by R. H. Stavis
That’s exactly what I want to do in this book.
CHAPTER 2
Finally Facing My Demons
Most kids who are raised in dysfunctional households become pathological caretakers. I’m no exception; it’s part of my genetic makeup to help anyone and everyone, especially because I know what’s hurting them.
There are a few problems with having this kind of excessive compassion, though. First, those who are wired this way often think of others—almost obsessively—before themselves, noticing everyone else’s problems while denying their own. I did this all the time, for years. I remember being at day camp one summer, and as I walked past the nurse’s station I noticed a sick boy sitting with his head between his legs. Down around his head swirled a dark cloud—the telltale sign that an entity had attached to him. I knew that if I looked closer, I’d be able to see its form. My heart stopped, and I was desperate to run to this poor boy’s side. I know what’s really wrong with you, I wanted to say. I need you to know I’m here for you. I hadn’t even sought out help for my own problems, yet all I wanted to do was save him.
Second, when a pathological caretaker looks for someone to care for, they tend to seek out the most damaged, neediest people they can find. That was my specialty. I lived with a woman who was desperate for attention, so I was used to that kind of behavior, and I sought out more of it. But the friends I found and surrounded myself with didn’t just seem troubled. A lot of times, I knew they really were troubled, not just by trauma or grief but because of the terrible entities they’d attracted.
By the time I got to middle school, I was exhausted. So many of my friendships flamed out in a destructive cycle that involved me trying too hard to help the other person, but in the end, them running all over me. My best friend was named Anne, and her mom smoked too much pot and paid more attention to her boyfriend than she did to her own daughter. Anne was depressed because of it, so she spent more time out with me than she did at home. Then, one day, she stopped returning my calls. I hadn’t done anything to anger or alienate her; she’d just decided to move on to a new group of friends.
I finally decided at the age of thirteen that it would just be easier if I detached from everyone and kept my distance. So, I transformed myself from the caring, supportive friend to all into a complete loner, the weird kid walking down the halls, dressed in black with my head down and my hair in my eyes. Everyone now gossiped about how strange I’d become, but they all stayed away.
As high school approached, though, the world changed. It was the 1990s, and piercings, tattoos, and black Doc Martens were everything. I listened to Alice in Chains and Faith No More and loved the movie The Craft, which was about four high school girls who happened to be witches. Suddenly being different was cool. My peers now thought I was mysterious and “alternative,” and I found a posse of fellow weirdos who welcomed me with open arms. Within that group, I met a boy named Kevin. He was a flannel-wearing, guitar-playing, dark, broody boy who was into drugs, and I developed a huge crush on him right away. We soon became “best friends,” though all the while I wanted more.
Kevin was deeply troubled. And I fell right into my old role of caretaker. I wanted to do everything I could to save him from his self-harm and self-loathing. Between my abusive upbringing and my natural ability, pathological caretaking was comfortable to me, and I felt my only value was to do everything I could for everyone—especially for people I thought I loved. But even though Kevin and I were as close as could be, I didn’t feel right telling him what I thought was at the root of all of his problems, or how to fix them. I just wanted to be there for him—all the time—and revel in his darkness. Misery loves company, right? He was burdened with entities. Of course he was. But my mom’s cold rejection had taught me to shut my mouth about all of that. Sure, being edgy was great and all, but even goth teenagers had limits.
Like most people with entities, Kevin couldn’t change. He was stuck in a well of unhappiness and couldn’t figure out how to climb out. Nor did he want to, either. I think he accepted being dysfunctional and unhappy and wore it like a beat-up leather jacket. I could see entities around him, and I realized they were doing something harmful to him, but I still didn’t understand the extent of their powers. I hadn’t yet figured out what motivated them, or exactly what particular brand of havoc they could wreak in which particular ways. All I knew was that Kevin was plagued more than most people, and that drew me to him like a moth to flame.
Our friendship was intense, but rocky. It followed a pattern: He’d get a girlfriend, and I’d become livid. In retaliation, I’d get a boyfriend, and when he found out he’d fly into a jealous rage. The back-and-forth madness soon became too much, and Kevin and I stopped talking.
Then my stepfather—who’d endured my mom’s craziness, and who I loved because of that and so many other things—died suddenly from a heart attack when I was sixteen. I approached Kevin, begging him to be someone he wasn’t able to be: a sane, compassionate man who could help me through my grief. I needed him to dig deep, to show me some sympathy, but quickly I realized he wasn’t capable. This ended our friendship for good.
Kevin called me years later, when I was in college.
“I dropped out of school,” he said. “I went to rehab because I was addicted to pills. I’m trying to stay clean and sober now.”
