Into the Dark

What happens when we stop running from the dark—when we step into it, hold it, and let it hold us? In this episode, we explore the depths of darkness—not just as pain or suffering, but as a space for transformation. Through my personal reflections on trauma, identity, and healing, let’s examine how darkness can be a guide rather than something to fear. From childhood wounds and chronic pain to relationship patterns and self-abandonment, I’ll share how facing the unknown led to clarity and growth.

Healing isn’t linear—it’s messy, cyclical, and paradoxical. But in the dark, we find ourselves. Join me as we illuminate the shadows, embracing the unseen and uncovering the wisdom that waits within.

Don’t forget to give the darkness a hug, too.

Thanks for listening to Rainbow After Dark! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future ones. If something resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts—feel free to leave a comment on YouTube or connect with me on IG @RainbowAfterDark (I don’t use it much, but I exist!).

This podcast is a space for reflection and exploration—it is not a substitute for professional advice. Please take care of yourself and seek support as needed.

More ways to connect coming soon—stay tuned, and thanks for being here.

Transcript

Hello, hello. It’s Rainbow, and today… we’re going into the dark.

I’m sure you’ve been there. When you’ve felt that shift, when you realize you’re standing on the edge of something unknown. You might be scared to step forward, but you can’t go back. The dark is uncomfortable. It’s heavy. It’s full of everything we don’t want to look at, everything we’ve buried. And it’s where healing begins.

That’s what we’re talking about today—what it means to step into the dark, to hold it—to let it hold us, to learn from it instead of running from it. And just like anything else in healing, the dark is not just about pain. It’s paradox. Because when we feel lost? That’s when we find ourselves. When we feel alone? We begin to truly understand connection.

So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the dark—the ways it shaped me, the ways it shapes all of us.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with darkness. For a lot of people, it’s something you avoid and on a subconscious level I was conditioned this way too, even when, ironically, I didn’t really shy away from the dark aspects of being human most of my life—I almost seemed to revel in it. But we aren’t really taught how darkness can guide us. We’re taught to fear it, to avoid it, to reject it.

In a way, that makes sense. The unknown is, well, it’s unknown. Human brains and nervous systems aren’t big fans of that. And as a human, I can understand that. 

My earliest experiences with the dark weren’t exactly safe. I was adopted from birth, and from the outside, my family looked… fine, I guess? For the most part. I came from a family of seven—I have four brothers and some people even seemed to envy having a big family. They’d tell me how wonderful it must be, but, y’know, people have their own perceptions of what a family like mine must be like. In one of my classes when I was in high school, my family issues ended up with the word “family” being embraced as “the f word”. My family was deeply dysfunctional and I consistently felt disconnected—I felt like I had to be something other than myself in order to be loved. I was usually the “good one,” “the golden child”, I was generally well-behaved—I was the one who didn’t cause problems. You know, that’s where you get perfectionism. And at the same time, I was a “black sheep”—I never belonged, I was unseen by my parents, I was ostracized by my siblings, and I felt things too deeply and saw things that nobody else wanted to talk about.

I learned early on that connection didn’t always mean being seen. Sometimes, it meant playing a role. Sometimes, it meant keeping parts of myself hidden. I felt like I had to stay in the dark to survive.

And that kind of disconnection? It does not stay in your mind. It lives in your body.

I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome in 2018–for reference, I graduated high school in 2008–but my body had been hurting for a long time before that. I’ve dealt with chronic pain since I was a teenager. I dealt with a lot of darkness when I was growing up, even before the pain started to present itself physically. I thought at one point that physical pain might actually be easier to deal with than the emotional pain I felt when I was younger, but once the physical pain became constant I was often looking to escape from myself, from my experiences… I wished I didn’t have to have a body, or that I didn’t have to exist at all.

I’m pretty sure my body has been telling the same story that my heart has—instability, unpredictability, everything falling apart at the seams. My physical pain was mirroring my emotional pain, but I didn’t have words for that. I just knew something wasn’t right.

It seemed like I didn’t need much to sustain me. I felt like I’d done a lot with neglect. But what would happen if I got what I needed to truly thrive, and not just survive? If I was nourished enough to flourish? Who could I become? What could I do? And what if everyone else was given what they needed to thrive, too?

The thing about living in the dark is that, eventually, you forget that there’s anything else. Or maybe you never knew that there was. You have to adapt. You normalize it. You don’t question it. It just becomes the way things are.

Until something happens and you are forced to see it differently.

A few years ago, I hit a turning point that made all of this painfully clear. It wasn’t the first time I realized that things needed to change, but it cracked me open in a way that nothing else had.

