Demon, Lilith or otherwise

I have had this happen before but not very often I must say. Been working with this guy for some time and we have been in recent times learning about and dealing with a demon in his personality structure. I have written about this before at The Demon Since then Kenoath has set about articulating much more about the demon subpersonality with his writings on Lilith.

We all have a Lilith but not a demon subpersonality, but there are some similarities between them

I use two chair a lot when working with the demon. As I have said before many therapists in my view do not deal well with this because the usual approach is to in some way constrain or get control of this aspect of self that can be quite destructive at times. My suggestion is one does not attempt to do that but instead gets some kind of coexistence with it. That means accepting some of its destructiveness which most therapists would have a hard time doing.

Any ways we have been doing the usual therapy stuff and this man is very well read and most articulate. However his life has been a whole series of crises often influenced by this demon as I call it. He states however that this influencing part is more alien than the what the demon would be. It is not an aspect of his personality in the usual sense of the word.

He has in his past studied the satanic world and there was an incident in his 20s when he met this man for a brief period through a mutual friend. They disliked each other intensely and this person he states had some kind of influence on him in a metaphysical way. This is what he reports the alien part to come from. He states that prior to him meeting this man it was there in a rudimentary form but it was since then that it became more pronounced and defined. This part is frightening to him and this guy has a ‘tough’ character one could say.

Again he is a smart man who in no way is prone to being off with the fairies and reporting wild theories and beliefs. Psychologists however could easily account for what he reports about this alien part. It would be seen as either a kind of dissociation or mild multiple personality, a delusion of some kind or perhaps even a sort of somatic hallucination.

Multiple personality

I am not discounting any of these but in this case it is almost too slick and too easy to pass it off with some diagnosis as described. I have looked hard and he does not show any of the other signs one would normally find with a dissociation or hallucination and so forth.

So what does one do? First thing I do is keep an open mind. Don’t let my theories restrict my observations of him. I’m not about to break out the cross and exorcism handbook. In the final analysis he has to deal with it in some kind of way such that his life becomes a bit better for him. Use the model for dealing with the demon as a flexible template that is to be altered where need be. Try this and try that and see what unfolds.

Our theories at times make it very hard to just keep

observing what is there and what is not

There is a problem with psychological theories (and the scientific model in general) in that they can explain everything. It is in the very nature of how they are constructed to be completely deterministic. Every thing can be determined by them. Unfortunately reality is not like that. There are some things that cannot be determined or explained and maybe this is one of those circumstances. There needs to be a new diagnostic disorder included in the DSM-IV. The “I don’t know” disorder.

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