Conflict tonight left me fearing old demons were breaking free

For some of us, the demons are always lurking.

We’re not always aware of them. They don’t always make themselves obvious. But when certain things happen and certain triggers are pushed inside of us, the echoes of old dysfunction suddenly become quite loud and the demons are eager to come out and play.

I got glimpses of some of my old demons earlier tonight. I felt like running away. And even though it’s been an hour since I escaped the presence of the people involved, I still feel the effects in my body.

My heart rate is still slightly elevated. Some of my muscles feel clenched. And I feel something vague and terrible in the pit of my stomach.

It adds up to echoes of the ways I learned to feel as a child — when I was small and powerless, when I felt terrified of the narcissist who ruthlessly ruled my life.

I felt afraid tonight. And none of it made sense to my conscious mind, because there was nothing rational to be afraid of.

I was around a group of people who were involved in some ridiculous drama. It wasn’t just one conflict. It was a series of interrelated conflicts among half a dozen people. None of it directly affected me, but something about my experience of their emotions pushed buttons in my mind.

Whatever I felt from the people involved, it triggered very old and primitive emotions in my memory. And that caused those old demons to start rattling their chains and pushing against the sealed doors that normally keep them far from my view.

The specifics of the drama don’t matter. It was the varied emotions of the people that caused me to feel small and powerless once again.

One woman was sputtering with irrational rage. She wasn’t dangerous. She didn’t shout. But the twisted rage on her face reminded me of the narcissistic rage that I used to see from my father quite often when the family was behind closed doors.

A couple of other people were hurt and angry by some things that happened. Their anger was quieter than that of the first woman, but they were hurt in ways that made them want to lash out at one another.

One man wasn’t angry at all, but he was loud and telling everyone how he or she must think and feel about what was happening. He was controlling in a way that pushed my buttons.

One woman was passive, but that was because she was afraid. She wasn’t afraid for her physical safety, but she felt trapped among angry people whose battles weren’t hers to fight. She was very uncomfortable.

And the partner of the woman sputtering with rage was talking trash about that angry partner behind her back.

I had my thoughts about which people had been right and which had been wrong, but it wasn’t my fight, so I had no strong emotions about what had taken place. The reactions I had were strictly from absorbing the anger and rage and fear and need for control that I was feeling from the people around me.

All of the emotions I felt from these people created strong physical reactions in my body.

None of the feelings I felt from the people seemed rational to me. The drama seemed like a garden-variety dispute that could have been easily talked about and resolved. But whatever was going on was triggering what seemed to be psychological demons in some of these people.

And as their demons swirled in a toxic stew around me, they smelled my old toxic demons. Even though mine are well-hidden, the toxic emotions around me whispered to deeply buried layers of my psyche, “Come out of your hiding spot. Join us in rampaging through the minds and hearts of everybody here.”

Nothing about their drama will affect me tomorrow. It shouldn’t still be affecting me tonight, at least not for rational reasons. But their toxicity reminded me so much of the ways that my narcissistic father acted.

In some deep emotional sense, it felt as though I was experiencing his rage and control all over again. It terrified me.

I’ve spent decades trying to heal from the damage that growing up with this did to me. I’ve made a lot of progress, especially in the eight years since he died. I didn’t realize that something such as this could still bring that out of me again, but the effects were undeniable.

In the time I’ve spent writing this — half an hour, maybe — my heart rate is down. I’m slowly relaxing. My stomach isn’t doing quite the flip-flops that it was doing earlier. The fear is fading. My calm and rational mind is taking control again.

I sometimes think I’m over the damage that was inflicted on me. Most of the time, I can be rational and reasonable. The demons stay locked in the dungeons where I hid them long ago.

But this odd experience tonight is a reminder that those demons are still there.

Even though I can normally live a reasonable and emotionally safe life these days, this is a reminder that the damage is still lurking at the core.

It’s a reminder that those inner demons will probably be with me until the day I die, at least in a hidden and latent form. The best thing I can do is to keep them locked up and hidden away.

I fear that some wounds will never fully heal.

Note: There’s a well-known psychology book that explains how our bodies react in the ways that mine reacted tonight. It’s called “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. It’s an essential book for anyone interested in the long-term physical impacts of emotional trauma. It can be an eye-opener for understanding the mind-body connection.