Sometimes it Pays to Chat With Your Demons.
An afternoon in my mind. (A detective’s story.)
This article is sketched from a list of clues. Notes I’ve been taking all day, tracking down the culprits of my mind, gathering hints and signs of what is happening inside.
I woke up hungry today.
Hungry for something to shift the mind. I was so bored I ached and at the same time was completely unmotivated. As the day stretched on that lack of motivation grew into a heaviness in the chest and a bout of depression.
It took a while to wrestle with that. Took some squirming, trying to escape, trying to feel better through outdated coping mechanisms.
Finally, I acknowledged the state I was in and started to look for the culprit.
Always look for the physical clues first. (Then follow the madness.)
“If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
The simplest answer for why I felt like crap today was a lack of sleep last night. I was up to 3 am writing my last article and had to be up by 7:30 for a client.
Added to this has been a lack of protein in my diet as its just harder to get clean protein here in Ubud.
I know that sleep and protein both massively affect my moods. However, as someone who knows this the next question becomes “why did I allow this?”
I worked way too long yesterday and should have cut some things out but instead I kept pushing to get everything done rather than spread it through my week. I know a lack of sleep can hurt me and yet I kept going.
I also haven’t been choosing the best food for my mental health. My choices have been based more on taste and pleasure. In fact, many of my choices have been based more on pleasure, signaling to me something amiss with my serotonin and dopamine.
They seem to be cycling to greater extremities: too much drive and then none, too much pleasure and then none, too much seeking overall.
While the lack of sleep and protein are the physical precursors to today’s depression they’re more like bodies left behind at a crime scene than culprits.
Clearly, I need to get more sleep and so I will. I’ve been working on balancing my nutrition all day and will continue. I also know after years of working with myself that I have to go deeper and see what is driving all this.
For that, I need to search through the clues of the day.
Clue #1, a response.
“What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
Harry J. Stead wrote a great article today on the fear of greatness and our need to stand up and live our destiny and responsibility.
As he works with depth psychology and mythology his teaching was linked to the story of Jonah and the theme of the death and rebirth of initiates. Included in this is the concept of the unconscious rising up in turmoil if we neglect our personal responsibility to life.
Immediately my mind ran off in a tangent; often a sign something is lurking beneath the waves, driving the thought process in an unconscious way.
I got fixated on the thought of scorn and whether people sometimes forsake their greatness due to hating the world. The thought, however, couldn’t complete itself.
I wrote a response and while I mentioned this new thought process about scorn I immediately shifted to another thread concerning fear of the unknown and yet another on adapting to trauma.
Before I could think to edit my response I had closed the tab, opened a new window and had a dozen tabs of new stories from Medium.
I suddenly became convinced reading these other stories and writing an article on them would fulfill my daily challenge and shift my mood.
I didn’t actually read the stories though, the mind drifted to another activity, effectively burying my response and whatever thoughts had been triggered through the article.
Something was pulling strings in the realm beneath.
The Hero, depression, and the polarization of the psyche.
“. . .the further you go into light, the greater your shadow becomes.”
— Carl Jung
Harry’s article on the fear of greatness touches on the archetype of the Hero, our grand narrative and purpose in this world.
Because the unconscious holds all duality where there is a Hero, there is also the Shadow, the underworld of the unconscious, all the parts of self that the ego finds undesirable.
It’s common these days to think of personal authenticity and walking our path as “going with the flow” but Jung often compared it with crucifixion. The closer we get to our individualized greatness the greater the polarization within.
If we are stepping into the role of our internal Hero the activation of this archetype summons our Shadow, our monsters.
When we are unconscious to this we project our monsters out onto the world. When we are aware of the duality within us we are forced to find a way to balance our Hero and our Monster.
These last few days have been good. I have been walking my Hero’s path, getting ready for the New Year, thrilled to be living my life, to be living my calling.
I’m working with clients on their transformation. I am finishing a book that I have been writing for half a decade and I am starting a new one.
After a lifetime of processing, I feel more capable than ever to share my larger visions with the world and make them a reality.
That vision is what yesterday’s article was all about. The one I stayed up too late writing.
I’m walking my hero’s journey and in so doing I am stirring up all the demons and shadows inside. Hence today’s depression.
A change in narrative.
“My soul, where are you? . . . Everything has become so different. . . What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again. . .”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
When I finally came to the point of being able to acknowledge my depression and sit with it I started doing some deep breathing. Telling myself it will be ok.
