I have a pitch dark pit too. A black hole sucking up all my energy. Every evening as dusk begins until well after dark, I feel like giving up on living. Every single evening, day after day after day in an endless series of struggles, this feeling of wanting to die comes over me and stays with me for hours.
Sometimes, I am overwhelmed by self loathing when there is no overt reason to feel that way. Sometimes, the memories of what I have seen and been a part of feel like they push me into the pit. Sometimes, it is survivor guilt, like a occasion when other child prostitutes died and I didn't. I was supposed to die but I didn't, so there is something wrong. Something left undone. I failed at dying. How absurd....but I was severely punished(read tortured) when I was found alive.
I guess this another kind of suffering I need to fess up to. Denial, putting on a good face for the family is very hard to do. I usually end up isolating. I don't want to stress out my family. They shouldn't have to deal with my depression, pain, sadness, hopelessness and fears. It seems to me that they would become secondary PTSD victims.
I've tried to change my thinking from being a survivor, which is pointless to me, and leads me further down the die path to calling myself a witness. I try to think about traditions which honor memory like the slaughter of the innocent in the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. They put three drops of red wine on their passover plate to remember the innocent ones and have done so for thousands of years. I hope I can make a new path in my thinking that moves me away from the painful one I am on now. It is bad enough that we were hurt in childhood but I am old now and suffer every evening, oh dear, so sad.
