Taking a Walk with my Dark Side

Growing up in a culture that thinks in black and white is easy—until something happens that shatters your good vs. evil paradigm. Then, it’s the hardest thing in the world. All the things you thought were bad—depression, anxiety, sadness, cynicism, bitterness, anger, hatred— they’re all inside you. And religion dictates that there is no place for them in a good person. So, you’re left to stifle them, to pretend they aren’t there, to pray them out of you, and to watch in utter confusion as you lose sight of the person you thought you were.

You watch yourself die. And when it’s over, there is nothing left but the ashes of an old life, old beliefs, old dreams, and old platitudes. You wake up in a different universe, where everything you ever believed in is up for questioning. You look in the mirror and see a stranger. The worst shock comes when you look in your heart and find nothing but black pain, along with all the other things you thought were evil and far away. There they are, living with you. You are forced to stay with your doubts while hearing sermons about the danger of entertaining one doubtful thought.

The people preaching about doubts have spent their entire lives remembering their doubts with guilt and shame. I’ve watched old men remember, and I see where the guilt and shame has etched their faces. They have felt it for years. I realize that they feel small and helpless in the face of their dark side. They are guilt-ridden over their depression. They feel ashamed that they were angry at their church. The anxiety attacks didn’t go away when they prayed, and they thought they had a spiritual problem. Maybe, when they were young, they were honest. They admitted they were hurt, angry, ashamed, and human, and the onslaught of judgement they received made them hide their pain, leaving it to fester under layers of confusion. They mistakenly thought they ‘conquered,’ and ‘got over it,’ but they didn’t. Years later, they passed on their pain, shame, and guilt to their children and to the young people who came to them for help.

By the time they are old, they can’t admit they have a dark side. They’ve buried it so deeply under their religion that they have forgotten they are human. They judge humanity harshly. When they see people doubting their beliefs, their first impulse is to silence them— because they stopped questioning years ago when they sensed that asking questions would mean the end of something. Questions mean change, and they don’t want change. They don’t want to see people discover the answers to questions they didn’t want the answers to.

The messiness of healing makes them uncomfortable. When others have the strength to struggle openly and honestly, they fight back in fear. They fight because they are triggered. They’ve taught themselves, over a period of decades, to fear the dark, struggling part of their humanity, above all else. The scary, heavy things that they refused to walk with all those years ago rule them now, through their fear. Maybe that’s why they get drunk on their positions of power and authority. Because leaders aren’t afraid, are they? Yes, they are. Especially when they earned their leadership by utilizing the injustices, lies, and dictatorship that they grew up in. They know it’s a house of cards. That’s why people who are healing scare them.

People who are healing scare them, because facing darkness uncovers things. It reveals lies. It reveals beliefs that don’t work in the real world. It reveals injustice, and its perpetrators. Facing your anger, cynicism, and pain mean living honestly with them, expressing them, and exploring them. It means something radical, messy, and life- changing. Healed people have faced their fear and crawled through their own darkness. They have counted the costs and realized that not healing was far deadlier than healing.

The fear of my dark side was engrained in me since I was a child. A black and white belief system automatically instills fear. Why? Because you can’t be good and bad. You are either ‘sheep or goat,’ righteous or unrighteous, and going to heaven or hell. So, when the paradigm shift comes, and you are left in the dust of your own ashes, you feel as though you’ve been thrown in hell without actually dying. You have all this never-ending pain, and it comes hand in hand with cynicism, sadness, and anger. All those things that you were taught were inherently bad are raging within you, day in and day out. What then?

If you listen to the voices of unhealed religious people, they will tell you that you are destined for hell. They’ll tell you to stop hurting the church. They’ll say things like, ‘confusion comes from the devil’ and ‘rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft’ and ‘repent of your unbelief.’ They’ll tell you that God allowed this for a purpose, and that ‘all things happen for good.’ They will preach at you about your bitterness, when in reality, you were only being honest. They will whine, gossip, and gaslight you, until you think that the thing that happened to you was your fault, even if it wasn’t. They don’t want you to actually heal, they just want your honesty out of their perfectly oiled, black-and-white machine of a church.

Meanwhile, you’re dying a second death because that black-and-white belief system was supposed to come to your rescue. It was supposed to save you. Instead, it turned on you in a cannibalistic fury. Your paradigm is shattered again, this time in a deeper way. They didn’t save you. Who will come to your rescue?

You will.

You will learn to take a walk with your dark side.

This happens in small, baby steps. It will take a lifetime. But it will be an infinitely more peaceful existence than living in fear of the darkness in you. Invite your anger on a walk with you. Scream at the sky and let it out. You’ll find that there was pain under the anger. You will feel like you are breaking. Allow it. Allow yourself to shatter. Write the words you are afraid to think. Speak your pain. Out loud. Get it out of your brain and give it to empty space.

Looking back, I realized that I did this without processing that I was doing so. It was the reason I listened to sad music, read terrifying and depressing books, and wrote my dark thoughts in my journals. I desperately wanted to learn to embrace the pain and the darkness. I wanted to make it a part of me that I wasn’t afraid of anymore. I wanted to stop feeling alone. I wanted to stop fearing the things I’d been taught were bad, because I knew that they were now a part of my existence. I took walks with them and invited them along and listened to what they had to say. I was the loneliest I’ve ever been, and I thought I couldn’t survive it. But, on the other side of that loneliness, there was peace. Anger, pain, bitterness, cynicism, and anxiety won’t let you alone unless you allow them to run their course. They must move through you and be released, or they will not release you.

It is a process that is never completely finished. You’ll lose the person you were before. But please, love the person you were before, because they died so you could live. Seek out people who don’t live in fear of their pain, because they are the most peaceful people you’ll ever meet. Realize that emotions are not ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ they simply are, and all of them are there to help you heal. They may be pleasant or unpleasant, but they are not bad. We all must live with our dark side, and when we learn to integrate it and embrace it, the fear of it slowly goes away. On the other side of the fear, is the healing. It’s not linear, and it is hard work, but it is worth it. And it is the biggest gift you could possibly give to yourself and the people who love you.