"There is nothing wrong with you" is a helpful but false statement from within a frame that reifies personal wrongness. But we can just decompose personal wrongness into its components!
There's approval and disapproval. There's error and disease. There's a particular parasitic behavior complex that involves reifiying disapproval as something like a permanent blemish and conflating that with error.
Every criticism of error processed through that complex will implicitly posit personal wrongness, and will correspondingly imply a nonsensical causal pseudomodel. ("The Buck Stops Here" or "Original Sin.")
There is no good-faith way to try to correct one's errors by condemning oneself, but there are some very clever ways of harnessing bad-faith to produce a sufficiently faithful simulacrum of error-correction to yield actually good results. Judaism imagines reality as an infinitely dominant male who hates anti-epistemology more than anything else. Calvinism cultivates the self-fulfilling expectation of being helplessly drawn towards the attractor of mimicking good, productive behavior (irresistible grace) despite one's badness (total depravity).
Blaming yourself for a demonic infestation is like blaming yourself for having a cold. It harms you and those around you. You can act to reduce the harm it causes. Maybe your decisions made it more likely. You can investigate this and make better-informed decisions in the future. Self-rejection actually impedes your recovery.
When I learned to stop dissociating from symptoms like a sore throat & sleepiness, I went from weeks-long frequent intense colds to rare mild days-long colds. I suspect I was doing some combination of cutting off blood flow to the affected areas, restricting lymphatic circulation, and keeping myself in a state of SNS activation (and wakefulness) that suppresses immune function systemwide.
Similar dynamic for demons.
I definitely consider the cold virus a foreign entity. It's a little more complicated with demons since they seem to have hardware support. CPTSD / attachment trauma integrates too smoothly with CS Lewis's Inner Ring-ism for trauma to be a nonevolved accident.
Compiled from a Twitter thread.
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