When anyone is abused, and especially when it is small, vulnerable children who are expecting love and nurturing, and the abuse is prolonged and unmitigated, the psyche of the abuser and the painful memory of the trauma penetrates the psyche of the victim. The shock and repeated shock goes deeper and deeper. These memories and feelings are often embedded deep within our bodies, as suppressed memories, old wounds, blocked pathways of vital energy.
If the victim, in an attempt to survive, buries that memory, shuts it away, it remains within nonetheless. The body never lies.
The same applies to any community or society that denies it’s past. That denial is a survival strategy of the survivor.
Recovery is dependent upon recalling and resolving those memories and wounds in a safe environment, where the survivor feels held. Coping strategies are an attempt to manage these feelings without ever releasing them. Coping arises from a deep fear, from the lack of help or safety that is all too common and is, as such, an adaptive strategy, and an adjustment to the prevailing situation. No real growth or learning is possible with this strategy. Belief becomes an essential tool of survival. Knowledge of the truth is banished. Often the survivor survives because he or she takes on the responsibility fro the abuse.
This is the self-loathing, shame, confusion that the survivors takes on. This si also what stops the survivor from speaking out.
And when, in day to day life, the survivor feels that fear, when the fear is triggered by related or unrelated events in the present, he or she will invariably see it as an external force, not as something emerging from within.
The psyche of a society that is abusive in nature will seem massive to anyone attempting to confront it, just as the psyche of an adult who abuses a child will seem massive to the child. That makes it more difficult to deal with in healthful ways.
These are real forces, they emerge from real events, and in a twisted way, the survival strategy of the victimised often helps the abuser and the abusive society to maintain their power over survivors if those forces are portrayed as being outside the human realm.
Thus Satan is an externalisation of the masked abuse of the Society.
My own demons are externalisations of my inner pain, fear and wounds. When I first saw them, I too saw them as externals, and they terrified me. I had to eat them, to breath into and through them to dislodge that illusion of externality. I had to recognise the parts of the abusers psyche that were within and excise them. This took love to do; that is to say compassion for the child I was, empathy for the child I was, actively recognising the survival strategies I engaged in, actively loving myself the way I found myself, actively nurturing myself. And taking it on, bit by bit, day by day.
Realising this is helpful, because then one has some traction on the problem. One can see that the demon is NOT so much an external force, or that it is beyond one’s reach or ability to deal with. It is not easy, that much is true. It is somewhat easier when one knows, that much is also true.
It takes the entire Society to deal with the Demons of Society, just as it takes an individual to deal with his or her own demons, with support from what Alice Miller calls an ‘enlightened witness’.
Just as many of my helpers were able to empathise with me, and to accompany me on my journey of exploration and recovery (as opposed to diagnosing me and issuing instructions and medication based on a diagnostic model), the survivors who are now speaking freely, in large numbers, and for the first time are able to reveal the full extent of their trauma are bringing the beginnings of healing to Society.
Those who have successfully ‘adjusted’ to the norms of our Society will find this process threatening, for it dislodges their concepts of identity just as those who exercise abusive power will find it threatening, though for quite different reasons: they do not wish to let go of their power and many will do ANYTHING to retain that power. That is the nature of the sociopath, the psychopath.
In truth, the psychopath and sociopath ARE demons; physical and human, if not humane. And they know it serves them to craft a scary monster, to shift the goal posts, the burden of responsibility away from themselves onto an imaginary entity.
They know too that those who have yet to meet their own 'demons' and metabolise them will all too easily fall prey to the illusion. This is the very basis for Organised Power and Organised Religion.
"There is no Satan, no such solitary force,
just old wounds that are hidden, protected and projected of course
The choice is yours, the choice is mine
we live by out choices all the time."
From my song "There is no Evil"
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Do what you love, it's your gift to universe
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