Old Demons Die Hard

Recently, my first academic paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was an occasion for celebration, something to feel proud about considering the rather challenging journey I have been on the last seven years. While I did feel excited and proud, I also felt ambivalent and even a little frightened. This fact came through most clearly when I sent the link to the article to two of my favorite female professors at the graduate school I attend. What’s odd is that in the email, I threw in a couple of self-deprecatory remarks that belied a kind of anxiety, especially about the past. During the course of obtaining my first master’s degree, I was living through some of the darkest most difficult times in my life, you could say I was a badly wounded animal, uncivilized, immature, and profoundly hurt. So I took swipes at people with my words, I attacked people and wounded them in turn. Although I also expressed some degree of warmth and kindness, most of my concerns and behaviors came through in highly critical ways that sought to differentiate between myself — self-righteous and arrogant as I was — and the people around me that I deemed insufficiently enlightened.

I behaved just like my father, really, and I hate my father.

In the email to my two profs sent a few days ago, my anxiety was about this very issue, the issue of my past. It’s a very dark past, especially from the perspective of therapeutic and clinical psychology. I’m surrounded by therapists and analysts since I am studying psychology and they often cringe, visibly cringe, when I tell them about my childhood and early adulthood experiences. So as I put myself forward expressing the contours of my creative and professional present, I couldn’t help myself from also feeling anxious about my past. The anxiety is rooted in a sense that the past, the darkness, the propensity to hurt others, the propensity to make the wrong choices and put myself in harm’s way, the tendency to subvert my chances for success and happiness, that all these and more shadowy demons in the deepest recesses of my soul will somehow get into the Now, they will smear themselves all over the Present, they will keep me from moving into a consciousness where I can trust myself.

As it happens, these demons of the deep past have their own autonomy, they live inside me and I must contend with them. I have grown so much stronger in the last few years and I see them all so clearly now, but old demons die hard and I know that I still have a lot of work to do and a lot of suffering to make peace with before they really let me be. In a chapter entitled “Reconciling with the Past” in his 2008 book A Life At Work, Thomas Moore explains that “many people so identify with their failures that they develop a negative image of themselves and expect to fail at whatever they do.” I think many of us can relate to this statement. There are two other statements that have significance for me at this time. The first is from a recent documentary about the basketball player, Michael Jordan. In it, one of the sports analysts explains that “most people project the past onto the future” and this is why they can’t ever change their present and instead continue to experience hardships and failures. The logic goes that since there was failure in my past, it means I am a loser and I will always fail. If there is failure in the family, too, if, for example, your father is a terrific failure, then the feeling of being doomed to repeat the story line can be overwhelming. When we expect to fail, we invariably do. The next relevant statement comes from a scene in a television program about the British royal family called The Crown when Princess Anne asks Prince Charles about the people of Wales. She asks (somewhat unkindly) if they are “stooped under the weight of an ancestral grudge?” This profound question says so much about the way countless people all throughout time have lived their lives: beholden to inherited ideas and stories about what is and is not possible in their lives, hampered and hemmed in by stifling narratives that ensure them they are victims who can never escape their shared burden of failure and shame. Entire lifetimes can pass under the influence of these dark trans-generational demons.

Projecting the past onto the future seems like a dead-end project that cannot possibly facilitate new growth, new life, or deep creativity. I do believe there is a time for scrutinizing the past and discovering its lessons but unconsciously carrying forward behaviors that are destructive to the present and to the future, blindly feeding and cultivating these dark demons which sometimes aren’t even our beasts but inherited ones, this propensity not only frightens me but it angers me, too.

I have watched this history at work in myself for the last few days and as it swirled around my psyche dancing and crying and grieving, asking for my serious attention, something magical happened. I suddenly realized that I have, in fact, transformed. I am no longer the same woman I was five years ago. I have healed many wounds and I have learned to accept who I am at my core. Fearing the past is a habit now, just an old habit. So I asked the triple moon goddess Hekate to bless me as I walk across this threshold of profundity from my past identity into my present one. I understand now that I need not kill the demons, but simply leave them behind at the crossroads and allow Hekate to lead them back down into the underworld where they can finally rest in peace among their own kind.

I believe that at any moment in life, we have a choice, we can choose the eyes, the perspective through which we perceive things. It’s just that most of the time, we don’t know we have a choice because the habits of the past are so strong. But if we can just muster the strength to make an effort, to strive and struggle and resist a bit, the habits will start to shift and we can find new allies in the soul who will support our growth. At the end of the day, it takes effort to become happy, fulfilled, and useful to others. We need constant vigilance to notice when we are sliding back into the shadowy recesses of the past or when we are projecting its shadows onto the future.

I suppose this is why forgiveness is such an important tool in the spiritual process. It’s not so much that we forgive or that we become purveyors of some kind of personal justice. It’s that we forgive to rescue ourselves from bitterness, from enslavement to an idea or event from the past. When we relinquish our hold on the past in an act of forgiveness, we not only rescue ourselves but the other person as well from potentially a lifetime of repetitious backward regressive strife. Anyone who has felt the creepy presence of bitterness in their heart knows that not having that type of currency flowing through the soul is much more peaceful and therefore conducive and productive to future flowerings and fruitions.

So I stood up and declared to myself and to the entire universe that I refuse to carry this weight any longer. I set it down at the crossroads for Hekate. From now on, I will only embody my present and when fears about the past arise, I will say fare thee well to them. From here on out, I walk without fear, standing solidly in my truth, embodied, empowered, and free to roam unhindered. Yes, old demons die hard, but we can just wave goodbye to them as we turn and walk upon our own centered path.