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The Dark Night of the Soul: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Move Through It

Personal Growth & Self-Discovery • July 22, 2026

LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: The dark night of the soul is a period of inner collapse that can arise when an achievement-based identity stops working. It doesn’t resolve the same way for everyone, and it should never explain away symptoms that need clinical attention.

The Night She Couldn’t Explain

It’s 1:50 in the morning on a Tuesday in March, and Carolina is sitting on the edge of her bathtub in a hotel bathroom in Zurich, still in the blazer she wore to dinner with the deal team. She’s fifty-one, a managing director at a global investment firm. Her phone is face-down on the tile, midway through a text to her husband that says “can’t sleep, don’t worry” and stops there, unsent. The bathroom fan is loud enough to cover the sound if she cried, which she hasn’t yet, though she keeps waiting to.

“I don’t even know what I’d tell you if you called me right now,” she says, two weeks later, in my office, turning her wedding ring around her finger without seeming to notice. “Everyone keeps asking if I’m okay, and I keep saying yes because what’s the alternative? I have a closing in nine days. My daughter’s wedding is in June. I have never in my life not been able to just push through something, and I don’t understand what ‘this’ even is. It’s not sad exactly. It’s more like the floor isn’t there anymore. Like I looked down mid-step and there was nothing under my foot, and I’m still walking on it anyway because what choice do I have.”

Sitting with Carolina that afternoon, I found myself not reaching for a label right away. That itself told me something; years of clinical hours teach you to notice when a formulation wants to arrive too fast. What I felt instead was the particular quality of her disorientation: not flat, not absent, but overfull and unnamed at once.

Before anything else, we talked through what needed ruling out. Had she seen her physician recently. Was she sleeping, and how much. Any change in appetite, concentration, her ability to feel pleasure. Any thoughts of harming herself. Any substance she was leaning on more than usual. She answered each question directly, and nothing pointed toward an emergency, though we agreed she’d get a full workup with her doctor within the week regardless, both to rule out anything physiological and because two months of sleep disruption warranted its own attention.

Only after that groundwork, weeks later, did we start using language like disorientation of meaning, a felt loss of the frameworks that used to make her life legible. Even then, it stayed one possible way of understanding what she was in, not a verdict. Carolina left that session still without a name for the thing she was carrying. She hadn’t cried yet either.

A note before we go further. Everything in this piece is educational, not diagnostic. If you’re in crisis right now, or if you’re having thoughts of ending your life, please skip ahead to the section on when to seek immediate help. Nothing described here should ever delay a proper clinical evaluation.

What Is the Dark Night of the Soul?

The phrase “dark night of the soul” originates with the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar John of the Cross, whose poem “Noche Oscura” and its prose commentary described a specific mystical experience: the felt loss of divine consolation, a disorientation between one phase of spiritual development and the next. John of the Cross was writing within a specific Catholic mystical tradition, about a specific religious experience. The phrase has since traveled far outside that context, and that borrowing is worth naming rather than assuming.

In secular usage, the phrase has come to describe a period of profound existential crisis: a loss of meaning, a collapse of identity structure, a felt sense of being stripped of whatever organized your sense of self and direction. Used this way, it’s a metaphor borrowed from a literary and spiritual tradition, not a diagnosis, not a universal developmental stage, and not proof of spiritual awakening. Some people using the phrase are describing a genuinely meaningful passage. Others may be using spiritual language to avoid looking at something that needs clinical attention. Telling the difference is part of what careful, humble assessment is for.

Thomas Moore, psychotherapist, former monk, and author of Dark Nights of the Soul (2004), frames it not as pathology but as a passage the psyche can sometimes undertake when an old form has been outgrown, while explicitly distinguishing it from clinical depression. That’s Moore’s frame, not a guarantee. Moore isn’t suggesting people forgo treatment, and neither am I. A concept that helps some people find meaning in suffering is not the same thing as a treatment plan, and it doesn’t mean the suffering itself was necessary or worthwhile.

The Psychological Dimensions of Dissolution

The dark night isn’t only a spiritual or literary idea. There are psychological frameworks that can help make sense of why a period like this feels so disorienting, and why it isn’t automatically the same as depression, even though the two can look similar from outside.

Carl Jung, MD, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, described what he called the individuation process: the long, uneven psychological movement toward wholeness, in which the ego periodically has to confront material it has disowned. For Jung, periods of significant psychological disorientation were sometimes initiatory, marking the loosening of an identity structure that had become too narrow to hold a person’s fuller inner life. Jung was describing his own theoretical framework, developed nearly a century ago, and it hasn’t been validated the way modern evidence-based treatments have. It’s one lens among several, useful for some people, not a settled scientific account.

