What the Dark Knight of the Soul Actually Feels Like

In this episode of Life A Blog, Trina opens up about a week that felt heavy in a way that didn’t quite make sense. On paper, everything is moving forward—but emotionally, something deeper is being processed. What unfolds is a raw and honest reflection on guilt, solitude, and what it actually feels like to move through what many call the “dark night of the soul.”

This episode explores the quiet discomfort that comes after you’ve made the right decisions—ending a partnership that no longer aligned, walking away from a relationship filled with red flags, and finally choosing yourself. And yet, even in clarity, guilt shows up. Not because something is wrong—but because old patterns, old conditioning, and childhood wiring are still catching up to who you’re becoming.

Through deeply personal stories about her mother, past relationships, and generational patterns, Trina unpacks how we learn to normalize chaos, mistake familiarity for safety, and carry emotional responsibilities that were never ours to begin with. She reflects on what it means to break those cycles—even when it feels lonely, even when it feels uncertain.

Featuring the song Friday Night Heartbreaker by Jon Pardi, this episode looks at the patterns we knowingly walk into—the red flags we see but ignore, the thrill that disguises itself as connection, and the realization that not everything we can survive is something we should stay in.

The theme is transformation through solitude: understanding that healing doesn’t always feel peaceful, that growth can feel disorienting, and that sometimes the hardest—but most important—thing you can do is stay in the quiet long enough to hear yourself again.

If you’re sitting in that space right now—between what was and what’s next—feeling the weight of your decisions but also sensing something shifting… this episode is for you. 

Always remember with everything you're going through, every song has a story and every story has a song.

Transcript

pring Depression And Unnamed Guilt

SPEAKER_00 0:13

You know, I have had a strange week, and I apologize for not being on last week. I think a lot of people would call it seasonal depression, and I do have bouts of it in the spring. Oddly enough, most people get it in the fall, so I hear, but I get it in the spring, and this has been for years and years, and nothing catastrophic has happened. The business is moving forward, the chaos that used to surround me isn't there anymore. And on paper, everything should really be quite calm. But emotionally I've been feeling heavy, and I started noticing this creeping in. Guilt. And the strange part is there's no logical reason for it. The business partnership ended because the work stopped happening, and that's the reality. If you want to stay a partner in something, you have to show up and build it with the other person. That's how partnerships work, and yet I still feel guilty. Then there's the relationship side of it, letting go who was already halfway back to the life he left, conversations with his ex, and then conversations with me, plans that were forming that had nothing to do with me, so I made a decision I chose to be alone. Not because I can't be with someone, but because I finally understand what happens when you ignore the warning signs and convince yourself things will change. And still, when you're sitting here all alone, there's that guilt. And I think I know where it comes from. When you grow up in environments where you're trained to manage other people's emotions, you start believing that everyone's out everyone's outcome are somehow your own responsibility. If someone struggles, you feel responsible. If someone gets angry, you feel responsible. If someone falls apart, you look at yourself first. It's a childhood framing that follows you into adulthood. So when you finally start setting boundaries, your brain interprets it as you're doing something wrong, even when you're doing something right. The past two weeks honestly felt like what people call the dark night of the soul. That strange period where you've already left the chaos behind, but your mind and body are still processing everything that happened. It's uncomfortable. You question yourself, you replay decisions, you wonder if you were too harsh, too cold, too quick. But the thing is, when you start being alone, it actually feels freeing and great, and you can do your own thing. But I finally understand why people recommend between relationships, between partnerships, you take that break to truly go through what you need to go through. And a lot of the time, sometimes the discomfort isn't that because you made a wrong decision, it's because you made the right one. And your old wiring hasn't caught up yet. And I think that's why solitude matters. I'm feeling it, I'm seeing it. When you're constantly surrounded by people, you can avoid these transitions, you can distract yourself with conversations, relationships, noise. But when you're alone, the truth shows up, the grief shows up, the growth shows up, and you have to sit with it. It is hard. I'm realizing that these quiet periods aren't punishment. It's a recalibration, if you will. There's a space where you become someone different. And sitting with it this past two weeks maybe realize something else. Growth doesn't feel the way we expect it to. And people talk about healing like this peaceful, enlightened place where everything suddenly makes sense. You see it all the time on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. But the truth is, most of the time it feels disorienting. Because when chaos disappears, something strange happens. Your nervous system doesn't know what to do with the quiet. I have watched numerous shows. Shameless, superstore, funny, sad documentaries. You're still sitting with it. For years, I've been responding to problems, fixing things, managing emotions that were never mine to carry, trying to stabilize situations that were already broken long before I arrived. And that becomes normal. So when life finally slows you down, your brain starts scanning for the next problem. And when it can't find one, it creates guilt instead. And peace feels unfamiliar when you spend years in surviving chaos.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

And that brings me to a song that I've been thinking about this week. And mom.

Country Song About Red Flags

ow To Survive The Dark Night

amily Support And Daily Structure

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Last Friday was my mom's birthday. She would have been eighty four. But she passed away a few years ago with throat cancer. And whenever that day comes around, I find myself thinking about mothers in a different way than most people do. When people talk about their moms, they often talk about warmth, safety, unconditional love. My story with my mom is a little bit more complicated than that. For most of my life, my mother and I had a very tumultuous relationship. She each struggled with alcoholism, and growing up there were nights where I would drive past our house as a teenager and see the lights on at ten o'clock at night, and I knew exactly what that meant. I would tell my boyfriend at the time who later became my husband, just to keep driving. We would circle around the bay and wait until the lights finally went off, because I knew if I walked to that door while those lights were on, trouble was waiting for me. We would drive around the bay and I could see right across the bay because they had these recessed lights outside. And we were halfway around, I'd say, Yep, I think she's gone to bed. And that was the rhythm of our relationships for years. And as embarrassing as it was sometimes, I accepted it. When you're a child and your parent behaves in ways that feels chaotic or unpredictable, you really don't have a choice. You love them, you adapt, you try to make sense of something that doesn't make sense. There were moments as a kid when I felt incredibly embarrassed by my mom. The confrontational moments, the sharp words, the tension you could feel in the room. But she was still my mom. So I accepted it. And what surprised me later in life was realizing that I carried that same acceptance into my adult relationships. When I grew up and had my own home, my mom still had a very strong presence in my life. For a long time she tried to step into my household the same way she had run hers. I would have knots in my stomach every time she'd visit, and my personality would change drastically until I had to draw a line. I remember telling her something that felt almost impossible to say to your own mother, This is my home. You cannot come in here and take over as the matriarch of my house. Setting that boundary changed things between us. We didn't talk for a few months, but eventually we came. But the moment that completely shifted how I understood my mother happened years later. You see, when I left my marriage, I told my mom about the drug addiction because, you know, she had dealt with drug and alcoholism all of her life. My brother was a drug addict. He died in 1999 at 36 years old with a drug addiction. So she seemed to be accepting of that, as strange as that sounds. But I hid the sex addiction of my husband for a very long time. That part of the story felt too humiliating to say out loud, and I knew once I told my mom, my marriage was definitely over. One day we were sitting on my balc on my balcony, and I told her the truth. And what she said next stopped me in my tracks. She looked at me and said, I'm so proud of you for leaving, because I never left. You see, my my entire life I put my father on a pedestal. In my mind, he was the stable one, the strong one, the hero in the story. And in that very moment, something shifted. And I was silent, and I felt sad. And I also felt jilted. I asked her why she stayed. She told me something that belonged to her generation. She had two children, she was a homemaker. Women in her time didn't have the same opportunities. Marriage wasn't something you walked away from, it was something you endured. She didn't know she would have support how she could have supported us on her own. And suddenly the anger that I carried toward my mom for so many years started to look different. Her drinking, her bitterness, her sharpness. Those things weren't just personality traits. They were scars of a woman who stayed in a life that broke her heart. And you know, during this time of darkness that I'm going through right now, I can see why she felt that way. And at the same time, she shared that with me. I was struggling with my own patterns. I was drinking too much. I was filled with remorse. I was trying to salvage a marriage that was never going to be salvaged. Truly, once a marriage is over, it's over. And she looked at me and said something I'll never forget. She said she could see the road I was going down, and it looked a lot like the road she had gone down. Then she told me something that changed the way I saw everything. She said she was proud of me, and she told me to state the course. She didn't want me repeating the life she had lived. What she didn't know at the time was that I was already seeing someone else. He told me his marriage had been separated for four years, that things were basically over. Later I realized the truth was far more complicated. And my parents met him, they enjoyed his company, he was funny, charming, easy to talk to. But they also saw something that I couldn't see at the time. They saw patterns. Not