It was a relationship—one of many that followed a similar painful pattern. If you know, you know. You know, the kind where you’re doing everything you can to be enough, to be what they want and need, to prove that you are worthy of love. The kind where you lose yourself and don’t even realize it. Or you wonder if you ever even knew who you were to begin with.

I wanted so badly for it to work. I thought if I wanted it enough, it would just work somehow. That I could do whatever it took to make it work. But it wasn’t working—not just the relationship, but me. The way I moved through the world. The way I was being in connection. The way I ignored my own needs. The way I believed love meant sacrifice, that love meant enduring. That love meant pain.

I couldn’t run from myself anymore. I had to sit with all of this. I got to choose to sit with it—to stop looking outward—at what they or anyone else was or wasn’t doing, at what I could fix or change—and to face inward, to look inward. Into the dark.

When you’re in the dark and you see a sudden flash of light, it’s disorienting. The contrast makes shadows seem deeper and darker. Your eyes have to adjust. Maybe that’s why we resist clarity—why we resist healing. When you’ve adapted to the dark, light can feel less like illumination and more like exposure.

But once you have clarity—once you see, you can’t unsee. I mean, I guess you could try, you could pretend… but… I feel like in most cases that ends up a lot more painful than going through it. I know for me, once I really saw myself—my patterns, my fears, my pain—I couldn’t keep moving the same way.

I had to change everything.

It was terrifying. And it was liberating.

Just like a seed has to sit in darkness before it sprouts, I see the process as cyclical. Darkness is not an interruption—it’s integral. Every time I’ve needed to face uncertainty, grief, deep rest; I changed—I softened, I was restructured, I became ready for something new.

I used to think healing meant reaching a state of constant clarity. But light can be overwhelming—you give a plant too much sunlight and it burns. If you sit in the sun you can get a burn, too. If you try to come out of darkness too quickly, it’s disorienting, like when you go outside after you’ve been sitting in a dark room. Brightness can distort before it illuminates. I’ve learned to move between these states with more grace, to trust that retreating and going into my inner world doesn’t mean I’m regressing, and emerging does not mean I have all the answers.

Healing isn’t linear. It feels messy and chaotic. Sometimes it feels like you’re going in circles, but it’s a spiral, and each time you return to the dark, you’re not starting over—you’re leveling up. 

Like, insert Mario noises or something in here.

And healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Or, you know, it’s not meant to. It’s all in relationship, even with ourselves. But when you’ve been hurt in relationships, connection doesn’t always feel safe. It can feel really risky. It feels like the most unsafe thing you could possibly do, even if you aren’t consciously aware of it.

I’ve struggled with that a lot—the push and pull between wanting to be close to people and being afraid of what closeness could mean. Between craving connection and needing distance. Between loving people and not knowing if I could trust them. Not knowing if I could trust myself.

For most of my life, I didn’t even realize I was struggling with this. I just thought I was anxious. Traumatized. I couldn’t see the depths of it when I already felt like I was in over my head. Sometimes it felt like I was the only one who hadn’t learned how to breathe underwater.

Years ago, when I started doing shadow work, I realized just how much of that fear came from inside of me. From the parts of myself that I hadn’t faced—that I couldn’t, that I wasn’t able to face before then. Because the relationships we attract—the ones that challenge us, that hurt us, that reflect our deepest wounds—they’re mirrors. They show us what we need to see in ourselves, even if it’s painful. Especially if it’s painful. Or they can reflect our growth if we’ve taken the time to look.

And maybe that’s why we attract the people we do—not to challenge us, not just to hurt or to heal us—to help us see ourselves more clearly. To illuminate the dark and allow us to embrace our shadows.

It makes sense that I saw so much darkness when I was the light. It took me a long time to understand that. I wasn’t lost in the dark—I was illuminating it. The shadows I saw weren’t signs that I was broken; they were invitations to integrate so that I could bring the unseen into my awareness.

For a long time, I unknowingly feared darkness—not just the absence of light, but the unknown, the unknown inside myself. I thought it might swallow me whole. It meant loss, isolation, shame—it felt like a void I had to escape. But the dark doesn’t consume us and it’s not emptiness. It’s like fertile soil; seeds soften and take root, growth begins before we see it. Periods of loss and withdrawal aren’t failures—they’re phases in the cycle of growth.