We hadn’t spoken in over four years, but hearing his voice and this news made me so sad. Deep down, I’d always known this was going to be Kevin’s path. Maybe I didn’t predict exactly what would make his life so difficult, but I had felt in my bones that he would not know peace. Yet even with my Superwoman complex, I also realized I never would have saved him. Sure, I was the girl who wanted to rescue every homeless person and abandoned kitten I saw on the street, but by my early twenties, I’d told myself that it wasn’t my job. I was trying to be normal. So I ignored entities and focused on my life and career. I left Florida, moved around the country, and settled in Denver, where I started writing under the name R. H. Stavis.
I spent most of the early 2000s creating comics, graphic novels, scripts for video games, and screenplays for television. Writing for a living had always been my dream because it was the perfect way to escape reality, and I’d spent hours during my childhood holed up in my room, making up stories to escape my terrible existence with my mom. Back in the day, horror and gaming were male-dominated industries, so I had some issues trying to break in, but I was determined—and it paid off. I soon created the backstory for Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, got invitations to speak at major comic and gaming conventions across the country, and developed scripts for a few feature films.
I also published my first novel, Daniel’s Veil. As the saying goes, “Write what you know,” so even though I was still forcing myself to reject the notion of entities, all the fiction I created was born from what I’d seen. I never called anything “an entity” in my stories, but I wrote a lot about Source and the afterlife, as well as shapeshifting bodies, intuition, and feelings. I think writing fiction was a form of therapy for me. There are other dimensions (like the etheric realm and Source) that people don’t understand—and at the time, I didn’t fully grasp them, either—but bringing them to life in my novels brought me closer.
I made what I thought were great friends, and I fell in love and married a man who I believed was all I’d ever need. But our relationship was totally superficial. I didn’t tell my husband about my secret vision, hiding my real self from him. We fought all the time, and I left him after a few years.
I loved Denver and thought the Rockies were the most gorgeous things I’d ever seen, but I’d always been drawn to Los Angeles. It was probably because I was born there, and it was definitely because it was far away from Florida and all the terrible memories I had of my mother and my childhood. In fact, my mother passed away a few years before my divorce. She’d developed stomach cancer and died six weeks after her diagnosis. I hadn’t even known she was sick until my brother texted me a few days afte
r she was gone, and I decided not to go to her funeral. Why attend a lie? I thought. Mom was never, ever kind to me. We hadn’t spoken in years, and now she was gone. My mother. Her death left a hollow self-loathing in my gut that would take years of emotional work to fill.
I finally moved to Los Angeles in 2009. My career had started to accelerate, and I’d often have to hop on a plane in Denver, fly down to LA for a day or two, crash on a friend’s couch, then fly back. After months of doing that I decided it made a lot more sense for me to be in a place where I didn’t have to schedule meetings days or weeks in advance. Instead, I could go see anyone at a moment’s notice, grab a coffee or a drink whenever someone asked. I said to myself, I’m just going to move there, find a place, and figure things out from there.
As soon as I left Denver, my career opened up—but my personal life still hadn’t. When I easily could have found happy, healthy people to surround myself with, I was having relationship problems with everyone, and I was miserable because I couldn’t resolve any of the issues I’d had with my mom or in my childhood. I felt like I was hiding who I was all the time, and it had become a huge burden. I was desperate and all alone in the world.
Then, one day, I was driving through my neighborhood and had stopped at an intersection. As I moved slowly through it, another car came out of nowhere and broadsided me. Neither I nor the other driver was injured, and my car was hardly damaged, but for a full week, I felt like I’d been slapped in the face. When I woke up in the morning, all I could think about was the crunching sound of my car’s back door caving in and the feeling of my neck snapping to the right.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to micromanage everything, I thought, and then some asshole hit me out of the blue. Suddenly, it dawned on me that I’d been so busy doing everything in my power to control the world around me, and then life had spun violently away from me in a split second. Something inside me woke up, shifted, and released itself, and I started to realize that it was time to surrender and let go. I had to open up my spirit to whatever life had to offer—good or bad. I’d stop pushing entities away; I’d face them head-on. I’d work against them and try to make them disappear from the lives of those they plagued. I wanted to share my gift. I needed to come out of the shadows. I wanted to help people, but I wouldn’t start until the right person and the right time came along.
Within a year or so, I found my moment.
I met a man named Peter through my work, and we soon started dating. We got serious quickly and moved in together. Pete was very into spirituality, and we connected over this. More than almost anything, he wanted to learn Reiki, which is a spiritually guided healing technique that involves a person channeling bad energy from the body, and good energy into it, through touch. Given what I do now, which involves manipulating energy, you might assume I’d be drawn to Reiki, but I wasn’t. Reiki just didn’t hold any interest for me because it was too touchy-feely. Too flowery, bell-bottom, groovy. I’m totally open to positive healing, but only in concrete, tangible ways that I can see. Reiki is all about weird, invisible forces, and that just isn’t my thing.
“Sorry, I don’t give a shit about Reiki,” I said.
Peter wasn’t convinced. “No, you’re coming with me. You have to try this. It’s very spiritual. You’ll enjoy it.”