From a neuroscience angle, some researchers describe experiences like this through the lens of predictive processing. Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, neuroscientist and University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, and W. Kyle Simmons describe the brain as constantly generating predictions about the body, self, and world to maintain a sense of coherence (PMID: 26016744). When a major life disruption challenges that predictive framework badly enough, one contributor to the resulting disorientation may be the brain’s meaning-making systems struggling to generate workable predictions. This research is about interoception and prediction broadly, not about “the dark night of the soul” as a named clinical entity, since no such entity exists in the diagnostic literature. It’s an analogy some people find clarifying, not a proven mechanism.

How the Dark Night Shows Up in Driven Women

The dark night, as a metaphor, tends to take a particular shape in driven women, shaped by how achievement-oriented identity gets built and the specific vulnerabilities that construction can create.

For many driven women, identity gets substantially organized around competence, accomplishment, and external validation. Why that happens varies a great deal from person to person and rarely reduces to one clean explanation. For some, it’s temperament, an innate drive that would have shown up regardless of family environment. For others, it’s opportunity and family values, being raised in a household that prized and modeled achievement directly. For others still, it’s the compounding pressure of class, race, or gender, needing to outperform simply to be treated as competent in rooms not built with them in mind. Financial necessity plays a role for women who couldn’t afford to be anything other than reliable. Neurodivergence shapes this pattern for some, where structure and mastery offer a kind of regulation that’s genuinely adaptive. For a number of the women I work with, achievement did become bound up with earlier experiences of safety or belonging, and that history matters when present. For others, there’s no such history at all: it’s workplace reinforcement, straightforward ambition, or simply liking the work. None of these paths is more or less legitimate, and I’m careful not to assume any one applies to a given client without her telling me so herself.

Whatever its origins, that identity, competent, driven, accomplished, useful, often works well for decades, until something loosens it. Sometimes it’s midlife, a passage Jungian psychology has long framed as a natural threshold, when the identity built in the first half of life has done its job and different questions start to surface. Sometimes it’s loss: a relationship ending, a health crisis, a setback that working harder can’t fix. Sometimes there’s no clear precipitant, just a slow internal pressure, like water finding its way through stone. In every case, ruling out a treatable depressive episode, a medical cause, or an unsafe situation comes first, before anyone reaches for a more existential frame.

The Dark Night and Depression: What’s Different, What Overlaps

The relationship between “dark night of the soul” language and clinical depression is genuinely complicated. Symptoms can overlap: low mood, loss of interest, disrupted sleep, trouble functioning, a sense of meaninglessness. It is essential, every time, to rule out a treatable depressive disorder, a bipolar-spectrum episode, psychosis, dissociation, an unresolved trauma response, grief, burnout, a sleep or medical condition, or the effects of a medication or substance. Depression left untreated because it’s been reframed as a spiritual passage can cause real, preventable suffering. This is the single most important sentence in this piece.

At the same time, some clinicians and contemplative writers describe features that, when present, may point toward a more existential frame rather than depression alone: a sense, even in the depths of it, that something meaningful is happening; a quality of seeking rather than pure blankness; suffering organized around identity and meaning rather than the neurovegetative symptom cluster common in depression, such as profound fatigue or marked cognitive slowing. These are not a checklist for self-diagnosis. They’re a starting point for a conversation with a qualified clinician, not a substitute for one.

A skilled, trauma-informed clinician can help sort through which frame actually fits, and can hold both a clinical and an existential dimension at once when both are present. That kind of layered assessment is exactly the sort of work trauma-informed therapy is built to do, and it belongs to a licensed mental health provider or physician, not to a blog post.

Both/And: The Dark Night Is Suffering AND It Is Initiatory

Here is the Both/And that seems to matter most for people moving through this: the experience some people call a dark night can be genuine suffering AND, for some people, a developmental passage that precedes real psychological growth. Neither cancels the other, and neither should be used to talk anyone out of getting evaluated.

Naming the suffering doesn’t require denying that something meaningful might also be happening. You don’t have to say “this is actually good for me” and minimize what you’re living through. The darkness, the loss of meaning, the dissolution of an old identity: these are often genuinely painful, and you’re allowed to feel that without reframing it into a lesson.

