Sharing your inner darkness: a good idea or a bad idea?
Talking about dark things is the only way to feel better about them. But if the pain is too intense, you might feel reluctant about sharing, not wanting to overwhelm yourself or other people. I sympathize.
Since I’m an abuse survivor, I have tons of inner darkness, and I’m always deciding how much to let out. The topic of abuse makes people very uncomfortable. Most people have probably experienced abuse from someone they love, and many cope by avoiding the topic, even in their own thoughts. Those who have moved beyond avoidance are often focused on figuring out who to blame. But neither avoidance nor blame address the key existential questions.
Some questions being an abuse survivor raised for me: “Why would someone I love hurt me? How can I respect the person I care about, and also respect the part of myself they hurt? How can a person who’s given me important good things give me such shatteringly bad things as well? Do I deserve this pain? Was there something wrong with me? How can I live in a world where such things are possible? How can I trust people when such actions are possible? How do I know who is trustworthy? How do I protect myself?”
These questions are hard to answer. For a long time, I avoided these questions by avoiding my own pain. I tried to convince myself that what was happening to me wasn’t a big deal, and hardened my heart against my own anguish. When my heart began to get soft again, I started feeling everything from my past, and that hurt a lot, like a burning.
“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh,” is one of God’s promises in the book of Ezekiel, but I wish Ezekiel had been more explicit about just how much the process hurts.
And why does it hurt? Well, abusers tell you that you aren’t allowed to feel anger or grief when they mistreat you. When you don’t feel your own anger and grief, it stays locked up inside a closet waiting for later. And if something happens to open the door to that closet? All the things you’ve stuffed in there fall off the shelves onto your head in a tumbling cascade! If the pain has been really bad, the locked-away possessions include feral rabid rats and poisonous snakes that bite on their way out. That’s why it’s easier for most keep the door shut.
I don’t want people to have the pain of listening to my story, any more than I want myself to have the pain of telling it. So that creates a social inhibition against getting into too many details. But we’ll never recover as the sickened society we are, if we don’t find ways to overcome that inhibition. To bring more balance to the world, I’ve been making an intentional practice of being a witness for other people’s dark stories.
After a couple years of witnessing, I can tell you: the darkness behind the curtain of normalcy is amazing, messy, astounding, intense, and shot through with rainbow strands of light and beauty. It may be a burden to witness darkness, but that is also where the human spirit shines with a Light that Astounds, a light that blesses everything it touches and makes it holy.
Witnessing the darkness (hearing a confession) is a position of great trust, but in desperate times, you take what you can get. It’s embarrassing to me that I can’t always carefully select a trustworthy listener. Sometimes I need to talk so badly that I can’t make myself stop. Those are the cringeworthy moments: when I know I’m potentially overburdening someone else, but I don’t know what else to do. It’s too heavy for me to handle. Of course it would be too heavy for them to handle too. But what else can I do?
I try to receive more foul stories than I give. I try to hold those stories and transform them, like the unicorn plunging her purifying horn into toxic waters to make them fresh and clean to drink again. But sometimes I get overwhelmed. Sometimes I can’t receive anymore, and someone still needs to talk. I know how terrible it feels to be an overloaded listener. So part of what makes it tough to talk is fear of overloading others.
What do you do when your stories are too heavy to unload, but also too heavy to keep carrying? I compare it to carrying a slimy poisonous octopus, dripping ooze and burning hot. You’re worried about poison slime, and you keep clutching this hot horrible burning clinging thing closer and closer to you, so that none of the poison oozes on anyone else. But it feels like an impossible task, because as soon as you have wrestled four or five octopus arms close and tight, the other two or three arms you are trying to hold escape you. That is what it feels like to be carrying a silence.
So when I do find a sympathetic listener, someone who can be trusted with my octopus (in the long term or the short term) the sheer relief of letting go turns me into a fucking word grenade. I can’t stop talking. I go on and on and on, horror after horror spiraling off my tongue and darkening the world around me, creating horrified expressions on faces. It feels so good. But it’s also a little terrifying.
I am writing this blog post during the beginning of the COVID crisis. Everyone is terrified right now. Not just that everyday regular fear of losing jobs and business and homes and routines and vacations: that horrible existential fear of losing certainties and expectations. In just a couple of weeks, the world has transformed to a new one where we don’t know the rules or where we’re going. No one knows what the future holds, or how they’ll fit into the new reality.
This existential dread isn’t new to me. It’s an old friend. My existential certainty came crashing down when my lifelong expectation of having a happy little family was broken by abuse and divorce. I’ve lived the past two years in the expectation that I can’t expect anything of tomorrow. That no one and nothing I love will necessarily be there for me the next day. That nothing I receive is a certainty. That every good thing that happens is a gift.
The emotions that you fear are too large to burden your loved ones with? I’ve been living with emotions like that for so long I can hardly remember what it felt like to be otherwise. I’ve long felt that the world is horror, and the only thing that makes it bearable is love.
I’m not frightened by the thought of losing everything. I’ve lost it before. When I think about much energy it will take to fight to keep what I have, I feel tired, not afraid. The only thing that frightens me about this stay-in-place order, is being locked alone in a room with the same demons I’ve been fighting for years. They are old friends now. I guess we’re about to get even closer.