Shame, though… shame told me otherwise. It told me retreating and reflecting meant something was wrong with me. That my pain and stillness proved I was unworthy and undeserving. That I was unlovable. I hid my most vulnerable parts, believing that being fully seen would lead to rejection. I feared abandonment so much that I abandoned myself. I tried to control how others saw me, and I curated the things that I shared. I was managing my emotions and trying to manage other people’s emotions too, because I didn’t want to be seen as “too much.” But control is fragile. We try to control things in an attempt to mitigate our pain. And as I tried to hold everything together, I became more fragmented. At some point, I realized that shame was actually trying to protect me, as counterintuitive and dysfunctional as it seemed.

I’ve always been sensitive—and like anyone who is sensitive, I was often getting messages, if not being told outright, that I was “too sensitive,” that I was “too much,” or, conversely, “too little.” Eventually, I leaned into sensitivity and I embraced it. Sensitivity is not weakness—it’s listening. It’s awareness. It allows for emotional attunement and for us to recognize that fear isn’t something to suppress—it’s wisdom. Fear is often protective. So is shame. It was urges us to pay attention, to tread carefully. I’ve been learning to distinguish between fear that is a warning and fear that is restricting.

Hiding parts of myself does not make them disappear. We are most controlled by what we refuse to see. What we can’t see. The stuff that’s in the dark. Shame grows in silence, but by naming it and turning toward it, I reclaimed the rejected parts. I realized that they weren’t my enemies.

That’s why the dark matters. Dark matter. Not because it’s a place to stay, but because it’s a place where we can see ourselves clearly. Where we meet the parts of ourselves that need us to acknowledge them. The parts that are scared. The parts we’ve rejected and disconnected from. The parts that have been protecting us, even when that protection has looked like self-sabotage or shutting down or staying in cycles that cause us harm. That perpetuate our pain.

The dark shows us what we need to heal. It’s a process, not a destination. And we can befriend it. 

Through that—through facing ourselves, learning to hold our own shadows with compassion, maybe even giving them a little hug—we can start to build authentic connections. Connections that don’t require self-abandonment. Ones where we can show up as whole people, instead of fragments. We get to take our masks off and stop playing roles that never quite suited us anyway.

Stillness is the way to knowing. And maybe that’s why darkness has always held wisdom. It’s not so much a void, but a space. A container where the light takes form.

We spend so much of our lives trying to fight the dark. To resist pain. To force understanding. But what if we stop trying to fight it? What if, instead, we hold it? Give it a little hug?

We’re often taught that fear is something to, y’know, fear. Something to rid ourselves of. Something “bad” or “low vibrational.” That it’s “an illusion” or any number of things that encourage us to bypass it. But what if our fear loves us? What if it illuminates what we truly love? What if we could go farther by sitting with it and considering it then we ever could by dismissing or rejecting it?

Learning to befriend my fear—learning to be in companionship with the darkness—with the unknown, with my shame, with my anger, with all of it—learning to truly embrace it all instead of running from it, avoiding it, fighting it, pushing against it… that’s when I really started healing.

Healing isn’t always beautiful. It’s painful and it’s messy. You lose a lot. You learn to let go of identities, relationships, versions of yourself that you needed to survive. You figure out how to honor them and be grateful for them and also acknowledge that they might not be part of your journey anymore. It’s about allowing space for all of the parts of you, especially the parts you’ve been rejecting.

I’ve had to let go of people I loved—people I still love. I’ve had to let go of beliefs that were keeping me small. I’ve had to grieve not just what happened to me, but what didn’t happen, too—the safety I didn’t have, the childhood—the life—I didn’t get, the love I didn’t receive in the ways I needed it.

And that’s hard. And necessary. In that loss, there’s space for something new.

I used to think healing was about becoming someone new. I realize now that it’s about becoming more of who we’ve always been. We reclaim the parts of ourselves we abandoned and rejected so that we could feel accepted.

If you’re in this place right now—the space between what was and what will be—know that you’re not alone. I’m in here, too. The dark isn’t something to escape. It’s something to enter. To sit in. To move through. To learn from. To embrace—it needs a hug, too.

What would it be like to sit in the dark, to sit with fear, to sit with all the things you feel that you don’t want to feel, and really listen to what they have to say?

Wherever you are in your journey, I invite you to take a moment. Notice anything that’s stirring in you or asking to be seen. There’s no rush.

If you’re standing at the edge of the dark, uncertain and maybe a bit scared, I’d like to remind you that you’re not lost. You’re on the path. Your path. And even if you can’t see the way forward, even if everything feels uncertain, you’re where you need to be right now.

You’re not alone in the dark. You are not alone in finding your way through it. Granted, this is a whole other paradox that I’m not gonna get into right now. But it is okay to accept that that’s the way it might feel right now.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being willing to go into the dark. Until next time—keep going. Even if “going” means sitting still. 

You got this. 

I love you.