Many people arrive here because something in their life no longer feels the way it once did. What used to feel meaningful, stable, or certain now feels uncertain, empty, or quietly unraveling.

Over the years, the Dark Night of the Soul has been written about almost exclusively as a spiritual crisis — something happening to your soul. But through my own experience and through walking alongside many others, I’ve come to see something different happening beneath the surface.

What we call the Dark Night of the Soul is actually, more often than not, the Dark Night of the Personality — the unraveling of the identity we’ve built our lives around. It’s not your soul in crisis. Your soul is actually doing the calling. It’s your personality that is being asked to loosen its grip.

That reframe changes everything.

What is the Dark Night of the Soul?

Having gone through the dark night myself, I resonated deeply when Dr. Zinia Pritchard, a Contemplative Practice Theologian, described it this way:

The Dark Night of the Soul is a spiritual process where the seed of life is buried within the soil of suffering.

The phrase was first used by John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet. While its origins are religious, it’s now widely understood as a universal metaphor for the human experience of transformation that transcends any single tradition.

For many people, the dark night is a confusing time of feeling lost and disoriented, as if the foundation of their life has been pulled out from under them. It’s often triggered by a season of suffering when the ways you used to make sense of the world no longer seem to work.

Sometimes it’s set off by a crisis — a loss, a health challenge, burnout, or a relationship ending. Other times, it creeps in slowly through what I call soul hunger: the quiet sense that something essential is missing, even when life looks good on the outside.

The dark night of the soul is not a sign that you’re broken or wounded. It’s a passage that unravels the layers of your conditioned self — roles, beliefs, and unconscious patterns — so that the deeper truth of who you are can emerge.

Why It’s Really About Your Personality, Not Your Soul

Here is what most people misunderstand: the dark night doesn’t mean your soul is in trouble. Your soul is actually the one initiating the shift. What’s in trouble, what’s being asked to change, is your personality. I wrote an article where I shared what I had learned from over a decade of asking the question, What is the Soul? It’s a powerful question that is actually triggered by the dark night of the soul.

William Meader, an esoteric philosophy teacher, calls our personality our “outer garment.” We develop this persona as children to help us survive, and for a while, it works beautifully. But over time, the same personality patterns that once helped us navigate the world become increasingly rigid. They begin to suffocate the natural expansion of our soul. What once helped us survive starts limiting our growth and blocking deeper connection with what feels meaningful.

The dark night arrives when the strategies and identities that once worked no longer do. Things that once brought comfort or success now feel empty.

Many people describe feeling like:

  • “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
  • “Life looks good on the outside, but I feel broken on the inside.”
  • “I should be grateful, but I feel flat and lost.”

That disconnect is your personality structure — your “outer garment” — beginning to loosen. It can feel terrifying. But it is actually an invitation.

My Own Dark Night

For months, I’d wake up with this unexplained heaviness. I had what many would consider a great life, yet inside, something felt profoundly off. I’d catch myself staring out windows, wondering, Is this it? Is this all there is?

I felt guilty for not being grateful, confused by the emptiness, and scared that something was fundamentally wrong with me.

What I eventually understood was that my personality “outer garment” had been built on the belief that I was meant to suppress my wants and needs and go with the flow of others. I was motivated by being liked and avoiding conflict, and as a result, I had slowly lost my Self.

That pattern served me well for years. It helped me raise a family, maintain a happy marriage, become a successful nurse, and build friendships. Our personality patterns aren’t all bad — they contain real gifts.

But when overdone, they become a prison.

The same way of being that had worked so well began motivating me to make decisions that weren’t aligned with my soul’s path. I felt like something was missing, even though I had so much to be grateful for. My previously meaningful life felt flat. I was burnt out, empty, and lost.

This was my dark night — the beginning of removing that well-worn mask. I had to integrate the parts of myself I’d left behind: my voice, my dreams, my feelings, my needs, my gifts. It was dark and difficult because I had to let go of who I was not and shift into becoming my more authentic self.

That emptiness forced me to retreat into what felt like a cocoon. In that cocoon, I began shedding layers of conditioning, resentments, and outdated beliefs about what it meant to be a “good” woman — until I could finally hear the quiet voice of my soul and what was calling me forward.

A simple, daily meditation practice, mindfulness, nervous system regulation, and the Enneagram of personality became my companions on the path inward.

Growth-Oriented Dark Night vs. Spiritual Crisis

It’s important to distinguish between two different kinds of dark nights.

For some, it’s a growth-oriented dark night of the soul — a season of emptiness, loss of spark, or questioning that, while painful, still allows them to function in daily life. With the right tools and support, this kind of dark night becomes a catalyst for reconnecting with your true self. This is the space where my work lives.

For others, it can feel more like a spiritual crisis — sudden, destabilizing, and overwhelming, with extreme anxiety, despair, or difficulty functioning. This is sometimes referred to as a “spiritual emergency,” and it requires therapeutic or crisis-level support. The Spiritual Crisis Network is a helpful resource if that resonates with your experience.

It’s also worth noting that the dark night can look like depression on the surface, but they aren’t the same thing. Understanding the difference matters.

The In-Between Space: No Longer and Not Yet

As the old self loosens, we enter a strange in-between space where the old no longer fits but the new hasn’t fully arrived. Confusion, emptiness, and questioning everything you once believed are common here.

