Owning Your Darkness

“Excuse me?” My tone was a little angry, a little bewildered.

Jane, my therapist, gave me a long, thoughtful look. “I asked what you could own about the situation. What are you responsible for in this?”

I could feel my blood boiling. The only thing that kept me on that couch was the fact that this woman had helped me walk through some of my deepest, darkest secrets for the last year.

We were working through one of the more traumatic times I’d been raped. And now she’d changed the rules. She was asking me what I was responsible for? I was the one who’d been used, abused, and thrown away—I was the one who’d been ignored and silenced when I protested, when I tried to get away.

I was sick of others telling me that things were all my fault. I was sick of believing them.

But I was clearly the victim, right? I was not responsible. Period. Pass. Move on.

*

About two years into my infertility battle, I sat at our tiny kitchen and had a desperate, gut-wrenching morning with God. I asked Him to show me what might be blocking life from taking root in my body.

I was expecting Him to reveal things I needed to repent of or generational sins that needed to be broken. I was not expecting Him to help me recall, in chronological order, all the sexual abuse and assaults that happened over the course of my life. As the flood of memories started, I grabbed my journal and wrote as fast as I could. Person, place/time, incident. Repeat.

Name after name. Sentence after sentence. Line after line. For 12 pages.

After the last line, I was shaking. I’d never committed any of this to ink before—and there was so much.

I took a deep breath…

…and slammed the notebook shut, shoved it on a bookshelf, and didn’t look at it for another year.

*

Three months after God brought the nation of Israel out of Egypt, they reached Mount Sinai. There, in the desert, God descended and delivered the Law.

He came as fire, and the entire mountain trembled violently, going up in billowing smoke, surrounded by earth-rattling thunder and lightning.

The people were terrified.

After he receives the 10 Commandments, Moses comes down the mountain to deliver them. And tucked between this exchange and Moses’ next journey up the mountain is one of my favorite verses:

“So the people stood far off, but Moses drew near the thick darkness where God was.” (Ex. 20:21)

This verse rocked. my. world. when I stumbled upon it. I always associated darkness with evil, void of God. I knew He’d created the dark, yet it was always talked about like enemy territory.

But here Moses, though maybe terrified inside, strode toward it, trusting God was there.

Not only that, but he goes alone—and he chooses to go. No one forces him.

And when the darkness finally envelops him, God speaks to him.

*

Eventually I told Brian and a handful of trusted friends about the journal and that morning with God. I knew, logically, that I needed counseling. But I resisted it with every ounce of energy I had.

I didn’t want to peer into that dark abyss of pain. I was terrified of what I might find. Of what I might feel.

I started drinking more. I binge-ate and gained weight. I threw myself into work and crashed in front of the TV at night. I watched and read things I shouldn’t have. I compromised my integrity for the chance to numb out.

I knew what I had to do, and I knew I was destroying myself by avoiding it. But it still took me a year of desperation in the wilderness to find the courage to do it.

*

The ticking clock filled the silence stretching between me and Jane. My mind and heart were racing. She waited patiently.

“I don’t understand,” I finally said.

She gave me a reassuring smile. “When we can find things to own—when we can right-size our relationship to responsibility—we start to find our voice,” she explained. “And when we find our voice, we are no longer trapped by the unhealthy power dynamics of the relationship, situation, or memory.”

I made a non-committal grunt.

“For instance,” she continued, “In this situation, you can own that your body was violated. You can own that you didn’t want him to violate you.”

I nodded. “So I can own that I was attracted to this guy. That I made the decision to go out with him,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I asked for—or wanted—this to happen.”

“Exactly.”

“Hmmmm,” I looked at my hands. “I’ll have to think about this.” But I could already feel a shifting in my soul.

*

When I could name those things I was responsible for, I could see why. Why the girl, who wanted love and connection so badly—who wanted someone to truly see her and not her body or accomplishments or what she could offer—dated the wrong people and got in the wrong cars and went to the wrong places.

I walked into that darkness, and it felt like I died a thousand deaths. And in a way, I did.

All the lies, all the false identities, all the humiliation and rage and shame, died when God spoke to me in that blackness. It wasn’t instant; deep soul-healing rarely is. But when I learned to lean into the pain, to work with it and not fight it, I realized it was healing pain.

In the dark, God was making me new.

*

That morning in my kitchen, God was showing me that the path to Life starts in the dark.

But making a conscious decision to walk back into our own darkness is one of the hardest things we will ever do. The ground is shaking and the thunder is roaring and the lightning is flashing and the blackness is thick and billowing like your world is on fire.

But God is in that darkness. Waiting.

And we don’t stare into our abyss to wallow or navel gaze. We do it to confront our pain with Love. Our hopelessness with Hope. Our fear with Truth.

We don’t do it to exonerate those who’ve wounded us. We do it so that the demons and monsters and mistakes of our past don’t dictate our future.

We do it so that we can stand up into who we were created to be instead of living bent over, captive to the lie that we don’t matter.

And so we pray. We confess. We repent. We forgive.

We die what feels like a thousands deaths so He can raise us from the ashes into Life.

We draw near to the thick darkness where God is.

Because the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

***