When we go out of our comfort zone, go for some new adventure or new challenge, we will naturally pay more attention to what happens in our minds as we’re going through this new experience.
“Demons”, i.e. results of past bad, or even traumatic experience can be active during our daily life, often in various activities ranging from getting out of bed to talking to people where we have complex relationships (family members, co-workers, bosses, even kids…).
In daily life, random acts of these demons can go almost unnoticed, but that could be just because we’re so much used to them acting that we’ve already normalized this “mischief” as normal facts of life.
One way of exposing them is talking to therapist.
Another way is learning to be mindful and pay more attention to oneself.
Yet another way is experiencing something new and unique – our brain will naturally tend towards some sort of mindfulness, merely by instinct of being careful in new environment.
This could also mean that people that are burdened by these demons too much (or in particular “effective” ways) can’t easily deal with the things that they discover about themselves, or that their demons act on some kind of “meta” level where they can smuggle themselves into the very process of this growth. As a result, they will tend to avoid these challenges which could lead to further spiraling deeper into “anti-growth”, and so on…
This is the main reason I don’t buy “video games contribute to greater violence” type arguments. The interactions with the darker side of your psyche do not simply blindly lead to a numbing or indoctrination of any sort. How you respond to those things is really up to you, and will often progress through different levels of understanding as you spend more years engaging with the hobby.
I came to contact with the darker side during my teens (nothing too extreme), and the moment when I woke up from it and realized what I was doing was one of scariest moments of my life. In a weird way, it also gave me a bit of confidence as “awakening” was something that I felt with such a clarity. I really felt the wrongness, the empathy and the disgust, and I really felt the immeasurable (both tiny and large) gap between my “normal” self and my “darker” self.
On the other hand, playing violent games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat was just fun, and being attracted and fascinated with the violent parts was somewhat weird but not so serious as in real life.
In the end, teens are age of self-discovery, and correlation is not causation.
Teenagers are kids and kids need to be watched over. Not just directly, but by equipping them with the right tools, a bit of wisdom and the knowledge of being loved. They know too little of the world to be left alone on the journey. What are the odds that they will deal with the necessary horrors of life, let alone the unnecessary ones, in a healthy way?
The fact that one of my parents made it impossible for me to respect him, and thus impossible to be really watched over by him (except for some twisted form of “reverse psychology” which I had not even realized) was not a cause, but a poor setting in which I, as any human ever, just had to meet my darker side and learn to manage it. (Not that he had any better equipment than me, probably even worse!)