Hi.
I am a Japanese comic fan and was reading "CAPTAIN AMERICA" #695(MARVEL LEGACY).
In the afterword by the writer, Mark Waid, there was a phrase I couldn't understand.
What does "exorcise some personal demons" mean?
The whole sentence is as below:
As unfashionable and retro-corny as it is, I have always believed that it's possible to be a good guy not because you need to exorcise some personal demons or because you're expecting some reward, but because life is just better when I watch your back and you watch mine.
I looked it up on the Internet and found "personal demon" is a title of some book. Does that something to do with this sentence?
Please advise.
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Answers & Comments
Verified answer
demons are literally bad spirits or bad supernatural entities, but we often talk about demons in a metaphorical way. For example, we call bad life events, or things in our past that cause us a lot of emotional troubles as "personal demons" (demons that are specific to the person, they belong only to the person; that person's own particular and unique troubles) even though they are not actual "demons"; they are troubles, a curse on the person from something they did or that happened to them in the past, in a way. So to get back to happiness or good karma, perhaps, we need to do something very good to offset that bad, to "exorcise" those "demons". That is what he is talking about. He apparently prefers people doing good things because they are essentially good people, rather than doing them as some sort of compensation for bad things in the past (they do good now to make up for bad that they did in the past).
However, there is something to be said for a person turning toward good after being turned toward the bad in the past (to contradict Mr. Waid). We can change who we will be by our own actions; the past does not impose the future. it affects it, and it might require extraordinary effort to avoid what the past is shoving in your way, but you can still beat that fate. That is, proving yourself to be a good person even when there are lots of reasons that you could have gone bad or you were already bad and could easily have stayed bad, is also a very great accomplishment. It is easy to be good when you aren't challenged, is one way of looking at things, but not so easy when life hasn't been very nice to you, so staying or becoming good in the face of a lot of pressure to be otherwise is a pretty good thing, in my book.
Fighting the Inner Demon
Why are some veterans turning to exorcism to cope with PTSD?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spot...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/krysti-turznik/exor...
How to Face Your Demons
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/face-your-demons-...
4 Beautiful Ways To Drown Out Your Inner Demons
https://thoughtcatalog.com/veronica-granja-sierra/...
If you face your demons, you confront your fears or something that you have been trying hard to avoid.
https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/face...
http://harvestinghappiness.com/exercise-exorcise-d...
In the Bible, there are several passages involving demons inhabiting the minds and bodies of people. The gist is that people aren't all bad, but just might have a temporary demon inside making them act bad.
Hello! A "personal demon" is something that you are trying to avoid but it keeps being a problem. It often means an emotional problem, such as fear of people leaving you, fear of not being good enough, a trauma that happened in your past, and other things like that.
It comes from the idea of a demon as an evil or bad creature that makes people miserable. In this phrase, the demon is not an actual creature, but an metaphorical idea.
To exorcise a demon, is to banish it through a ceremony (usually religious). So to exorcise a personal demon would be to figure out how to overcome the problem.