And: some clinical literature on post-traumatic growth, alongside centuries of contemplative writing, suggests that people who move through a genuinely difficult passage, with support and time, sometimes describe a changed relationship to themselves afterward. Not unchanged, not unscathed, and not universal or guaranteed. This isn’t a reason to romanticize suffering or decline treatment while waiting to see if it happens.

Holding this Both/And means refusing two traps: catastrophizing it (“this darkness is permanent”) and spiritually bypassing it (“this is just my ego dying, I shouldn’t be getting help”). Both positions can prevent someone from getting what they actually need.

The Systemic Lens: What the Dark Night Is Responding To

An experience like this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It often arises in response to systemic conditions as much as individual psychology, and naming those conditions is part of taking the experience seriously.

Many driven women describe entering a period like this partly because the professional cultures they’ve operated in have demanded a kind of self-alienation as the price of admission. Succeeding in medicine, law, finance, tech, or academia has often required suppressing the intuitive, relational, and questioning parts of the self in favor of the productive, outwardly legible self. Some clinicians describe this kind of crisis, at a systemic level, as the suppressed self finally refusing to stay suppressed.

There’s a gendered dimension too. Women who’ve moved through structural barriers in their fields have often managed their visibility by compartmentalizing an inner life that would have read as unprofessional. A crisis like this sometimes arrives when that compartmentalization reaches its limit.

Naming this systemic dimension isn’t about redirecting your healing into political analysis before you’ve done any inner work. It’s recognizing that wanting a more meaningful, fully inhabited life isn’t a private pathology. It’s a reasonable response to conditions that have required you to be less than fully yourself to participate and succeed.

How to Move Through the Dark Night

Moving through an experience like this, not around it, calls for a different orientation than the productivity mode that built most driven women’s careers, and it’s different from passive, surrendered waiting too. It tends to require staying with what’s dissolving: letting the questions stay open, sitting with not-knowing, grieving what’s being shed, without forcing an outcome, while continuing appropriate clinical care if that’s part of the picture.

Lucy is forty-seven, eighteen months past a divorce she initiated, sitting across from me with a chipped travel mug she’s carried into every session since summer. It’s late October, and rain is coming down hard enough that we can hear it through the office window. She still doesn’t know if the divorce was the right call, and she says so almost every time it comes up.

“I did the things you’re supposed to do,” she tells me, turning the mug in her hands without drinking from it. “Therapy. Running. I forced myself to go to my friend’s birthday dinner last week even though I wanted to cancel. None of it touches whatever this actually is. It’s not that I’m sad about the marriage ending, I’m not, mostly. It’s that I don’t recognize the person making coffee in my kitchen every morning. I keep waiting to feel like myself again and I’m starting to wonder if that person isn’t coming back, and nobody warned me that was a possibility. I don’t know if I’m grieving him or grieving her. Maybe both. Maybe neither.”

I felt the weight of that distinction land in the room. Not “I miss my marriage.” Something closer to: I no longer know who I am without the architecture that marriage provided, and I can’t yet see what’s replacing it. We’d already spent a full session making sure nothing medical was driving the exhaustion, and her doctor had cleared that possibility the month before. What was left was harder to rule in or out with a bloodwork panel.

What I’ve come to think of as the unscheduled middle is the part of a passage like this nobody prepares you for: not the crisis itself, not whatever comes after it, however that turns out, but the long stretch in between where nothing resolves on any predictable timeline. Lucy is still in that middle. Some weeks she tells me she’s found something steadying, a writing practice abandoned in her twenties, an hour outside most mornings before the day starts. Other weeks she tells me it’s worse than three months ago, that she cried in a grocery store parking lot for no reason she can name. Both can be true in the same month. I don’t know yet how her story ends, and I told her as much. She said that was, unexpectedly, the most useful thing anyone had said to her in a year.

Some practical supports people describe as helpful: skilled therapeutic support from a clinician who can hold both the clinical and developmental dimensions without minimizing either one; a contemplative or somatic practice, such as the kind supported by somatic therapy; trusted people who can sit with the darkness alongside you without rushing you out of it; and unhurried time that respects the pace of a slow reorganization, rather than a rigid timetable for “getting over it.”

For some people, this kind of disorientation connects to earlier patterns worth understanding on their own terms, such as early attachment patterns or childhood emotional neglect. For others, it doesn’t trace back to childhood at all, and looking for a hidden origin story can become its own kind of avoidance. It’s also worth ruling out the specific depletion described in executive burnout, since burnout and a dark-night-type crisis can overlap or be mistaken for one another. Trauma-focused approaches like EMDR therapy are sometimes part of this work when earlier trauma is part of what’s surfacing, and sometimes it isn’t. None of this substitutes for an individualized evaluation with a licensed clinician, who can help sort out which combination of support fits a given person’s situation.

