The Reason You Dance with Your Demons.
We’re a strange species, humans. So much of who we are and what we do is idiosyncratic, inexplicable, indefinable. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t do at least one thing that was self defeating, self sabotaging or just plain self harming. You’d think with all of our vaunted intelligence and awareness we’d have stopped all of that by now.
But we haven’t, and we probably won’t anytime soon.
Because all of us have our demons, and we persist in allowing them to control parts of our existence because we get something out of it. Anytime I am confronted by somebody acting in a way that makes no sense, I step back and force myself to ask one simple but very powerful question…
Why are they doing this?
And there is always, always an answer. The more anomalous the behavior, the more twisted the reasoning, but even crazy people have their reasons, even though they don’t make sense to those of us who aren’t sampling their particular flavor of reality.
For most of us, those answers are often hidden under years of trauma and emotional avoidance as we have battled to forget the things that gave us the demons in the first place.
But our demons bring us gifts, which is why we let them stay with us.
Maybe your demon is a fear that you are always letting people down, when you aren’t. We’ll call it the demon of ‘over-responsibility’. It probably came from a parental figure who you couldn’t make happy.
That demon robs you of a sense of fulfillment and peace, but you keep it around because you believe its lies that you can one day be enough if you just get everything right for everyone, and the idea of that feels good to you.
Or maybe it’s the demon that constantly reminds you that you can’t be selfish, or have a life of your own, so you forever look for opportunities to give away more than you can afford.
Somehow the demon has lied you into a belief that one day you will be ‘perfect’ and ‘holy’ if you give away more than you can do without, and you sadly take a sense of self esteem in your ‘generosity’, when really it’s a pathology that robs you of the things which you have earned.
Or maybe your demon convinces you that your father’s emotional absence was due to your unworthiness, and so you believe the demon’s lies and constantly berate yourself over everything.
This you do because it helps you to avoid the unpleasant truth that you try to avoid, that your father will never be there for you in the way that you want, and you are never going to feel his acceptance.
Our demons lie in our feelings, and display their dominance in our dedication to their falsehoods.
So if you want to exorcise your demons, you have to start by understanding what it is that their presence in your life brings to you. Because no matter who you are, or what your demon makes you do, there’s a little part of you that allows it to be here because it gives you something.
And once you understand what that is, you can begin to let go of the demon’s hand.
And dance your own dance, and not theirs.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings