Encountering the Dark Side
Author: Francesco Papagni.
.Understanding one’s dark side allows for an authentic and full life, free from the burden of repression.
Difficult moments force us to look where we usually don’t want to. There’s nothing heroic about it at first, no courage: there’s just raw, inescapable reality, which confronts us with who we are. Everyone has their dark side. For some, it’s an illness; for others, it’s a sense of emptiness; for still others, it’s the suffocating routine of every day.
For me, that dark side was made of diagnoses, of months spent fighting my own body, of a mind that betrayed me and seemed trapped in another world. Every therapy session was a step into the unknown, and every day in the hospital forced me to confront myself. But what makes these moments so profound is that they’re not limited to physical pain. It’s as if, beneath the surface, everything conspired to bring us face-to-face with our own shadow.
Jung and the Shadow
(sidenote: One of the most recommended read!) spoke of the shadow as that part of ourselves we avoid, the dark side that contains fears, failures, and dissatisfactions. It’s the part we often try to ignore, but in times of difficulty, it catches up to us, looks us in the eye.
There are no shortcuts. There’s no other way to grow except to look that shadow in the face and choose to move forward.
Jung, the father of analytical psychology, described the shadow as the part of us we’d rather not see. But this dark part is fundamental because it gives us access to energies and potentials that would otherwise remain suppressed. For Jung, psychological maturity doesn’t come with control, but with the acceptance of the shadow, with the ability to look it in the face and integrate it.
Surrender isn’t submission; it’s recognition.
Understanding one’s dark side allows for an authentic and full life, free from the burden of repression.
The Journey Through the Darkness
Every hero, deep down, goes through their own darkness. There are no fairy tales without a descent into the abyss, without that moment of uncertainty where all seems lost. But what matters is that, however much it frightens us, darkness is just a stage, a part of the journey.
To begin means to accept that life can go beyond the surface, that there’s something more beneath every routine, every dissatisfaction, every pain.
Perhaps you’re reading these words because you also feel a call. Maybe it’s not an obvious tragedy, there’s no health crisis or extraordinary event. Sometimes it’s a sense of emptiness, a dissatisfaction that creeps into everyday sameness. It’s that silence that grows when we realize we’re in a cage built by our own habits.
And yes, this too is a shadow worth exploring, because pain isn’t always an obvious wound: sometimes it’s a deep, invisible malaise that asks us to listen.
To begin the journey means this: to welcome that part of us we’ve avoided, that makes us uncomfortable. To accept that the shadow exists and that, in its own way, it pushes us toward change.