Passing Through Darkness

(Disclaimer: If you haven’t read my “Not Everyone Likes Me” post, do that first, because this one talks a lot about IFS therapy, and that one explains IFS therapy. If you’re like, look, I like you, but I don’t have time for that, check out the glossary under “IFS therapy” for a shorter explanation.)

A Wrinkle in Time is a weird book. It’s theological children’s science fiction. It’s about good and evil, angels that look like old women but are also something like pegasuses or stars, different planets, and giant brains. I love it. Like all really good science fiction, it’s much more about the power of love than it is about aliens.

There’s this moment in A Wrinkle in Time that I think about a lot. Meg passes through the Black Thing. The Black Thing is evil—literally, it is the physical form of evil, and by touching it, she is hurt. The wise people of a new planet treat her and help her regain her physical strength, but she is still wounded. When she lashes out at her most important people, her alien caretaker says, “Don’t judge her harshly, She was almost taken by the Black Thing. Sometimes we can’t know what spiritual damage it leaves.”

I thought about this a lot in graduate school. Graduate school was when I really started facing up against evil in the world. I was studying colonialism in class, which sometimes left me in partial panic attacks, and at home I was caretaking from roommates who were healing from sexual violence. When I turned to scripture for comfort, I saw more trauma cycles–Nephi’s conflict with his brothers turns into thousands of years of war; the patriarchal tales show parent after parent exhibiting favoritism that inevitably hurts everyone involved; the trauma endured by early members of my faith still negatively shapes how we interact with others. 

Everywhere I looked there was darkness, and everywhere I looked it was being passed forward, and how were we going to be OK–how were any of us ever going to be OK–if interaction was a steady process of handing our hurts to each other?

I took this question to God for a year before He answered me. Healing can be passed on too.

So I went to therapy. Because I’ve passed through darkness, and I know I’ve passed it on. I grew up in a colonial town with the skin of a colonizer, and I couldn’t find a way out of being the bad guy in my story and in the stories of those around me. I had friends and boyfriends who left scars when they left, depression that sank me like a stone, and while, on a scale of bad things, these probably don’t rank above a two, still. It was darkness that lived in me, so it was darkness that I was passing on. I went to therapy because I wanted to get married and have kids and pass on as little darkness as I could. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from passing some, but damned if I wasn’t going to do everything I could to minimize it.

In the middle of 2020 I was in therapy, and it was not going well. I was working with a four-year-old part that developed when my mom was sick when I was little. This part thought that her job was to make sure mom was OK, because if mom wasn’t OK, then I wouldn’t be OK—a fundamental and semi-universal truth of childhood. But my mom wasn’t OK, not when I was four, and not in 2020. Both times she was so depressed she could barely function, and I couldn’t make her better, no matter how hard I tried. I was desperately trying to take care of her and, simultaneously, I was sinking into debilitating depression myself. That day in therapy I was sobbing with my four-year-old, unable to bear the return to this childhood trauma with the added complication of being sick myself.

And then Jesus came. Jesus rarely comes to my parts work, but when He does, He usually shows up unannounced and does something unexpected (classic Jesus). This time He laid his hands on my part’s head and performed a priesthood blessing. On June 10, 2020, Jesus blessed me with healing and with the ability to pass it on. 

I haven’t talked about this much, and I’ve debated writing about it here, because this moment was so soft and warm and real, I don’t want to put it out into the world to be manhandled. But I do want to testify.

I was sick then, but not nearly as sick as I was about to be. Before 2020 was over, I stopped being able to take care of myself, much less anyone else. The darkness overwhelmed me, and I could barely remember what light felt like.

And then I got on medication—and, at my urging, so did my mom. I kept going to therapy—and, at my urging, my mom started. Specifically, she started going to go to IFS.  She started healing from her own childhood hurts. And then my dad, who has always had a bit of a bad taste in his mouth about therapy, saw how much it helped my mom, and he decided that he wanted to go too. And then he told my sister about it, and now we all go to IFS. We talk about our parts, and we all know what we mean. Sometimes, now, when I’m worried about my mom, I say, “Mom. My four-year-old is kind of freaking out.”

And she says, “OK. OK. Tell your four-year-old it’s going to be OK. I’m going to be OK. I’m taking care of myself.”

My family has always been the best part of my life. They are my favorite people, my safe place, my home. But none of that ever meant everything was OK or that we didn’t all have things to heal from. We’d all passed through darkness, some of it very deep, and we’d all passed it to each other. But now we’re passing our healing on too. We’re apologizing to each other and accepting apologies. We’re voicing concerns and talking through them, and sometimes it sucks, because sometimes healing means allowing yourself to acknowledge the pain. We all pass on darkness automatically, but we have to learn how to heal. I’m glad my family and I are learning it together.

One of God’s most spectacular promises is healing, and God keeps those promises. Healing—even healing that must reach back and forward through generations—can happen. Darkness is sticky, but healing flows like water.