Demon Possession
When you believe the wrong things about yourself you believe the wrongs about everyone and everything else.
This is a rational statement of how beliefs work:
Beliefs agnostically self-reinforce instantly creating feelings, thoughts, and actions in that order, which creates more self-reinforcing feelings, thoughts, and actions.
When you believe the wrong things about yourself you believe the wrongs about everyone and everything else.
It boils down to love or fear. Those who don’t believe in themselves cannot love themselves and others. Since fear-based beliefs create self-reinforcing fearful feelings, thoughts, and actions, damage is inflicted on Self and others. The root of fear is lies and the damage they inflict causes damage to both the liar and recipient. Everything you do to others you do to yourself.
I recently experienced an extreme form of this universal dynamic. My father passed and one of my siblings lied about every single aspect of it. I mean absolutely everything. It infuriated me, saddened me, and I knew why because I’ve been down there myself.
But then something unexpected happened. I became her. I felt all the years of self-reinforcing feelings, thoughts and actions swirl out of control. I felt her decades of feelings regarding the abuse handed out by our father. I saw me from her perspective. I vehemently argued against her perceptions as she felt and acted on the trauma our father inflicted on us.
I didn’t like it one bit. For decades I’ve been encouraging her to simply stop lying about everything. She lies about her lies, and lies about those lies. It’s infuriating because there’s no possibility of having an honest talk about anything factual or otherwise.
And now…I stepped inside her feelings and experienced how disordered she’s been all these years. Disorders begat disorders, beget disorders until her thinking was all screwed up. This infuriated me to no end, that she couldn’t see it from my perspective: at some time you really just have to say “No” to whatever besets you. But what I found was that in her highly disordered state she was trapped, stuck in the quagmire of her own making though the initial trauma was no fault of her own.
I struggled mightily with this state of extreme Post Traumatic Disorder. I deliberately left out the word ‘stress’ because hey, stress is stress and most people don’t recognize that the extreme disordered states that trauma can inflict is beyond ‘stress’. PTD is so terrible that people just want to stop the anguish at all costs. Because we’re trained to address the symptoms, not the causes, many die by various self-inflicted means.
As I grappled with this possession that overtook my thoughts it triggered a thought I had about a metaphor: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The assumption of that allegory was that people need to be brought out of the cave of their ignorance up into the light of information and knowledge. I remember thinking that the allegory is best thought of as an allegory about allegories, that the shadows are the symptoms, and the objects that cast the shadows are the causes, and furthermore, it’s one’s perceptions of those objects is caused by their beliefs.
That led me back to a thought I had about Lord of The Rings. It’s a brilliant metaphor about the power of beliefs imbued in all of us. Watching Gollum I recognized that my sibling’s behavior is identical: instant flipping between crying and anger several times per minute. I could feel what she held precious was the same as Gollum: that control over others will give control over self. That thinking is an inversion of reality. What led my sister to treat her parents, siblings and children as horribly as she has was due to our father’s abuse and neglect.
Eerily she used nearly identical verbiage as Gollum. “Be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you,” says Gollum as Frodo attempts to save his life from Faramir’s soldiers. I, too, have attempted to save my sister from herself over the years.
Shit is deep, adding up at the bottom, but once I recognized how seamless her experience was possessing me I knew I had to stop communicating with her. I could feel the fight and life going out me. It’s what demon-possession must feel like, every thought colored by darkness, the sharp edges blurred, and who I know myself to be was gone, replaced by a state of chronic insecurity instead of trust.
I realized that those who lie and deceive others have first believed the lies of others. When Eve believed the lie that implied she was not like God, she ate the fruit and she and Adam felt naked and afraid. That story has been abused a billion times as ‘obey or else’ but never has been deconstructed for what it is: you manifest according to what you believe about yourself.
I finally understood why even her own children want absolutely nothing to do with her, how easily transferable and seamless the experience was. Even a week later I feel residual infection inside my soul.