That’s when I focused on the world within and invoked the Jungian tool of active imagination to see what was going on.
It was interesting to observe a different narrative in my mind.
In the past, the future felt like an uphill battle, my depression weighing me down. The theme was that of a struggle. The inner world expected the worst, wrote its stories as a pessimist.
Today, even in the midst of the depression there was a new optimism.
I can’t quite explain the experience. It was as if the old narrative was a faded background scene. A pleat of time-worn through, giving way to a new sensation.
I saw myself still climbing the mountain but rather than weighed down with depression, dreading the future, I find myself expecting increased freedom. The thought came that “even if 2019 is rough I’ll still be healing, I’ll still release some of this, next year will be even better.”
In the scene within the traumas that had weighed me down were transforming. I wasn’t fighting the gravity of grief. Instead, I was looking into the future and expecting myself to feel lighter, the burdens slowly, consistently being released.
As someone who has spent decades of their life deeply depressed. Someone who tried to take their own life because they couldn’t imagine how they were going to keep climbing that mountain, this shift inside is breathtaking.
Of course in the depression this afternoon I wasn’t exactly singing praises. I whispered a “thank you” but still felt miserable.
The voices of Legion.
“Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness?”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
As soon as I realized the internal shift of my inner world from pessimist to optimist an inversion occurred in the internal vision.
The scene of the mountain ascent began to shine but at its apex, it darkened. Another image appeared. A tortured figure, covered in filth, looking demonic.
I want to stress the difference between daemonic and demonic here. The daemons were supernatural beings in the Greek tradition. They could do good or ill. In a Jungian perspective, they are parts of self with their bright side and shadow.
Demons are a Judeo Christian invention. They are the casting of the old ways into shadow and the labeling of them as evil. In its own way, it is the casting of parts of our selves into shadow and labeling it evil.
I use the word demon here to denote the extreme aversion that my psyche has to this particular figure of my inner world.
The vision of this part of self looked hideous, cruel, a demon from a horror film.
It even spoke as such, threatened to destroy me.
At the same time I saw this inner sight I remembered the article.
I realized this is the polarization of the psyche. I have been stepping up into my hero’s journey and this is the monstrous, the demonic response.
I also remembered my response to the story of Jonah. I had wondered if we avoided greatness because a part of our self scorned the world. I had wondered if it was fear of the unknown or the conditioning of our trauma.
Perhaps all of this was wrapped up in the figure appearing within.
I breathed deeply and tried to hear the demon out. It shouted that walking my path would be horribly unfamiliar, uncomfortable. The demon wouldn’t let this happen. It wouldn’t allow for the change, it would drag me down.
I looked around the room and said “we’re in Bali. I flew across the world. We’re in a place of foreign languages, a different religion, different tastes, smells. It was all unknown and we survived. How could this change, this stepping into a new role be any worse?”
With that the image receded. It grew quiet. I found myself with the energy and desire to get out of bed.
I remember the song playing at that moment, the Shins’ “September.” I took a shower and sang along to my Spotify list. Decided to get food.
I had been hungry for hours but the depression was too great to really move.
Sometimes with depression, you just have to lay there until you feel a shift, a momentary burst of energy. When you sense that new energy its important to move, to do something for yourself before the energy shifts back and you’re stuck again.
The interview continues.
“Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner?”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
I sang on my walk and felt some relief but when I got to the restaurant as soon as I sat down I was back in the depression.
With the depression came the vision of the demonic creature. Clearly our culprit.
I asked its name, I heard “I am fear. I am trauma.”
In that moment my Spotified switched to this song.
I instantly remembered the music video. The first time I saw it. The ache and the knowing that a child raised in chaos like that bears deep wounds.
As someone who has wrestled with their own addiction I have pondered the lyrics before and the ways I have hurt others.
“I’m a creature of habit just like I always was. . . you may try and find me but good luck I say because I’m left behind and I like it. . .”
I am familiar with the research of how trauma affects the mind and body. Of the struggles that girl would have to endure and the telltale signs that the villain in this video is conditioned himself by trauma and fear.
I realized that the demon is conditioned by trauma and fear. It doesn’t want to change, to be saved. This is the world it is used to and it is the world it perpetuates. It’s left behind and it likes it.
To move forward would be to enter into the unknown, to have to do the work to heal, and very possibly to have to recognize the pain it has caused itself and others.
The mind is a lot more than our conscious self. I was working with a meditative visionary state, some Jungian active imagination. I was speaking to an image of self-wrapped up as demon but the mind was processing lyrics, memories, music videos. It was having a conversation far deeper than my conscious mind could grasp.
