Part I - Basic Introduction to My Problems
Please help me. I am in need of serious spiritual help.
I believe that evil is a genuine force in this world. I do not view Satan as some kind of abstract concept, or something to take a "liberal interpretation" of. No. Just no. I feel the devil in my life every day and it's only getting worse. Whenever I try to be follow the Christian path at all anymore I only feel a stronger and stronger resistance like I'm trying to climb a wall with unending height, covered in poisonous spikes. I am surrounded by darkness, it is in me, it is in my life, it is everywhere, and I feel doomed.
It wasn't like this when I was a young child. I was filled with the Holy Spirit as a young child. I loved almost everyone and everything dearly, I was filled with a joy, a thankfulness to be alive. I loved God and while I had my many moments of doubt or sin, overall I felt I was walking the right path.
It's probably been almost 10 years since I've felt like that. I'm 18 now.
When I was 12 I hit puberty and that's when everything went downhill. I have very little self-control. My fascination with sexuality overwhelmed me resulting in me living a very perverse lifestyle now. I gladly partake in sexual gratuity and perversion on a regular basis now.
I started using vulgar language constantly when I was 13. I've only used it more and more every year. Particularly over the past two years it has taken on a deeply hateful tone. Racist, sexist, blasphemous, anti-semitic, and homophobic slurs have become a regular part of my speech, and I spout it off anywhere at any time. If someone gets offended, I couldn't care less. It's gotten to the point where I feel that every vulgar word that comes out of my mouth is no longer simply "dirty" or "inappropriate." It's pure hatred, and therefore blasphemy against God and life.
I started watching disturbing horror movies constantly when I was around 15 years old, and they often involved the devil in some way, especially movies I've seen in the past year. That progressed to me looking at pictures and footage of real-life torture, violence, war, death, horrible accidents, and so on online, in this ridiculous and vain hope that it would "toughen me up" and make it easier for me to deal with life. All it has done is destroy me and my heart. I feel nothing now other than pain, grief, horror, and hatred, with a tiny glimmer of light buried deep, deep within, covered by layer upon layer of self-inflicted spiritual harm.
I see violence and horror in the news all the time. One -------- after another, more --------, more violence, more horror, ---- ---- ---- ---- everyone ---- left and right and no matter how many tears I cry about it people keep -------- each other and ----- and ------- and ------ and plundering and the world gets darker and darker every day.
I have been in violent situations in real life. I have punched, slapped, kicked, pulled, and shoved people, almost instigating fights. I have gotten in trouble with the police. I was in a car crash that destroyed my grandma's car that was passed onto my family when she passed away several years ago. I love her so much and I still miss her so much. I still have not forgiven the person who ran into my dad and I.
A friend's mom committed suicide, another friend's mom died, family members and other people I know have been getting cancer or been suffering from other serious medical problems.
I listen to explicit gangster rap constantly that glorifies blasphemy, satanism, extreme wanton violence and murder, sexual perversion, suicide, usage of illegal drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and most anything else you can think of. I feel addicted and drawn to it now in a sick way that I do not understand, and it only further erodes my humanity and what left I have of a heart.
I have struggled with social phobia since I was a young child. Last year I was clinically diagnosed with major depression, social phobia and OCD. I have been taking a lot of prescription medication for these problems and at times I have deliberately abused these medications, as well as various OTC medications. I have started drinking alcohol recently as well.
I hate myself. I have felt suicidal many times, and I have fantasized about hurting or ------- myself and/or other people. This is beyond evil and I would never do it in real life but the fact that I ever extracted any "joy" from thinking such thoughts is so sick and perverse I cannot even believe it. And then I just hate myself more and more, hate hate hate hate it never ends.
I haven't truly considered myself a Christian for any extended period of time for years and years. I went down a new-age path, got into occult stuff, psychics, hypnosis, astral projection, and other things that are renounced in the bible so I just don't know what to think about it all. There are things in the bible that make me feel uneasy too.
At this point I don't think I could open up many more doors to the devil and demons/negative spirits if I tried. I hate and fear the devil and have my entire life, at no point was I deliberately trying to let demons into my life. But the fact of the matter is that I have anyway through my crazy and shameful behavior.
Even now as I write this I feel the Holy Spirit within me, calling to me to come back to love and light. But whenever I try to do this I always end up failing. I feel the evil within me doubling up in power, becoming frantic in its will to destroy me.
I'm not blaming my mistakes on the devil. Everything wrong I've done was through my own conscious choices and will. But at this point I have no doubt that through my own conscious choices and will I have let a multitude of demons into my soul. I won't go so far as to say as I'm possessed -- I pray to God that that has not happened yet -- but I am undoubtedly oppressed.
I feel a spiritual heaviness all the time. I feel like the happiness and joy in my spirit is constantly being sucked out of me into the ground. I feel like there is a 1,000 pound weight on my back all the time smashing me into the ground, this heaviness and density in the air that makes me feel like I'm suffocating. This darkness and this feeling that I'm being watched, hated, and influenced in some way.
Yeah, depression is a mental condition, but after all the pills I took I'm not any better. I'm worse. I think that's because, regardless of whether or not I have psychological conditions, the devil has taken root in my soul and is slowly eroding and destroying whatever is left of light and goodness within me.
“’When the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and not finding any, it says, “I will return to my house from which I came.” ‘And when it comes, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and takes along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.’” (Luke 11:24-26)
This is exactly what happens to me. Whenever I find some momentary rest or peace in the constant unceasing spiritual storm I live in I always end up falling back into darkness and I always end up being exponentially worse and doing exponentially worse things than I was the last time.
