The Dark Night

Everyone around you expects you to describe your experience in purely personal or medical terms. In contemporary society we believe that psychological and medical language best conveys the experience we have of a dark night. You are depressed and phobic; you have an anxiety disorder or a bad gene. But perspective thinkers of other periods and places say that good, artful, sensuous, and powerful words play a central role in the living out of your dark night. Consider this possibility: It would be better for you to find a good image or tell a good story or simply speak of your dark night with an eye toward the power and beauty of expression.

Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul

There are times when life does not feel difficult so much as withdrawn.

Energy drops away. Meaning thins. What once mattered no longer seems to reach us. We may still function—go to work, care for others, fulfill obligations—but inwardly something has gone dark. Not chaotic. Not dramatic. Just absent.

Historically, this state has been described as the dark night of the soul. While the phrase comes from religious mysticism, it names a psychological experience that appears across cultures and eras: a period in which familiar sources of orientation no longer work.

In modern language, this state is often called depression, burnout, or existential crisis. These terms are useful, but they do not fully capture the quality of the experience. A dark night is not only about suffering. It is about disorientation.

What once guided us—beliefs, roles, identities, ambitions—loses its authority.

In depth psychology, this is not understood as failure. It is understood as a necessary undoing.

When Meaning Withdraws

In a dark night, the psyche seems to turn away from explanation. Advice feels hollow. Reassurance misses the point. Even insight can feel strangely flat.

This is not because the person is resistant or broken, but because the psyche is no longer oriented toward understanding in the usual sense. Something deeper is happening.

The dark night strips away borrowed meaning—ideas of who we should be, what our life should look like, what ought to make us fulfilled. What remains is often bare and uncomfortable, but also honest.

In this sense, the dark night is less about darkness and more about uncovering.

The Difference Between Crisis and Dark Night

Not every crisis is a dark night, and not every dark night looks dramatic.

A crisis demands action.

A dark night demands waiting.

A crisis pushes outward.

A dark night pulls inward.

In therapy and medical contexts, the focus is rightly on stabilization and care. But from a depth perspective, there is another layer: the recognition that some forms of suffering are not asking to be eliminated, but listened to differently.

This does not romanticize pain. It acknowledges that certain psychological states mark a transition rather than a pathology.

What the Dark Night Asks For

The dark night rarely asks us to do more.

It asks us to relinquish certainty.

To tolerate not knowing.

To remain present without rushing toward meaning.

To allow the old orientation to dissolve before a new one appears.

This can be profoundly unsettling in a culture that values clarity, productivity, and forward motion. But depth traditions remind us that something essential is often forming precisely when nothing seems to be happening.

After the Night

The dark night does not end with revelation.

It ends quietly.

Meaning returns slowly, often in altered form. What re-emerges tends to be simpler, less performative, and more rooted. Life feels less heroic, perhaps—but more truthful.

The person who emerges is rarely the person who entered.

This is not growth as improvement.

It is growth as reorientation.

Periods of darkness do not mean something has gone wrong. Sometimes they mean something is being asked to loosen its hold.

The dark night is approached neither as a spiritual test nor a clinical problem, but as a meaningful psychological state—one that deserves patience, care, and respect.