All I could do was feel it out, keep notes, ask questions and keep talking to myself.
What are you afraid of?
“What if we fail?”
We’re surviving now and we wouldn’t fall lower than this. We’d be ok.
What if we go mad?
I’m talking to myself. We’ve already gone mad and it’s not the worst place to be. We’re learning and we’re growing.
What if they see your darkest shadow?
That would hurt. That would hurt a lot but I have done what I have done and whatever comes of my shadow, of my past, it is my responsibility to bear.
You say that but it’ll hurt more than anything. Can you survive it?
Maybe. If it happens we’ll see.
Fractalled talks. The mind and its associations.
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it?
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
After chatting with this inner vision for a while the discussion began to grow deeper. Thoughts came and went, memories popped up, my mind would catch on lyrics of songs and see how they applied.
I want to capture this for you so you can see the process that occurs when we stay mindful of our madness. When we allow ourselves to observe it and work with it to find an answer, to find what is at its root.
It may come out as choppy but inside it felt more like the fitting together of the broken pieces of a mirror.
I felt the urge to change the demon but I couldn’t figure out how. I wondered if the fear could be reassigned? Is there a healthy fear?
If I am launching on my hero’s journey maybe I would do well to fear an inflated ego?
But that led to the same sensation of not wanting to step forward, of resisting my path. I tried out a few other scenarios and then thought “fear keeps you frozen. There’s no way to simply reassign this, we have to transform this.”
Fear as caution.
“I must learn to love you.”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
The notion arose that the healthy form of fear is caution. One still moves forward but observes what is happening, looks for danger.
The fear had already admitted it rises from trauma, from pain, from expecting the world to go wrong. For most of my life this was my inner experience and it was based on some solid lived facts.
The fear had been looking out for me and reminded me of this with its memories.
When I recognized the need to transform fear into caution, mindfulness, self-awareness I saw rain begin to pour down on the image within. It slowly transformed from something demonic looking to something almost elfin.
Weird, I know, but what can you do with the mind?
Memories and the need to see clearly.
“Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. . . The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert.”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
A memory popped up from childhood. I couldn’t have been any older than nine. I was playing alone on the playground at school. I usually played alone. My speech impediment was so bad other kids couldn’t understand me.
I had been reading the Lord of the Rings and was pretending to be Legolas seeing so very far. A little while later I had to go in and get glasses.
The memory sparked another memory, a story of Neil Gaiman’s. “When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11¼.”
A dark fantasy story of the world slowly unraveling as a little girl recounts a surreal picnic in a class essay and unknowingly reveals her father’s abuse of her mother. To her it's just life.
I remembered a story I wrote an outline to inspired by Gaiman’s. There’s a child who lives in a world of make-believe, a magic world until she gets glasses and suddenly she sees that the creatures, the snakes flaring, the spirits wailing, they are the arms and screams of the abuse around her.
She breaks her glasses to escape it all.
Pizzas and wounded children.
“Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical.”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
I realized the comment I had left on Harry’s post ended with trauma.
The human mind seems to value its familiarity as seen in traumatic relationships the world over.
I had been thinking of the way traumatic childhoods condition future relationships and behaviors.
Around this time of the shifting pieces, I was trying to remember Gaiman’s story’s name while asking “what does trauma transform into?”
“Growth, depths, pain, insight.”
“There is good here too,” I thought but the depression couldn’t be magicked away. I knew there was still more to touch on.
And that’s when my pizza showed up.
Or rather what should have been my pizza. Instead, it was covered in the totally wrong ingredients, pineapple and wheat crust instead of the gluten-free I had ordered to cut down on inflammation and my cognitive daze.
I had no idea what to do. I didn’t want to eat it (I hate pineapple on pizza) and I didn’t want to waste the food. I sat there terrified of making the wrong choice.
I heard myself speak out loud to the woman “I don’t know what the right thing to do is.”
I finally decided to eat it rather than waste it but the event was another clue.
I’m always terrified of doing the wrong thing. My parents believed strongly in a firm hand. They intended it to be controlled but we’re human and intense trauma runs in our family so physical discipline was chaotic sometimes.
Meanwhile, our belief system posited that God was constantly testing or punishing us for the wrongs that we do.
The impression of chaotic discipline by human hands merged with the expectation of discipline by God. Meaning we were always looking out to make sure we didn’t mess up but didn’t quite know what all messing up meant.