necessarily my father, but my mom sir sure did. They saw that the man I had chosen carried some of the same energy I had grown up around. And after my parents passed away, I realized something else about myself. I had never really been alone. I had gone from my marriage to caring for my parents, then directly into another relationship, and that relationship turned out to be incredibly toxic. And he had shared some insight in his life. And the way he spoke about his life was very familiar to the way my mother had spoken about hers. They stayed. They stayed inside relationships that were hurting them. Both of them were people who had been ridiculed for being snappy, confrontational, difficult. But when I look back now, I see something different. Those traits were armor. They had both experienced deep hurt and betrayal. Instead of leaving those environments, they stayed and hardened inside them. Underneath that armor were people who had wonderful qualities. They were funny, charismatic, capable of warmth, but neither of them ever fully stepped outside the life that was hurting them long enough to rediscover those brighter parts of themselves. And, you know, along with all of the feelings, the guilt, the sorrow, the dark night of the soul that I've been going through, that makes me sad. And I look at people very differently now. Instead of anger, I look at them with sadness, wishing that they had made better choices to see their own light. And I also recognize something else. Their lives taught me a tremendous amount. They show me what happens when people stay inside cycles of pain. And because of that, they also helped show me why leaving matters. So on my mother's birthday, the thing I chose to remember was this. She was proud of me. She was proud that I broke a cycle. She never felt she had the ability to break herself. And if you're listening tonight and you're sitting at a crossroads in your life, I want you to hear something clearly. Leaving abuse is lonely, and choosing yourself can be terrifying. Walking away from what everyone else thinks you should do can feel like stepping into complete darkness. But sometimes that is exactly what empowerment looks like. Standing in the loneliness, breaking the cycle, and building a life that previous generations never had the chance to create. Sometimes the greatest gift our parents give us is not the life they lived, it's the courage they inspire in us to live differently. So I'm going to talk about a song that I would play in jest, I guess you would say, for lack of better words. And there was some truth to it. However, I never really dove into the song to really uh understand it completely. It's Friday Night Heartbreaker by John Pardy. And at its core, that song is about desire disguised as a warning. The narrator isn't singing about some deep love story. He's singing about a woman who walks into the room like a bad decision everyone can already see coming. The whole song really runs on tension. She knows she's trouble. She's pulled in anyway. The phrase Friday night matters because it's signals impulse, nightlife booze, bad judgment, that emotional chaos that feels exciting before it feels expensive. And musically, the track leans to that energy. Electric guitar, steel guitar, fiddle. It's polished, honky tonk, if you will. Not a soft romance, it's swagger and temptation. But here's the interesting part the woman in the song almost becomes a symbol. The girl you want, the girl you should avoid, the girl everyone blames for their own lack of discipline. And underneath it all, the real story isn't about her. It's about men walking towards something they already know will hurt them. They see the red flags, they just decide the thrill is worth it. And that's why the song works. Because if we're honest, most of us had had moments like this in life. I've had them many times. We knew something wasn't good for us, and we went there anyway. I know I did. And when I listen to it now, though, it lands differently because I'm starting to understand something about patterns. When you grow up around dysfunction, chaos feels familiar and it feels good. The emotional roller coaster feels like chemistry. The unpredicta unpredictability feels like passion. And the warning signs don't always look like danger. They look like something you already know how to survive, and you probably can survive them. But are you surviving them happily? And that really resonated with me. It's I don't want those patterns. I want something more, and if I have to wait to another lifetime to experience it, I'm going to wait. Because I don't want those patterns to enter my life again. And I think my mom up there is probably watching me down here thinking, just wait. There's better things to come very soon. And you know, sometimes the hardest decision you'll ever make is walking away. Walking away from something that still has chemistry, walking away from someone you understand, walking away from something that feels familiar. Because familiarity isn't always safety. Sometimes it's just a pattern repeating itself. And breaking patterns doesn't feel triumphant. It feels quiet, it feels lonely, it feels dark. It feels like this strange emotional hangover where your body is