Peter often tried to sell me on things he knew I’d hate, like the time he tried to take me camping (I’m a glamping kind of woman), or the day he begged me to go to a five-day music festival that had no indoor toilets. This time, however, I suspected his intentions weren’t totally selfish, so I caved.
“You know what? If you’re really into this, I’ll go with you. But you are going to owe me.”
One weekend morning, we drove to a friend of a friend’s apartment a few miles away. When we walked in the front door, there were six or seven people I didn’t know sitting in a circle, with the lights low and candles burning, sipping tea. It was eleven in the morning and the sun was so bright outside I still had my sunglasses on. They all looked as if they’d just gotten home from Burning Man. I’m Goth Barbie. This was not my crowd.
“Today’s going to be beautiful,” some super flowery stranger said, reaching out to touch my arm. “Reiki is pure love.”
“Ummm . . . okay,” I said, turning my head to roll my eyes. Fuck this, I whispered to myself.
I settled into a love seat on the outer edge of the crowd. One of the strangers who’d been seated on the floor stood up and smiled. “Good morning, everyone. I’ll be leading things today. First, I need someone to volunteer for treatment.”
Peter, who was always the life of the party, the guy who’d never met a stranger, jumped up immediately.
“That’s me. I’d be happy to.”
“Great,” the teacher responded a little too enthusiastically. “Please come and lie down over here.”
This woman had set up what looked like a massage table in one corner of the room. She motioned Pete over, and he climbed right up and made himself comfortable, lying on his back. When the teacher called the rest of us and asked us to join her, the remaining people in the room didn’t hesitate. They surrounded the table in perfect formation. But I hung back a few inches, regretting with all of my being the moment I’d agreed to come here.
The teacher cupped her palms and positioned them over my boyfriend’s body. Then she asked us to do the same.
“You,” she said, nodding at me. “Place your hands over his core. We need to get the energy flowing.”
By its very definition, the core is the center of your being and the seat of many of your emotions. Many people hold tension in their bellies, literally stomaching their pain, and when someone’s nervous about something, they’ll often experience nausea. The core is where energy is held most powerfully by most people—where the “root” of emotional issues and traumas lie. Now that I’ve been a practicing exorcist for almost a decade, I work with the core all the time because it’s where entities typically feed from. They may not show themselves directly in the core, but they feast off the abundance of energy in it.
Standing in that hippie’s LA living room that day, though, I had no idea what I was doing or why I had to put my cupped palms two inches over my date’s now-half-naked body. But I did as I was told, and when I looked down, I saw something.
Holy shit, I thought. There’s one of those creatures in there.
My hands had instantly started shaking, and I pulled them away from him as fast as I could. The closest door I could see led out to a small balcony, so I turned around, practically leaped through that door, closed the curtains behind me, and stepped outside. As soon as I hit fresh air I started gasping. For the next ten minutes or so, while everyone else stood around my boyfriend and manipulated his energy, I paced.
Of course, I’d seen entities before—and I knew Peter had them just like anyone—but this time was different. I’d suddenly fully grasped exactly what was inside him and what it could do. Even though Peter was extremely outgoing, he was sometimes quick to anger, and now I understood why. His volatility was because of this entity.
Even more than coming to terms with the entities’ power, though, I’d realized who I was—and I wasn’t sure I liked it. I wanted to be normal, in a regular relationship, but that was never going to be the case. Admitting who I was—and all that that entailed—was the last nail in the coffin. I knew I could never go back from that moment on.
After what felt like hours, Peter came outside, looking entirely confused.
“What happened in there?”
Now, Peter knew a fair bit about me by then, but I hadn’t told him about seeing entities. I was still too scared of being rejected, judged, or told I was insane. I’d fallen for this man, and letting him into that part of my life felt too dangerous. But I was still shaking, and Peter was looking at me, desperate for an explanation and half-worried that I was about to jump off that fourth-floor balcony. It was no time to lie.
“Listen, this is going to sound absolutely
nuts,” I said. “And I won’t be offended if you break up with me because of what I’m about to say. But I see these strange things, like, I don’t know, demons or something, all the time. Usually they’re floating around people or attached to them, but I just saw one inside you. Right in your stomach. It was feeding off of you.”
I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth, bracing for his reaction. I knew it would not be good. No one had ever responded well to this before.
He didn’t run in the other direction at all.
“Tell me what it looked like.”
I took a breath, almost in shock, and then started speaking. “Well, to me, it looked like a child’s drawing of a ghost. Sort of a cloaked blob, with no arms and legs, lines for eyes, and a squiggly mouth. It was Casper the Unfriendly Ghost, but gray.”
I looked up at him, and his eyes grew wide.
“You’re not crazy. It makes complete sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“When I was little,” he said, “I used to draw something just like that when I was having a hard time with life or suffering in some way. It was a little ghost, and I’d always ask it to protect me. When I walked into this apartment today, I was feeling vulnerable, just as I did when I was a kid.”