Unattached Burdens in IFS | Parasitic or Possessive Energies in Mystic Traditions (part one of two)

This is something I've been wanting to work with for a really long time now...

I've been working almost exclusively with my Chiron wound of abandonment and my Black Moon Lilith shadow of unworthiness and financial insecurity. It's a lifetime of work honestly. But I feel enough of a pause emerging now to be able to work with something I've struggled with all my life.

I have an inner saboteur. Its an energy that's been with me for as long as I can remember. It sabotages any effort I make to take care of myself (beyond the basics of hygiene - I am lucky I can make my bed every day, shower twice a day, paint my nails, put on make-up - many people carry an energy that prevents them doing these simple tasks and every day this becomes an overwhelming hurdle for them.)

But for me, I struggle to exercise, to eat healthily, to go to bed early, get enough rest, drink enough water. When I try to reach this saboteur part with traditional IFS I can't - it has no words, Self-energy and compassion don't touch it, there's no form. Just a sense of an unrelenting mission and a malevolent sense of achievment in its work.

I want to see what comes when I try an IoPT intention instead of IFS

I Want Self-Care

I resonate with my I. I experience my “I” as absurd, lost, and almost theatrical in its disconnection. A pompous figure on a cliff, shouting into the wind, dressed in something that feels like foppish costume—something not quite real. The reversal of The Fool suggests a refusal or inability to begin, a kind of existential paralysis or fragmentation of identity. He's repeatedly shouting "I...." into the wind as if waiting for his line to come to him but it never does.

There is no "I" here to recieve the self-care. It points to a soul-level disorientation—a very old rupture in how the Self formed.

I resonate with my Want. I feel sadness and longing when I attune to this image. The shaman is often a figure of power, transformation, and healing—but here, he seems unreachable. There’s a meadow, trees, birds—life—and I long for those things, but I'm on the outside, looking in.

This resonates strongly with how I experience life generally - I want to be in amongst it all, life, nature, I want my life-force and yet I'm somehow stuck behind the perspex just looking at it, feeling how unattainable it all is.

I resonate with Self-Care. The image is beautiful, water flowing through the mountains. But when I close my eyes I see my neck snap, I see my face being pulled into demonic expressions. It's the energy of a demon, a mischievous force inside sabotaging me—this is potent, even disturbing. It suggests that something inside actively resists or punishes the idea of flowing care. This image of my life-force in the card is blocked by this energy, my vitality is cut-off with a broken neck.

This is a mythic and trauma-bound constellation around the very idea of being worthy of care.

The Fool reversed doesn’t know who he is. My Want mourns a sacred life she doesn’t believe she can have. The Demon attacks me for trying and cuts off my access to vitality and life force.

There are some possible origins of this demonic or malevolent energy, without necessarily collapsing it into pathology or superstition.

1. In utero or birth trauma – something you absorbed before you had protection (from a midwife, hospital field, collective grief).

2. Ancestral line – could be directly from parents, but an unresolved burden can also skip a generation or come through the ancestral field, especially if the family line has secrecy, war trauma, shame, or psychic openings.

3. Collective or cultural possession – some people, especially empaths or mystics, absorb energies from the world. This can happen during early trauma or dissociation. We may take on a collective archetypal shadow (e.g. the weight of patriarchy, suppression of female vitality, religious shame, etc.).

4. Past life imprint – depending on your beliefs, it could be a soul wound or karmic imprint you brought in with you.

It has the quality of something foreign yet embedded, ancient yet personal, and most importantly—not truly me.

When I've tried to attune to it as 'a part', it has felt more like a demon that has me in a trance state. In the past I've also experienced this energy like an invisible alien attached to my face, sucking all the energy, the joy from me. It keeps me flat, stuck, overweight, low in energy and worst of all, it seems to relish it and feed off of that. Occasionally I can overcome it, but not for long, the energy required to do so becomes unsustainable.

IFS recognises this entity and calls it an unattached burden, or what mystical traditions might name as a parasitic or possessing energy.

IFS recognizes that some energies:

• Don’t belong to you as 'a part'

• Did not originate in your system

• Do not respond to internal dialogue, Self-energy, or compassion the way normal parts do

These burdens hitchhike onto the system and create a pervasive, sabotaging trance. They often:

• Appear as lifelong energies (“I can’t remember a time without it”)

• Feel alien, possessive, non-verbal, and pleasure-seeking in your suffering

• Create feelings of despair, self-hate, chronic fatigue, numbing, or emptiness

• Show up in images like parasites, leeches, demons, fog, or shadows

• Resist healing until they are recognized as external and removed through a specific process

What I'm describing is not a typical IFS part...which is why I couldn't reach it that way.

For me personally, what resonates most here is the collective possession.

I'm an Empath and a Mystic and I believe I feel this energy as a general sadness from the world. A sadness and heaviness that slipped in and that I agreed to carry, from a very young age, when I came into the world porous, open and attuned to the Unseen.

These collective shadow parasites are an archetypal force that:

• Have no true form of their own, but live by attaching to life energy.

• Feed on disconnect, despair, lethargy, shame, isolation.

