insidejob

Has anyone here experienced the Dark Night Of The Soul in recovery? The complete absence and separation from God and man that comes with that experience?

If so, what was your experience of it and how did you survive it wiithout drinking and taking your own life?

yeahgr8

I know exactly what you mean...any reprieve from it during abstinance was fleeting and it was when taking my life seemed to be the only escape that i finally walked into AA and pleaded for help...the steps resulting in a spiritual awakening means the dark nights seem like a different lifetime but i still can feel what you mean when i look back and am very grateful for the gift of sobriety...AA does have the solution which is clearly laid out in the Big Book, including instructions and testamonials;-)

insidejob

Thanks, but I'm talking about a dark night within sobriety, with a 12 step program.

insidejob

Hi KCB, ya it's a good thing you don't know. It's an uncommon spiritual experience and a very very dark one. I know few people who have experienced it and survived to tell the tale.

Taking5

Please explain what this means.

insidejob

Here's a better description KCB, at the midnight of the dark night. Apologies for the abrupt answers - I'm struggling to type:

Alone, and not wishing to be, unable even to express yourself to others, you enter midnight and the greatest intensity of the dark night. Here you have finally come to the time of sovereign solitude. In this precious time, which has no apparent prospects of love or happiness, you clearly perceive that nothing in the outer world has proven adequate to heal your condition. Nobody, not even your dearest friends and loved ones, can make you whole. Even if they have tried, and love you enough to try loving you forever, they can’t give you peace.

You eye your books and consider all the benefit you have gained from these extremely wise vessels of truth. Yet not one book, not one thought, goes deep enough inside you to where the affliction abides.

You look at your possessions, your money container. No material thing has been able to help you. No material means have worked. Nothing, no one, in the outer world has enabled you to come out of this dark night.


In your loneliness, you next — in a seemingly random process — notice that none of your thoughts have proven adequate to your suffering. Not one — even repeated fifty thousand times — breaks the inner storm and lets in light. God and higher consciousness seem so far away that perhaps they are unreal. Neither one has, despite your protracted exposure of yourself, done anything to ease or remove your agony. Nothing appears efficacious. Nothing works.

Clearly, there is nowhere to turn. There is nothing to be done. All actions you considered have been tried. There is nothing to think, nothing to feel, nothing to do, nowhere to go. It seems you have to accept this defeat — or, you can persist in struggling against it. For awhile longer, you go about thinking, feeling, and doing other options that occur to you. But you realize in the midnight of your soul that you have tried every option you know of.

insidejob

That's where I am now, and have been for some time. Hence asking for those who have survived it for their experience.

Say a prayer for me KCB.

yeahgr8

hmm so you have worked the steps, had a spiritual awakening and continue on your new spiritual path working on it daily and still have a dark night, thats what you mean?

Im no expert but i would have a look at the work you are doing and your spiritual fitness as being spiritually fit and having a dark night seems like a bit of a contradiction in terms...

but if we are talking about going to meetings, and being in the program as in talking about it and thinking about it then there is no reason whatsoever why the dark nights should not continue until the work has actually been done with rigorous honesty:-)

Tommyh

inside,I have a male friend in Pensacola Fla who has mentioned it several times over the yrs to me,and he has a woman friend in Canada who did the same.I will send you their phone number and email address in a pm or email if you want to contact them
there are a few books called a dark night of the soul
have you read them?

Charmie

Bill Wilson himself suffered very badly,but i believe this was depression,i am no expert of this area but im sure other folk will be along soon to share their experience.hang in there inside job.thanks bballdad for your help,what a wonderful feelowship.i hope you take him up on his offer inside job.
i had an experience once but it didnt last long,in sobriety after my spiritual awakening,i felt like evil from all around was closing in on me,it is one of the most horrible experiences i have ever had and it was never fully explained.my friend who is very open on spirtual matters thought it was because of my new awareness,he believes we are open and aware of good and bad.it had a physical effect on me very badly.
im not sure if this is what you are describing,mlike i say better experienced folk will be along soon
in my prayers,
Charmie.

Pagekeeper

Here is what I know of it: Many priests and spiritual people go through them--Saint John of the Cross, Mother Teresa, in fact from what I've read, one has to be pretty spiritually advanced to have one at all. It's almost like a fragmentation of reality and a deterioration in order for one to get closer to God and to "grow up" spiritually and let go of the "good feelings" that come with virtue and as a result they cross over into a higher state of consciousness. It's mainly associated with Christianity, but almost all faiths have documented the same type of experience, although it's called by another name.

insidejob

Thanks Pagekeeper. Yes, a wise friend who is very spiritually advanced has experienced it. It is he who pointed it out in me when I described where I am, and gave me the words to describe my experience. It is a place beyond feeling, beyond God, beyond life, beyond humanity. Stangely peaceful and quiet while at the same time intensely painful and devoid of anything. Little has meaning now. Words are useless. Action is meaningless. Time is irrelevant.

My friend is praying that I will survive it. He knows how dangerous it is to walk this path.

It is not a failure of the 12 steps, nor a failing in me, rather a success. But success, failure, and survival mean nothing in this place.

I cannot pray now. I am in a place where it no longer means anything.

Pagekeeper

I'll keep you in my prayers.

CarolD

Gratefully.... I've not had that experience in recovery.

