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CHAPTER 2

Hiding Demons

Projection of our own shadow makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.

Carl Jung

How many of us grew up in a family where our rage was supported? Anger is a natural and essential element of the spectrum of human emotion. We all have it, but if, while we were growing up, we were shut down or told off every time we got angry, we soon learned that expressing our rage was unacceptable and would result in a telling off or worse. ‘How dare you speak like that to your mother?!’ We learn to suppress, not express, our rage, and month after month, year after year, all that non-expression accumulates in us, creating a mini pressure cooker ready to react and explode.

What happens to all those parts of ourselves we attempt to edit away? These essential parts of ourselves are impossible to amputate. The best we can hope to do is suppress them, bury them in the basement somewhere out of sight, but because these aspects of us are alive, it is impossible to eradicate them completely. In fact, ironically, it seems that, like a beach ball pushed down under the water, the deeper we try and bury them the more violently they spring back up. There’s a reason they say ‘beware the anger of the quiet man’. The more we try to deny and keep a lid on these demons, the more likely they are to suddenly leak into our everyday lives in unexpected, self-sabotaging episodes.

If we are too successful in our suppression, and we bury something so deep that it never gets expressed, then in the dark it continues to grow, but without any outward expression it has to turn inward and become a disease. Life will find its way of expressing, and if we don’t participate and allow it to be expressed outwardly in a safe context, as energy can never be cancelled out or destroyed, it finds a way to feed itself in the dark.

REPAIR WITH GOLD

The human body is the most amazing self-mending machine we know of in the universe. We take it for granted of course, but isn’t it amazing that when we scratch our skin, it heals itself? If we break a bone, it knits itself back together. Deepak Chopra talks about the human body as being ‘an exquisite pharmacy’. While we go about our lives, our body is scanning for viruses and bacteria, it is making its own drugs! Secreting substances from glands and then administering them to us in the perfect quantities day and night while we work, play and sleep.

The body is hard-wired to mend itself, no matter what, but it is not just on the material plane that it is self-mending. It is also hard-wired to mend itself on the emotional and mental planes. Despite all these ways we’ve edited ourselves down, all the snips and cuts and clever ways we’ve found to edit away these essential parts of ourselves, the body and Life itself is working round the clock to un-edit us, to restore the unapologetic, complete version of ourselves that we began as. Life has no choice but to do this; we are hard-wired to constantly mend ourselves. So no matter how successful we think we are being at manicuring this appropriate person to please the world, Life has other plans. Have you noticed this?

Have you noticed how whatever you push away keeps coming back, knocking at the door? More than that, the deeper you have buried it, the more forcefully it needs to get your attention. The more you deny and disown something, the more Life has to almost break the door down to get to you. There seems to be no escaping yourself. It reminds me of something my folks would say to me when I was not co-operating at bedtime: ‘Do you want to go to bed the easy way or the hard way?’ As the Zen proverb says, ‘Let go or be dragged’, because Life will evolve you whether you come kicking and screaming or agree to participate and make it easier on yourself. ‘Bedtime’ comes for us all, whether we make it easy or hard on ourselves. I have discovered when I become a willing participant in this process my life treats me more gently, but it requires a total reframing of how I’ve been taught to experience my life.

Most of us have been uploaded with the basic human software, Victim 101, where we view the unexpected and challenging people and situations that cross our paths as problems, as things we have to suffer, as things that are ‘happening to us’. It takes a great leap of faith to imagine during these uncomfortable moments that there might be a deeper intelligence at work which is in constant connection to our state of being and doing its best to invite us back to our juicy, unedited selves.

Let’s upgrade our internal software from Victim 101 to Warrior 305.

Here’s an example: from the usual perspective, the people who irritate us are annoying things we have to put up with, but from the reframing stance of ‘Life is trying to show me something’ there’s a whole new level of data to explore. The person who annoys you might not bug me at all, and you might well be totally immune to the people who drive me crazy. It is almost as if the people who irritate us have been sent over specially by some sort of Central Casting agency to be just the kind of arsehole who pisses us off. Is it all random or might it be a perfectly designed situation sent or manifested deliberately to give us some sort of a clue?

