Regain Your Personal Power by Walking through Your Darkness and into Your Light

 

"You must recognize the darkness in yourself 

in order to understand the darkness in others." 

Carl Jung 

The past few days, I've been walking through my darkness. I can't say I've enjoyed facing the fire, but it is necessary in recovery. Most of my life, I had no idea how much darkness was in me. I thought of myself as the good boy. But being wedded to good behavior--perfect behavior-- is a huge darkness in itself.

No one can be perfect and no one can truly be the good boy or good girl 24/7. I have challenged myself to do things my way. Many people have held power over me for years: mother, father, clergy, friends, classmates, coworkers and complete strangers. These are the people who I have allowed to be in charge of my decisions, my actions, my beliefs, my view of myself and most every other aspect of my behavior.

If they said "jump," I jumped. If they said "This is a sin," I felt dirty. If they said "You are inherently bad," I was a bad person. That one, accepting the idea that we are somehow bad, is devastating. It has really haunted me my entire life. Any mistake I make brings the intense, dark feelings of being irredeemably bad.

And this lie about being bad, is really nothing more than a manipulative action on behalf of those people who were determined to control us. Once someone else can convince us that we are bad people-- and they are not-- we have trapped ourselves into a web of being untrue to ourselves.

Suddenly our self-worth is all dependent on whether or not we please the other person based in their beliefs, their concept of morals and of acceptable behavior. Any behavior on our part that fails to meet their standards means that we are bad. Worse, it leads us to believe that we have to live under the thumb of their rules, or face the consequences of abandonment.

Many of us were trapped under the thumb of others as small children, which left us with no choice. We had to accept what parents and other adults were shoving down our throats or face the fear of abandonment. As a child, there is probably no fear that is greater. We can't survive without adults to help us. We need them. And we are also desperate to be loved, so we bend to their rules, believing that if we keep them, we will be loved.

On reaching puberty and our teen-age years, some of us are able to break free. Some of us are not. But even those who break free by leaving home as soon as they are old enough, still suffer from the lies they originally accepted. Externally, these people are free, but internally they are still in emotional bondage. Those who aren't able to understand fully the damage they have experienced then choose to medicate away their emotional pain-- which they do not understand-- with addictions.

Whether we were among those who were able to physically break free from our parents, or not, we continue to live with the shame of being "bad," and the fear that others will find out and abandon us. So we continue to place ourselves under the thumbs of friends, colleagues, other addicts-- most anyone. We continue to live by the rules and beliefs of other people because we are too afraid of breaking them and being abandoned once more.

Living by the rules, beliefs, assumptions, expectations and needs of other people is emotionally deadly. It keeps us from discovering who we truly are and living our lives by our own standards, beliefs and personal rules.

It's scary at first-- trying to own my personal power-- but after I wade through the fear of being judged and rejected, it feels GREAT! I no longer have to be the person that someone else wants me to be. I no longer have to be false to myself.

We can't be our true selves until we walk through our personal darkness. Walking through that darkness exposes all of the ways that we have been untrue to ourselves. It exposes all of the lies and rules we are still living by that don't belong to us and certainly don't serve our spiritual and emotional growth.

Like Jung says, the more I uncover my own darkness, the more I have empathy for the darkness in others. Even the people who imposed their beliefs and expectations on me have a darkness inside that I now recognize. They may not have been able to do any better than they did because they were plagued by their own insecurities and fears. 

Walking through the darkness provides us with the ability to understand ourselves for the better and to understand the struggles of other, who are actually very similar to our own.

Your Higher Power will lead us down the path to self-discovery. God will walk with us through the darkness and point you toward the light. From there, we need to make the choice to step out of the darkness, to begin to discover our true selves and to walk forward living by our standards based on the light within us.