January 27, 2003 | 4:58 PM

After having thought a lot about Victims, I�ve also been thinking about Saviors. I�ve been both in the past, and really each role is one in the same�they just play themselves out in different ways.

The savior is someone who is inordinately attracted to victims. They are the people who put up with all the bullshit. They sacrifice a great deal in the name of supposedly �helping someone else� or �working on the relationship.� Everyone looks at The Savior with awe and wonder at how kind and good he/she is. Everyone feels sorry for the Savior because he/she is so stoic and strong.

Time and again the Savior�s attempts to Save The Victim are thwarted. But the Savior doesn�t leave. The Savior waits and waits and waits. It eventually becomes obvious to everyone that the Savior doesn�t have much sense of reality, and that subconsciously and unbeknownst to the Savior, he or she wants to be in exactly this type of relationship.

See, the Savior has just as little sense of self as the victim. The Savior doesn�t feel that he/she can have an equal relationship with another person based on mutual strength. The Savior flocks to those with major emotional problems, or those who are abusive, or those who don�t have a lot of get up and go because then the Savior gets to be The Good Guy. The Savior gets to be in charge and make all the decisions because the Victim is of course too helpless to do so. And then of course the Savior gets to complain about always having to be the person who takes care of everything.

The Savior often spends a lot of time criticizing others who don�t behave as she/he wants them to behave. The Savior tends to make grand proclamations about how poorly someone is behaving, but the second he/she is paid attention to and treated with some importance by the very person the Savior has been condemning, The Savior changes his/her tune.

Like the Victim, the Savior is easily influenced by his/her environment, although so judgmental does he/she come across, that this is not apparent to other people until they witness the violent swings of attitude the Savior has. The Savior needs so badly to feel that he/she is loved and adored that The Savior refuses to see the difference between illusion and the reality. The Savior willfully blinds her/himself as to what is going on. That way, they can�t be at fault.

The Savior may have referred to So and So might as a total bastard and an abusive jerk for years and years. But the minute So and So pays attention to The Savior, supplying him or her with a sense of self and belonging, suddenly everything the Savior ever said about So and So is no longer of any importance. The Savior is being loved! Held! Told he/she is beautiful! Nothing else matters.

Both the Savior and The Victim tend to live their lives based on moral technicalities and feel the consistent need to defend themselves and their positions. Both of them do an excellent job of rationalizing their own behavior and tend to isolate each incidence or episode from one another, thus divorcing specific situations from any Bigger Picture in relation to their own behavior or histories.

The Victim and The Savior often switch rolls, because as I said, they basically are the same, each one side of a power struggle, identical in their lack of self.

The sad thing is that there may indeed be love, kindness, friendship and true camaraderie within the relationships of people playing out a Victim/Savior dynamic, but eventually, it will most likely be destroyed within the power struggle, and both people will wind up persecuting each other when they are finally forced to see the truth.

Unfortunately, most people don�t learn from this when the relationship ends. They think it�s that �specific� relationship that was the problem. They may even go so far as to acknowledge certain wrongdoings on their part and attempt to change their behavior in isolated ways (i.e. �Next time I won�t hit on my girlfriend�s friend while she�s in the other room� or �Next time I won�t get violently drunk and tell my boyfriend I�m going to cut off my fingers and throw them in the blender if he doesn�t stop hurting me.�)

But if the fundamental belief system itself doesn�t change�if the way in which The Victim and Savior view the world does not shift dramatically (after all, relationships are merely microcosms of the way we view ourselves in relation to the world) then nothing will ever change and each relationship the Victim and Savior find themselves in will be strikingly similar to the ones they were in before.

The good news is, people CAN change if they work really hard and/or if they are absolutely forced into facing their worst fears about themselves and the people they are involved with.

The more inner psychological work I do on myself, the more I realize how this Victim/Savior dynamic has poisoned so many of my relationships, and how it has affected my entire life in general. I�ve had inklings of this in the past, but only now do I have the full picture.

It�s pretty fucking healing.