The main thing is to not take the attitude of "dealing with it" but rather to think of the dark night as an opportunity and to "learn from it and master it". All the primal dark night urges/emotions/thoughts that come to the surface are EXACTLY the kind of stuff that humans need to learn to see clearly and make friends with if we're ever going to become more than barely-intelligent monkeys.
The stuff of the dark night are all the human triggers that send us into trance or traumatic over-reaction, and there is no way to develop a stable and courageous mind unless we can handle these things. So the dark night is a great opportunity. That's the way to think of it.
Plus as an added bonus, you're working toward a profound state of equanimity -- which is good. And if you are able to dwell in equanimity (which is sometimes surprisingly difficult, it's almost too easy, so we miss the subtle resistances that are still there and we get up earlier or we quit practice completely or we just kinda phone it in and don't really investigate...) then we eventually hit stream entry --- which is also good.
But if you discount the dark night and just try to get through it in order to get to equanimity/stream entry, then you'll probably fail at both.
So really look at this as an opportunity to look into your own psyche and grow in wisdom.
Another little bit of advice is to establish your support group now. Who can you practice with? Who can you talk to just as normal friends? Who can advise you on meditation practice? Who can help you if you totally freak out and just need a safe place to be? (The last item is rarely required, but I mention it out of throughness.) Establish your support group now, before things get difficult.
The last thing I'll mention is that there can be a lot of benefit in studying the dark night stages and then writing out how this shows up in your life... and how to meet those challenges. Like if misery totally dominated your psyche, what would that look like? What are your misery triggers? How does misery show up in sensations, urges, emotions, and thoughts? What is the best thing about misery? What is the worst? What allows you to simply be with experiences of misery? What would like to learn more about the whole mechanism of a state of misery? What do you tend to avoid or ignore about misery?
You see what I mean? This kind of analysis helps you sensitize yourself to the sorts of things you might experience, how you might react, how you might sabotage yourself, how you might learn something about yourself.
For example, I might say "I have a lot of trouble just being with someone who is feeling miserable and sobbing and wimping out of life. Therefore when experiences of misery come up during a sit, I will make an explicit effort to full experience them and not avoid or ignore." Or "I can't handle the image of my children suffering. Therefore I will know that this is a possible trigger that would get me to over-react and I'll be prepared for it if it comes up during a meditation." Etc. etc.
Hope this help. Most of all, don't feel like you need to script yourself into having a horrible time in the dark night. It can be tough, but with the right attitude and commitment, it really can be a deep purification and refinement. Hope this helps!