I can't really tell you how long that went on for - probably not more than a few seconds. I felt the thing slip off into the shadows. Not dead - but gone for now. My hands are bloody from hitting the lamp the thing had been around. I am afraid, and at same time I feel strong.
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The next few days are fantastic. Working out is easier than ever. I face up to a lot of my own fears - not just of external reality, but my own rage and anger. The anxiety is almost gone. It slowly returned over the next few weeks - I didn't *kill* my demons after all.
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But the levels never reach quite what they were before, and in the two nightmares I've had since then, I ended up attacking and killing the monsters chasing me, which has never happened before.
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I'll need some serious spiritual firepower to permanently kill or banish my demons, but this was a good start. So: Go read Conan the Barbarian, to learn how to punch your demons in the face
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Some follow-up: Some of you are probably wondering "Vogelfrei, do you think there are actual demons". Honestly, I only practice reductionism on things I can reduce. All I know is that prayer and punching seem to be more effective than understanding them "scientifically"
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In terms of psychology, a very useful heuristic for trauma is the idea that people generate fixed fight/flight/freeze /fawn responses. Part of the job of this bizarre psychological stuff is to break up the fixations and let you explore new basic responses.
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In terms of anxiety, another useful model is that people with anxiety are hallucinating predators everywhere. (For people who believe in real demons - they would obviously exploit underlying anxieties to manifest, so there's no contradiction here)
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So some people are constantly being "triggered" into fixed patterns that then go on to color a lot of the rest of how they think and live. But you can change these things. It isn't easy, but you can.
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The Conan the Barbarian stories are a *lot* of fun - you should read them even if you're not going to try anything similar. Reading Mishima was very useful for helping me to understand the Ethos of immanence/action, and undergirded my success here.
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And yes, while this story is strange it is also absolutely true.
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I love this unreservedly. Good on you bud 

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