What I notice is that whatever aspects of myself I have tried to edit out, whatever parts I am disowning or have no permission for in my life, whenever I see other people displaying those characteristics it stirs me up. Whatever I’m not accepting in me I will judge harshly in you. So if I grew up in a house where flamboyance was frowned upon then when I see someone being big and loud I will think to myself, what an attention whore. You might be sitting next to me witnessing the same person but because your natural entertainer was never squashed in your home you aren’t annoyed by them dancing on the table, you’re just enjoying the fun.

Think of the last person who irritated you, and think of the quality they were expressing. Whatever it was, do you have permission to be like that in your life? We all contain the potential to be everything, including greedy and selfish and needy, but these darker parts of ourselves have become so judged, so unwelcome, so rejected, that we have learned to deny our own parts, never let them be seen, and when we see others behaving that way we judge them, as if we ourselves are never like that. But it is nonsense, when you look at it, because we are all a bit greedy sometimes, no? Did you never take more than your share? Or want to? We are all a bit needy, we’re all a bit selfish, and because we have no permission for these qualities, seeing others with those qualities feels painful. We feel the shame and the pain of where that unaccepted part lives in us.

So from one point of view these are annoying people, but when we reframe the experience as ‘life illuminating us’ we see that every annoying person is giving us a living menu of all the aspects of ourselves that we are not accepting. With this framing, the unending list of numbskulls who cross our path is really an educational list of all the ways we are rejecting ourselves, and if you’re a willing participant on this journey back to wholeness, it is a list that is useful to have. When we frame them this way, then what used to be annoying people ruining our afternoon becomes a vivid series of illuminations. Instead of being a downer, the experiences give us a chance to be powerful. It depends how you choose to look at it.

Like Me!

Have you noticed how often you make judgements about other people, whether just to yourself or in conversation? For one day, I want you to practise the habit of adding ‘like me!’ whenever you hear yourself say anything about anyone, good or bad.

For example: ‘He’s such a great guy, but not always completely honest . . . like me!’ ‘She’s so talented but a bit of an attention-seeker . . . like me!’

It is so liberating.

We can create a lot of false separation and alienation when we describe or pass judgements on others, as if we ourselves are ‘not like that’. We separate ourselves from them in our definitions. The truer and more intimate way to live is to shout ‘like me!’ each time we judge something in another. We all have the potential to act in the darkest and lightest of ways and one major reason we judge is because we want to distance those ‘unacceptable’ qualities from ourselves. Joyously announcing one’s fallibility at every opportunity dissolves this false separation and creates oxygen for everyone to be their perfectly flawed selves without feeling the need to live in hiding.

Once the separation is dissolved, intimacy naturally arises . . .

If you want to see this menu of your disowned parts in action, for one full day, keep track of each and every judgement you place on someone else and every time add the ‘like me!’ phrase at the end. It will also give you a tidy list of numerous ways you’ve not, until now, been in acceptance of yourself, and if you’re in the mood to be diligent, with a little enquiry, you can dissolve them one by one.

FEEDING MEAT TO THE DEMONS

Life is doing its best to reunite us with all of our disowned parts. They need to find their expression somewhere, hopefully not too destructively in our lives. They are alive, you can’t amputate them or ‘get rid of’ them. So, to avoid them leaking out and sabotaging us or festering away deep inside us and turning into illness, we need to find safe places for these characters to play and breathe and express. The Tibetan Buddhists call this ‘feeding meat to the demons’. How can I find ways to play with my deviousness, my violence, my meanness, without actually causing harm to anyone?

There are many realms where this can be explored and played with. Musicians are lucky that they can write a killer punk rock song and express the rage that way. Have you ever met a punk rocker? They’re the gentlest souls alive. Why? Because they’ve channelled all that rage into their art so they’re not being yanked this way and that by their anger in their everyday lives. Music – creating and listening to it – is a great tool for enjoying emotions that are less welcome in our everyday lives. Three quarters of all pop music is wallowing in co-dependent love. ‘Baby, I need you, I can’t live without you, I wanna be the only one to hold you, don’t leave, baby, come back . . .’ You would never allow yourself (unless totally desperate) to express yourself in such an unbelievably needy way as those lyricists do, but getting swept away in the music of it gives permission to feel those parts of ourselves safely and without shame.

