Years ago I had a dark night of the soul in which I owned up to and took responsibility for some behaviors of mine that were not in keeping with the person I would like to think I am. They were learned behaviors, patterns of being I’d grown up with and had modeled to me, but when I realized just how much and how often I was repeating the very behaviors that I knew were harmful, I was horrified.

Around that time, a friend sent me some videos by a guru she liked. In one of them, this person talked about how necessary it is to come face to face with “the full horror of who we are”–to see and accept that not only are we not perfect, sometimes we’re not very nice at all. Not with the goal of saying “oh well, no one else is perfect either” or to find excuses for our bad behavior; rather, to admit that we are not without sin, we are not qualified to judge others, we are not in a position to think ourselves better than anyone else. Most of us need humbling so we can be humble, so we don’t let our egos run the show.

The television show “Will Trent” has been dealing with this issue. The main character, Will Trent, and his ride-or-die friend Angie are both detectives with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who came up through the foster care system and suffered abuse often as children. They are recovering alcoholics as well. They know, better than anyone, what demons lurk in each other’s past, and they have been each other’s mainstays through all of it.

Then Angie makes a mistake. The man who abused Angie when she was a teen gets out of jail and, swearing he’s a changed man, romances a woman with a teenage daughter. Both mother and daughter refuse to listen to Angie’s warnings. But sure enough, he makes a move on the girl, who kills him. Angie conceals evidence and claims that she was the one who shot him, trying to protect the girl.

But Will figures it out. Will is a rule-follower; AA doesn’t work unless you always, always keep to the straight and narrow, and he can’t overlook Angie’s violation of the rules. He arrests her and she goes to jail for a few months. (The girl gets off because it was self-defense.) Angie in turn cannot forgive Will, the person she thought would always have her back no matter what.

Time passes. Angie is released and goes back to work. They speak but realize they can’t fix the situation, as both still feel they were justified to act as they did. They both start dating other people.

Then a terrible thing happens. Will is chasing a person of interest who is running away, when the man turns and shoots. Will shoots back. The bullet ricochets off the man and hits a teenage boy, who dies in Will’s arms before help arrives.

Everyone tells Will he is not to blame, it wasn’t his fault. There’s an inquiry and Will is cleared. But he can’t forgive himself. He cannot tell himself it was not his fault; it was he who shot the bullet that killed the boy. He doesn’t want consolation. He doesn’t want to be taken out of himself and do something enjoyable, as his girlfriend keeps urging him to do. He doesn’t want to move on. He doesn’t want to go to therapy. He wants to feel the full enormity of what he did.

He doesn’t begin to surface from his pain until he says “I am a horrible person” and someone replies “Yes, you are.” Until someone else acknowledges the full horror of what he did, the thing that will always haunt him. And it is Angie, the person who did the thing Will couldn’t forgive, who understands that he can’t forgive himself either, and finally, forgives him. Her acceptance of Will just as he is lets Will take the first step forward into life. I’m guessing that we are going to see a different Will from now on, less rigid, less judgmental–for who is he to judge?

We’re so frightened of looking at our own shadows, the things that lurk in the back of our minds that we don’t want to acknowledge, that cause us to feel shame. Rightfully so, because finally turning to look at those things can mean getting sucked down into a deep pit of despair and self-loathing, as Will is. But until we do, we are fleeing from ourselves, from the totality of who we are–the good and the bad. We may flee by denial, we may flee by distracting ourselves with food or drink or drugs or gambling or sex or any of the many forms of addiction, we may flee by locking down our emotions and becoming heartless monsters. Until we turn and face inward, we are never going to be our true selves, owning up to all that we are.