I edged on that deep meaningless before I quit drinking.
I felt that I had saturated my soul with alcohol.
It was a horrific time in my life.

Praying for your healing.....

LexieCat

I don't mean to be simplistic, but untreated depression can feel that way, from what I understand. A malfunctioning brain can interfere with our perceptions of our entire existence.

Have you had a workup for depression?

RobbyRobot

Hi Inside.

Yes, I have had similar experiences in my own way, such as you are sharing in this thread. Suicidal no less while still sober and after several years of good living. Even something beyond suicide it seemed really, if that makes some sense, because even then suicide seemed so pointless. Obviously those times changed me because I'm not dead and gone or despondent today. I have empathy for your share, Inside. Your words sound real and true and so for me that has meaning that you are indeed in a dark place that I have been myself. In that place is a horrible lonliness and suffering of the heart and mind that sadly can claim willing victims in its wake. It goes beyond personal experience and becomes a truly human event at a primal level of existence. Just a bit beyond being completly numb and insulated from life. I've been there sober and i've been there drunk. It surpassed me completely and totally humbled me in everyway. I was done and finished. I was spiritually bankrupt. The capacity for living spiritual was there to be sure. There was simply no currency no interaction no anything. I was alone.

For me, I had to come to the understanding of the wrongness of my ways. For me, it was now or never. For me, it was not a time for the same old same old. For me, nothing changes if nothing changes. For me, I became totally accepting of the wrongness of my ways so as to accept the rightful ways before me.

Quality of life is a truly subjective experience and as such who are we to judge anothers choices? With that said, i've sometimes had difficulty in judging others and so there are consequences for my having those hard difficulties. One immediate consequence is that as I judge others so I judge myself. That reality often leaves me in a place of lonliness and seperation from love of others and God. The love is 'there' but I'm not 'there' to receive it and share it back in return.

I've learned that I have many justified reasons to be wrong about a great deal of different things about my life and the lives of others. And as well, I have justified reasons to be wrong about God too. I used to be very unforgiving of myself because I felt guilty for being so arrogant and ignorant of myself and others struggling with the challenges of a hard life. I blamed alot and that is the simple truth. In my being honest with myself about the simplicity of that blaming of myself, others, and God, I've discovered a way forward for myself that comes not from my efforts to know all the answers [or even all the questions] but to come to an understanding that I am after all not just RobbyRobot but I'm as well another human being no less, a man, one of billions also living on this wonderful place we all call home. I have a right to be here. We all do. You do too. Even in the darkest moments of our lives we all have the true right to be here and not have to be here alone and wretched in our lives.

Guilt and punishment used to be something I valued in my earlier years of learning to live a quality life. I was so sure guilt had to be an essential item in the receipe of my life. So arrogantly and ignorantly sure I was. And my life challenged me to give up all that selfish desire to be a slave to guilt and punishment by having such dark times for me to revisit and rethink my wrongness of living. Those dark times gave (and will give again) another chance to become the better me living the better life as a matter of free choice and not into continued slavery to suffering, failure, and misery. Life is as life does.

I'm not saying you are living wrongly, Inside, only you can truly judge that for yourself, its not my affair, I'm only sharing my ESH. I am saying in those darkest times for me, for me, I discovered that I was living wrongly and not rightly with God. I had my justified reasons to be sure, but nonetheless I was living wrongly. And my darkest times was none of it my 'fault' whatsoever I was not to blame. Only my responsibility was mine to own. Guilt and blame no longer need apply. I changed to be more rightly living from those dark times and into the light of day my life began anew once again. I didn't have to relapse because of my wrongness, and I didn't have to die a dry useless death while yet sober simply wishing for an end to it all. I encourage you to have faith that revisiting some of your possible justifications can surely bring you out of the darkness and into a well lived purposeful life. Right now it seems plain from the share you have offered, that you could use some of that simple goodness created within a comforting life naturally. Please be well and safe in all that you do, and may you have a blessed day this day.

as always,
RobbyRobot

WakeUp

I've been there. At the 5-6 month period, I was almost back out there drinking.
It was a horrible time for me.

the Dark Night of the Soul was first penned by St John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic from the 1500s of the Carmelite religious order I believe.
The dark night is a time of intense pain and a feeling of alienation, from everything it seems. This dark night is a kind of purgatory, which you are being purged of self. It is ego deflating.
The good news is the dark night prepares you for coming into the light. After you emerge from the dark night you walk into the light, one with God, illuminated, and at peace.

I believe completely in the dark night of the soul. It's painful to go through, but it prepares us to walk in the light.

spryte

I think that it's normal to go through a period of darkness when grappling with existential issues.

RobbyRobot

In my experiences I have found that there were the times I felt suicidal and contrasting those times were the times I had plans at hand for suicide. Both of those dark times are different for me, and I've come to a better understanding of those darkest days as well from a changed thinking on my responsibilites to my own affairs.

Feelings change. Plans can be discarded. Realities can be reforged. Life can be renewed without paying an impossible price. We do not have to be held in perpetual ransom for our own lives. I know this now to be true after living thru my darkest times. Thanks be to a God of my own understanding for both the light and the dark times of my life.

Rob

Tommyh

this has turned out to be a great thread.Thanks for all the shares
Praying for you inside