I was already powerless to begin with, only God has any power. And now I feel like I'm doomed. I feel like God loves me but at the same time I always have this "voice"/feeling in my head always telling me that God could never love someone like me because of how evil I am, because of how many times I have blasphemed and used God's name as a curse in some way. I fear that God has abandoned me and that the devil is going to drag me straight to [profanity].
I love God. The true me loves God. But I don't live like I do. Not even close. I don't even know where to start. I can't do this on my own, I just can't.
Whenever I try I fail.
Please help me. I'm at my wit's end and I don't know what else to do. I pray to God but the devil always destroys my prayers. The greatest manifestation of my OCD is when I try to pray. I feel paranoid constantly until I satisfy this strange, inexplicable but overpowering urge in my head to chant a meaningless, empty prayer over and over again, and these days it even gets to the point where I just end up broadcasting blurs of meaningless sound in my mind over and over again, because if I don't I feel like I'm under attack by demons from all directions.
The few times I manage to get my senses about me and pray to God legitimately and from my soul I am only able to go for a minute, often less before it devolves into more meaningless counting, 1 2 3 4 5 counting over and over again saying the same empty sounds over and over again to keep the devil out and suddenly I'm not praying anymore and I feel God has turned his back on me and everything is silent. Whenever I try to do anything positive, happy or good my mind suddenly starts to wander, my thoughts shut down, scatter, I forget what I'm doing, I dawdle around like I don't have anything important to do.
I destroyed myself enough and turned away from God enough that the devil is now destroying me. I have no idea how to stop this. I have no power over demons. I'm just a wimpy, stupid human that they love to exploit and destroy in every way possible.
Part of me knows God loves me and God can and will save me but then there's that voice again telling me that I'm not worth it, I never was and I never will be, that God hates me and I'm going to [profanity] or whatever negative realm I'd end up in after death.
But wait, there's more. I feel that I am being attacked by demons or some kind of dark/negative spirits in my dreams. Ever since I was a little kid I have had a lot of nightmares. When I was young my nightmares were pretty "innocent," at least compared to what they are now, but they almost always revolved around ghosts and other supernatural phenomena.
For the past few years almost every single dream I remember is a nightmare, and they're only getting worse and worse.
At this point I have lost count of how many dreams I have had in which I was physically and/or emotionally assaulted by demons.
Last year I started having extremely violent dreams. The most disturbing part was that I was the bad guy, not someone else. Those dreams I had felt like a direct assault on my deepest spiritual and moral values.
Also starting last year my dreams started to enter into the physical plane and they also started to feel like one or more external forces were invading them. Normally in a dream, even in a nightmare, the only "living presence" I truly feel in the dream, in retrospect, is myself. Everyone else, including the monsters/demons/whatever, feel like 2D characters or something.
In dreams I've had starting last year, I now begin to feel at least one other "living presence" in my dreams that's not supposed to be there.
For example, last year I had a dream in which I was screaming at something I perceived to be Hitler. I was accusing him of being a ----- ------ and using a lot of profanity toward him. I woke up unexpectedly with a jolt, and the moment I woke up I felt a hard, physical slap on my face. This was in real life, not in the dream.
Also last year I had a dream about something largely unimportant to this problem, and then I felt a "living," external force "yank" me straight out of the dream I was in, and suddenly I found myself laying on my bed in my room. It was dark. I thought I was awake, it felt exactly like real life, at least at the time. Then I heard an inhuman scream/growl to the side of my bed, and an invisible force pulled me toward it, and I woke up.
There was a space of relatively "normal" nightmares between then and right now, but now things are only getting worse.
A few days ago I fell asleep in my chair and felt an invisible demonic force attack me. It felt like it reached into my heart and was trying to pull my soul up and out of my body. It hurt, the force against me was tremendous, and I woke up quickly.
That same day or the next day I had a longer dream in which I was in what looked like my room, the light was on and everything. I was being attacked and harassed by an invisible demon. It would assault me physically, but weird [profanity] would happen, too. The only other thing I remember is smearing a ----- ------ that looked like [profanity] (literally) over my walls and ceiling. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary with this until I noticed all the [profanity] smeared high up on the wall and the ceiling. I realized I had no memory of putting it in those specific spots, and I was suddenly filled with fear that the devil was there and had done it. I woke up and had to get the [profanity] out of bed to check that wasn't real because it felt so [profanity]ing real in the dream.
Another dream I had recently was the most horrifying dream I've ever had in my entire life. Not because of any of the events in the dream, as bad as they were, but because of what something in the dream said to me.
I was in what I perceived to be the basement of my house with my parents. There was at least one demon in the basement and we were trying to deal with it but in retrospect I have no idea what the [profanity] was going on. All I really remember is my dad making me spin around in a circle constantly and I was trying to look to find the demon.
Now, some real life info. My parents are extremely kind to me, they always are and they always have been. They love and support me dearly, and I them. We aren't a perfect family by any means but we work stuff out easily. I do not have any kind of resentment, hidden or overt, or of any sort, toward either of them. That is important to understand to know why this dream was so disturbing.
I was spinning around in the basement trying to find the demon. I was not aware I was about to leave the dream and wake up, but my "dad" said to me "no, don't go, you'll miss the fun!" And right after he said that I woke up.
A dream character has never spoken to me like that before. It felt like a living presence in my dream that was NOT supposed to be there. It feels like something evil was pretending to be my dad to [profanity] with me.
I don't know what to do.