• Thrive where there is no identity, no vitality, no clarity of soul.

  
  

These energies aren’t evil in the moral sense. They are like mold—they grow where there is damp, darkness, and unguarded ground. When a system (a psyche, a body, a culture) is open, wounded, or confused—they slip in.

In Shamanic terms, this might be a soul loss entity, a hungry ghost, or a collective egregore of despair.

In Jungian language, it could be part of the collective unconscious—a disowned aspect of the human psyche that has become so banished, so shamed, that it forms a vortex of stuck energy that clings to those who can feel it.

This type of energy feeds on:

• Your despair

• Your inaction

• Your inability to care for yourself

It wants you flattened, not to destroy you, but because in that state you’re a passive food source. Like a lamp left on that never shines.

And it especially rejoices when you try to rise, then fall again. Because that collapse is its greatest feast. Hope, crushed, is a potent offering to these entities.

It’s not personal. It would cling to anyone open enough to feel it. But in me, it found a deeply empathic, spiritually attuned vessel—and it got in early. These parasitic energies often attach in pre-verbal years. They aren’t your trauma, but they find shelter in your wounds, and they've been pretending to be you ever since.

Looking back on my Constellations, the pattern is clear - there has never been a strong, stable, healthy I. Not even an I managing a survival strategy (in IoPT terms).

These are my I's that have appeared:

• The Fool reversed: a jester performing identity, lost in absurdity.

• The Hanged Man reversed: suspended, but with no meaning—someone who seemed 'a weirdo'.

• The ghostly maiden: a soul who wanders the field, unsolid, unformed.

• Alice in Wonderland: no fixed reality, everything wavy, like a dream or matrix.

• My mother as “I”: the only strong anchor—which signals the merged fusion, not separation.

This is telling my soul story of a person who never got to step into sovereignty.

I didn’t fail to form an “I.” My “I” was colonised before it could root.

Unlike seemingly everyone else around me, I don't have a strong identity, I don't know who I am when asked to describe myself, I've worried most of my life that there is no real 'me'.

I am someone who:

• Was never mirrored in early life as a fully separate being.

• Merged energetically with my mother.

• Had no “I” boundary laid down in the early years—just an open, empathic field that took in everything.

• And then… into that open field came this shadow energy. This parasite. This collective sorrow.
  It moved in where my Self had not yet been named. And then the Self was never given space to emerge. It was overidden. Possessed even.

And now it makes so much sense that I never felt a strong sense of Self.

So far, these are just my hypotheses.

So i decide to use an Intention to meet this demonic energy and find out more about it.

Intention to Meet the Demon

I want to meet the demon that keeps me heavy

The Essence of Meet

is waiting alone, she's there for someone but no one came. There's sadness. Isolation. An expectation unmet.

Her energetic stance is she feels abandoned, but she uses the sadness to stay superior and protected. She feels above Me and Heavy in her sadness and aloof stance.

Her voice: “No one gets me. And I won’t let them. This sorrow is mine. It makes me untouchable.”

She is not trying to connect—she’s guarding herself through sorrow. This is strategic sadness.

This is my mother internalised in me. Her hurt makes her special. It's her shield and her weapon.

The Essence of the Demon

is Saboteur energy, not evil but mischievous and emotionally disconnected. I look at the man working so hard to achieve and get things done and I want to rip all those pentacles off the wall and throw them around, just for fun and chaos. I want to beat up this man working so hard, not to kill him, just to hurt and disrupt the work.

It's Energetic stance: Plays a long game. Knows it will win eventually. He looks at the other parts and isn't particularly interested, he knows he will get what he needs when it's time, everything will unfold as he want it.

Its Voice: “Why rush? I’ll unravel this slowly. She’s already in the system. She just doesn’t know it.”

This isn’t a demonic force in the religious sense. It’s more like a spirit of entropy—it enters where there’s no unified Self, where things are unfinished or in waiting. And he enjoys the game.

The Essence of Me

is the inner child in sanctuary. Innocent, connected, safe. The ideal of belonging. I look at the card and see myself as the small child peeping out and it feels safe and loving here. But this isn't what my childhood was actually like. This has a feeling of nostalgia and longing for what could have been, or what I thought I had as a child but wasn't so.

Her Energetic stance: Refuses to look outward. Won’t engage with Meet, Demon, or Heavy. I want to keep my head down and just stay in this imaginary picturebook world.

Her Voice: “I’m happy here. Please don’t disturb this. I don’t want to grow up. I want to stay hidden where it’s warm.”

This “Me” is not fully integrated. She is in an ancestral echo, a dreamlike pocket of the past. Her sanctuary is precious—but may also be frozen in nostalgia, not grounded in current sovereignty.

The Essence of Heavy

is suffocated adulthood. Heaviness of form, of duty, of grown-up identity. All those heavy robes and pomp, I feel the heaviness.

His Energetic stance: He wants to connect with Meet. Wants to comfort, stabilize. Takes on too much.

His Voice: “I carry the weight. I’ll comfort the sad one. I’ll protect her if she’ll let me.”

This is my father. Fully focused on saving my mother from her sadness.