Movies are great for this, too. Of course it is not attractive to be vengeful, but how delicious it is to totally give ourselves to a cinematic story where there’s an awful, cruel villain getting his or her comeuppance! We follow a carefully structured path of events, all perfectly timed to deliver us the greatest satisfaction as we witness the baddies getting exactly what they deserve. Those characters are servants for our denied lust for vengeance. Also, literature can perform the same function. I’m reminded of our dear, sweet housekeeper as a child, the nicest, politest woman you could meet, who, once her duties were done, would curl up with a chilling murder thriller.

And, as we’ve established, it is not only our dark sides that we hide away and disown. Many of us have no permission for our power and heroic natures, too, as if it would be arrogant to stand up and lead. Our inner heroes and heroines have fallen into a bit of disuse, languishing in the shadows as we watch Harrison Ford and Angelina Jolie act them out for us. I love this quote by Marianne Williamson which was included in Nelson Mandela’s inaugural speech:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? . . . Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

THE VOICES IN MY HEAD

It is healthy and necessary for us to follow the heroes and heroines conquering all adversity and winning the day, and it acts as a shadow-expressing exercise. We can vicariously enjoy the victories and bravery that we don’t feel ready yet to express in our lives. But art can only give us a watered-down version of our own shadows. It does not connect with all the parts in us that need to be fed, the parts we’ve determined are unsafe for public consumption. Similarly, shouting abuse at the referee at the football match every weekend does not quite do the job of fully releasing the amount of rage and injustice many of us carry. It is time to go deeper.

Because we cannot amputate these aspects of ourselves – we cannot fully get rid of the rageful one in us, the controlling one, the bitch, the critic, etc. – and because we work so hard making sure no one else ever discovers they’re there, the only place left for them to go is inward. So we end up with a whole legion of characters taking up residence in our heads and giving us a rich and compelling daily inner dialogue that is very hard to ignore. They don’t limit themselves just to filling up our heads inescapably but they also, when triggered, make use of all our body’s alarm chemicals, churning our bellies and adrenalising our bloodstreams with galloping hearts.

All the time I’m head tripping about something, turning some situation over and over in my mind, be it obsessing with the future or the past, I am missing my life, and I can never get that wasted time back. I’d better have a very good reason to spend time meticulously deconstructing the past because every minute I spend doing it I’m missing the Now where another, more immediate experience is happening and available – and will never be repeated. Is what happened before so precious that it deserves double time? Being a puppet on a string yanked left and right by whatever worry or regret my mind chooses to offer up makes me miss huge chunks of my life that I’ll never have back. There’s a reason so many religious and spiritual paths pray and meditate and focus on freeing themselves from the seductive storylines of the self-cherishing mind.

I spent some time looking into these practices and what I noticed was that if I just had one voice chattering away up there I might stand some sort of chance of getting control over it, but the truth is, I have a whole committee of voices and characters that live in my head, and they all have very different agendas. They all have strong attachments to certain things which must happen and other things which mustn’t happen, and they don’t all match up. How are we supposed to move forward gracefully with our projects and relationships when part of us wants to go left and another equally vital part of us wants to go right? It’s no wonder we often go around in circles.

One character in my mind says, ‘If only we had more money. Life would be so much better if I had loads of money,’ and there’s another one in there who thinks, ‘Aren’t rich people wankers?’ Conflicting needs, conflicting perspectives, and both of them me. We are giving ourselves mixed messages and it can be impossible to satisfy the whole committee that lives in my head.

These characters are never going away, they are with us for life, and when left to their own devices they can be confusing and demotivating, even destructive. They become so troublesome and unruly that we call them demons, but are they all trouble or might they have essential gifts for us? Perhaps it’s all in the framing.

