jennfrank.

my exorcism

A few years after GamerGate, I called ahead to a metaphysical shop and made an appointment for an exorcism. I think I expected a one-and-done, which was naive of me, but I’m grateful to’ve had the full experience.

The “Bind Trump” movement had received a little public boost in visibility because Lana del Rey was talking about it on social media. I remember thinking to myself, man, that’s got to be psychologically effective, to be aware of so many people rooting for your downfall.

And then I realized I was describing myself, and then I began to melt down. Oh no! How was this any different from being afflicted with a real, actual curse? I decided to consult a professional.

I looked up spiritual practitioners and found one willing to perform a Christianish, ‘nondenominational’ exorcism: to help me get out from under the sticky, clinging cloud of others’ projections and perceptions. Did the exorcism work? That’s always people’s first question. In some ways it probably made life a little worse, although that isn’t anyone’s fault directly. In other ways, the exorcism was a great thing: I went to therapy. First exorcism, then therapy. People will literally get exorcised instead of going to therapy. It’s me, I’m people.

But what I hadn’t understood was the simplest type of exorcism, which is also the hardest: handing a projection right back to someone. “That’s not mine, that’s yours.” That’s your anxiety, your fear, your wounding; I’m not trying to take a video game away from you, I’m not your mom. I’m not even my mom. (Well, I am, but only in the sense that I’m a parentless, feral child who regularly works hard at cultivating inner parents.) But confident deflection makes some people even angrier than they were before, so I eventually forgot how to do it.

There are factions of the Christian deliverance ministry racket that refer to certain people as “witches” or “warlocks” or “destiny swappers”; these terms, in actuality, describe a compulsive pattern of blame-shifting. Unable to accept any accountability, responsibility, or blame (but demanding credit for anything that does go well), some people deflect every time, externalizing and projecting their own shame, woundings, fears, or bad behaviors onto other people. This is considered, in the contemporary deliverance world, “witchcraft”1 or “spellwork”: the manipulation of others’ perception of reality, attempting to manifest a narrative by repeating it until it comes true. Really, it’s the erosion of others’ will.

The type of person embroiled in this unconscious pattern may look for easy, willing repositories for their own shame2. So I am working hard at noticing when someone is trying to deposit their own bullshit on my side of the fence, “Hey! That’s not mine! That’s very much a you thing,” and deflecting accordingly, refusing to internalize it. Equally important is accepting responsibility for what is my portion, but taking not a single bite more. I’m happy to eat shit, but I resent eating someone else’s.

My best friend was telling me, in hushed tones, about a woman who was having trouble in her marriage. The woman had started communicating only by text message to her husband—because, when she communicated verbally, nothing was getting through to him. Or rather, communication was all confused, garbled. (“Passing through the funhouse mirror filter,” I said, nodding. “Like, how did you ever get that message from what I said.”)

Their home issues had become so extreme, the woman had “gotten the church involved3,” my best friend told me in a very low voice. Then: “She thinks he has a demon.”

I blinked.

“Here’s something we do know about” the actual, clinical cluster-Bs, I finally said to my best friend, who is an ardent churchgoer, after a long pause. “Some people don’t have conversations with actual people; they have conversations with introjects.” Then I admitted we all do this to some extent; we have illusions about people, about the things they say to us, running raw data through a perception filter of our own experience. And man, I get it. My nervous system cannot pump the brakes on my own anxiety. I will sit there having a doom-spiral conversation with my own anxiety until someone comes along to interrupt it, like Girl. Chill.

“She’s an internal object,” I explained. “It’s almost like the opposite of metacognition. Her husband is having conversations with himself, but he’s given the critical voice inside of him her voice and her face.” I hesitated. “So it is like a demon, in a way,” I said. “He’s married to an inner monologue wearing his wife’s face.” I exhaled, exhausted.

I pointed out that we’re all susceptible to interacting with a fantasy of a person, as if the idea of ‘a parasocial relationship’ could somehow sneak all the way into the home, masquerading as real love and intimacy. (“Don’t marry a fan,” I suggested. “Don’t meet your heroes?” my best friend asked. I thought about it, then nodded. Yeah, because the person won’t be able to live up to your idea of them. Limerence strikes again.)

“The fantasy goes both ways4,” I continued. “I recently heard that always seeing the ‘good’ in someone isn’t kindness at all, but a survival strategy. Because if you’d seen your earliest caregivers fully as they were, it would’ve been too terrifying5.”

“That sounds like her,” my best friend said flatly, adding something about the woman’s childhood. “And she got together with her husband in high school.” They have a ton of kids together, apparently.

I nodded grimly. “That’s how they getcha,” I said.

Right after that conversation, she was showing me my childhood bully, my preteen frenemy6, on Facebook. “She teaches theater now,” my best friend had been telling me. “Some sort of method acting.”