When to Seek Immediate Help

If you are having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out right now. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7. If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room. Thoughts of suicide are never a sign of spiritual growth or a stage of the dark night to simply wait out. They are a medical and psychiatric emergency that deserves immediate, direct attention.

Please also seek prompt evaluation from a physician or mental health provider if you’re experiencing: significant difficulty functioning at work or in basic self-care; symptoms of psychosis; dissociation that leaves you feeling disconnected from your body for extended periods; signs of a bipolar-spectrum episode; a substance or medication issue contributing to how you feel; or a situation involving abuse or danger, which requires safety planning first, not a spiritual reframe. If you have religious trauma, a well-chosen clinician can help you work with spiritual language in a way that doesn’t retraumatize you. And if what you’re experiencing is better described as grief, existential questioning, or burnout, those deserve their own appropriate support too, whether or not “dark night of the soul” ever feels like the right phrase.

This article is educational content from Annie Wright, LMFT, and Annie Wright LLC. It is not a substitute for individualized clinical assessment, diagnosis, or treatment, and it doesn’t establish a therapeutic relationship. If you’re working with a therapist, physician, or spiritual director, please bring what resonates here into that relationship rather than acting on it alone.

What the Contemplative Traditions Have Explored, Alongside What Psychology Is Still Studying

Part of what makes this concept useful to some secular readers is that it comes from a tradition that has written about this territory for centuries, even though that tradition’s claims are religious rather than clinical or empirical.

Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and writer, wrote about the “false self,” the constructed persona built around achievement and performance, and its dissolution as a precondition for a more genuine inner life. His description echoes how trauma-informed therapy describes the loosening of a defensive structure in service of deeper integration. This is Merton’s theological framework, not a clinical model, and readers outside his tradition may find some, all, or none of it resonant.

Teresa of Ávila, sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and Doctor of the Church, described the interior life as a series of “mansions,” each requiring passage through difficulty before the next could be inhabited. That framing can be genuinely useful to some readers and genuinely foreign to others, including readers from different religious or cultural traditions who map meaning differently. This piece doesn’t suggest a Christian mystical framework is the only, or best, lens available.

None of this requires religious belief, and none of it requires abandoning appropriate clinical care. What these traditions can offer, for readers who find them meaningful, is the idea that dissolution can be purposeful. What any given person believes about the nature of that purpose doesn’t need to be resolved for the practical work of getting support to begin.

Practices People Describe as Supportive During This Kind of Passage

There’s no protocol that reliably shortens or resolves an experience like this. There are, however, practices some people find help them stay present with a difficult passage rather than fighting it or checking out entirely. These are companions, not solutions, and none replace an evaluation if you’re struggling to function.

Unstructured, private writing is one of the most commonly mentioned, the kind that lets something true surface without an editorial layer watching. Creative practice more broadly, visual art, music, movement, gardening, works through a related mechanism: it gives an inner life a form without requiring it to be immediately useful to anyone else. Unstructured time outdoors, not exercise, not goal-directed activity, is one contributor researchers have studied in relation to lower rumination, though it’s one piece of a larger support system, not a stand-alone treatment. A contemplative practice, whether meditation, prayer, or simply quiet, can support someone through a difficult passage by offering a regular return to a different quality of attention than the driven, productive mode most of the day runs on.

And finally: letting other people know what’s actually happening, rather than performing “fine.” A passage like this is isolating enough without adding deliberate concealment on top of it. People who can sit with you in the not-knowing, without trying to fix it immediately, alongside professional support when it’s warranted, change the texture of the experience considerably.

If what you’ve read here resonates, know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work, alongside referrals to psychiatric or medical evaluation when that’s the more appropriate step. You can also explore Fixing the Foundations^™ or schedule a consultation to find the right fit.

Warmly,
Annie

Related Reading

Moore, Thomas. Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals. Gotham Books, 2004.

Jung, Carl G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Translated by W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. Harcourt Brace, 1933.

John of the Cross. Dark Night of the Soul. Translated by E. Allison Peers. Image Books, 1959.

Hollis, James. Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up. Gotham Books, 2005.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, and W. Kyle Simmons. “Interoceptive Predictions in the Brain.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16, no. 7 (2015): 419 to 429.

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