Jason Isbell is my favorite songwriter working today. Why? Because he's willing to write and sing about the things most radio-friendly artists wouldn't touch. He has openly and vulnerably tackled misogyny, racism and addiction. He's checked himself for his own privilege. He's even written a hit love song about death. Like Bob Dylan before him, Isbell is willing to bring forward the uncouth and the uncomfortable in a poetic way that touches listener's emotions and, I believe, makes change on a wide scale possible.

It's no shocker that Isbell—a recovering addict who's spoken openly about his participation in A.A.—is comfortable mining the darker sides of his humanity. There's a saying in twelve-step groups that you're "only as sick as your secrets," and one of the first things members are asked to do is take a moral inventory of their lives, examining all the problem areas, and sharing the results with another person.

I'll always remember going to my first sponsor's apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the fall of 2009 to read him a list of all my dirt: the money I'd stolen, the drugs I'd sold, and the girlfriends I'd cheated on. He sat and listened to the entire thing in silence, nodding his head periodically. At the end, he gave me a giant hug. It's impossible to convey in words the relief I experienced that night. After we said goodbye, I sat on the curb outside his building for a couple hours, just floating. I couldn't remember ever feeling so light.

For most of my twenties, I thought this totally counterintuitive practice of calling out your own bullshit was just for addicts. But then I started reading Carl Jung. Jung was a student of Freud's who explored the darker half of the human psyche with an unprecedented wonder and excitement. He came up with a theory that to live and function in modern society, citizens were required to disguise certain human traits, beliefs or behaviors that weren't socially acceptable. These shameful elements of the personality gathered in the basement of our unconscious and formed what he called The Shadow. When left unexamined, Jung observed, our shadows tended to run wild and overtake us.

In Jungian terms, the political and social unrest happening in the United States right now is the result of a very powerful shadow. Racism, gender bias, personal freedom, and environmental decline are skeletons that have been relegated to the basement for decades, and are now forcefully appearing in the zeitgeist. This is the same way it works in individuals: I have a good friend who was raised Conservative Christian in North Carolina. In his church community as a child, drugs, tattoos and casual sex were all taboo. When he moved to New York City in his late teens, he covered his body in tattoos, had his weed dealer on speed dial and slept with half of Brooklyn. That's the shadow at work: repress it long enough and it will find a way out eventually.