Finding Light in the Dark: Mental Health Lessons from the Solstice
By Jen Bennethum
The Sacred Pause of Maximum Darkness
On December 21st, we reach the winter solstice—the longest night of the year. In our always-on culture that fears stillness and medicates away discomfort, the solstice arrives as an ancient teacher, reminding us that darkness has always been part of the cycle. This isn't about finding silver linings or rushing toward the light. It's about honoring where we are when the darkness feels total, when hope seems impossibly distant, when we can barely imagine spring will come again. Our nervous systems know these rhythms intimately—they feel the shift before our thinking minds can make sense of it.
Honor where you are even when the darkness feels like that is all there is.
When Your Inner Landscape Mirrors Winter
For those living with depression, anxiety, or trauma, the solstice can feel less like metaphor and more like daily reality. The darkness isn't poetic—it's the weight on your chest each morning, the fog that makes simple tasks feel insurmountable, the isolation that deepens even in rooms full of people. This is embodied experience—not just thoughts about darkness but darkness lived in the body. Seasonal Affective Disorder compounds this for many, as shortened days trigger very real neurochemical changes. Our bodies, wiser than we credit them, attune to the earth's rhythms, sometimes pulling us into hibernation modes that modern life won't accommodate. This isn't weakness or failure. It's biology meeting biography in the depths of winter, our autonomic nervous system responding to ancient cues of survival.
The Wisdom of Imperceptible Shifts
Here's what the solstice knows that we might forget: the very moment darkness reaches its peak, it begins—imperceptibly—to recede. You won't see it on December 22nd. The sunrise will come perhaps one minute earlier, a change so subtle your eyes can't track it. But the turn has happened. I might equate this to planting a seed, you won’t see anything at first. This mirrors how bottom-up healing works—not through cognitive override but through tiny, somatic shifts. The day you notice your shoulders drop a fraction. The moment your breath naturally deepens. When you feel safe enough to cry. These micro-movements of regulation are your minutes of returning light, too small to see but absolutely real. Your body remembers how to thaw, even when your mind insists on permanent winter.
Honoring Both Descent and Return
Ancient cultures understood something we've lost: darkness serves a purpose. Seeds germinate underground. Bears birth cubs in the depths of winter dens. The earth itself needs this fallow time to restore what endless productivity depletes. In trauma work, we call this dorsal vagal—the profound shutdown that protects us when fighting or fleeing won't work. It's the freeze response that gets pathologized but actually saved your life. Perhaps our psyches need winter too. This doesn't romanticize depression or minimize suffering—clinical darkness differs from natural cycles. But it does suggest that fighting every moment of sadness, exhaustion, or withdrawal might be like cursing winter for not being spring. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is acknowledge: yes, this is a dark time. Yes, it's hard. Yes, your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe.
Rituals for the Longest Night
Cultures worldwide have always marked the solstice with rituals—not to banish darkness but to companion it. They lit candles not to deny the night but to promise themselves they could endure it. This is resourcing in action—building felt sense memories of warmth and light to carry through dark times. What rituals might serve your embodied self? Perhaps it's writing down what you're ready to release as the year wanes, feeling the weight of the paper, the pen in your hand. Maybe it's lighting a candle for everyone else navigating their own longest nights, watching the flame flicker like your own ventral vagal system coming back online. It could be as simple as placing a hand on your heart, acknowledging what you've survived this year, letting your body know: I see you. I honor what you've carried.
Moving Forward: Trust in Cycles
As we stand at the threshold of winter's deepest night, remember that no feeling—however consuming—is permanent. The earth knows how to tilt back toward light, and somewhere in your depths, beneath the frost and frozen ground, your body holds this same knowing. The return might be gradual, measured in minutes of daylight and moments of regulation so slight you'll miss them if you're watching too hard. But return is written into the very structure of things—into your neuroplasticity, into your capacity for post-traumatic growth.
If you're ready to explore this embodied path back to your own light, consider approaches that honor your body's wisdom. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can help your nervous system process what got stuck in the dark. IFS (Internal Family Systems) can help you tend to the parts of you still living in eternal winter, bringing them warmth and witness. Somatic therapies can teach you to track sensation, to notice the subtle thaw, to trust your body's own knowing of how to return to spring. These approaches understand that true healing doesn't come from thinking your way out of darkness but from helping your nervous system remember what safety feels like, one breath, one moment, one tiny shift at a time.
On this solstice, you don't have to manufacture hope or force gratitude. You just have to trust the turn, even when—especially when—you can't yet see the light returning. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is simply stay here, breathing in the dark, knowing that dawn comes not because we've earned it, but because that's what dawn does. And maybe, just maybe, we can let our bodies teach us how to do the same. Please feel free to reach out to us at Integrate Therapy and Wellness Collective for more information about therapy or if you want us to walk with you on your journey to wholeness!
