Blood of the Depths: My Path with Darkness (Part IV)
Dark ocean waters with a hand reaching out from the depths, under stormy skies, symbolizing emergence and transformation.
The Baptism
I was born into the underworld. This is both poetic and literal.
The underworld is not merely a mythic place but a state of being—a realm beneath the surface where what is hidden festers, transforms, or devours. It is the domain of the forgotten, the exiled, the too much and the not enough. A place where truths are raw, unfiltered, and often unbearable to those who dwell in the light.
My mother was an unconscious, dark goddess—unpredictable, consuming, and vast in her shadowed power, though she never claimed it. My father, an uninitiated magician, full of lost incantations and untapped potential, forever reaching for something beyond his grasp. Together, they wove the underworld into my bones before I even knew its name.
I was the only child in a house of chaos and fire, a front-row witness to destruction and rebirth playing out in real-time. My parents were locked in an endless cycle of collision—rage and ruin, passion and devotion, unraveling and returning. Their storms pulled me in, made me part of it. There was no neutral ground, no place to stand untouched.
The air in our home was thick with extremes—anger that cracked like a whip, depression that sunk everything into slow, suffocating silence. Substance-fueled highs burned bright before collapsing into aching lows. But just as present was love, fierce and consuming, admiration spilling out in grand gestures before turning to ashes the next day. Life here was never still. It surged, devoured, and remade itself constantly.
Outside our walls, the pattern continued. We were working-class, living on the edge of things, circling the underbelly of the world. My father, a bass musician and singer, played in night clubs, and I would join, watching the stage lights flicker over faces lost in sound and smoke. These places pulsed with raw energy—people drinking, drugging, playing until they became something more, or maybe something less. For a while in the spaces, it was intoxicating, alive. But as the night dragged on, the glow would dim, and the same people who had once howled with laughter sat slumped over tables, lost in the quiet loneliness that usually came after.
On weekends, our home became an extension of those spaces. The parties were loud, reckless, electric with something untamed. Laughter, shouting, music vibrating through the walls. And yet, there was always a moment when the energy turned—when celebration tipped into chaos, when an argument would break out, when the night revealed its teeth.
This was my inheritance. This rhythm of creation and collapse, of reckless joy and violent endings, of love that could turn brutal in an instant. I was shaped by it-forging me for what I was to become. But inheritance is not just what is given; it is also what is demanded. Some inherit wealth or tradition. I inherited fire, a lineage of destruction and rebirth, a path that required something of me before I even knew I was walking it.
The In-Between
In my early adolescence, I lost my older sister to a heroin overdose. At the end of my 13th year, I got my first real taste of actual death—not just the metaphorical kind I had lived with my whole life, but something irreversible, something that split reality in two. There have been many deaths since, but this one was the first true gateway. A catalyst. The original portal of death that I stepped through. It opened something in me, sharpened something that had already been forming beneath the surface. It wasn’t just grief; it was a pull, an unshakable awareness of death as something more than an ending.
But if I’m being honest, this pull didn’t start then. Even as a young child, before I had the language for it, I was drawn to death. Skeletons, graveyards, anything that hinted at what lay beyond—I was mesmerized. I loved creatures of the underground, the ones lurking beneath the surface, half-hidden but still alive. Maybe I thought I was just a product of my environment, that I loved dark things because I came from a dark family. But it was deeper than that. It wasn’t just what surrounded me—it was something in me.
My sister didn’t live with us. She was my half-sister, raised in another home with her father. So in our house, I was still the only child, but now I carried this invisible tether to loss, this awareness that something had been severed. My family was destroyed in its own way, but I was the one who felt like I had crossed a threshold.
That crossing set me on a path. I wanted to understand—death, the psyche, the forces moving beneath the surface of things. Depth psychology became my way in. Carl Jung cracked something open in me, gave me a map for the territory I had always wandered. LSD expanded it further, shattering my perception and rearranging it into something truer. I had always been drawn to the depths, but now I was starting to see them with new eyes.
That pull toward the depths became something I could shape into a path. I pursued a master’s degree in clinical counseling, moving toward licensure as a therapist. If Jung cracked something open, formal training gave me words for what I experienced—for what had shaped me without my consent. Trauma, attachment, all the ways we learn to survive what we don’t receive. But learning this language also did something else. It created a sense of lack, of something missing, as if reducing my experiences to theories stripped them of their raw power. It made me feel shame for what I didn’t get, for what I had been shaped by. It pulled me away, for a time, from the magick that was destined to be mine.
But I am a person of contrast-a walking contradiction. I learn by immersion, by moving so deeply into something that I have no choice but to emerge on the other side. This was no different. I had to go to the depths of understanding before I could find the next part. Before I could return to what had been there all along.
As someone with a Scorpio stellium—my sun, Venus, and Uranus all clustered in the 10th house of legacy and impact—descent is a natural state for me. I strip things down to their raw essence, pulling them apart until all that remains is truth. For over a decade, I examined my past through the lens of trauma and attachment—what I lacked, what I didn’t receive, what was imprinted onto me by the chaos of my upbringing. But at some point, I stopped asking, What happened to me? and started asking, What energies was I born into?
The Becoming
Answering a call from my soul, I was drawn into deep study of goddess spirituality, pulled toward the dark dieties—Hecate, Ragana, Baba Yaga, Circe, Innana, Persephone, Nyx, Medusa, Lilith, Ereshkigal. Their myths were not just stories to me; they were doorways. Through them, I saw something reflected back: the power of descent, the necessity of the underworld, the force of destruction not as a wound, but as an initiation. And I began to wonder—was I shaped by my childhood into resonating with this energy, or was this resonance always mine?
