I have been watching a Korean series called “Through the Darkness.” It tracks one of the earliest criminal profilers from South Korea as he develops insight into the minds of serial killers. He must enter some very dark places in his work—both inside his own psyche and those of the people he’s studying.

Most striking to me is how many of these killers have horrible childhoods. The profiler starts to see he has to face his own past as well if he is to understand his subjects. That element really spoke to me. For me, the healing process has exactly been like that.

Working through childhood complex trauma is not a tidy or gentle process. Sometimes it’s terrifying. It means stepping into the suffering you have spent your entire life attempting to evade. It means facing your family, your past, your own inner shadows honestly and acknowledging how much events you did not choose have shaped who you are now.

But every time I enter the darkness, I come out altered, just as the profiler in the series does. I come out with more clarity. More compassion. More understanding—not just of my past, but of myself. And oddly, also of other people. Particularly those who bear their own buried suffering in ways that might seem to be destructive or perplexing from the outside.

We all carry monsters within us. Suffering can twist us into things we never intended to be. Still, the goal isn’t to deny that. The point is to face it—to learn how to sit with it, grow from it, and slowly, with patience and practice, start to integrate it. That’s where the healing begins.

Some days the weight of it is too great. When that occurs, I go back to the fundamentals—just sitting in silence, breathing into my belly, reminding myself that I’m still here. That I made it through. Again.

This is the heart of the work I’m doing through Dao of Transforming Trauma—offering ways to navigate this difficult path using the wisdom of the Daoist healing arts.