Thinking About: Personal Demons

We all have them – those voices in the back of our minds that tell us that we’ll fail at whatever we’re attempting or that no matter what we do or how we are that no one will ever truly love us. They are our own personal demons. Of course, they’re not really demons (which don’t exist) but are aspects of our own personalities. Some of them are internalisations of parents or siblings absorbed into our early psychological make-up long before we had defences to keep them out. Tell a child bad things about itself often enough and it will believe that it’s stupid or ugly no matter what it becomes or believes in later life. No matter what happens there will always be that voice telling them that they will simply not be good enough – ever.

For as long as I can remember I have been criticised for the things I do and the person I am. In subtle and not so subtle ways I have been told for probably 50 years that any problems I encounter in my life are primarily the cause of my personal inadequacies and that if only I stopped doing X or started doing Y or behaved more like Z then I would lead a much happier life and get what I want from it. In other words if only I wasn’t ME things would be so much better. I don’t think I ever actually made a conscious decision to regard this as the bullshit it is rather than try (impossibly) to be that person that other people wanted me to be, but at some point I must have said NO (internally) and decided to be who I wanted to be (or simply to discover who I really was). Inevitably this only increased the level of criticism aimed at me. After all how dare I think I knew best and how arrogant of me for wanting to be an individual in a world populated by clones too afraid to be who they should be. Of course I wasn’t born with this attitude ‘problem’. Like anything under attack I developed my defences over time. Which meant that some of the early attacks made it through and caused damage before I was ready for them. Some of the surviving attackers stayed behind as infiltrators and ‘fifth columnists’ and it’s with these early invaders that the nagging voices originate like propaganda broadcasts attempting to undermine the legitimacy of the incumbent regime.

So, how do I deal with these ‘broadcasts’? Mostly I ignore them as beneath my notice. When I have to deal with them – when they get too strident or too confident or when the ‘regime’ has moments of weakness - I have two stock responses: laughter or ridicule and cold hard reason. Most of my demons would make excellent stand-up comedians. Their snipping criticisms are so far off-beam and so ridiculous that the only rational response is howls of laughter. Of course knowing that they are in fact serious makes the whole performance even funnier. They are literally laughed off the stage. Other demons are harder to shift. They use my own mental abilities against me to fabricate arguments I should have difficulty refuting. Classically they put forward the oldest arguments – some of which I’ve actually heard from real live people and not just from my demons. Sweeping statements like “You’ll never amount to anything” or “You’ll never get anywhere (with an attitude like that)” are intermingled with “No one will ever love you” and “You’ll die alone”. I’ve heard these statements so often that they have become – if anything – rather tedious and frankly boring. To each I turn on the cold, hard light of reason and watch with delight as the demons scuttle away into the few shadows left clearly shaking in their cloven boots. “What exactly am I supposed to be amounting to?” I ask. “Where is this place I am meant to go to?” I question and “What makes is such a great place?” In response – silence. As to love I retort that I have been loved in the past (apparently) and may be loved again before I die. But tellingly I respond that love is too often a passing emotion, too often misunderstood by those in its grip and designed simply to bind two people together long enough to carry children beyond their most vulnerable early years. My personal experiences and my observations of others, I lecture my demons, tell me that love is a ‘nice to have’ but that actively seeking it and placing it as a central need in your life simply results in opening you up to a whole world of disappointment. Life, I continue firmly in lecture mode, would seem happier on the whole and on balance without the turmoil of love. At this point I am delighted that my demons are beginning to shuffle in their seats, look at their watches and to stifle yawns. Finally a smug looking demon shouts out that no matter what I do with my life and no matter how I defend myself I will inevitably die alone. So I look that particular demon squarely in the face and smile for a moment. “We all die alone” I say drawing that particular sting. “More important”, I remind it “is the fact that when I die all of you demons will die with me.” As the realisation hits them and their eyes begin to widen in shock I turn my back on them and walk away….. laughing.