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