DAEMONS VS DEMONS

In the good old days back in Ancient Greece ‘daemons’ were divine helpers rather than problems. The Romans called this kind of attendant spirit ‘genius’, so rather than an individual being a genius, the genius was a divine entity that was believed to live in the walls of the artist’s studio and would come out and assist or inspire in their creativity. Your daemon was your friend, a sort of semi-magical being who lived half in this world and half in the spirit world, unbound by the same earthy laws as you and I. It could run ahead down the path and warn us of approaching hazards. They were there to show us stuff. In fact, as my pal and anarchic workshop creator Dave Rock told me recently, the word ‘monster’ comes from the French word ‘montrer’ meaning to show. Hence our word for ‘demonstrate’. Long ago, if you committed a crime or indecency in France you would be dressed up as the exaggerated version of your crime and paraded around the village as a cautionary tale to others.

The early Christians were frightened of the perceived power of these daemons and so the idea spread that they were evil, looking to control human beings rather than help them. Now we’ve become so used to resisting the unexpected and uncomfortable things which arise that we ‘demonise’ them and push them away. How would it be if we harvested their jewels instead? Yes, they do leap out at often inconvenient moments, and yes, they can seem upon first inspection to be potentially destructive or chaotic, but when framed differently they can contain potent wake-up calls.

Have you seen the Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau? He is a bumbling French police detective who has an Asian manservant called Cato (not Catto), an expert in martial arts whose job is to attack Clouseau unexpectedly, leaping out from hiding places, to keep Clouseau’s combat skills sharp. Of course he always attacks at the ‘wrong moment’ and Clouseau shouts, ‘Not now, Cato!’ as they fight and pretty much always totally trash whatever environment they’re in.

Our demons are Cato. On some level we hired them to show us, not always comfortably, things we need to be aware of or be reminded of, especially our disowned self. And of course, in the surprise of their sudden appearances, leaping out of the closets of our lives, we nearly always scream, ‘Not now, Cato!’ – but there’s an invitation to reframe and re-evaluate our demons and even transform them into illuminating allies. When we treat them as friends keeping us on our toes, not enemies hindering us, a whole new menu of opportunity is on offer.

In making a list of the characters who live in my head, the first eight or so seem pretty universal. I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the end of the list, but here are some of the main players. I wonder if you have them, too.

1)The Pessimistic Worrier

Whatever’s about to happen, especially something which is not in my control, there’s a character who lives in my head who will imagine and play out the worst possible way it could go, the most negative scenarios that the Worrier thinks I need to prepare myself for. This even includes running imagined versions of potentially difficult conversations I need to have and inventing the most infuriating and triggery dialogue. Have you ever found yourself driving home and running one of these imagined exchanges in your mind? Have you ever found yourself getting angrier and angrier at the person you’re having the imaginary argument with, all because of the script you gave them? I can sometimes drive for half an hour and arrive home with no memory of the route I took, I was so immersed in my negative imagination. Painting the future as black as it can be, is this some kind of insurance? Control? Does this character live in your head?

2)The To-Do-List Addict

No matter how many times I run through the list of all the things I have got to do, this character never rests. ‘Let’s just run that through one more time. First I’ll do this, then I’ve got to do that . . . oh, and then . . .’ The anxiety that not everything might get done or that I might miss something or forget something, the overwhelmingness and pressure of everything I’ve got to do, and all the diverse and vital tasks I have to remember to tick off the endless list, can send my mind into an involuntary loop. This is also the character who starts trawling for trouble when nothing is wrong. I’ll sit back, relax, and then I’ll start running through the checklist of my life, relationship, money and health, looking for problems, things to solve. Invariably I’ll find something that isn’t OK, that needs sorting out. It is like a perpetual sense of having gone out and left the gas on. Something must be wrong somewhere and I mean to find it, worry about it, and fixate on it instead of allowing myself to simply relax in the space where I am.

3)The Innocent Victim

Oh, the injustice! My inner innocent victim is always upset by others’ lack of empathy and fairness. ‘There I was, only trying to help . . .’ Other people’s unfair behaviour is both painful and deliciously addictive in a way, because it is so hard to let go of a situation where we are definitely in the right. In fact, this character has its own cast of thousands living in my head because my innocent victim has to present unarguable evidence of his rightness and suffering of injustice, and that often plays out as a kind of courtroom scene in my mind where I list point by point items which prove my rightness and their clear wrongness, and everyone in the jury or in the gallery nods in agreement, equally outraged and sympathetic, understanding perfectly how utterly unfair this episode has been for me. How do they all fit up there in my head?