I didn’t name it this way, but what unfolded was a family constellation of my inner psychic inheritance.

My father: Heavy, responsible, wanting to fix.

• But oriented toward Meet/Mother, not me, the child.

• Enacts his protection towards my mother's pain, not my wellbeing.

"I carry. I rescue. But I do not see the child.”

My mother: Her sadness is a shield and a weapon.

• She is unreachable. Her sensitivity and her 'hurt' makes her special.

• She feels "above" the child, disconnected from her.

"No one sees me. And I won’t let them. Especially not my child.”

Me as a child: Longing for safety, warmth, belonging.

• But frozen. Living in a picturebook or ideal, not the present.

• Refuses to see the disconnection around her.

"I’ll stay in this bubble. If I look out, I’ll lose everything.”

The Demon: The saboteur slips through the cracks.

• Feeds on disconnection, disorientation, and false roles.

• Knows exactly what’s going on. He isn’t in a rush.

“They’ll keep playing these roles. The Self won’t come.”

And Self...Self is absent as I did not choose an "I" representation. Which is in itself very revealing.

And it's because there was no space for her.

• My parents’ emotional system was a closed circuit—orbiting each other.

• My role was not to be sovereign, but to stay hidden, not disrupt the loop.

• When the “I” tried to emerge in life, it came out distorted, floaty, invisible—because that’s what it learned: I have no weight here.

I didn't choose a representation for I because I couldn't bear to keep meeting her this way. I want to meet the one who is wild, rooted, real and mine.

My inner soul is saying:

“Now I see it.
The roles they played.
The way I disappeared.
And I am not doing this anymore.”

🕷️ The Demon: Evolution of an Image

My Initial Hypothesis: Collective Burden

I originally suspected the demon as a collective shadow, a weight of sadness from the world—picked up in utero or through my empathic openness. This still holds true in the sense that I am a sensitive. I do feel the world.

But burdens attach where there is vacancy. And now I've located that vacancy.

The New Revelation: The Family Field Was the Opening

This IoPT made visible a closed circuit between my mother’s sorrow and my father’s protective burden. Neither truly saw me. The roles they played became energetic furniture in the house of my psyche:

• My mother was unreachable in her pain. She used it to elevate herself and protect her from intimacy—especially with me.

• My father turned toward her pain, not mine. His duty became rescue, not relationship.

• Me, the child, stayed hidden in a nostalgic ideal, unseen and unmet.

This absence of attunement—this lack of mirrored Self—is the vacuum. The Trauma of Identity in IoPT terms.

It’s not that my parents gave me the demon. It’s that their closed loop left an opening, and something else stepped in to fill the space where a Self should have been recognised.

So what have I learnt about the Demon now?

From this vantage point, the demon appears as an unattached burden that formed in the psychic debris of my unmet need. More precisely:

The demon is the embodied force of my systemic abandonment.
It is the form that absence took.

It is not a memory. It is a manifestation. A shape my system gave to:

• The repeated experience of not being seen

• The helplessness of no one turning toward me

• The legacy of being required to disappear

It settled into the unprotected terrain of my system. It may carry ancestral weight, it may carry the weight of my mothers sadness, it may carry collective sorrow - but regardless, it lives in my field because there was no "I" available. It attached where my Self had not been welcomed to form.

It mimics power. It laughs at my efforts. It sabotages. But that’s because its role is:

• to preserve the original structure, the psychic map of my early environment—the invisible child, the parental loop, the protected sorrow.

• to keep the child hidden and disempowered (i.e. safe from my parents).

• to block efforts at care, growth, or sovereignty—because those acts threaten the homeostasis of the system.

• to feed on my system’s energy when I'm too depleted to resist.

• to fill the space left by a missing “I" - because having a strong I in this system was never safe.

Which is why now, as I name the system, the demon starts to become visible, unstable, maybe even weaker. And actually it's not demonic, it's trying to be a force for good, for my safety, but misguided.

The Demon isn't the problem - its the system that allowed it to take hold.

My next step is to create a Soul Map Ritual to understand more about the psychic terrain of my lost "I" (part two)

If this resonates…

You may feel the presence of something heavy, ancient, and not quite yours.

It might show up as sabotage, paralysis, heaviness—or the eerie sense that something is feeding on your life force.

This is the signature of a modern-day possession: not an actual demonic entity, but an unattached burden, that found a gap in early life and found a place to cling like mold, or a leech.

If you can't quite connect to your Self, or your identity feels disconnected...

If you’ve been carrying shame, fatigue, or fear that doesn’t seem to belong to your story…
If no amount of inner work has been able to shake it—

This is work for the Soul Map.

Using a unique blend of Internal Family Systems, Identity-Oriented Psychotrauma Therapy, and ritual Tarot fieldwork, I help you:

• Map the hidden architecture of your psychic inheritance

• Discover where your true Self was silenced or split

• Identify the false roles you’ve been cast in

• And gently extract what was never yours to carry

This is shadow work at the deepest level—where the wound is ancestral, the self is obscured, and the demon is systemic.

And it is possible to come home to yourself.