The Dark Night of the Soul After a Breakup

If you are going through the dark night of the soul after your breakup, you’re not alone, even if you feel alone right now.

Whether you’re going through unspeakable grief because of a breakup, or a divorce, or the death of a loved one, or you find yourself finally in confrontation with your authentic self after years of people-pleasing, disconnection, and trauma, this will help you navigate the dark night of the soul and offer you some tools to help you get through it.

A dark night of the soul can be triggered by external events: a breakup, a death of a loved one, the loss of a job. But it can also be triggered by our own internal “knowing,” a change in how you make sense of your life. It can be a recognition that your marriage isn’t working and you need to get divorced, and all the weight and grief that recognition brings, even if you haven’t called a divorce lawyer. It can be a loss of faith. It can be the realization that we don’t want to be doing what we are doing for our career or commitments. It can be the understanding that we can’t keep drinking anymore and need to become sober. It can be a reckoning we face with our childhood trauma, or our parents, or our religion, or social expectations.

The dark night of the soul can result in a major re-organization of our entire lives. It is a life revolution. As Eckhart Tolle, explains, “a dark night of the soul can be a collapse of perceived meaning in life,” but also be a precursor to a spiritual awakening. This revolution of meaning can result in a kind of death of the ego. Our ego is tied to who we think we are, to our individual consciousness, and to our place in society, the world, and the universe. With ego death, we experience a radical rupture in our sense of our place in the world. We are no longer wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, daughter, son, mother, father. We become something else.

What is the Dark Night of the Soul?

The dark night of the soul is originally a mystical idea first posited by St. John of the Cross in his poem, Dark Night of the Soul.

While the poem has often been read in metaphysical terms as the union between the soul and God, the poem can also be read as a return to oneself. In the poem, “Dark Night of the Soul,” the speaker steals out into the night without being seen. He explains that he was “without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart. This light guided me more surely than the light of noonday…” The guide leads the speaker to a mystical reunion with the “Beloved,” which is often read as a union with God, but can also be read as union with the authentic self. The poem ends with the speaker writing, “I abandoned myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies” (Translation E. Allison Peers).

The dark night of the soul is a recognition of self-abandonment. This can take many forms.

Often the dark night of the soul gets triggered when we go through a breakup. When we’ve realized we’ve had enough of the relationship or marriage, we recognize our self-abandonment and return to ourselves. Yet, there’s a paradox in this return, because the only way we can return from our self-abandonment, is by abandoning our primary relationship. And because we are often so self-defined by these relationships—by marriage, by our partners—it can sometimes feel like a breakup is a kind of self-abandonment. And in a way, it is. We must abandon the old way of living to make room for the new. We must abandon the part of ourselves that lived with another as a unit, to discover who we really are, alone.

When we realized we’ve had enough of the job, the career, or a way of living, we can also enter a dark night of the soul. When we recognize our own self-abandonment in the life we have chosen, and decide to do something differently, this can lead to a dark night of the soul, because there is a period of adjustment, a period of recognition, a period of heartbreak, while the ego holds on to what it clung to, while simultaneously learning how to let go.

And when we experience grief, due to the loss of a loved one, we can enter a dark night of the soul in that loss. In her book, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief, Joanne Cacciatore, PhD writes, “losing someone we love deeply changes us, inescapably, and for all time, and it is painful beyond all imagining…through grief we can experience an alchemical transformation… to fully inhabit grief is to hold the contradictions of the great mystery that loss shatters us and we become whole… We mourn our beloveds’ absence and we invoke their presence… We know the darkest of all nights and in so doing can bring the light of our loved ones into the world. We are the paradox. We are the bearers of the unbearable.”

My Dark Night of the Soul

I went through my own dark night of the soul several years ago. That year, I finally left a physically and emotionally abusive relationship. I lost my job and returned to my freelance writing career, but I hadn’t been doing it for so long that I found myself facing the prospect of having to find new clients and re-establish relationships with lost clients. It was terrifying. Yet, despite the immense trauma, I told myself I was okay. And in many ways, I felt okay. 

I felt no anger.

I felt some sadness, and some fear but it was all manageable. I got up in the morning, did what I needed to do, did my workouts, stayed sober.

But then, one day, someone attacked me while I was surfing in the ocean. I was in my safe space, trying to reconnect with nature, and in one moment, and in one act of violence, it had all been violated. Something broke open within me. For days, I couldn’t stop crying. The rage and the anger became a whole universe onto themselves.

For weeks I struggled to get out of bed in the morning, and found myself unable to work, to surf, to even talk to other people.

I’d spent so many years unable to feel anger and not giving myself permission to feel anger, that the moment the anger and rage and sadness broke through, I didn’t know what to do with it. In my physically and emotionally abusive relationship, when I expressed anger, I risked violence. Over the years I’d been in the relationship, I’d learned how to repress my own anger.

While I was terrified about feeling anger again, I also could see that I was healing. I had created a container of safety so robust that my body finally felt ready to process anger.

Still, it was all very difficult. It was a true dark night of the soul.

