Extended suffering, emptiness, or despair as part of the process
The dark night of the soul — extended periods of profound suffering, emptiness, or despair that often accompany or follow major openings. Not depression in the clinical sense, but a process of deconstruction that can feel indistinguishable from it.
Several accounts describe the dark night as more intense than anything before the opening — a phase in which everything that was previously meaningful has dissolved, and nothing has yet arrived to replace it.
It's just heartbreaking how deep people can go into darkness and despair, and especially if they feel it's hopeless.
"It's not all rainbows and unicorns... suffering is the portal through which it happens. I know those people are lying. I know they're bypassing. They haven't gone through the darkness."
I would say that there could be degrees of darkness, couldn't there, with dark nights?
In that moment everything cleared away, it felt like everything fell down and all there was was emptiness — all there was was clear nothing, there was nothing there.
Experience types that appear most often alongside this.
Other integration challenges that co-occur most frequently in the same accounts.