Psychiatrist Gerald May described it beautifully:

Things that gave us pleasure in the past may now seem empty… Perhaps the career we worked so hard to achieve is not as rewarding as we’d expected. Maybe the love relationship we thought would make us complete has become timeworn and frayed.

In this tender space between no longer and not yet, your personality craves certainty — but the dark night asks you to surrender to the unknown.

How to See Your Personality Patterns

Here’s where most people get stuck. You might sense that something feels off, that you’re living according to old programming, but you can’t quite see the patterns clearly enough to change them.

To truly loosen our identification with personality, we first have to see it. This is where the Enneagram of personality becomes invaluable. As Enneagram teacher Suzanne Stabile says:

A person’s Enneagram type is like a mask, a layer of self-protective personality put on in early childhood. The goal of understanding one’s number is to remove the mask and bring one’s healthy, True Self to light.

The Enneagram gives you the blueprint to see your prison walls clearly. Then practices like meditation and mindfulness give you the tools to find your way to freedom.

7 Truths People Discover in the Dark Night

After speaking with many people who have navigated their own dark night — people I call “way showers” because they help illuminate the path for others — I began to notice consistent patterns in what they discovered. Here are seven truths that appear again and again.

1. The Life You Built No Longer Fits Who You Are

The dark night often arrives when you’ve drifted too far from your soul’s authentic expression — even if your life looks successful from the outside. One way-shower described it this way: “I was a sensitive person working in a left-brain environment. It just wasn’t a fit. I knew I was cracking.”

2. You Stop Living From Your Head and Start Listening to Something Deeper

After navigating the dark night, people stop making decisions from willpower and strategy alone. They learn to listen to a deeper wisdom — what one person described as “the profound place within.” This shift from forcing to flowing is one of the most profound changes people describe.

3. The Pain Isn’t the Problem — It’s Part of the Path

The suffering isn’t something to escape. It’s something to move through consciously. As one way-shower shared: “The more present you can be to the experience and the suffering, the more you will get out of it as it deepens you. It feels like it just continues to free you.”

4. You Begin to Feel Like Yourself, But in a Way You’ve Never Known Before

On the other side, people describe a sense of coming home to themselves that they had never experienced before. “I’ve felt like I’m coming home to the truth of who I am… I’ve said ‘hello’ to a me that hadn’t existed — it’s a powerful and profound feeling.”

The transformation isn’t dramatic in a flashy way. It’s deeper: a lightness of being, the dissolving of old anxiety and people-pleasing, a quiet inner peace.

5. As You Change, Your Life Changes With You

The inner transformation inevitably impacts relationships and work. Some relationships naturally evolve or fall away as you become more authentic. This can feel lonely and disorienting, but it’s part of the process.

6. You Feel Caught Between Who You Were and Who You’re Becoming

During the transition, you’ll feel tension between your old patterns and your emerging self. “A life force is trying to renew. Trying to birth something new and truly life-sustaining.” This internal tension is normal. You’re literally becoming a new version of yourself while your old identity resists change.

7. You Can’t Do This Alone — Support and Practices Become Essential

Every way-shower emphasized how crucial it was to have practices and people supporting the inner journey. “I started meditating daily, and that’s when the powerful changes started. That’s when the healing began.” The dark night asks you to develop new inner capacities. What I call the 4 Keys to Inner Peace — self-regulation, self-love, self-discovery, and self-expression — make all the difference.

The Birth-Death-Rebirth Process

Periods of transformation always involve the death of something that needs to disappear.

Nature teaches us that all life follows the pattern of birth-death-rebirth. In the dark night of the soul, you die to your conditioned patterns and give birth to your more authentic self. As James Hollis wrote:

There is no going forward without a death of some kind: a death of who we thought we were and were supposed to be… But life has other plans; indeed, our own souls have other plans.

This is what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey — hearing the call and responding with courage to embark on a new adventure. While often portrayed as a physical quest, it’s really about the inward journey.

Your personality doesn’t disappear through this process. Instead, it takes on what I call a “luminous quality” and assumes its rightful place in your life: as an outer garment that enables you to express your soul in the world, rather than blocking it.

On the other side of this passage:

  • You feel more peaceful and at home in your own skin
  • You have clarity about who you are and what truly matters
  • You live less from performance and more from authenticity
  • You reconnect with vitality, creativity, and meaning
  • The ache of something missing transforms into a sense of wholeness and alignment

A Message of Hope

If you’re in the midst of your own dark night, I want you to hear this from one of the way-showers I spoke with:

You need to trust that there’s a greater plan for you. You don’t have the foresight or knowledge to anticipate it — and you need to trust. That you are always held. You won’t just be okay; you’ll be better than okay.

The dark night of the soul is not destroying your life. It is dissolving the identity that once protected you so that something more authentic can emerge. The soul isn’t the one in crisis. The soul is the one doing the calling.

And that calling is worth answering.

Moving Forward

This journey asks a lot of us. The uncertainty can feel overwhelming, and the loneliness can be profound. But you don’t have to navigate it alone.

If you’re in a growth-oriented dark night and ready to explore this journey with compassionate guidance, I invite you to schedule a complimentary clarity call.

If you’d like to understand your own personality patterns more deeply, I offer Enneagram discovery sessions and would be honored to explore them with you.

In the following video, I speak with Sharon Stopforth, a psychotherapist, about her journey through the dark night of the soul.