On Dealing With Darkness

Source: PxHere

Some of us know there’s depression, and then there’s depression. The first kind is like feeling blue, or down, or upset about the way our life is going. The second kind is a black hole from which there is no escape. Life has no meaning, it never will have meaning, and there is no point to anything, including the notion that this experience of the black hole can have some kind of redeeming purpose.

Some of us know there’s low self-esteem, and then there’s a sense of profound worthlessness. The first kind is feeling we don’t measure up to our peers. This friend is better looking, that friend has more money, this cousin has a better spouse or more successful kids. The second kind is feeling I don’t really deserve to live. There is nothing about me of any value, there never will be anything of value, I am the incarnation and personification of every negative trait ever listed.

Some of us know there’s anger, and then some of us have tapped into rage. Anger is wanting to yell at someone who was rude to us, to snap back at someone who snapped at us, to shout at our kids or our parents or our coworker who frustrated us. Rage is wanting to annihilate someone, to systematically want to take them apart limb by limb and then smash each individual piece into tiny fragments.

The difference between these types of negative feelings is not quantitative, something further along a particular continuum. It’s a qualitative difference, a shift to an entirely different realm of being. It’s like the difference between an ocean wave and a tsunami. We can learn to cooperate with the ocean waves – to dive under them or ride them. There is no cooperating with a tsunami. You just have to get out of the water.

I find a useful way to understand this difference is between tapping into the “personal” vs. the “collective” unconscious.

These two terms were coined by Carl Jung. Like most things in psychology, we can’t really prove they exist but they are very helpful roadmaps of our inner world. The personal unconscious is what Freud called the unconscious – that which is not yet conscious but which can become conscious. It feels challenging, but it’s a challenge we can wrap our arms around.

The collective unconscious is the sum total of the personal unconscious of every human on the planet – not just now, but throughout all of human history. This is why it is experienced as overwhelming.

Not everyone taps into the collective unconscious and not all of us do it in a predictable way. In my experience, a history of early trauma makes us more vulnerable to experiences of the collective unconscious, as if some protective membrane has been ruptured or never allowed to develop because of the abuse we suffered as young children.

Why am I writing about all of this? Because I find it very helpful to know about this terrain if someone is in the midst of horrible darkness. It’s important to help them realize that this is a real place but that they do not have to identify with it. When our individual ego tries to incorporate something that is far too big for it, it gets swamped and we feel overwhelmed, in a dark dungeon from which there is no escape. It is possible to extract ourselves from these places, by not identifying with them. It is when we identify with them – I am evil, I am horrible, I am worthless – that we get lost in them. Instead, it is better to hold the position that this place is real and I have access to it, but I am not it.

Darkness is not something our American culture is very comfortable with. Not liking it doesn’t make it go away. Recognizing its existence better prepares us for it when it appears in our lives.