Abandoning oneself is not recommended; however, when we don’t truly heal, it’s exactly what we do.

I spent over 25 years trying to heal from all the ways in which I didn’t feel good, or ok. Most of what was plaguing me was sadness and anxiety. I went to therapists, meditations, retreats, teachings, psychics, and doctors of all kinds. I’ve worked in the healthcare profession and the wellness profession the entire time.

I knew I would have to work on my mental health my whole life, and many of the struggles I faced with it were passed down from my father’s side of the family in genes, and in a long history of abuse on all levels. Yet, my childhood wasn’t as bad as so many others I came to know in my adult life. I started to realize, my past wasn’t holding me back, but I was still unable to harness my own empowerment and healing in the present.

Some of the healing endeavors were very helpful, and I don’t regret trying so consistently to find peace within myself. Even when I was physically healthy looking, with very little body fat, good muscle tone, and hydrated skin – I did yoga, ran miles, hiked, etc. – I smoked cigarettes for about 18 of the last 30 years of life. I was able to quit, but even at my peak, I was still failing to be completely healthy, and in a big way.

The Dark Night of the Soul

If you’ve never heard of the concept of “the dark night of the soul” it’s basically the process of hitting rock bottom and having to climb one step at a time back to level ground, hopefully to transcend and ascend to a better way of experiencing life. Human life is challenging, and so we often go through several dark nights, like rights of passage. And if we don’t learn, heal and grow, we will repeat the same mistakes, or accidents, until we truly do heal.

Even though rock bottom isn’t necessary for every soul to grow, there are plenty of us who run towards to proverbial brick wall time and time again because we have a thing I call stubborn human tendencies. Our soul itself is riding along in this human vessel and is there providing us with vital energy, life source and love, while our human self is trying to figure out why we don’t feel ok. In the human body, we dislike feeling ill or out of harmony with ourselves and our surroundings.

We feel out of sorts a lot because we are not living a natural life, by default. We’re born into a time when our systems and structures are not in harmony with our natural selves and with nature. It’s why we suffer so much mental illness, depression and anxiety included, in our culture. Some of us are always passionately trying to get back to a natural state, and for us everything looks like an injustice. We can’t seem to flow naturally and be at peace with our surroundings. This causes discomfort and disease.

Some of us have just settled into comforts of shelter, food and technology and might not be as irked by the outer world, but even those who seem passive and/or peaceful – the human self feels the collective, and we’re in a time of human discomfort on planet Earth. If you’re lucky enough to live in a first world country and have access to the internet, you’re already aware of the chaos and suffering the human race is presently serving itself. As a collective, we are currently going through the dark night of the soul.

Why Do We Keep Running into the Wall?

Whether it’s collectively or within the family or within the individual, it seems like sometimes we can be riding a wave of positive momentum, only to find ourselves crashing and burning again some time later. We do this because we haven’t truly broken the cycles and patterns of our history. It’s like we’re always on the hamster wheel.

When I recently found a way to use resources to remove blocks, grudges and erase negative thoughts – I noticed something telling. Sure, I felt at peace, my mind felt kind of empty, I am calmer than I’ve ever been – but given a little time, the negative thought patterns came right back. I just wasn’t being affected as much by the thoughts. I can now be an observer of my thoughts without having reactions to them. But observing the negative thoughts sneaking back in helped me to see that when true healing started to work to undo decades of negative thoughts and emotions, it didn’t mean my human mind and ego wasn’t able to generate more.

I now know better than to start this cycle again. Yet, after trying so hard in my adult life to manage my mental and emotional health, why did I abandon myself again, recently any way? Why did I need that abandonment to guide me to true, deep healing?

It’s not because I didn’t want to find healing, it’s just because I really hadn’t engaged with myself deeply enough through all the healing I did do, to know that the final step was to realize I was harming myself and that I am not a victim. If we hunker down and tell ourselves we’re just not cut out for the cruel world, and we look for healing through the lens of distress – we’re simply scratching the surface of healing instead of taking the deep dive.

How Do We Break the Cycle?

The way to ensure we’re breaking through and eliminating old patterns, so that we can heal, move on and experience life differently, requires us to be accountable for ourselves and to come out of denial about the ways we have prevented our own healing. When we feel like most people don’t do “the work” to heal and that’s why we have an epidemic of depression and anxiety throughout our society, it’s because “the work” means taking a good look in the mirror. The work is acknowledging the dark parts of ourself, known as our shadow side.

If we ignore what we consider ugly in ourselves, that ugliness grows and is mirrored back to us with every challenging experience. The reason we all have some ugly, some darkness, and some evil – is because we are all sharing the human condition. What is in one is in the whole. The more self protective we are, the more we are closed off to our own negative patterns, thoughts, intentions and behaviors. This is why the one who thinks they are perfect and can do no wrong is the most harmful to themselves and everyone around them.

Whether we can get humble or whether we become desperate because we’re so tired of banging our head against the wall, making the same mistakes again and again, we will start to make progress with deep healing when we look at ourselves the same way we look at others. It’s easy to analyze a good friend, a partner, a family member and find every fault, or every wound, or many justifications for bad behaviors or negative patterns. It’s easy to become upset with the other when they’re not “acting” the way we want them to act.

