Very draft-y/note-y. Hopefully others benefit.
I finished my second Jhourney retreat recently. I wanted to talk about what I spent most of it dealing with, what I’d call my “EA demon”.
For the first few days I couldn’t really meditate. I kept trying things, carefully forming theories and experimenting. But I kept feeling worse and worse. Depression and self-hate edging into suicidality. An extremely malicious voice was telling me to kill myself on repeat.
In a shower, while investigating this, I came into full contact with the malice for the first time. It was striking! I’ve never felt that much malice before. It was the mental equivalent of “die n-word die”, all directed at me!
After two days of failing to solve this on my own, I asked for my laptop back to call people. I was really spiraling. The Jhourney team scheduled me with their on-site coach, Mark Estefanos.
The following day I worked out and managed to summon unwavering resolve and temporarily defeated the demon in my head. Felt good even! But after I stopped meditating it came back. Then came my talk with Mark.
We did some IFS, I can transcribe the session from memory:
Me: “I have this mental demon, I’m not sure if it’s a part of myself or an actual demon. Just pure malice directed at me.”
Mark: “Well, either way we can work with it. We’ll see.”
Me: feeling relieved mark is implying he can help work with it no matter what
Mark: “So, start off by finding the part in your body”
Me: (After maybe 30 seconds) in my head
Mark: Where in your head?
Me: (After maybe 1 minute) in the top front
Mark: Great. Now ask it what it wants?
Me: It’s just telling me to die.
Mark: Chase it around and poke it with a stick till it answers. You’re not exactly on good terms.
Me: laughs Okay, (minute later), it says I should die because I’m evil/bad. And what does evil mean? Hmm… (minute later) oh, it thinks I’m a mass murderer from not working on AI safety enough. It’s my EA trauma!
Mark: Great, so it is a part of your mind! This’ll make things easier.
…(will transcribe the rest later. it’s late. roughly: Mark asked me what made it that I should die and not other people. I got back “I should be different/better than this”, this led me to the responsibility/ev thing, then mark asked me what wholesome orientation i’d have now. I said some stuff. he added on “humility: not knowing what I can do”, I included that, radiated the wholesome replacement orientation I wish my 16-year old self could have, then everything got crazy.)…
After radiating the wholesome wish to save all sentient beings, including myself, with no contradiction or hate involved, with wisdom, with humility, all included, to the EA demon part. I started violently shaking. Trauma release shaking. I got on the bed and shook violently for ~40 minutes. None of it conscious. I would just radiate the wholesome version of EA that I know now and ask, “What do you think of this as a way to meet your goals?” and then I would start shaking. My muscles hurt a little afterward. It was that intense.
And I felt much better! It didn’t fully resolve, there’s soo much there it seems. But progress!
I continued the unfolding on my own, asking mark pointed questions over lunch every day. I still haven’t integrated it all. This is a huge piece of trauma. The result of fully taking responsibility for the suffering of the world, for years, and telling myself that, if I failed to act, I would effectively be a mass murderer. A year+ of burnout and suicidal depression founded on this. So much pain.
I find it plausible that often when I feel depressed, apathetic, low energy, it’s actually something like this being repressed. Better to feel numb than self-hate you can’t deal with!
Very likely the reason this came up on retreat was because I had the space & safety for it to stop being repressed. I hope I keep being able to work with it as I return to regular life tomorrow. There’s definitely more to do.
It was awesome to meet Mark, he really is a mind wizard! I’m excited to keep learning how to work with my interiority. There are a lot of bugs I want to resolve! I hope I’ll post an “EA demon 2” in a few months that says I’ve resolved it!
This’ll probably be my main focus until it’s resolved. Mark said if I bring up the part/issue and measure how “big/weighty/dark/etc” it feels I can roughly estimate “how much left” there is. I’m still learning to do this, but when I can attempt to bring up the part and basically can’t (short of re-creating it) I’ll know I’m ~done. Then, on to the many other ways I abuse myself!
Oh, one more thought relating to this: Very plausibly there’s a lot of repressed grief involved that I need to feel. I almost cried while shaking but couldn’t. I’ve been a bit blocked on crying recently.
Really, the critical thing here is to learn to measure progress while I’m working. That seems to require two things:
- Being able to vibe-estimate “how much of the thing I’ve worked through” in a way that’s relatively stable/real. Not just a measure of “how active is this issue right now”.
- Being able to tell when I’ve resolved something vs. just temporarily placated a part. Mark said there’s a difference between a relaxation/release when something resolves, and a “going dark” / “losing awareness” feeling. I’ll start to get a feel for this with experience. Exciting!
I’ll note: Mark did mention that often we’re “Part factories”. I asked him how he thinks about if there’s “Just one part” or “Many” and he said something like “Oh yeah, there could be 50, we often make ‘part factories’ so you could have this guy, his brother, etc. etc.”
This reminds me of another Mark, the author of meditationbook.page, who said the mind can be very discrete. It’s possible the way this stuff works is like, discretely integrating parts, but there’s just 50 copies of the same part. Or other possible models. Stuff is weird. The important thing is the ability to:
- Know I’m making progress
- Know how much more there is to go (roughly)
I expect that with more work I’ll get faster and faster at integrating the various copies of the EA demon, and then eventually I’ll be done. Or at least, done enough that I move on to other abusive voices (such as my internalized-dad voice, yelling at me for not being perfect!)