the dark night of the soul

"The dark night of the soul is a totally loving, healing, and liberating process. Whether it feels that way is another question entirely. Nowadays most people think of the dark night of the soul as a time of suffering and tribulation--redemptive perhaps, but entirely unpleasant. This is not always the case.

The only characteristic of the experience of the dark night that is certain is its obscurity. One simply does not comprehend clearly what is happening. Some dark-night experiences, as I have indicated, may be quite pleasant. One friend of mine, driven by unrelenting perfectionism, had dedicated his adult life to doing everything right. He had a sense of humor, and we had good times together, but it hurt to see the pain his self-judgment was causing him. Then, gradually and inexplicably, he felt himself relaxing. He was delightfully liberated from his burdensome sense of responsibility; he was 'free just to be', as he put it. Although he wasn't sure what was going on and at times wondered if he might just be getting lazy, his overall experience of the change was joyful.

For another person in another situation, the same kind of liberation might be very painful. When I was practicing psychiatry, a woman came to see me for depression. She had spent her life taking care of her family, frequently neglecting her own interests in the process. She felt guilty about anything she did for herself. She struggled with a sense of emptiness after her children had grown up and was later devastated to discover that her husband was having an affair. The experience was beginning to ease her care-taking compulsion, but it certainly did not feel like liberation. All she felt was pain, loss, and abandonment. Glimpses of her growing freedom made her even more depressed at first, because in relinquishing her total dedication to her marriage and family, she felt she was losing her only source of worth. Gradually, however, she began to enjoy time for herself. And in ways so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable amidst her pain, she began to feel a sense of meaning and value not for things she did, but just for who she was.

Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully, always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss. It may be a loss of something we're glad to be rid of, like a bad habit, or something we cling to for dear life, like a love relationship. Either way it's still a loss. Thus even when a dark-night experience is pleasant, there is still likely to be an accompanying sense of emptiness and perhaps even grief. Conversely, when a dark-night experience leaves us feeling tragically bereft, there still may be a sense of openness and fresh possibility. The point is, no matter how hard we try, we cannot see the process clearly. We only know what we're feeling at a given time, and that determines whether our experience is pleasurable or painful. As one of my friends often says, 'God only knows what's really going on--literally!'"
(excerpt from The Dark Night of the Soul by Gerald G. May)