10/29/2025
The Light Was Me All Along
“You’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in the part where most people quit. Keep going. This is where the 1% is made.”
There have been seasons in my life when the light seemed to vanish completely. Not fade — vanish. The air was thick with despair, the silence deafening, and I found myself walking through what felt like an internal wasteland. I thought it meant I had failed — as a therapist, as a human being, as someone who was supposed to know better.
But now I understand something I didn’t then: the light didn’t go out because I was lost. It went out because it was time for me to discover where it truly lived.
And it wasn’t outside of me.
It was me.
The Darkness That Teaches
Every hero’s journey begins in the dark.
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker’s initiation wasn’t in the thrill of battle or the flash of lightsabers. It began on Dagobah — in the swamp — a place of solitude and self-confrontation. When Yoda sends Luke into the cave, he tells him, “Your weapons — you will not need them.” Inside, Luke faces the image of Darth Vader, strikes it down, and sees his own face beneath the mask.
That is the essence of psychodynamic transformation — the confrontation with the unconscious self. Jung called this the process of shadow integration — the meeting of one’s denied or disowned parts (Jung, 1959). Winnicott (1960) might have called it the death of the false self — the collapse of the adaptive persona we build to survive in environments that could not hold our truth.
For me, that descent began when the external light — the figures, mentors, and systems I had relied on — could no longer hold what I needed them to. The very structures that once anchored me began to disintegrate, forcing me to confront the psychic cave within. It was a descent not into failure, but into authenticity.
The Upside Down
Looking back now, I see that period through the lens of Stranger Things. The “Upside Down” — that hidden, inverted dimension — mirrors the unconscious mind: familiar yet distorted, echoing the real world but saturated in darkness and decay.
That’s what trauma feels like — living in two worlds at once. The outer self that functions, performs, smiles — and the inner self trapped in the shadows, frozen in time.
For years, I tried to seal off the gate between those worlds. I was the strong one, the helper, the healer. I thought if I kept enough light in the outer world, the inner darkness would stay quiet. But the psyche doesn’t want containment — it wants integration.
The monsters of the Upside Down — the Demogorgon, the Mind Flayer — are not unlike our own repressed drives and wounded parts. They grow in power when unacknowledged. Healing doesn’t come from killing them; it comes from facing them, naming them, and reclaiming their energy as our own.
Like Eleven closing the portal with trembling hands, I had to face what had been exiled inside me — the longing, the grief, the rage, the hunger to be seen. These were not enemies to conquer. They were pieces of me asking to come home.
The Fire of Unmaking
Psychodynamically, collapse is not regression; it is transformation. The ego, when stretched beyond its defenses, begins to disintegrate — not to destroy, but to rebuild.
Bowlby (1988) described how early attachment ruptures create internal working models that shape all later relationships. Klein (1946) spoke of the “depressive position” — the painful, necessary step of integrating love and hate toward the same object. And Masterson (1988) described how the self must move through abandonment depression to emerge whole.
Each theory, in its own way, describes the same archetypal process: ego death and rebirth.
For me, that meant grieving illusions — the fantasy that someone else could rescue me, that healing required another person’s light to guide me. The therapeutic relationships that once held me eventually had to fall away so that their lessons could be internalized.
In the language of Star Wars, it was the moment when the guide disappears — when Obi-Wan becomes a voice instead of a body, when Yoda fades and leaves Luke to face his destiny alone. The external holding must eventually become internalized. Winnicott called this “the capacity to be alone in the presence of the other” (1958). I had to learn to hold myself even when no one else was holding me.
Becoming the Light
The realization came quietly — not as revelation, but as reclamation. I was no longer searching for the light to return from somewhere else. I was learning to generate it from within.
This is what Jung (1961) called individuation — the process of becoming who we truly are, not by rejecting the darkness but by integrating it.
For years, my identity had been shaped around being the healer — the one who holds light for others. But healing required me to see that I was also the one who needed holding, and that both truths could coexist without contradiction.
The light I had been chasing was never missing; it was dormant, buried under years of over-functioning and self-protection. As I began to trust the process — to allow grief, anger, and longing to coexist — I found that the light was not a return to who I once was. It was the birth of who I had always been.
The Alchemy of Endurance
In The Last Jedi, Yoda reminds Luke:
“The greatest teacher, failure is.”
The 1% isn’t defined by success. It’s defined by endurance — by the willingness to stay in the dark long enough to let your eyes adjust. To not flee the discomfort. To trust that the absence of light is not the absence of life.
Every time I stayed instead of running, something new emerged — not strength in the heroic sense, but quiet solidity. Every time I sat in silence and refused to numb, another spark returned.
The light didn’t reappear because I was rescued.
It reappeared because I remembered who I was.
The Return of the Light
All great stories — Star Wars, Stranger Things, or the arc of human development — lead to the same truth: integration. The hero doesn’t banish the dark; they bring it home.
When I emerged from my own cave, I realized the world hadn’t changed — I had. I no longer needed to be carried or mirrored to exist. The light I once sought from others now burned within me — steady, self-sustaining, alive.
Because the light was never gone.
It was just waiting for me to remember I was the source.
“I thought I was waiting for the dawn. But the dawn was waiting for me.”
References
Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Masterson, J. F. (1988). The Search for the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Disorders of Our Age. Free Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, 416–420.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. International Universities Press.
Dr. Kimberly S. Benson LMHC, CAP, CCTP
Edited with the assistance of AI for grammar, flow & illustration
