Psychic Attack: Progress!

Recently, I have discovered an unlikely ally in my fight against psychic attack: marijuana.

Here’s the really crazy part: It’s not that marijuana helps me fend off the effects of psychic attack. It’s that I’ve been using it as a bonding activity with my attacker.

Necessity has driven this counterintuitive approach. As far as I can tell, the persistence of this energy that plagues me is primarily rooted in the fact that my attacker and I were almost incommunicado for a couple years. I came into her life in a completely unexpected way and ended up turning her world upside down. In my immense guilt, I was afraid to even talk with her, though I did offer more than once. But she never took me up on it, as she was in an avoidant place (hoping the problem would just go away if she ignored it long enough), and by her own recent admission, she was content to make me the bad guy in the situation. So, her resentment grew and grew as months stretched into years, and she mostly dealt with her uncomfortable emotions by repressing them. This is where the psychic attacks come in; everything she couldn’t bring herself to say to me (or even to herself), her unconscious shadow ended up taking out on me instead. The attacks have been the hardest experience of my life, so by the time we got to a point where we were willing to talk more freely, I had become even more afraid of this person due to the intensity of the emotions I knew she harbored towards me. This made it incredibly difficult to intentionally talk about our deeper feelings, which we felt intuitively must be the best way to clear the air and shed some light on the shadow that has been my tormentor.

Enter marijuana. Long a believer in the healing potential of certain substances, I concluded (with her enthusiastic consent) that we just needed to get high with each other. So, we have been doing this every few days for a couple weeks now, via Zoom (she lives in another state). And I honestly feel more relaxed and at ease than I ever dreamed I could be with her after everything that’s happened. We don’t (as of yet) talk about the deeper stuff; there seems to be no need. We just roll with it. When we're high, I am still aware of the situation as it is and the energy that plagues me, but I can make a simple choice to set it down for a while and be present in conversation with her. I can just be myself, and she can do the same.

The results thus far have been miraculous. While I still feel the energetic malaise that I associate with her attacks, I am basically no longer being “verbally” attacked. The barrage of abuse in my mind has quieted, and my own resulting agitation has virtually disappeared. I don’t have to constantly play music as a defense anymore; I am free to be with my thoughts. It would seem that without us even getting into what made her so angry, we are assuaging her anger just by spending time relaxing together, with no agenda, talking about whatever. What it will take to lift the heavy energy has yet to be ascertained. It is also unclear whether we need to try to go deeper on these calls (sometimes “dredging” for old anger has had undesirable results). For now, I am just so thrilled that we’ve found a tool that has allowed us to make more progress in two weeks than we have in two years!

For anyone reading this who is going through psychic attack, I understand that it may not be desirable, practical, or even advisable to connect with your attacker in this way. But I think this method really points to a deeper truth: it is very easy to be angry and afraid in a vacuum, but the more opportunity we have to humanize each other through neutral mutual exposure, the more our anger at and fear of each other naturally dissipate. I will continue to experiment with this.