I finally watched KPop Demon Hunters and found it surprisingly relevant to my work as a coach. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t watched it.
After studying trauma-informed coaching last year, it’s not surprising that I see trauma everywhere. But it really is. All of us carry traces of past experiences, times when we couldn’t process overwhelming emotions. Those emotions get stored as tension in our bodies, and come roaring out when we are in situations that remind us of the original experience.
KPop Demon Hunters is an exploration of the trauma experience, of how the real “demons” are the “negative” emotions we carry with us from our past experiences: our shame, our anger, our anxiety, our insecurity. There were times when somebody told us we weren’t good enough, and those become our demons. And we can’t let them go – we keep replaying them, letting the voices we heard keep telling us we can never change and we can never escape (like the demon king Gwi-Ma in the movie whispers to the demons).
How do we move on from those experiences? We share them. Brené Brown writes that shame is a social experience, and therefore healing shame requires a social experience: “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.”
And that’s the message of the movie. When we can share the thing we are ashamed of, the part of ourselves that feels so icky that we don’t think anybody can tolerate it (because we were told it was unacceptable, as Celine told Rumi)….and then somebody accepts us as we are – that is how healing begins. That is how you defeat demons – not with swords and violence, but with sharing and compassion.
What’s something about yourself that you’ve been holding on to, terrified that somebody will find out? Can you find one good friend who loves you to share that with? You might be surprised that what you thought was shameful and unacceptable can be accepted.