Reclaiming a God of True Love

Stranger Things holds a powerful message. The epic five-series Saga portrays the battle with evil that each of us must wage inside ourselves.

As a therapist, I see people wrestling with the strange things inside themselves all the time. Sometimes people feel just as immobile inside themselves as Max or Will do in Stranger Things after they have confronted the evil that has occupied their minds but then become afraid again.

Stranger Things depicts that when other voices control our mind, the only thing that can free us is to remind ourselves of something beautiful and something we passionately love inside ourselves.

The upside-down lives inside our mind. That is where the dragon, or in Stranger Things, Vecna, has to be defeated so that the voice of fear in our hearts can no longer control us.
• To defeat fear, we have to go into the heart of it, as the motley crew in Stranger Things does.
• Evil can never be defeated if we seek it outside of ourselves. We have to slay the dragon inside.
• No outside violence will defeat fear. Because, as Stranger Things shows so clearly, when we try to fight evil with external violence, it only retreats for a while, but then the fear creeps up again.

Whether it is El or Max or Will or Holly, each of the characters defeats what scares them by staying in touch with what they are passionately in love with.
Then they can embrace what is strange in them, what they fear.

Then they can be in their right mind, in what the series calls the right side up.

There’s a fascinating similarity between Stranger Things and the story in the gospel where we get our reference to Legion from. 
• The gospel of Mark portrays the same process as Stranger Things: the so-called Gerasene demoniac in Ch. 5 has the voices of Legion, of many, in him that have occupied him, colonized his mind. Everyone thinks he is possessed by demons. 
• When someone cares (in this case, Jesus) about who this man really is – which is what love is really about -, he remembers his true identity. The many voices no longer control him so that at the end of the story, he is in his right mind.

Takeaway: While you cannot control the voices outside, following your longing for love, you can empower yourself to fight those voices inside and decolonize your mind so that they no longer control you inside.

Follow the true passion for love that is you this year and you can be in your right mind.