“You’re the best thing that ever happened in my life,” David told his new wife in one of our joint therapy sessions, “but being with you deepens my anxiety, my sense of failure.” David married late in life. He struggled knowing his wife now witnessed his lifelong battle with self-destructive behaviors. “The guilt I feel makes me hate that destructive part of me,” he said. “I know you hate that part of me, which translates to me, you hate me. That causes me to hate me.”

David’s self-loathing, in turn, feeds his demons, makes him turn to them more, for comfort, for familiarity. His demons know him better than his wife knows him. He unconsciously sabotages the relationship, tries to “kill” it so his wife can’t witness, can’t see him in his shame. She feels him pushing her away and interprets that as his not loving her. Things spiral downward. The dark side of them both surface and interact.

I was a philosophy major in college. One of my favorites was Fredrich Nietzsche, a 19th century German philosopher famous for his statement, “God is dead.” That’s from a work called Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this philosophical piece, the Ugliest Man killed God because he could not bear the thought of God looking at him in his shame.

He did away with God, killed God – or his metaphor of God – so he wouldn’t have to deal with his own dark side. “He saw with eyes that saw everything,” the Ugliest Man said of God. “He saw man’s depths, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. He crawled into my darkest nooks. He had to die. Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live.” (Nietzsche, 379)

Most of us have a hard time embracing the dark side of ourselves, our personal demons. We fail to accept the fact that human beings are both generous and devious, both loving and selfish, both magnificent and flawed. We fight that part of ourselves we aren’t proud of, don’t like. We want to split it off, not address it.

I see this struggle in many of my clients. Fred wore a rubber band around his wrist for the first few weeks of therapy. I didn’t have to ask the reason; he used it to remind him to emotionally beat up on himself. He couldn’t live with the fact he impregnated a woman with whom he had casual sex and then didn’t want to acknowledge being the father.

He wanted the whole thing to go away. It marred his image of himself as hero in his family, the one everyone looked to for guidance. It caused him to want to kill the God-energy within himself – the healing energy within – as he didn’t think he deserved love or forgiveness for his “selfish, random act of lust.”

We’re not meant to be perfect in this life. We’re meant to be whole. In fact, our imperfections, our warts, are what a friend of mine calls “the love handles by which God can grab hold of us.”  There’s also that line in The Arabian Nights: “Where you fall, there is your gold.” Learning to face the dark side of our personality and coming to a place where we can befriend it is what cracks open our shell and releases our higher angel. It brings us down to earth, humbles us, softens our heart, grows our compassion.

For our newly married David, allowing a loving presence in to the secret spaces of his self-destructive behaviors – allowing someone who loved him to witness his struggle, his existential battle to live – allowed him not to battle it out alone. It offered him the possibility of self-acceptance and healing. “If you can love me in all my darkness, I can learn to love me,” he told his wife. Hope was restored, and energy to do the hard work. 

Love and acceptance melt down the walls of our pain and shame and allow healing. The sweet consolation of a loving presence in our life, especially in the midst of what seems like a losing battle, awakens in us a song we had forgotten to sing, a laughter we thought was lost to us forever.

When we fail to allow this, because of our shame, we become the Ugliest Man, wandering around in sackcloth and ashes, beating ourselves up and refusing to be open to the very forces that can heal us. These invisible healing fingers – love, connection, beauty – are everywhere, accessible to anyone willing to face and tame whatever demons might line one’s journey through the forest.

The truth about living we gain from our wounds, from our darkness, becomes the wisdom that saves us in the end, or as Hemmingway put it, makes us “stronger in the broken places.” Once we struggle, or fall, we know the landscape of it. We learn from past dark experiences how to illuminate these dark moments with the bright beams of beauty and love available to us, until these light our way to the other side.

Failing to do this, we fall prey to even stronger self-defeating energy, like addiction and suicidal ideation. This is the negative dark that lies at the lowest bowels of our darkness. It is that part of us that wants us dead. It is unforgiving, unrelenting. Staying connected, reaching for the light in our life, whatever that is, frees us to rise up to higher ground.

My client Fred eventually removed that rubber band from his wrist, allowed the healing support of friends and a new loving relationship help him find the good in himself, and discovered he could indeed deal with having a son out in the world. His shame melted into gentle self-acceptance. He gave up having to be seen as perfect.

Learning to live with our dark side is not easy. Slowly, we come to realize that we have everything we need within ourselves or within our reach to handle what comes our way. The gold in it is what it has to teach us about the fragile, glorious, baffling thing we call living.