“Oh?” I’d asked. My best friend had previously mentioned that the woman taught theater, but never that there was a specific method to it.

“Yeah,” she’d said. “Let me look it up.”

My frenemy had been beyond vicious. I did know her motivating emotion was envy—envy about acting, specifically, about theater—so I’d gone out of my way to bring her with me to auditions, to afford her every window of opportunity I had. Enviousness is an ugly-feeling feeling, but it’s just your body and brain physiologically screaming at you to notice what you actually want. I’d hoped to redirect her attentions away from trying to annihilate me and into going after the thing she really wanted, to go after it in an honest and productive way. How effective this was, I do not know. I think I just made her angrier. Oh, well! AFABs are socialized to find the meanest girl they can and to drop gifts at her feet, praying she doesn’t turn her lens of hatred and destruction onto us.

One thing is for sure: my frenemy, and people like her, successfully convinced me I don’t want it enough. There isn’t a single thing I want bad enough to tackle someone else over it. I will back away slowly, no problem.

My best friend held up her phone. It was called the Michael Chekhov Method.

I inhaled sharply. “I know what this is,” I said. “I mean, I don’t, I’ve never heard of it, but I know exactly what this is.”

When I first started acting seriously, maybe age 8ish, I explained, I didn’t understand why my peers couldn’t just do it. I couldn’t wrap my head around this. Acting is easy. Just be yourself! You’re yourself, but in a dramatic, exciting, fictional new circumstance. You make it real for yourself. Then you do all your real feelings, all your real reactions, while repeating the words as written. The performance is effortlessly ensouled because you’re just being your real self in a surprising new setting, making the words real, putting your breath and your back into it. It’s just like living; you’re being alive where others can see it. You’re Dorothy Gale having a little dream.

Hmm. Maybe this cannot be called acting at all. I’ve heard film actors—typically femme ones—criticize “method” actors, typically men, who cannot be disturbed or disrupted as they occupy the headspace, for weeks and months at a time, of a figment of their own imagination.

“And I could never understand why other kids couldn’t just do it,” I said thoughtfully. I guess I figured everyone emerged into the world fully formed, already with a strong sense of personhood, already individuated, a strong internal compass, an ability to already envision themselves in extenuating circumstances: the self-knowledge to know what that would look like. “Of course, it means I’m not necessarily good at character acting,” I continued, smirking. I’d always been cast as the lead, an everywoman, rather than as a ‘funny’ character. I do like funny side characters, or scary ones; I think it’s thrilling when an actor can find the humanity inside a caricature of a bad guy.

“So this method is going to be the opposite,” I continued, describing my suspicions. “It’s embodying7 another character until it feels real enough to the actor.” By starting with movement and physical mannerisms, eventually the actor could try to Single White Female herself into an acceptable simulacrum of the character. (“There’s no there there,” I said to my best friend sadly.)

I looked up the Method later. And, I mean, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a type of mimicry that starts with inventing a person piecemeal, out of movements, physical attributes, little sharply-observed bits.

This isn’t to shit on actual training, technique, or methodology. I love when Nicolas Cage talks openly about doing weird stuff like this.

  1. The concept of “speaking death” over another person comes from Protestant Christian deliverance ministry, an incredibly weird cottage industry which in its post-1970s iteration carries a lot of influence from other cultures. “Speaking death” typically means lies or gossip, or outright curses and ill will, but there’s a less obvious type of “speaking death”: a well-intentioned warning.

    At one point a close friend was warning me exactly how the next smear campaign against me was going to go. In that moment she was in it, very much reliving an actual thing that has happened to her, and she was warning me of a pathological narrative with a predetermined end. “It’ll take about 10 years,” she was telling me. At least 10 years. I knew I didn’t have 10 more years of misery left in me. Her worldbuilding was so elaborate and so persistent, I finally typed, I’m sorry, do you want this to happen to me? No! It’s just that she’d already been through it, and she wanted to apprise me of what to expect from the experience. But that was just it: I don’t want to be primed to expect anything. I don’t want fears or worries projected onto me. I want to live out my own story instead. (I answered that I’d already lived through one smear campaign, and I’m not particularly eager for a redo.)

    I fully understand and even enjoy the coziness of shared, mutual misery; that is how you survive a Chicago winter. But the blustery cold is already a fact, a shared reality, a consensus feeling. I think, though, that in order to feel connection, or to try to solve or process something for ourselves—by partying-up against an internal or external monster—we can inadvertently induct others into our own solo instance, our own frozen Tartarus.

    Maybe we’re hoping, not for a solution or processing at all, but for our own stories, our own traumas, to live on, very much alive in someone else’s body. Well, it’s the main reason I’ve not had children up to this point—although I think child-free people are just as vulnerable to unconsciously doing this, if not with their own explicit biological children. I’m trying to get better about trauma dumping, but the worst type of trauma dump is when, instead of saying “I” or “for me,” you say “you will.” Holy shit, I need to stop writing in second person.↩

  2. My best friend and I were talking about the toilet bowl; I’d cleaned out the rust rings using a pumice stone.

    “We have hard water,” my best friend said apologetically.