still bracing for chaos, it never arrives. And it's so crazy in my quiet, dark night. I think I am waiting for that chaos, and it never comes. And I think that's where I'm being deeply affected. But it's actually getting easier. I'm actually seeing light at the end of the tunnel. It's it's a it's tough. And I'm gonna go through some things that you can do to help yourself while you're going through this dark night. And I just want to remind you, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist. I'm simply sharing reflections from my own life and experiences. This podcast is meant for conversation and entertainment, not professional advice. But if you're in that space right now, separation, grief, sitting alone in the quiet, here are a few things that actually help me move through it. First, I stop trying to rush my rush myself out of it. There's a real instinct to fix the feeling as quickly as possible, fill the time, talk to someone new, stay busy, stay distracted. But this part isn't meant to be skipped. This is where the clarity comes from. If you rush it, you carry the same patterns into the next chapter. And second is to pay attention to your thoughts, not just your emotions. The emotions hit hard, but the thoughts underneath them are what shape how long you stay there. If your mind keeps going to I should have done more, or maybe I was too much, catch that. That's old wiring talking, not truth. Third is get honest about the pattern, not just the person. It's easy to focus on who hurt you or what went wrong. But the real growth comes from asking, why did this feel familiar? What did I overlook? What did I tolerate that I wouldn't now? And fourth is protect your environment. And I mean that in a very practical way. What you listen to, what you scroll, who you talk to. Shameless definitely wasn't something I should have been binge watching while I was going through all this. If everything around you is feeding the past, you'll stay in it longer than you need to. You don't have to isolate yourself, but you do need to be intentional about what you let in. This week I let my son, my daughter-in-law, and my little grandson in, and it was a great week with a lot of smiles, and it really brought me into seeing that family is a huge component of life. And when they left, I realized that, you know, our kids are only little for so long, and you gotta let them fly free. And leaving today, I was very sad to see them go, knowing that I'd be alone again. But I was very proud to see that little family of three get in the car and drive away as a package. And it just makes me proud to see that I've raised such a great son. I got a great daughter-in-law, and I got the most beautiful grandson ever. And fourth, fifth, excuse me. Create small structure in your day. When everything feels heavy, even simple things can anchor you. Get outside, move your body, make your bed, cook something. Not because it fixes everything, but because it reminds your brain that life is still moving forward. I've got into making sourdough. I made a lot of food while my kids were here. It seems that emptying the dishwasher and filling it up again has become quite the fixation in my life. And keeping things orderly because I often lived in chaos and let things go, where now I'm finding that moving around the house and getting things in order and keeping things organized actually feels good.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

I'm not through it yet. But I'm almost there. And six.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Let the quiet teach you something. This is the part most people avoid. But when you sit in it long enough, you start to hear yourself again. What you actually want, what you won't accept anymore, what peace feels like without someone else in the room. And finally, don't confuse loneliness with a bad decision. Just because it feels uncomfortable doesn't mean you made the wrong call. Sometimes loneliness is just a space between who you were and who you're becoming. The dark night will feel dark. There's no way around that. But it's not there to break you. It's there to separate you from everything that no longer fits your life. And I'm blessed that I've actually took the time this time around to actually go through it. And if you can stay in it long enough without running back to what hurt you, all we can hope for is that we'll come out different.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

And if you're in that space right now, just know this.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

You're not behind, you're not broken, you're in transition. Understand the lessons that you're going to learn through this. Understand what role you play.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

And try to analyze whether you need to fix it or keep it.

ransition Mindset And Closing

SPEAKER_00 23:45

This part feels quiet for a reason. It's where everything resets. So take your time with it. I'll see you next week. It's going to be a heck of a busy week for me, so I'll probably be doing my podcast on Saturday or Sunday. But take care and always know that you can reach me and ask any questions you have about what you're going through because I will respond.