4)The Strategising Control Freak

It seems so important for everything to stay in control, to go the way I want it to. This character is very focused, and often anxious, running all kinds of control trips and strategies, weighing the odds, comparing probabilities, and devising plans and possibilities for me to have my own way. This character has a one-track mind and is fixated on only one outcome. He has no trust that unexpected situations might work out well for me. He sees through a tiny keyhole and yet acts as if he has all the information and knows his way is the best way, and when it looks like life has other plans he will attempt to take over and strong-arm everything back into his vision of rightness. This can often include manipulation – ‘If I do this, then she’ll do that . . . if I put it like this then they’ll think . . .’ – working out ways to say things to get the desired outcome, to control people without them ever feeling controlled. Mock innocence. The greatest opportunities often come cloaked in disaster and if we are patient, things can unfold much better than the original plan we had. This character has zero trust in that, can’t wait and can’t sit in the uncertainty.

5)The Vengeful Murderer

We each have our own personal cocktail of things which drive us so crazy that we almost want to kill whoever presses that button in us. For me, you only need to be driving too slowly in front of me when I’m in a hurry and I want to kill you, maybe have some huge crane appear and lift your car vertically off the road and throw it over a bridge with you inside, and for you to know it was karma exacted on you for your appalling, selfish driving. And in that rage surge I am so sure I am just and right. We have become so reactive and fragile. Most of us are lucky enough not (at this moment) to be living in a time where bombs are dropping all around us. Most of us do not (currently) need to walk eight hours to get clean water, yet we will ruin a whole day, or even a whole relationship, over the tone of voice you just spoke to me in. My injustice meter is so super-sensitive, and the surge of pain and injustice that can explode in me so overwhelming, that suddenly, in disbelief at the other person’s outrageous wrongness, I want to kill that person, or at least make them suffer, and feel completely justified. The vengeful murderer can go from zero to one hundred per cent in a moment.

6)The Slave-Driver/Inner Critic

I’m not sure whether this is one character or two similar ones working in tandem, but I have never met anyone who is totally free of this undermining voice. When we were growing up, usually the way our parents and teachers delivered advice on how to succeed and get it right was with very critical and judgemental language. It became so important for us to achieve what was expected of us that we internalised the same voices to keep us on track and free from failure. Approval and success are so important to us that we feel justified in slave-driving ourselves along, and often our compassion for our fallibility is sacrificed along the way. It is only very recently that children are being taught that encouragement is even an option unless one is already succeeding.

7)The Naive Child

‘This time it is going to be different!’ Aw, bless this little boy who lives in me. I remember how neat my handwriting was on the first page of every new exercise book at school. I had such positive intentions that this time I was going to absorb what the teachers were saying. After all, everyone else seemed to get it. ‘I’ll just listen. I’ll focus and listen. I can do this!’ Yet pretty soon I’d be daydreaming again and spacing out, unable to take in what they were teaching, and inevitably would get in trouble for my laziness. Still I soldiered on with my well-intentioned version of studiousness – to no avail, sadly. The naive child in me can’t understand why the world is so corrupt and unpredictable, and he often feels painfully powerless in the face of the current state of the planet. We want to live in a world where we can expect people to be fair and kind, and none of us want to live life looking through a cynical lens, expecting the worst, but inevitably certain people and situations are going to disappoint us. This little guy, like a faithful puppy, comes back again and again for more and often forgets to make the necessary boundaries I need to protect myself from the unpredictability of life’s relationships and challenges.

8)The Needy One

Some people have done a great job of shutting this character down, especially as it is one of the more shameful ones. The needy one in me thinks that he depends on other people’s actions and decisions to feel OK. I live in a very volatile and tenuous realm when this character is in the driving seat. The beliefs that this character lives by are totally self-sabotaging because none of us can depend on everyone else acting as we would prefer. People are undependable. Everyone has their own lives and changing priorities, and while I am only OK when they choose what I want them to choose I am guaranteed to live like a hungry ghost, never fully satisfied and never feeling fully safe. The beliefs this character lives by are rooted in childhood and can be hard to shift. To cultivate the healthy path of self-care, not dependent on others, is a wonderful yet challenging undertaking. I’m not sure the path ever ends but until I take a more self-caring attitude I can live a totally disempowered existence, as if I’m a regressed child waiting for Mother’s milk. This character also brings a lot of shame with it, as our culture looks down on neediness. As Woody Allen said, ‘If only neediness and begging were attractive qualities.’

