One of the chapters in Darkness Before Dawn spoke so well to me that I marked a lot of passages. It’s called “Into the Dark Light” by Elizabeth Rabia Roberts.
She says “any loss that strips away the identity you have cultivated and become comfortable with can start a slide into a serious depression.” pp121-122 I realize that I don’t have an identity that I’ve “cultivated and become comfortable with.” I have an identity that I’m familiar with but that I have been trying to change for a very long time. That identity is itself depression. When Erica said I was “extraordinary” and then when she said what I believed about myself, who I learned was me from my parents, my familiar identity, was never true in the first place, it completely shattered that old “identity,” the picture of myself as worthless, cowardly, selfish, etc. At first it felt wonderful, liberating. See post from 5/17/15 Then I felt like I had fallen into a swamp of fragments of what used to be me and what might be me, and was floundering desperately. Now I feel like I have a place to start. I remember Dr. Asher saying “You must have been very frightened” and writing in my journal “It was OK to be frightened!” I think that was the first thing that cracked the shell of who I thought I was. Meanwhile, David had abandoned me, triggering the ancient wound. For the first and last time I got angry about being abandoned, and went and smashed David’s windows, and then went into the hospital where they and I tried to close down the thing that had opened up. See Breakdown in Davis.
Another thing she said, and Parker Palmer has said too, that on coming out of depression they experienced new growth. This certainly has not been my experience.
She says “You are not alone. Someone is holding the consciousness of your greater world while you do your inner work.” p123 Our culture defines depression as “weakness,” as a consequence, “we feel bad about feeling bad.” p125
“There is a lineage of both religious and secular literature reminding us that times of total darkness are a natural part of the human condition.” p125 “These times were recognized as important and transformational because suffering is the predominant feeling of the process through which a human being must pass as the ego deconstructs and the transpersonal self is birthed. … Our ancestors identified these times of great confusion and inaction as ‘initiatory states.’ …
“To descend, submit, and die — the openness to being acted upon — is the feminine essence of the human experience. … If these dark times are a natural part of our spiritual growth, then the long periods of sadness, grief, inactivity, and inner suffering that can accompany them are not evidence of weakness or failure, as we are too often told. Rather, they are part of a restorative and creative time in which we have access to previously hidden realizations and wisdom that can bring us into a new life.” p126
Being acted upon, the author’s italics, is the root of the word “suffering.” My experience right now is of “sadness, grief, inactivity and inner suffering.” I surely hope that it will lead me into a new life.