    “So did we,” I said. I hesitated. “I thought it was me,” I said then, and hung my head. “I really thought there was something wrong with me.” IBS or maybe some other health issue that was making my biological output extra toxic, extra acidic: I’d believed the rust was poop.

    “Boy,” I said then, miserable, “I will really take the blame for anything.”

    “I was just thinking that,” my best friend whispered.

    “Well maybe I justed wanted to feel powerful!” I joked. “By believing I have ultra high-octane superpowered IBS!” I think, once you’ve fallen into this pattern in childhood—functioning as your parents’ identified patient, which is to say, their toilet bowl, with their bullshit surging through your plumbing—people around you unconsciously notice it about you, and they will gleefully give you negative credit, ascribing grand feats of destruction to your mere presence. Some lies are so audacious, so absurd, I know they cannot be true, but this hasn’t stopped me from reviewing and reviewing my own actions looking for what I might’ve done to somehow contribute to a catastrophe, or maybe even how I could be held culpable by a jury of peers.

    And I think that’s much more insidious—to hunt around for what could be my fault, what could be ascribed to me—because it’s a distraction from me noticing and taking responsibility, or even credit, for what is actually mine.↩

  3. Sometimes we revert to our first language, or to our earliest understandings of the world, when faced with ontological shock. Betrayal counts. At these points, the language we might choose to communicate an idea can be incredibly alienating to others. This is by design—so that only the surrounding church community will understand, for instance, because churches themselves are insular, isolationist—so it’s important to learn other vocabularies, to shift between them, inhabiting their overlaps.↩

  4. The thing about engaging with a fantasy version of a person is, we are quantum. So there is a ‘best version’ of a person, just like there’s a ‘worst version’, somewhere out there in all the parallel timelines of a person. If the universe is being written by monkeys on typewriters, then the fictional version of a person you have so much faith in, or so much fear for, does exist, somewhere in the metaverse. But that version of the person is still fictional in the here-and-now, in the present moment, where all other possibilities have collapsed and there is only this one.

    So having faith in an idealized version of a person makes a certain quantum sense—it’s easy enough to forgive childhood or workplace bullies, or your own parents, once you concede you’ve only encountered versions of them entertaining their most desperate, most self-preservative base instincts, and it’s nice to uphold faith in a quantum best version of them, to grieve the fact that you never got to know those versions of a person, and maybe also to appreciate that, like a roll of the dice, certain people are forced into being a lesson for you—but engaging with that idealized ghost version as if it were true will endanger you again and again.

    Everyone is inconsistent. Attempting to stabilize a sense of self, our brains might smooth our own whims out into averages, into a cohesive narrative we tell ourselves about our own behaviors. The fact is, who a person is exists only from moment to moment. That’s scary, but also, it is what it is.↩

  5. I leaned against the doorway.

    “I realized I’m scared to go to the storage space alone,” I said, “or anyplace alone, ever. Because of my dad. Because I left him there and crossed all those lanes of traffic alone.” I should’ve died. I shouldn’t even be here. I’m not confident I can play real-world Frogger twice.

    My best friend gasped. “I never thought of that,” she exclaimed. My best friend has been my best friend for 35 years.

    Never cross without an adult. Never run in front of a car. Walk, don’t run. Everything they tell little kids is bullshit. He is going to die there. I can’t sit around waiting for someone to notice we’re missing. The sun was beginning to set. I’d closed my eyes and made a run for it. I’d already lost all faith in everyone around me.

    “I want someone to hold my hand while I cross the street,” I said, exasperated. I think my confidence in my own ability to lead the way fizzled then and there, at a busy Seattle intersection.

    “How’s that book on fawning going?” she teased me. The book is titled Fawning.

    I gave her a ghastly smile. “Haven’t started it!” I said.

    The inside flap asks if you’ve ever done any of the following, and then a list of embarrassing bullet points: Befriend your bullies? Obsess about saying the right thing?↩

  6. I think I actually saw my earliest caregivers fine—individuated from the womb!—simply because the environment was that horrific, and I was that aware of living in someone else’s mess. But I’m functionally unable to allow myself to consciously appreciate, at any given moment, the degree of danger I might be in, which is very much a related issue.

    Here’s a dreadful thought: if, as a 5-year old, I’d been able to drag my dad up onto his feet and prod him into moving, we would’ve been in greater danger crossing the street than I actually was walking across alone.↩

  7. This magpie approach to formulating a believable sense of personhood—a specific gesture, an item of clothing, a bit of hair—does sound a bit like possession, or perhaps like channeling, like turning one’s own body into a sort of poppet.↩