9)The Flaming Sex Maniac

Anyone not have this one? Some days nearly any stimulus can trigger sexual thoughts and sometimes in the most inappropriate of situations. This character only sees life from one single perspective. When he’s walking down the street all he sees are fuckable, competitor and irrelevant. This is one of the characters who we tend to try and keep the most hidden, as not everyone would appreciate the nuances of our dark appetites. Our culture is very hung up around sex. As Gabrielle Roth says, ‘We make it both too important and not important enough’, and it is no radical news to suggest that religion has been largely responsible for brainwashing generations of hell-fearers away from their natural, horny impulses. Sexuality can be one of the most powerful portals to experiencing one’s spirituality, to making a direct connection with whatever your idea of the Divine is. Priests don’t want to give up their jobs of being the middle-men, so over the years they’ve rebranded sex as a sinful thing and, as we said earlier, the further you push a beach ball down under the surface of the swimming pool the more violently it springs back up. Suppression magnifies intensity and it tends to leak out in all sorts of directions. We probably wouldn’t have the endless menu of sexual flavours and depravities available to us had religion not been so busy trying to ban it. That’s my kind of karma!

DEMON GROUP THERAPY

When you use the Way to conquer the world,

Your demons will lose their power to harm.

It is not that they lose their power as such,

But that they will not harm others;

Because they will not harm others,

You will not harm others:

When neither you nor your demons can do harm,

You will be at peace with them.

Tao de Ching

These living characters have needs and fears and compulsions. When we are in constant shame and suppression of these essential parts of ourselves, our demons find their own ways to get their needs met, and often in unexpectedly dramatic and self-sabotaging ways. These characters never die (until we do) and they need expression, so if we don’t feed meat to the demons we are setting ourselves up for endless unexpected dramas. We need to enter into a new relationship with these guys and stop trying unsuccessfully to hide them in the basement. They start banging on the trap door and as Tom Robbins says, ‘In the darkness they grow fangs and at unexpected moments leap out and bite you’. We almost need to start our day with a little group therapy session with the characters in our heads.

Ah, good morning, murderer, who’s on the list today? Oh, everyone? OK . . . and, sex maniac, what is it today? Oh, donkeys and baked beans, nice.

Once their desires are given a little oxygen they no longer need to force their way to the surface, breaking down the doors to get their needs met. I think of my demons as a school bus full of unruly freaks. If I don’t let them express themselves they find a way to distract me and grab the wheel! ‘Hey, Jamie, that guy on the internet called you a wanker!’ and my attention is momentarily diverted. It only takes a second for that character to leap into the driving seat and get control of the wheel, and God help me if he gets control of the mouth or the internet. Suddenly my inner vengeful murderer has control of my email . . . arrrgh! This is truly hazardous. This is one of the areas where our faster-is-better culture really does not serve us. In the days before the internet, if I was going to write something irretrievably rude or aggressive, by the time I’d hand-written the letter, folded it and slipped it into the envelope, there’s a good chance that while licking the gum I might come to my senses, crumple up the letter and write something less petulant and destructive. Email does not afford us this luxury. All too quickly I write my confrontational reply, probably totally over-reacting to whatever I have been sent as my I’m not being treated with the respect I deserve buttons have been pressed, I hit ‘send’ and it’s over, another bridge burnt.

The truth is that when we stop looking at these characters as enemies and consider that there may be some benefit to reframing our experience of them there’s an endless harvest of treasure available. That’s right, I’m saying that even these demonic voices have a function in Life’s genius. They have illuminations within, they can show us our limiting, wounded beliefs about ourselves, they can lead us into compassion for ourselves and others, and they each have skills and gifts which may presently be applied for dysfunctional ends, but with a new dialogue they can be transformed into allies, even employees. But first, we need to be willing to step into the shadows.