Turning towards our demons

In the psychedelic community a common advice is to: turn towards your demons, rather than away from them. Generally this is not bad advice at all and I have guided many people who reported how helpful it was when they did this. Still, this advice never sat very well with me.

The other day one of my therapists helped me get in touch with a deep, quite existential fear. I could almost see it, but not quite. It was not much more than an intuition of a great, familiar fear, somewhere in me. Fear of what? I could only guess. But an intuitive guess can be valuable. It was something about me doing something, it being misinterpreted somehow and causing a horrendous rupture in the bond with this person. Quite abstract. More associated with my mother than my father. And very old, I guess from the earliest years, perhaps months of my life.

So there seems to live in me an old and deep fear of the rupture of bonds with loved ones. A demon made of a memory of the horror of losing a close relationship.

Now, if you have a therapeutic background and are trained in a healing method, like my therapist and like me, It seems so clear what we need to focus on. That the key to releasing this burden of fear would lie in confronting the demon. If I could only really allow myself to feel that fear and the pain behind it. That will heal me.

I get it, I have more than enough experience in the field to be aware that this can be liberating and how it works. But that is not what happened.

Luckily this therapist is a very wise and sensitive one and she was able to help me say no. Even though we were both quite sceptical of this response. Something similar happened on a walk with my wife - also an experienced therapist. On our walks, we often dig into the personal challenges in our lives (we are therapy nerds, we can’t help it, it’s too interesting). Investigating a similar or at least very related wound in me, I could only say that; no, I just did not feel the point of going there.

Healing is such a mystery to me. And I just love my work for exactly this reason. But I never get to know. It is why I appreciate models like IFS and Hakomi. They are excellent tools that help me with open minded exploration. IFS taught me specifically that if I have an agenda, I am in the wrong state to support the healing of my client. Which is a bit of a tricky one for us therapists, isn’t it?! How can we not have the agenda of helping and healing our client? That is the heart of the contract we have with them!

And yet; models like Hakomi and IFS help me do this. They help me to work in a way that I do not have to know. And they help me be humble; when I think I know.. That is when I should take a step back. Just like my therapist did when we got to this fear in me. So she listened to the messages from my body, from my subconscious system. The messages that I cannot hear by myself. And it turned out that no, I do not need to focus my attention on the fear and pain. At least not at this stage. Now it would be much better to work on self love and to open up to the love, support and presence that is already available from the people around me.

Even though this session with my therapist was a sober one, it illustrates my unease with the advice of turning towards your demons. Especially related to the highly unpredictable world of psychedelic experiences I am suspicious of supporting a mindset that there are reliable rules of thumb or approaches. They may be helpful a few or even many many times. But when they fail your sense of direction is taken away. I think it is because there is a bias in this mindset of relying on an insight, on a method or a direction. Instead I tend to support open minded exploration, tuning to what seems to be happening, listening to the different messages coming from the process. Ideally together with someone else.

This seems to require us to be present-with rather than to do something specific. Often, perhaps always, things happen spontaneously when we are present enough with the process. So we do not need to do them anyway. Then we can be surprised; a crucial element in healing processes because only then something truly new happens. We need something new to happen don’t we? If the solution was already here, we would not need any healing.

So.. let me rephrase the advice for fresh psychonauts; When you encounter a demon; be with it. No need to do anything, see if you can allow to happen what needs to happen. You might be pleasantly surprised what does.

By the way, you can also read this post on my Substack: https://substack.com/@coendekoning