Entering the Darkness

What I'm doing to clarify the path ahead

“Psychology like mine prepares for an end or even the end. The question is only, what are we going to kill: ourselves or our still infantile psychology and its appalling unconsciousness.”

-Carl Jung, 1959

The truth is that for the last year, I have been in a freeze state. I have been compartmentalizing the sinking feeling that things were spinning out of control and would only get worse. I’d hoped I was wrong and did my best to tell myself that things would shift and practice hope instead. But now I know that I have been frozen not only in grief for all the suffering over this last year but also for all that it was leading towards.

On Tuesday, that frozen fear arrived at its destination. I was no longer awaiting further horror from other people’s chess moves but feeling the shock in my system, struggling to believe what was happening and struggling to sleep. Yesterday, I sobbed on and off throughout the day. I have cried with friends, cried with my partner, cried with neighbors, cried in coffee shops, and on walks.

After the fourth time I broke down in tears, I heard Arundhati Roy’s famous words in my mind:

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

This quote is now over twenty years old. I’ve believed it and repeated it at various moments of our collective decline, various moments of the assault on women and the feminine that have been ramping up year after year. I want to believe it’s true: that another world is on her way, that out of the darkness cometh the light. One part of me knows that—my dreams suggest as much, over and over. But another part of me feels it’s just foolish to continue believing that anything at all is on its way. I want to believe in progress and an underlying meaning to all the pain and the cruelty. But I can’t imagine the timescale on which we must be operating for that to be true. How many steps backward must we take, and how many times? Why so many passes round the burning-of-the-witches stage? Why must we repeat the fundamental terror of women having rights, voices, and control over their own bodies century after century?

I have no idea what the universe has in store for us. I do not know the deeper meaning of all that we’re living through. While I maintain a sense of some larger story at play, I also believe that we are in for very dark times ahead, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say so. Exactly what we all feared when we were warning against a Trump election in 2016 has been cued up for a second term. This Trump term will be significantly worse than his first. The checks on his power are gone. The best people have fled his orbit, and the worst have rushed in. Meanwhile, his mood has darkened, and his cognition has worsened. His favorite heads of state around the world are the most dangerous, and they are just waiting to be let through the gates.

The scale of cruelty this group of men is capable of should not, for a moment, be underestimated. This is a time, in Jung’s words, when we will benefit from having an “imagination for evil.” Because Trump and his men will have one, and they’ll also have the military and the power.

This is what Jung wrote at the end of his life, in the late 1950s, as he feared for the future of mankind. (I quote the first line in the short description for this newsletter.)

Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence.

We stand perplexed and stupefied before the phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about man, or at any rate have only a lopsided and distorted picture of him. If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case.

We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us, let alone what to pit against it. And even if we did know, we still could not understand ‘how it could happen here.’

With glorious naïveté a statesman comes out with the proud declaration that he has no ‘imagination for evil.’ Quite right: we have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip.

Tens of millions of people did not take Trump at his word. Tens of millions of people got hypnotized by his chaos. We have to get very good at seeing reality for what it is and then respond in kind. We have watched this kind of decline occur all over the world, and throughout history. Margaret Atwood warned us. Afghanistan warned us. Iran warned us. Germany warned us. The call is now coming from inside the house.

I am grieving what did not happen in this election. Acclimating to this new reality will take time. But as I try to make sense of things and clarify the path ahead, there are six areas of focus to which I’ll tend.

I offer this to you as one structure for a way forward.

1. Take care of yourself. There are many ways to say this, but it needs to be a top refrain. Take care of your mental and physical health, and your physical safety. What are your areas of vulnerability that you need to be particularly aware of in the coming months?

2. Choose one creative project to commit yourself to in a sustained way. This thing does not need to have “a point” that you can rationally understand; you may not know the point, who it will benefit, or how it will change your life. Do it anyway. Perhaps it is a daily painting practice or a weekly poem; perhaps it is planting a garden, creating recipes, recording an album, writing a novel, learning a new form of healing, exploring new solutions in math or science, or knitting. Find a way to devote yourself to that thing sustainably. If nothing is calling to you, allow yourself to notice the people’s lives who inspire you and try your hand at what they’re doing. It is not selfish to focus on something creative; it is necessary to sustain our souls and create a different world. What is asking to come into being through you? What will help to restore your spirit day after day?

3. Choose one area of activism, one cause, to which you feel particularly drawn, and commit yourself to that one thing for the long term. You don’t need to know what it is yet. This may reveal itself over time and through conversations with others and time with your journal. You may need time to clarify what your top priority is among 10,000 worthy causes that need our help, if you’re not already dedicated to a specific area. Action will ward off helplessness and acquiescence, and our collective action will make a difference for the planet and individual lives. Find the place between focused devotion and burnout. Find a rhythm at which you can stay engaged. A specific focus will help build community as well as ward off debilitating overwhelm as all of the different needs make themselves known. What is the area of advocacy that most calls to you? Can you get even more specific?

4. Practice going underground and develop an intentional persona. There are times when our work needs to happen underground and when it’s simply not safe to be seen and perpetually visible (online or off). Not everything that you do has to be public, and at this point in history, it probably shouldn’t be. Don’t document everything. Don’t share everything. Sustained change takes time, devotion, and faith. The most successful resistance movements in periods of tyranny and fascism did not announce themselves—sometimes for years (sometimes ever). Making change quietly may be necessary for your sanity and safety. What protections do you need to stay safe? What masks do you need to wear, and with whom?

5. Lean into history, mythology, and science fiction. This is not the first time humans have been through what we’re going through. This is not the first time that immense power has been fought. The details and characters are different, but honestly, only barely. What histories and stories help you to see courage in action and imagine that another world is possible? How can they guide you?

6. Lean into love. Self-love. Love for the planet. Love for animals. Love for your people. And—without causing self-injury—love for your enemies. Terror can act on us like a pressure on coal and refine our capacity for love. Let it. Practice love over hate not for the sake of “being good” but for the sake of survival and self-respect. Don’t let them win. Don’t let them tear you from what you love and what needs your love. What or who helps you remember to love in the most challenging moments?

I now have a better sense myself of why I’ve been clearing space for next year. In the coming weeks, I’ll be contemplating my answers to all of the above and the ways in which I want to show up for this community too. My tendency in these times has been to organize like mad and over-schedule myself right away. But I’m resisting that impulse in this moment so I can lean into reflection first. I need to get clear on the right next steps and be sure of the feet I’m putting forward. To those ends, and following my own advice, I’ll be offline for a bit to read and rest, to be with my dreams, nature, and my people.

I will be hosting a 90-minute winter retreat online on December 8th, and would love to see you there. We’ll figure this out together.

Hilma af Klint, 1915, The Dove no. 13

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.