The Psychotic Within

The past week has been a fascinating experience of seeing and engaging with the man within me with murderous intent against me. I am training in Psychodrama, a therapeutic method for working with groups and manifesting the truth within on a stage, using the group as actors/auxiliaries in the drama. There is a woman in the group who, last year, was my lover, and who suddenly decided to depart, and I felt hurt, anger, rage, sad and alone. I found plenty of healing within was required to move through the debris of the situation. This past weekend as I was in training, I found myself observing her. She was alive, comfortable, free, clearly blossoming and shining as a person, solid and beautiful in her presence. The more I saw and admired her, the more I connected with and understood the love I felt, and do feel for her. That was a beautiful and freeing experience.
However, I also experienced another voice within, that started up quietly and grew through the weekend. The gist of the voice was “She is so beautiful and gorgeous, no wonder she left because you are dirty and filthy and there is no way someone as beautiful as she is would choose to have you in their life.” To call the voice vicious is an understatement. I would have preferred to have had a chance to do a drama and bring out that part of me and work with it. Instead, the opportunity was not available to me. I experienced much distress as, at one point I became overwhelmed by my own vicious attacks, and felt shattered and defenceless.
I subsequently had a dream. I was on a very dark uphill path from a set of cabins and heading to my sleeping quarters. I met a man. In the darkness he attacked me. He punched me, kicked me, and mercilessly and relentlessly laid into me. Murder was his intent. I escaped somehow, finally reaching my cabin. I found my mattress rolled up, and as I was standing on steps to the upper bunk bed, the man opened my cabin door. Futilely I attempted to slam it shut, but he got inside, and I awoke, knowing he was going to kill me. I knew the man in the dream with such vicious intent was me, and I knew he was out in strength, long time buried, because of the experience with my ex-lover, and other events of the past week.
I recognise that he developed in me when, as a child my father left the family when I was seven, and I tried answering my own question: why did he leave me? My answer was: because I am not good enough for him. Over the years that voice was strengthened to my psychotic killer of self as I did things I judged as evil and wrong. Sexual desires as a developing young man were among the myriad of feelings and expressions that I judged as bad, indicative of my evil, and piece by piece my vicious self-destructive self was developed. I am thrilled now that I am able to work with this part of me, a part that over the years has taken many forms and intensities, and that now I am prepared to engage with and resolve. This is an example of my inner world that creates fog for me to work with, and maybe now I can change its intent as I find a new way of being within, train and develop a kinder, gentler person as those who know me see in the external world. What a fabulous opportunity to heal myself, and resolve some inappropriate aspects developed by myself as a growing child and teenager who wanted to understand some things that did not have good answers, but as a child had to be “my fault”. We can create so much pain for ourselves simply by attempting to interpret a world we are not equipped to comprehend as a child, or even as an adult.