By midlife, most of us have a lot of impacted emotional
pain. That pain can poison our system or leave
it. Those are pretty much our only two choices.
Sometimes depression is to the soul what fever is to the
body: a way to burn up what needs to be burned up so
that health can return. Some dark nights of the soul
last months or years, while others just last a night or
two. Either way, they're part of a mystical detox of
our accumulated fear and despair. Any thought not
reconciled with truth remains in our psychic
"in-box," put in the trash but not yet deleted
from the computer. Whatever energy isn't brought to
light, surrendered and transformed, stays in the dark--an
insidious force of constant, active attack on both body
and soul.
Even if you've lived a pretty good life, unless you've
lived it in some isolated mountain village where everyone
around you was nice all the time, then you're probably
carrying some pain around. In your 30s and 40s you
were so busy that you were able to keep distracted, but
sometime. . . that pain demands to be heard. It will
be heard. And it's far, far better to hear it in
your head and in your soul, than from your doctor when the
test results come back and unfortunately they do not look
good.
Turning on the TV these days, one feels bombarded by
advertisements for sleep medications.
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It's
understandable, of course, that people who have to get up
for work the next morning will do anything necessary to
get a good night's sleep.
But there's
a deeper story here, of people seeking help in their
efforts to handle the monsters that often emerge from
their psyches very late at night. Some of these
monsters need to be let out. They need to be
freed from the caves they live in. They bring
messages of pain, it's true, and yet the pain they bring
is often important pain. If you don't feel the
guilt, how will you ever reach your motivation to make
amends? If you don't feel the self-loathing, how
will you ever reach the motivation to act more responsibly
next time? If you avoid the pain, you'll miss the
gain. Just suppressing the monsters only makes them
larger. Allowing them out--and allowing yourself to
finally face them--is the only way to make sure that they
will ever go away.
It's not always fun to face your past--not the
white-washed, historically revised version, but the real
backstory you don't look at daily because it would make
you cringe so much if you did. It's not really about
what you don't want others to know; the actual events
probably weren't any worse than what others have been
through in their lives. Compared to others, you
might not have even done so badly. But wherever you
didn't live up to your personal best, shame remains like
an underground toxin. You live with regrets that
haunt you, perhaps rarely during the day when the ego's
illusionist worldview holds sway, but during those nights
when no pill or drink or amount of sex can keep them from
you. They move through locked doors in your mind as
though they're ghosts, which they are. And no amount
of "Go on now, go!" can shoo them away.
Only the rigorous work of taking a fearless moral
inventory will do that--the bravery to respect your
conscience, to know that if something's up for review,
then it's best to review it. And that can be
difficult. In the words of the ancient Greek
playwright, Aeschylus, "He who learns must
suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot
forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own
despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful
grace of God." Numbing yourself--while sleeping
or waking--will not erase the pain; only forgiveness and
love can do that. Then, through the alchemy of
atonement and grace, the ghosts will go back to the
nothingness from whence they came. And they will be
no more. The past is over, and you are free.
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