Carl Jung said the foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

Jungian analyst James Hollis writes about what he calls existential guilt. He says, “The ironic consciousness can see the flawed choices, can understand their consequences, but this knowledge is neither redemptive nor avoidable. Such a person is always left with a troubled consciousness, but at least, as Jung pointed out, he or she is thereby less like to contribute to the burdens of society.”

What he calls existential guilt, I call abiding shadows, those parts of ourselves that got us in trouble at 18, again at 38 and 58, and will probably still be getting us in trouble at 88. Try as we might, we just can’t rid ourselves of these tendencies. They are often the shadows sides of our strengths. One of mine is a tendency to speak when it would have been better to keep my mouth shut. I have a plaque that reads, “It’s all right to have an unexpressed thought.” I keep it in a prominent place because I need to keep it in a prominent place.

Hollis writes, “Perhaps this existential guilt is the most difficult to bear. To know oneself responsible, not only for the things done, but the many undone, may broaden one’s humanity but it also deepens the pain.”

His words remind me of a stanza I have committed to memory from William Butler Yeats’ poem, Vacillation:

Though summer sunlight gild cloudy leafage of the sky

Or wintry moonlight sink the field in storm-scattered intricacy

I cannot look thereon, responsibility so weighs me down

Things said or done long years ago or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do weigh me down

And not a day but something is recalled

My conscience or my vanity appalled

In the previous stanza he talked about the great sense of wonder experienced after he turned 50, that he was blessed and could bless. He kept both parts of himself in close proximity in the poem, I suppose because they are in close proximity in real life.

In her book, Own Your Self, Dr. Kelly Brogan writes about how modern medicine rushes to treat people struggling through depression by prescribing SSRIs and other medications. Anti-depressants have been very helpful to me over the years. In my opinion, the problem is not their use. It is that we rush to use them, and even more problematic, we use them to avoid doing the work to which depression calls us.

Most of my clients who experience depression are working through legitimate existential issues that are depressing. Ultimately, a good bit of life is working through such issues. Brogan writes supportively of the work of Carl Jung and depth psychotherapists who focus on working through problems, not medicating them into submission.

A couple of years ago, for about six months, I went through a period of great struggle. There were decisions I had made born of my own abiding shadows. As I worked through my issues, friends and family were concerned. “You’re not okay,” they said. I did not disagree. I was not okay.

I preached about it more than I should have, but that period of struggle was absolutely necessary for my personal growth. I remember saying to Cathy, “I must be fundamentally different as Paula than I was as Paul. I never had to deal with these kinds of personal issues before.” She said, “Actually, you’ve always been this way. As a man, you just got a free pass, that’s all. Now people are calling you on your shit.” That was a sobering revelation. Powerful white men get a free pass. Women do not.

Did I like going through that period? Of course not, it was awful. I lost 15 pounds and wore out my welcome with my closest friends. Was it necessary? Absolutely. Well, if I want to keep growing it was necessary.

Too often people are delivered by fate, or the gods, or their prayers into the desert, but retreat as soon as they arrive. I see people do this in therapy all the time. The second we get close to the real issues, they bolt for the door, occasionally literally.

The only way through the desert is through the desert, and the wisdom gained in that dry land is essential for the accumulation of wisdom. Great successes make you a little wiser. Great failures are the birthplace of greater wisdom, but only if you abide in those failure, until your ego is broken and your soul can rise. Those experiences do not destroy your sense of self. They hone your sense of self.

None of us can go through the dark night without honest, steadfast companions and spiritual guides. Those folks  have been there and know that while religion is for those afraid of hell, spirituality is for those who have already been there.

My doctorate is in pastor care, a variation of pastoral counseling. We have the same training as LPCs, MSWs, or psychologists. In our case, woven through our education is a spiritual perspective, often appearing as a crimson thread through the tapestry of the therapy experience.

We are inherently spiritual creatures. Our spirituality is driven by the right hemisphere of the brain, the part of the brain that is more holistic and focused on experiences, not facts, the left brain’s focus. Since the beginning of the modern age, religion sought respectability by making itself a left brain endeavor full of facts, rules, and regulations. It failed miserably. Religion should have stayed in the right brain, where it finds is greatest expression.

The right brain came online in the species long before the left. It comes online in infants earlier than the left. Pastoral counselors tend to focus on the right brain because, well, as a therapist, that’s where the money is. Most unresolved issues that result in suffering are born of unintegrated experiences.

The Buddha said life is suffering. The only path to true wisdom, the kind that leaves the world a better place than you found it, is through suffering. If we choose to suffer well, not only will we find a more redemptive life, we will be living our lives for the greater good.