a tiny keyhole and yet acts as if he has all the information and knows his way is the best way, and when it looks like life has other plans he will attempt to take over and strong-arm everything back into his vision of rightness. This can often include manipulation – ‘If I do this, then she’ll do that . . . if I put it like this then they’ll think . . .’ – working out ways to say things to get the desired outcome, to control people without them ever feeling controlled. Mock innocence. The greatest opportunities often come cloaked in disaster and if we are patient, things can unfold much better than the original plan we had. This character has zero trust in that, can’t wait and can’t sit in the uncertainty.
5)The Vengeful Murderer
We each have our own personal cocktail of things which drive us so crazy that we almost want to kill whoever presses that button in us. For me, you only need to be driving too slowly in front of me when I’m in a hurry and I want to kill you, maybe have some huge crane appear and lift your car vertically off the road and throw it over a bridge with you inside, and for you to know it was karma exacted on you for your appalling, selfish driving. And in that rage surge I am so sure I am just and right. We have become so reactive and fragile. Most of us are lucky enough not (at this moment) to be living in a time where bombs are dropping all around us. Most of us do not (currently) need to walk eight hours to get clean water, yet we will ruin a whole day, or even a whole relationship, over the tone of voice you just spoke to me in. My injustice meter is so super-sensitive, and the surge of pain and injustice that can explode in me so overwhelming, that suddenly, in disbelief at the other person’s outrageous wrongness, I want to kill that person, or at least make them suffer, and feel completely justified. The vengeful murderer can go from zero to one hundred per cent in a moment.
6)The Slave-Driver/Inner Critic
I’m not sure whether this is one character or two similar ones working in tandem, but I have never met anyone who is totally free of this undermining voice. When we were growing up, usually the way our parents and teachers delivered advice on how to succeed and get it right was with very critical and judgemental language. It became so important for us to achieve what was expected of us that we internalised the same voices to keep us on track and free from failure. Approval and success are so important to us that we feel justified in slave-driving ourselves along, and often our compassion for our fallibility is sacrificed along the way. It is only very recently that children are being taught that encouragement is even an option unless one is already succeeding.
7)The Naive Child
‘This time it is going to be different!’ Aw, bless this little boy who lives in me. I remember how neat my handwriting was on the first page of every new exercise book at school. I had such positive intentions that this time I was going to absorb what the teachers were saying. After all, everyone else seemed to get it. ‘I’ll just listen. I’ll focus and listen. I can do this!’ Yet pretty soon I’d be daydreaming again and spacing out, unable to take in what they were teaching, and inevitably would get in trouble for my laziness. Still I soldiered on with my well-intentioned version of studiousness – to no avail, sadly. The naive child in me can’t understand why the world is so corrupt and unpredictable, and he often feels painfully powerless in the face of the current state of the planet. We want to live in a world where we can expect people to be fair and kind, and none of us want to live life looking through a cynical lens, expecting the worst, but inevitably certain people and situations are going to disappoint us. This little guy, like a faithful puppy, comes back again and again for more and often forgets to make the necessary boundaries I need to protect myself from the unpredictability of life’s relationships and challenges.
8)The Needy One
Some people have done a great job of shutting this character down, especially as it is one of the more shameful ones. The needy one in me thinks that he depends on other people’s actions and decisions to feel OK. I live in a very volatile and tenuous realm when this character is in the driving seat. The beliefs that this character lives by are totally self-sabotaging because none of us can depend on everyone else acting as we would prefer. People are undependable. Everyone has their own lives and changing priorities, and while I am only OK when they choose what I want them to choose I am guaranteed to live like a hungry ghost, never fully satisfied and never feeling fully safe. The beliefs this character lives by are rooted in childhood and can be hard to shift. To cultivate the healthy path of self-care, not dependent on others, is a wonderful yet challenging undertaking. I’m not sure the path ever ends but until I take a more self-caring attitude I can live a totally disempowered existence, as if I’m a regressed child waiting for Mother’s milk. This character also brings a lot of shame with it, as our culture looks down on neediness. As Woody Allen said, ‘If only neediness and begging were attractive qualities.’
9)The Flaming Sex Maniac
Anyone not have this one? Some days nearly any stimulus can trigger sexual thoughts and sometimes in the most inappropriate of situations. This character only sees life from one single perspective. When he’s walking down the street all he sees are fuckable, competitor and irrelevant. This is one of the characters who we tend to try and keep the most hidden, as not everyone would appreciate the nuances of our dark appetites. Our culture is very hung up around sex. As Gabrielle Roth says, ‘We make it both too important and not important enough’, and it is no radical news to suggest that religion has been largely responsible for brainwashing generations of hell-fearers away from their natural, horny impulses. Sexuality can be one of the most powerful portals to experiencing one’s spirituality, to making a direct connection with whatever your idea of the Divine is. Priests don’t want to give up their jobs of being the middle-men, so over the years they’ve rebranded sex as a sinful thing and, as we said earlier, the further you push a beach ball down under the surface of the swimming pool the more violently it springs back up. Suppression magnifies intensity and it tends to leak out in all sorts of directions. We probably wouldn’t have the endless menu of sexual flavours and depravities available to us had religion not been so busy trying to ban it. That’s my kind of karma!
DEMON GROUP THERAPY
When you use the Way to conquer the world,
Your demons will lose their power to harm.
It is not that they lose their power as such,
But that they will not harm others;
Because they will not harm others,
You will not harm others:
When neither you nor your demons can do harm,
You will be at peace with them.
Tao de Ching
These living characters have needs and fears and compulsions. When we are in constant shame and suppression of these essential parts of ourselves, our demons find their own ways to get their needs met, and often in unexpectedly dramatic and self-sabotaging ways. These characters never die (until we do) and they need expression, so if we don’t feed meat to the demons we are setting ourselves up for endless unexpected dramas. We need to enter into a new relationship with these guys and stop trying unsuccessfully to hide them in the basement. They start banging on the trap door and as Tom Robbins says, ‘In the darkness they grow fangs and at unexpected moments leap out and bite you’. We almost need to start our day with a little group therapy session with the characters in our heads.
Ah, good morning, murderer, who’s on the list today? Oh, everyone? OK . . . and, sex maniac, what is it today? Oh, donkeys and baked beans, nice.
Once their desires are given a little oxygen they no longer need to force their way to the surface, breaking down the doors to get their needs met. I think of my demons as a school bus full of unruly
