Own Your Darkness: Integration vs. Repression

Artwork: Jake Baddeley

“First and foremost, you don’t do it alone—you need a person to see it.” Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Ph.D.

The Darkness Concealed

The sun rises, the lights turn on, and the day’s ritual begins again. The conscious mind is awake—or so it seems. Yet, beneath the veneer of daily life, an entire cosmos exists, concealed behind the polished exterior we present to the world. It’s a universe of quiet battles, a landscape of unspoken conflicts and repressed desires. Like summer lightning flickering in a Southern night sky, these internal struggles flash in and out of consciousness, barely noticed but deeply felt.

Take, for example, the person you sit next to at work. She’s smart, polite, and seemingly the picture of stability. But her nights are filled with crippling anxiety, her days structured around secret rules meant to maintain the façade. Or the man whose LinkedIn bio reads like a dream—successful, charismatic, grounded in faith—but who hides the truth of his addictions, his infidelities, and his discontent behind closed doors.

These stories may seem extreme, but the truth is they’re not far removed from the hidden lives many lead. The outer appearance belies the inner chaos, and this concealment is where our darkness festers. Unseen and unacknowledged, it grows stronger, influencing our decisions, our relationships, and the way we move through the world. But it’s not just “them”—it’s us.

Not Me but Them

It’s easy to hear stories like these and say, “That’s not me.” We distance ourselves from the darkness in others, assuming it’s an aberration, something that only plagues the morally bankrupt or the weak. But this is a defense mechanism—a way of denying the truth that each of us carries a shadow within. The question isn’t whether we have darkness; it’s how we deal with it.

If we see the darkness only in others, we miss the opportunity to integrate our own. The more we reject our shadow, the more it controls us from behind the scenes. We project it onto those around us, judging and criticizing others for the very things we fear in ourselves. We build walls of moral superiority, but those walls don’t protect us—they isolate us from our wholeness.

Is Darkness Sin or Evil?

We often associate darkness with sin or evil, but Jung would argue that it’s neither. Darkness isn’t inherently malevolent; it’s simply the part of us that remains unconscious. It includes our fears, desires, wounds, and even potential.

Repression turns this darkness into something twisted—an energy that seeks expression through distorted behaviors and compulsions. But when we face it, when we acknowledge its existence and bring it into the light of consciousness, it becomes a source of wisdom and power.

Our darkness is where our unprocessed pain lives, but it’s also where our creativity, passion, and authenticity reside. It’s not something to be feared or exorcised—it’s something to be integrated.

Night and Day Within

Every person has both day and night within them—light and dark, conscious and unconscious, good and bad. The goal isn’t to eliminate the night, but to create a dialogue between these opposites. This is the heart of Jungian psychology: holding the tension of opposites until something new is born from their union.

This is the essence of a conscious intimate relationship. Holding the tension between masculine and feminine opposites until something spiritually new is born from their union. This spiritual emergence of one from the union of two opposites is reflected on the physical plane with the birth of a child—a third emergence from the union of two.

To be fully human is to embrace both parts of ourselves. The day-self, the part we show to the world, is important, but it’s incomplete without its counterpart. The night-self, the hidden, shadowy part, holds the key to our wholeness. When we acknowledge and integrate our darkness, we bring balance to our psyche, and only then can we truly know ourselves.

Outer vs. Inner

In today’s world, the outer appearance or persona is king. We live in a culture obsessed with image, with curating our lives to fit societal standards of success and happiness. But this obsession with outer perfection leaves the inner self neglected, insecure and starving for attention. The more we prioritize the outer at the expense of the inner, the more fragmented we become. The more we mistake behavior or persona modification for transformational integration of our inner parts the more gravity these unconscious forces like shadow exert pressure on our psyche resulting in fluctuating neurosis/anxieties.

The mask we wear begins to crack under the weight of unprocessed emotions and unmet needs. This persona doe not nourish the soul. We look for external solutions to internal problems—new jobs, new relationships, new distractions—but nothing on the outside can heal what’s been denied on the inside.

Pitfalls of Psychotherapy

Many turn to therapy in search of answers, but even here, the path to integration isn’t always clear. Traditional psychotherapy often focuses on symptom management, helping individuals to “fix” what’s broken.

But this approach can perpetuate repression if it treats the darkness as something to be eradicated rather than explored like 12 step addiction programs and cognitive loading skills like CBT, DBT and many other behavioral modification modalities. Others like EMDR, brain-spotting and somatic experiencing can and do alleviate anxieties but fall short of addressing the substructure from which these distresses emerge.

True healing requires more than managing symptoms; it demands a confrontation with the shadow. This is uncomfortable work, often resisted because it forces us to see parts of ourselves we’d rather keep hidden or projected onto others. This process requires anti-fragility and a commitment to push into the darkness not reconfigure it with “therapy speech.” The soul’s purpose is on a Hero’s Journey. Decending down into the scary unknown to find a new treasure. An archetypal journey often leading to a climactic, uncomfortable rebirth. But without this confrontation, we remain fragmented, slaves to the very darkness we’re trying to escape.

Repression Is Not Remission

Repression is the psychological equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug. It’s an attempt to push away uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, hoping they’ll disappear. Repression is usually a unconscious maneuver, whereas, suppression is a conscious effort to control through an act of will. Repressed emotions don’t go away—they go underground. Think about how Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRI’s) blunt emotions psychotropically. On the one hand they are effective at inhibiting unwanted emotional affect and on the hand they blunt emotions necessary for the feeling function. And like anything buried, they eventually resurface in ways we can’t control. Repression leads to compulsions, addictions, and destructive patterns that play out in our relationships and behaviors.

The shortcoming of many treatments that rely too heavily on psychotropic drugs, and symptom management is that the relief of symptoms is often a form or repression mistaken for remission. For example an addict may trade their substance or process addiction to an addiction to a therapist, group therapy, 12 step cult, an online guru/coach, or a spiritual bypass like church, an ashram to name a few.

The shadow aspect whose voice has been making itself known through unhealthy means isn’t heard. Instead it’s unconsciously repressed or consciously suppressed by willful force back into the unconscious. Until one day it finds a new avenue for it’s expression. This could explain why REHAB and 12 step programs have such abysmal track records.

Integration of the Dark

Integration, on the other hand, is the path to wholeness. It requires courage—the courage to see ourselves fully, to acknowledge our flaws, our pain, our desires, and to bring them into harmony with the rest of our being. Integration doesn’t mean we become perfect; it means we become real.

We begin to accept that for day there must be night and for night there must be day. They are two but one. Like every alchemical growth oriented intimate relationship—they are two but one both light and dark, masculine and feminine.

As Psychoanalyst Dr. Schwartz-Salant is quoted above, “we don’t do it alone-we need someone to see it.” This is one of the many reasons for the bond of a hieros gamos or sacred marriage—you have someone to see it all and love you through and in it all.

Darkness Becomes the Light

All opposites at their furthest extreme turn into the other. Jung expressed this concept by the use of the Greek word enantiodromia.

When we own our darkness, we stop running from it. We take responsibility for our actions and our inner life. We stop projecting our shadows onto others and start the work of healing ourselves. And in doing so, we step into the fullness of who we are—both the light and the dark, the day and the night, integrated and whole.

This is the path of individuation, the journey toward becoming truly ourselves. It’s not easy, but it’s the only path that leads to true freedom.