It’s really all just light.
When we break it down, when we look at it, the darkness… It’s light too.
It’s hard. It feels scary. But when we take the time to look at the darkness (what I’ll define here as fear, forgetfulness, the things we prefer not to look at, the parts of ourselves we don’t like but may call out in others, and the emotions we try to suppress), we find that it’s just light reversed.
Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychotherapist said ““Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
Parts work, shadow work, inner child work… These are all modalities to help us recognize and unravel ourselves from our own darkness. Truly, the darkness is the cage that holds our inner children, children that are screaming at us for attention and love, buried beneath the protections we’ve developed to try to suppress their pain.
Take this for an example:
The other day I was journaling from the part of my own “Internal Punisher”. I know some of you reading this have this part, too. The part of you that will verbally beat you down to a pulp and leave you on the floor for dead… if only you didn’t have a dog and a (very) tiny voice in your head saying “Get up. Go to bed.” At the core, that very shadowy part of me doesn’t want me to feel the unbearable pain of feeling confused, lost, scared, and unlovable which honestly, WAS unbearable for me to feel alone as a child. The difference is that I’m now a safe adult able to be with myself through challenging emotions, and I can sit with these very young emotions that my parents just couldn’t handle when I was small (because my parents were just kids with their own suppressed emotions too). And as I worked with this protecter-firefighter part (to use IFS terminology), the last thing it said to me was, “I’m not bad, I’m not a villain, I’m just trying to keep you safe (from aforementioned emotions).”
This doesn’t make me like or approve of a lot of what is happening in the U.S. But it does keep me from hating the people making some of the decisions, which saves me from feeling the emotion in my body. Actually, it creates some empathy. They’re a bunch of scared kids, unfortunately running the show, yes. But what I know about kids is that punishment doesn’t work. Telling them they’re wrong or bad can make them more defensive/protective (this is true for my shadows too). Understanding helps. Boundaries* help too (my Internal Punisher can still have a say but is not allowed to berate me.). This isn’t the answer, I know. But remember…
Darkness is really just light that’s turned on itself. Fear is Love that’s forgotten its truth. Pain exists only in the places we haven’t allowed the sun to shine. In the end, it’s really all just light.
*Dr. Becky Kennedy recently posted about this. Obviously, its a little different for adult kids, but not that different. “No.” , is still a complete sentence.
A Dog and Her Girl 