubt is a feeling of uncertainty or a lack of conviction behind your actions. When we doubt, we second guess our (or others’) actions. We get stuck in a limited path of conditioned thought and ignore the potential for imagination.

Our mind takes a fact (my subscriber count went down) and creates a story around the fact in order to put it into a context and act on it (I must be doing something wrong, they don’t like my work, I need to take more writing courses, I’ve never been able to succeed at anything so I should find a new path). This story is based on false assumptions and conditioning that our mind keeps hold of.

The only fact in the above scenario is that the subscriber count went down. There are hundreds of possible reasons for that, but when left to its own devices, the mind will come up with the ones that feed into our wounds and conditioning.

---

The Saboteur is the primary archetype whose shadow manifests self-doubt. When we ignore the signs that the Saboteur is messing with our thoughts and feelings, the self-doubt can lead to self-destructive behavior and lead us away from resolving the issue of losing subscribers.

Instead of feeding into limited thoughts and personalizing the doubt (I must have done something wrong) we can open up our feelings and use the doubt to feed the inquiring process in a more controlled manner.

What are some reasons people unsubscribe?

• They can’t keep up with their subscriptions and need to declutter.

• They are going off the grid and cannot access the internet anymore.

• They are pursuing other interests and my content isn’t relevant to them anymore.

You’ll notice that none of these other potential reasons have anything to do with me.

The Shape-Shifter is another doubt archetype whose shadow manifests as lack of conviction. While the light side of the Shape-Shifter allows us to adapt to changing circumstances, the shadow acts as an escape mechanism. We keep changing our mind or changing our focus whenever we run into the slightest roadblock. We don’t have the conviction or belief to keep going and work a little harder to get past it. We run into a block and immediately decide that we must be on the wrong path, so we change focus and try to become something else. We know that this latest trend is THE one!

I’m a writer, but why am I not getting readers?

Should I do a podcast? I could get used to being on camera.

Maybe Twitter (X) will generate the attention I need.

Serious writers post on LinkdIn, should I be doing that too?

We think too much and feel too little. -Charlie Chaplin

What Do We Do About It?

We can allow our natural inquisitiveness to bring us peace of mind and clarity by tapping into our Human Design strategy and authority, or we can allow our mind to take us down a rabbit hole of doubt and suspicion guided by our old wounds and conditioning.

When you’re presented with a fact, recognize that it is just a fact with no attachments. It’s not personal. Decide if this fact even has anything to do with you (it may not). Decide if you need to take action at all. Then you can open your mind, your imagination, to make inquiries that stay focused in fact.

Tapping into my sacral authority as a Manifesting Generator, I know that if my response to something doesn’t give me a “hell yeah, that’s right” feeling, then it’s likely a story my mind has created out of old wounds. A Projector with self-projected (GCenter) authority will want to talk it out (out loud) to hear what feels right. Those with splenic authority (Manifestors or Projectors) are the ones who will instinctively “know” what’s right within them. It will be more intuitive. As long as they keep their mind quiet and those conditioned or wound thoughts out of the way, they will be able to trust that intuition.

Doubts are feelings, and like any other feeling, they are valid. We can feel the doubt, address our questions around it, and move through it. We don’t want to get lost in the shadows of doubt which will only take us away from the truth and our true path.

---

What doubts do you face regularly? If you’d like to explore your design and how you operate in the world, let’s chat about it and see how Human Design might help you find the tools you need for making your right decisions and living life on your terms in your unique way!