In that moment with the pizza it wasn’t a choice of taste or even an ethical choice of waste, something inside felt like it was a cosmic choice deciding between salvation or damnation and I wasn’t sure which was which.
That’s when the Shins’ “September” started playing again. This time I paid attention to the words. The mind knew they were important.
“I’ve been selfish and full of pride. But she knows deep down there’s a little child.”
I realized the demon is a wounded child. A part of self that transformed from childhood imagination, an elf with keen eyes to see distant dangers, to a nearsighted wounded creature fearing pain all around. Fearing that he’ll mess up, do something wrong, be tortured again.
“Time is fluid here.”
“Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you.”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
I had been searching the whole time for Neil Gaiman’s story about the girl and came across “Other People.” A story of a man tortured by a demon.
I’ll leave the ending to you but I will say it speaks about the dynamic aspects of inflicted pain and self-loathing. Reading it brought about my original thought, the one that had ran away and hid behind the traumatized, fearful child afraid of change.
“Am I bitter at the world?” I asked as I walked home.
At first, I couldn’t see my bitter self so I asked: “am I angry with myself? Is that what was hiding behind the comment on scorn? Contempt for others or a contempt for myself?
“Does hate keep us from greatness? A self-loathing or a hate of the world around and the ways it has hurt us?”
It was really hard to think of myself as hating or loathing. I had to recognize that the child’s fear of being wrong would cause it to cast any realization of bitterness into the realm of Shadow, the realm unseen.
So I had to dig in and really look at myself.
I know that when I am able to remember why it is people act as they do I can hold a place of understanding for most anyone but I don’t always remember.
Shower thoughts.
I got home and showered while meditating on my ability to understand and loathe people.
I realized I do have a strong visceral reaction to people when I am not staying mindful. My shower brought several experiences back to me.
The man I met who saw himself as “woke” and thus wouldn’t admit to saying transsexuals are “wrong,” but rather created an incredibly elaborate explanation of free choice and destiny to say that maybe their souls would eventually regret their transformation as a “mistake.”
Then there was the yogi complaining she wanted to go home from Bali because her detox was so hard. In the next breath, she talked about all the alcohol she had drank the night before knowing she was jetlagged.
There was the woman who was telling people that any failure in a course is the responsibility of the student.
She told a story of an online course she taught where everyone but one man failed. The man made a ton of money. I suggested perhaps his motivation or privilege would have led to the same result without the course and teaching styles may have to be considered.
She went off on me and my “victim mentality,” referring to another conversation I had with a man where she said I had been “bitching” when I challenged the man who was calling “unsuccessful” women lazy by default. He ended up threatening me with his guns he was so angry at being challenged.
All in a “spiritually” oriented entrepreneur group. The woman said I had to do more shadow work and blocked me.
I definitely found myself loathing these people and realized my inner world has a love-hate relationship going on with the world outside.
As I pondered what to make of this I turned off the shower, thinking “perhaps I’m supposed to embrace some of this loathing as a part of self,” and in that moment I heard a man whistling amongst the noise of the street “Amazing Grace,” the song my family holds as its most cherished hymn.
As I wrote out the stories of people who get under my skin I realized the common theme were people who could not see their shadow.
The man was too identified with his “liberal nature” to see his transphobia.
The Yogi couldn’t see the conflict between a detox for the body’s health and the poison of alcohol.
The teacher couldn’t see her own part to play in her student’s failure.
As someone who has hurt people I deeply care for I know my shadows have gotten the best of me at times.
Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
Where does it lead?
“My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.”
— Carl Jung. Red Book.
I don’t know if this journey within can be boiled down to a simple lesson. I think the story is what counts here, the ways the mind forms associations, the ways it can get itself stuck in tangles, the ways the mind finds itself, its way out.
I found today that when I push hard for my dreams I scare my demons and they come after me. They try to drag me down through addiction and dopamine cravings, through depression and being too apathetic to leave my bed.
I found that these demons are wounded pieces of self, parts that had wanted to look out for me but got so used to the pain and trauma that they began to expect it, that they began to fear a world beyond it.
I discovered that the story is never so simple as “the demon is a child” but that it is in fact a demon still, loathing others, hating them for their own shadows.
There’s work to be done here.
What is trying to keep me from my greatness?
The wounded bits of me.
What about you?
Where do your rabbit holds lead? Is something holding you back?
Love and share.
I’m starting something new. Writing every day as I put my random thoughts down on binary paper.
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