Connect to Your Dark Side to Heal

Accepting anxiety, anger, envy, and schadenfreude enables joy to emerge.

Posted November 4, 2025 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” —Carl

Connecting to every aspect of your existence is critical to healing. This is particularly true of survival reactions meant to protect you, but that are intentionally unpleasant.

The need to be and feel safe is a deep, driving force of all life. However, it is not by any means a given that you’ll be safe. Life is competitive, and living creatures are always on alert. Dolphins and whales sleep with one eye open. Many animals live in caves or burrows. Horses and giraffes can sleep standing up. Countless creatures communicate warning signals and form groups to defend themselves against predators.

We humans share the same basic needs of sheltering and defending ourselves from external threats. One trait that sets us dramatically apart from other species is language. While language extends our communication skills far beyond those of other species, it also creates an extra level of complexity and vulnerability.

Your body’s alert system is like a personal brain scanner, and it cannot be turned off. Don’t think that solving a given problem is going to decrease your anxiety for any length of time. Your mind will quickly find another target of worry.

When you don’t feel safe, you’ll experience the survival quartet, always beginning with anxiety. The four core survival responses dominate human emotional experience, all serving the same fundamental purpose of keeping you alive in a threatening world.

The sensations you experience with each of these emotions are created by your physiological state. We have no cognitive control over these powerful reactions. They are biological functions, not moral categories. Your powerful physiology drives behaviors more than conscious interpretation. Much of human cruelty and harmful behavior does not emerge from inherent evil but rather from individuals caught in cascading cycles of personalized survival responses.

Anxiety evolved to be deeply unpleasant. Words fail to convey the depth of discomfort that people will do nearly anything to avoid or escape. Anger is even more powerful, and it's addictive. Masking feelings of fear , it has evolved to be destructive, fueling a last-ditch survival reaction. Schadenfreude feels good. 1 Often, watching someone else's failure or suffering prompts activation of the brain’s pleasure circuits.. The reaction is especially intense if the person is a competitor or someone you dislike, which indicates that you have increased your odds of survival. All these sensations are disruptive to your peace of mind and create a sense of unease. But your body is simply doing its job of protecting you.

Most often, bad behavior and repetitive unpleasant thoughts (RUTs) stem from misinterpretation of survival responses: taking them personally at face value. We often suppress or repress the sensations quickly. However, suppressing disconcerting thoughts and emotions intensifies the threat physiology from which they originate. shrinks the memory center of the brain, increases opioid craving, and creates generalized chaos in both the body and the brain. 2 Suppression is a conscious action, whereas repression is automatic and below the level of conscious awareness. Suppression is a maladaptive control tactic: We don’t like to feel bad, so we don’t.

A vital step, one of four, in calming your nervous system is to separate your identity from the body's survival reactions. Anxiety, envy, anger, and schadenfreude are sensations that you have, not who you are. However, it is essential to allow yourself to feel them deeply, even to allow yourself to react.

But when you’re in a reaction, train yourself to take no verbal or physical action, except in proper self-defense. Use your skills to calm down as quickly as you can to avoid acting out in destructive ways.

Not feeling the sensations means that you are suppressing them. You must feel where you are before you can change direction. There are many words to describe these physiological sensations, but they can be broadly grouped into the four main categories articulated: anxiety, anger, schadenfreude, and envy. Learn to live with them, and really live. Joy will emerge.

Hidehiko Takahashi et al., When Your Gain Is My Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude, Science 323, no. 5916 (2009): 937–39. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1165604 .
Eric L. Garland et al., “hought Suppression as a Mediator of the Association between Depressed Mood and Prescription Opioid Craving among Chronic Pain Patients, Journal of Behavioral Medicine 39, no. 1 (2016): 128–38, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-015-9675-9 .

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David Hanscom David Hanscom is an orthopedic spine surgeon who now teaches methods for solving chronic mental and physical pain. His newest book is Calm Your Body, Heal Your Mind: Transcending Pain, Anxiety, Anger, and Repetitive Unwanted Thoughts.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.