I was exhausted all the time, I was angry, I was scared, mostly scared that this was my “new normal” and that I’d never be able to leave my dark night of the soul. And yet, with time, and with the help of my therapist, I was able to work through the strong emotions. In many ways, I never could go back to the peaceful, but also numbed and disassociated self, the woman who didn’t feel anger.

But in time, I realized that I didn’t want to go back. Being able to feel my anger and grief, meant that my anger and grief could now serve a protective function in my life. Anger is protective. It is a signal your body is sending you that you need to step away from a person, situation, or belief. Grief is also a signal your body is sending you. It is telling you, “make space for me.” I need attention. I need extra care.

My dark night of the soul was a reawakening of my “whole self” in all her messy iterations.

According to Judith L. Herman in her book, Trauma and Recovery, “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.”

When we enter the dark night of the soul, our first response might be: when will this end? But perhaps the better response is not “when will this end” but rather, “what will I learn from this?”

A Call for Greater Alignment

The dark night of the soul is a call from deep within you to live in greater alignment. It is a call for a radical inventory of your life. Are your relationships and your commitments in alignment with your authentic self? Is your work in alignment? Are you in alignment with your emotions? Do you need to hide your emotions from yourself or the world?

Often when we enter a dark night of the soul, we need to take some time to step away from what we’re doing to take stock. This might manifest as a desire to stay in bed, to not hang out with friends, to end commitments, to end a relationship. There is a natural outflowing and shedding that takes place when we start to recognize our authentic self and start to wrestle with the consequences of that authenticity.

The Sacred Pause

Acceptance isn’t just awareness that we’re going through something, whether it’s grief, or a breakup, or immense loss. Acceptance requires that we do something.

Often that doing means doing nothing at all. Our society tells us that our value is tied to our production, to what we can do. We are overtly or subtly encouraged to move on, to remember that life keeps moving. And yet, a dark night of the soul is like early grief, “wild, primitive, nonlinear, and crazed. It commands our assent and our attention,” to borrow the words of Joanne Cacciatore in Bearing the Unbearable.

When we create space for the dark night of the soul without demanding anything more of ourselves than to sit with our anger, our grief, our lostness, we create space for true healing. Cacciatore notes that the word selah, which means “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” occurs 70 times in the Psalms. The pause doesn’t need to be structured. It can be simple.

It can be a single, consciously taken breath.

It can simply be acknowledging and naming the feeling.

In the Dark Night, Life Goes On

And yet life goes on. The bills need to be paid. The children must be cared for. The dinner must be made, and you need to drink your water.

The dark night of the soul is a chaotic place. It resists structure. And yet, as life continues, we will need to contain structure for ourselves to do what must be done, and part of that structure will be to set aside time where we can sit in the chaos and let ourselves feel and confront our pain.

Letting Go & Surrender

When we let go and surrender, we suspend our judgement about what is happening. We stop resisting the dark night of the soul, and we start to inhabit it. According to David R. Hawkins in Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, when we let go, we move beyond suppression and repression, beyond expression, beyond escape and avoidance (the endless scrolling, the endless search for the next dopamine hit, the endless distraction). Hawkins explains that “Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. It means simply letting the feeling be there…” Only by making space for the feeling can we let go and surrender. Only by befriending it, by getting into relationship with it, can we move past it. The same is true for the dark night of the soul.  

This process of letting go goes beyond mental manifestations in our lives.

The dark night of the soul often results in a re-evaluation of relationships in our lives. It’s why after we go through a breakup, we might find ourselves suddenly struggling in our friendships as well. Either because our friends break up with us and choose sides, or because as we achieve greater alignment within ourselves, we start to recognize the relationships that are no longer serving us or aren’t in alignment with what we want or need. The dark night of the soul often calls us to let go of relationships.

The calling might come in other forms as well. We might be called to leave a job, leave a city, or let go of old habits, and ideas. Letting go of things we once assumed were sacrosanct can be a difficult process. And there is a period of grief involved in the letting go. Giving ourselves the space to pause, to sit with the grief, and to process our emotions is essential as we navigate the dark night of the soul and the changes it brings.

Self-Care

As you process intense emotions, it’s important that you take time to take care of yourself.

Take time to meditate, eat healthy nourishing meals, drink the big glass of water, get out into nature, pull out the journal. Take a nap, if you need to.

Breakup Coaching

One way you can practice self-care is by taking time to learn strategies to help you navigate the dark night of the soul and to make conscious space for growth and learning. Self Love Breakup Coach’s self-paced breakup coaching program offers strategies to help you learn how to regulate your nervous system, connect with your authentic self and get clear about what you want, understand systems of coercive control and toxic relationship dynamics, and take steps to break the patterns of the past when you start dating again.

If you find yourself in the sacred pause, it can be incredibly painful to try to navigate it without support. The dark night of the soul can be an uncharted territory, a scary place without map or guidance. Our self-paced breakup coaching program offers you a roadmap forward, with practical meditations and exercises to help you get out, stay out, and move on. Get access now.