Pain, Collapse & the Dark Night
When the Bottom Falls Out
I know collapse.
I’ve lived it in jail cells, bankruptcy courts, hospital beds, and empty houses.
At the time, it felt like the end.
But eventually, I came to see something else: collapse wasn’t failure.
It was a doorway to truth—if I was willing to walk through it.
The life I had constructed was no longer sustainable.
In its collapse, I could begin to see what had always been real.
Pain and collapse aren’t punishments.
They are sacred thresholds.
They unmask the beliefs we’ve mistaken for truth—
I am what I achieve.
I am what others think.
I am what I can control.
And they invite us into something deeper.
The dark night of the soul isn’t abandonment by God.
It’s a quiet invitation back to what was never lost.
What Pain Reveals
Pain speaks in a language most of us try not to hear. It whispers through the body, through grief, through anger, through emptiness. Instead of running from it, unlearning asks us to listen. Because beneath every pain is a message: you are ready to remember.
When we meet pain with curiosity instead of resistance, it becomes teacher instead of enemy.
Collapse as a Threshold
Collapse strips away the scaffolding of false identity. The career, the relationship, the success story—all the things we thought defined us—can fall in an instant.
But collapse isn’t always loud. It can arrive quietly—in disappointments, doubts, anger, or fear. Like striving or proving, it becomes a familiar rhythm. And yet, beneath it all, there’s a sacred interruption.
In that falling, something astonishing happens: We begin to discover the self that cannot be collapsed.
This doesn’t mean collapse is easy. It’s brutal. It shakes our sense of safety. But within it is a hidden grace: The chance to begin again—this time from truth.
The Dark Night of the Soul
The mystics called it the dark night. I call it sacred collapse.
It’s the season when nothing works—
prayers feel empty,
success feels hollow,
identity dissolves.
We try to go back, but the old self doesn’t fit.
We can’t yet see what’s always been there.
This in-between is terrifying—and holy.
Because in the darkness,
the false burns away.
And what survives is love.
FAQs About Pain, Collapse & the Dark Night
Why does suffering happen?
Suffering isn’t punishment—it’s a signal pointing us back to truth.
Pain shows us where we’ve mistaken roles, achievements, and identity for our true selves. Suffering comes from clinging to what cannot last. When we pause and ask, What is this for? We begin to see pain not as cruel but as purposeful—a messenger guiding us home.
What does collapse mean spiritually?
Collapse isn’t the end—it may be the threshold of awakening.
Spiritually, collapse is the unmaking of false foundations. What falls away is everything that could never sustain us. What remains is what cannot be lost. Collapse clears the ground for truth to emerge.
What is the dark night of the soul?
A season of unmaking where false identity dissolves so truth can emerge.
In the dark night, our strategies stop working. We feel abandoned, lost, or empty. But this is not punishment—it is purification. The dark night removes the masks we can’t let go of ourselves, leaving us bare enough to remember who we are.
How can pain become a teacher instead of just something to survive?
By meeting pain with curiosity, we discover what it wants to show us.
Pain is never random. When we soften instead of resist, we notice what lies beneath it— grief that honors love, anger that guards boundaries, collapse that opens new beginnings. Pain teaches us where we’ve forgotten love and invites us to return.
My Invitation
If you are in pain or collapse, I want you to know:
you are not alone, and you are not broken.
The dark night is not the end of the story—it is the passage into a truer one.
If this is where you are:
Collapse is not your undoing.
It is your beginning.