For the first time, I wasn’t just searching—I was seeing. These myths didn’t just call to me; they revealed me to myself. I began to understand how archetypal energy doesn’t just live in stories—it lives in us, shaping us from the inside out. Maybe the right question isn’t how my childhood wounded me. Maybe the right question is: At a soul level, did I choose this family so I would be forged in the fire of destruction and rebirth to later be in service to the descent?
The journey didn’t stop there. In the depths of my study, I came across a passage that shook something loose in me—one that said the word “virgin” originally meant to belong to no man. That single line ignited something ancient and undeniable in me. In that moment, I knew that reclaiming my sovereignty meant more than healing wounds; it meant severing ties that were never mine to carry.
I decided to take a new last name—not my father’s, not any man’s—as an act of devotion to my own soul’s autonomy. I understood then that anyone born into a female body, and at the time I identified as a woman, was often claimed through marriage or lineage. And that wasn’t going to work for me. My reclamation came through the name Winteraven—a name that was gifted to me by my inner Knowing, a name I now know was always mine. Chosen before birth. Remembered in this life.
To step into that name, I prepared for a death and rebirth ceremony in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. For three days, I underwent a ritual that changed the trajectory of my life. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what I was doing—because I wasn’t moving from logic or language, I was being moved by something deeper. I was following a felt sense, an embodied knowing that hadn’t yet found words. Even now, five years later, I’m only beginning to understand the depth of what I stepped into. That ceremony marked the turning point: from being forged by unconscious darkness to consciously walking as a dark worker. This wasn’t just survival. This was soul work.
In the years since, my studies have deepened. Astrology, in particular, became a map, a living, breathing guide of who I am to become. My North Node—our soul’s compass—sits in Virgo, in the eighth house: the house of death, rebirth, power, intimacy, and transformation (ruled by Scorpio). There I hold another stellium, amplifying the call. My path is about meeting the intensity of life, metabolizing its mess, and alchemizing it into something useful. I’m not here to transcend the underworld. I’m here to work within it—to help others navigate the same terrain.
The Reckoning
Western psychology tells me that I should grieve what I didn’t get, that my nervous system should have been attuned a certain way, that I should have been shaped for secure attachments, for stability, for a well-regulated life. But I don’t feel like I was deprived anymore. I feel like I was given a precious gift.
The chaos I was raised in trained me to sit with what most people turn away from. I can hang in the depths of the human psyche. I can sit with uncertainty, grief, destruction, and not flinch. Not because I’ve transcended it—but because I know it. Because it runs through my blood and bones. It made me fluent in the language of the underworld- and now, I translate it for those ready to listen.
I am good at what I do—not just because I am a psychotherapist, but because I carry something deeper, something innate. A wisdom forged in fire and shadow. And now, I’m questioning everything-the very foundation of what I have been taught, what I’ve accepted and what I’m becoming. This realization set me on a collision course with the very foundation of healing as we know it.
How much of what we call “healing” is actually erasure? How much of therapy is an attempt to mold people into something they were never meant to be? How often are we told to soften our edges, regulate our responses, strive for balance—when some of us were born to burn?
I don’t have the answers. But I am asking.
If you’ve ever felt like therapy is leading you to a dead end, not getting the “results” you want, and believe it is your fault- if you’ve tried to rewire your trauma responses only to find that they aren’t wrong—they simply are—I wonder if there’s something here for you. Maybe these parts of us aren’t broken. Maybe they are meant to be honored, celebrated even. Maybe they hold power—not power over, but power with.
Does this resonate with you? Have you ever felt like the so-called healing methods you’ve been taught are actually pushing you further away from who you really are?
I respect lightworkers and see the necessity of their path. But I know that I am something else. I am a dark worker. I don’t guide people into darkness to transform it into light. I guide them there so they can be with it, embody it, and claim it as their own. Generative darkness is not something to integrate or transmute—it is its own force, its own intelligence. It is the fertile void and the source of creation itself.
When we reclaim our darkness, we reclaim our fullness. We no longer exile the parts of ourselves that hold raw power, deep knowing, and untamed instincts. We cease fearing the forces that move through us—rage, grief, desire, chaos, uncertainty—and instead learn to wield them with sovereignty. A society that welcomes its darkness breeds depth, resilience, and authenticity. A society that represses it breeds shame, projection, and unconscious destruction.
I choose to walk into the depths, not to escape them, but to live fully within them. This is the path I hold space for.
How would your life change if you allowed yourself to be both dark and light, without judgment, shame, or a constant pressure to integrate one into the other?
Is it possible that by diving deeper into your own darkness, you could unlock a part of yourself you never knew existed?
These are the questions I sit with. If they stir something in you, if they awaken a knowing you can’t quite name—then welcome. You are not alone in this reckoning.
As part of this series, I’ll be offering reflective questions at the end of each post—an invitation to pause, turn inward, and engage with these themes in your own way.
What did you inherit—and what has that inheritance asked of you?
What patterns, energies, or archetypes were woven into you before you had a choice? Which of those have shaped your becoming? Which ones are asking to be claimed, and which are asking to be released?What moments in your life marked a threshold—when everything changed?
Was there a loss, rupture, or initiation that reoriented your sense of self or purpose? How did it move you? And what did it begin to reveal about who you are beneath the roles and stories?What truths about your nature have always been there, even before you had language for them?
What were the early signs of what now feels sacred or essential to your path? How might you honor those signs now—not as curiosities of the past, but as soul-deep guidance?
Forged in the dark,
AW🖤
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