The work comes when we look at how we’re “acting” as well, and then we stay there. We will take a deep dive into healing as we come to understand that we need to heal. We break the cycle by letting go of the need or desire to see someone else change to make us feel ok. We break the cycle when we start the changes in ourselves that we desire to see in all others. These changes don’t occur in isolation while we hide out from the world and try to comfort ourselves by not participating. Life is happening for us – if we can’t full on embrace it because we’re depressed, or anxious, or believe we are broken – life won’t stop happening for us, we’ll just let it pass by unused. Ignoring our own negative qualities will do us more harm than good.

The Key to Consistency

Once we’re able to make progress with healing, how do we stay consistent?

I think once deep healing actually occurs, the consistency comes by default because the feeling is positive, light, calm and peaceful. For many of us, it will be the first time we have ever felt so good. That alone is motivation and inspiration to ride the wave. It’s also a great starting point for the rest of our life, in terms of being able to recognize the moment we are starting to feel like something is off, out of alignment, and not ok. Healing brings us to a level of more awareness about what not to take into our lives. It shows us what needs to be let go.

There’s also something to be said for the consistency of trying, no matter how often we seem to “fail” or backslide on our wellbeing. There may be times where we fall back into some old pattern, maybe an addiction of some kind. When we find ourselves slipping, we’re better off to admit that it happened and not become discouraged or upset with ourselves. Part of our human make up is to be vulnerable to forming habits, whether good or bad. If we keep trying for the healthy way, eventually that becomes the habit.

In my case, I went straight into a horribly abusive relationship after staying out of relationships for a decade because of getting “duped” on my last try by an emotionally abusive narcissist. I abandoned myself immediately to a different person with those same fatal flaws ten years later because no matter how much therapy or how many classes or how much education on health and wellness, I truly brought along all of my old wounds, old patterns and my anxiety along for the ride. I did not know myself any differently, so I went forward with the same map.

Even though at my age I certainly saw all the red fags and knew better, I went any way into the detriment of ignoring the deal breakers to see what I might get by lowering my standards and not having impossibly high expectations of a partner. I was in this for less than six months, but the amount of damage I did by falling in love with an abusive person and abandoning myself, was very impactful. Almost every area of my life was negatively affected and my mental health sank to another all time low. And this was what made me look at myself.

I had to really look at my wounds, and how I used negative aspects of myself to survive and then to later covered the wounds. I felt like a victim when I was at a low point. I was mad at the world. And I made a mess of things in my life by really feeling like I had been harmed, or duped, or wronged. I knew when I hit that low point, I was about to lose everything I’d worked so hard for – for no other reason than that I was really sick of trying to succeed at life and relationships.

I had to look at my own dark traits of narcissism and abuse and where that played out for me throughout my life, even as I functioned as an empath. I learned about how early childhood trauma produces both empaths and narcissists and how those opposites very commonly end up in relationships together. It’s never good for the empath, but empaths do get something out of it – the constant feeling of being needed. I had to recognize that many of my empathic tendencies had actually caused harm to myself and others. When I was always trying to rescue people that didn’t want to be rescued, I allowed myself to be used and drained.

Looking at myself didn’t necessarily make me want to criticize myself, like I’d done in the past after every failed relationship. It made me see how we really are made up of the same stuff, and we really are connected. It made me see that I shouldn’t deny my dark side, or even hate on it – it was better for me to understand we all have this and that not addressing it is causing problems. Yes, it was a little unsettling to admit to myself so many times when I could have made better decisions or handled myself better. Yet, there was so much benefit when I realized that I’m just like everyone else and nothing in life is really that big of a deal.

Realizing our connectedness reminded me of how small I am compared to everything. My experiences are just a tiny particle of all experiences of life combined. If I don’t have to really take my experiences so seriously, I don’t have so much heaviness of worrying about outcomes. If I live more relaxed, knowing that I am capable of handling my life as it comes, then I immediately come into a more aligned way of living. The more aligned I am with what’s around me, the more I can sail through life without all the drama.

I’m not suggesting everyone abandon themselves to hit a rock bottom that really makes them look at all the dark, and causes them to heal through the journey of trying to become whole again. I’m suggesting looking at the darkness and shadow side of self now, and embrace any dark nights of the soul as necessary and not necessarily painful to endure. We can go into the dark parts of ourselves and of humanity without attaching emotion and pain to the issue.

It’s simply about observing, and then using choice to be the change, while detaching from any negative emotions surrounding judgements of past or present. We must learn to see what we see and respect ourselves enough to understand that we do all make mistakes, we all have had terrible thoughts at one time or another, we all struggle, and there’s nothing to judge. We are the way we are because we’re experiencing life as a human being.

Deep healing can happen when we embrace our humanity, even the parts we’d rather not acknowledge. Once we embrace and heal, we can move forward and start from a fresh perspective to form new, healthy habits and patterns live through.

With a world of information now at our fingertips, we have access to so many methods of healing. Most effective methods of healing are free, like meditation and breath work. Some are definitely worth paying for. Yet, we will find everything we need inside of ourselves to heal, we just have to commit to going there, and staying there.

Deep healing is possible. And when we engage in our own wellbeing and healing, we help ourselves, everyone around us, and the whole human collective.