I'm sure that I can't be the only person who has experienced the phenomenon I am about to describe. It's happened to my many more times than I could ever recount. It's one of those subjective weirdnesses that is common to every person, yet the rules of how we tend to think the world works prohibit us from understanding or examining it.
Have you ever learned a new concept or been exposed to an idea, and then started experiencing that idea in the world frequently, despite the fact that up until that point in life you'd never seen or experienced this insight even once? The best and simplest example I can give is vocabulary. Seems like whenever I learn a new word, I start hearing it, reading it, and/or running into it frequently. Being a verbose and language oriented person, I have a strong conviction of having never heard the new word before, at least consciously, because if I had, I would have gone out of my way to make sure I knew what it said.
I feel as if I may be going off into the woods here, so I'll bring it back. Today I was exposed to some Jungian philosophy on the matter of neuroses, and why they exist. Later in the same day, I put the ideas in context with what I had been learning about Christ (from an academic standpoint, as in I was listening to a lecture about the historical/biblical christ vs. the church's version of christ). All of a sudden, the connection between the neuroses that a psychologist fights in their patient and the demons exorcised by Christ became very clear.
When there is a behavior that you don't like that you do, the typical response is negative self talk, or judgment of the self and the behavior. In a sense, we tend to try to separate ourselves from that which we perceive as bad. We call the behavior an addiction or sin sometimes, or perhaps we just label ourselves as "bad" for having done it even once.
For example, someone who drinks often enough that they start impacting their life negatively will start to think of drinking as "their problem." The part of them that wants to do that will be actively repressed. But that behavior, that desire, is still technically a part of the person who considers it a problem. It's as if they want to slice out a part of their own being and throw it away.
This is the typical approach to how we think about what we want to change in ourselves. If I only did do this or did not do this, I could be (fill the blank: happy, complete, etc.). But that part of ourselves we like to slice off and toss away doesn't actually go away. It is a part of your consciousness and always will be. In fact, when you take that part of yourself and put it in a dark box in the basement, you are almost creating a split personality for yourself. You won't always be able to hold that fraction of yourself back. Someday it will get into the control room of your body and run shit for awhile, resulting in things like binge drinking or other choices that the higher part of ourselves would normally not make.
These fractured parts of the mind might be the demons that the biblical Christ spent his time thwarting. And the reason he was able to beat them was not actually by casting them out. Christ healed the mentally broken people that he encountered by loving them with pure compassion. It seems to me that the best way to deal with one's own behavioral issues is not to get mad at oneself, or judge oneself as bad. Instead, try looking at the mistakes in the past for what they are, opportunities to learn and grow. Never talk down to yourself for something you've done, instead, accept the reality of the mistake and talk to yourself the way you would give guidance to someone who you love unconditionally, who you want to see whole and happy.
