11/7/2022 0 Comments I am the nightmare in the dark![]() ![]() I try to imagine how a symptom, like a long-standing dark night, might be re-imagined and even lived out in a way that is not literally depressive. I don’t look for quick escapes from the pain or good distracting alternatives. In the archetypal psychotherapy that I practice, we always say: Go with the symptom. This tendency might be an aspect of the cult of celebrity, where we lose sight of our own importance by making too much of it in others. Contemporary people often don’t take their lives seriously enough. One theory is that he escaped his melancholy in his efforts for his country, but another possibility is that the very darkness of his life-he once said, “If there’s a worse place than hell, I’m in it.”-was the ground out of which his leadership grew.Īs a therapist, I have worked with people profoundly sad and discouraged, and I join with them in looking for ways to transform that heavy mood into a weighty life. ![]() With his early life surrounded by death and loneliness and his adult life weighed down by a war in which thousands of young men died, he was a seriously melancholic man who, in spite of or through his dark night, became an icon of wisdom and leadership. One outstanding example is Abraham Lincoln. One simple rule is that a truly deep dark night requires an extraordinary development in life. You may have several dark nights in the course of your life because you are always becoming more of a person and entering life more fully. Engaging the NightĪ dark night of the soul is a kind of initiation, taking you from one phase of life into another. ![]() It can be useful to search for the roots of a dark night, but in my experience the best way to deal with it is to find the concrete action or decision that it is asking for. They may take medication or go into counseling looking for a cause. With dark nights you always have to be alert for the invisible memories, narratives, and concerns that may not be apparent on the surface.įaced with a dark night, many people treat it like an illness, like depression. Often a dark night has a strong symbolic quality in that it points to a deeper level of emotion and perhaps a deeper memory that gives it extra meaning. But sometimes a seemingly insignificant event can give rise to a dark night: You may miss a train and not attend a reunion that meant much to you. I reserve the expression ‘dark night of the soul’ for a dark mood that is truly life-shaking and touches the foundations of experience, the soul itself. His life was broken by some loss, failure, or long-forgotten emotional wound that left him in a desperately dark place. In his voice and body language I could see that this man was not caught in some passing depression. Help me.” I shouted back my email address. Not long ago I was giving a talk at a university when a man shouted at me from back in the crowd: “I’m terribly depressed. Anyone may go through a period of sadness or challenge that is so deep-seated and tenacious that it qualifies as a dark night of the soul. ![]()
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