Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)

by Carolyn Elliott

I learned first-hand that by embracing my “psychic masochism,” by recognizing and empowering the darkness of my “shadow,” and in the end taking “pleasure” in my yucky stuff that I could do something amazing. I could completely integrate my “good” self with my “bad” self and become a whole person. Healed.

“Fear is excitement without the breath,” as Fritz Perls said. Well, often sensations that we experience as terrible or painful are just pleasure without approval.

We all embody duality—we all have both light (conscious) and dark (unconscious) dimensions of our being. The dark side of our personality—the “other,” the shadow side, is dark not only because we don't (or won't) see it; it's dark because it's comprised of what we would consider our primitive, primal, or negative impulses—all of which we choose to keep hidden from our consciousness, and denied. And like Persephone, our goal is to become whole.

The English word psyche, meaning “soul” or “mind,” comes from the Greek word psyche, meaning butterfly. Coincidence? I suspect not.

But Jung also pointed out: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Now he can't pay rent on his own, and so he has to go live with his parents again. To his conscious mind, this feels to him like a huge failure, humiliation, and calamity. To his unconscious, this is a giant victory and a great fulfillment of the deep underlying desire—his desire to want to be taken care of. Unconsciously, Alex is enjoying living with his parents and being taken care of. The ironic thing is: as long as Alex resists allowing himself to consciously experience his job loss and his being “taken care of” by his parents as a great victory and fulfillment (in other words, as long as he resists consenting to experience it as kinkily awesome the very same way his unconscious experiences it), then the more he will feel out-of-control and cursed by Fate.

Paradoxically, the moment Alex becomes willing to “get on the side” of his taboo unconscious desire for dependence and goes ahead and deeply savors its victory—at that moment he can feel empowered again. He can realize that his taboo wish to be dependent has been fulfilled, and let himself receive the hot weird pleasure of that. Then, rather than being a loser, Alex is actually a massively fulfilled person. From this vantage point of deciding to consciously allow himself to enjoy and be satisfied by his previously unconscious pleasure, it's then much easier for him to go ahead and make his way in the world. In essence, he's no longer guilty; he's not beating himself up anymore. He's no longer resisting his situation, so it doesn't need to persist.

Only being able to earn a certain amount of money each month, no matter how hard or how much you work Only being attracted to partners who turn out to bear an uncanny resemblance to your asshole dad (or to your asshole mom, or to the first person who broke your heart, or whatever)

Having grand plans for the future, but never getting around to taking the first concrete steps to realizing those plans Being very sensitive and taking everything personally Habitually seeking approval, doing things to get people to like you even when you don't really want to do those things

And if you're curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don't need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets. This is something we'll discuss more in a bit.

If you want to know who you unconsciously believe you are, just take a look at your life, your surroundings, your relationship. Your life mirrors those deep beliefs.

The circumstances and relationships that we create often just don't feel “synchronous” or “magical” because they're repetitions that we're accustomed to; they feel maybe a bit boring and confining, a bit expected. Many of us have unconsciously accepted conditioned identities as “wrong” or “broken” or “deserving of resentment” or “not deserving to be highly valued”—and so we continue to magically generate results that reflect and affirm that.

You are not who you think you are. Whoever you happen to think you are, I assure you, you are not that. I suggest that you remind yourself of this often, because it makes this work easier. When you brush your teeth in the morning, think to yourself, “I'm not at all who I imagine myself to be. I'm something entirely different and far more vast and strange. Hmmmm. I wonder what I really am?”

Existential Kink is a potent form of magic (also known as: “psychological integration”) in which the receptive feminine—the unconscious, the disowned and denied, the soul—becomes pregnant with the perfection-vision of our spirit—the masculine, projective part of our being, and eventually gives birth to positive synchronous manifestations in our lives.

The paradox is that once you fully commit to being who you already are, having what you already have, and hugely celebrating it, you become a masterful practical magician, a force of nature capable of shifting circumstances very easily.

So a big part of Existential Kink involves deciding to at least start by “pretending” (i.e., experimentally accepting the axiom “having is evidence of wanting”) that some hitherto-unconscious part of you playfully, humorously, curiously chooses and desires a given painful situation, behavior, stream of thought, or mood.

In any given day, there are all kinds of “strokes” that come towards us from other people, from our own minds, and from “fate.” The more we're willing to “get off on every stroke” that comes to us, the more pleasure and fun we can have in our lives, and the more magnetic we can become to positive synchronicity.

This axiom is thoroughly connected to the previous one, but it adds in the idea that turn-on is a matter of deep approval. Disapproval is alienating and distancing. It takes you out of the flow of interconnection and interrelationship and puts you into a grim isolation of resentment and disempowerment. But if you can let yourself get turned on about being resentful, well, you've just interrupted the pattern.

How turned on and approving you are tends to have a lot to do with whether you're willing to playfully perceive your life as a wild, kinky game or whether you're hell-bent on taking it seriously and believing that it “should” follow a certain ego-pleasing pattern. The more you allow yourself to be “turned on,” the less resistance you offer to the positive, creative current that's always attempting to move through you into manifestation. It's possible to be sad, angry, disappointed—in a turned-on way. It's just a matter of giving yourself permission to fully feel the raw sensation that those emotions present, to meet the sensation with your innocence rather than your cynical judgment and “stories” about what these emotional sensations mean. In

Let's take the feeling of sadness as an example. An open, receptive approach to this emotion might be, “Ah, a deep heavy feeling of sadness, how exquisite. Hmm, let me feel into this, what is the texture, the sound? It's rather spongy, and when I pay close attention, I notice in my heart it sounds like a slow xylophone melody playing in a rainy alley.” As opposed to, “Oh no, a deep heavy feeling of sadness. This must mean I'm a failure and my life sucks and I'm screwed. Everyone knows only losers feel sad.”

We have all these unconscious desire-curiosities, and many of them are quite taboo and “wrong” according to the standard of our conscious mind. Some of these include the desire for scarcity and limitation, the desire to feel wronged, the desire to feel rejected, the desire to feel not good enough, the desire to feel offended.

Even though these unconscious desires are met in our lives by circumstances and events, we tend to miss a crucial step: celebration of fulfillment. We don't usually allow ourselves to consciously experience a turned-on sense of fulfillment and joy when these desires are met, because we habitually deny having them in the first place.

For example: once I've realized that I'm fulfilling my previously unconscious desire to feel “not good enough” through various dramas in my life, and I go ahead and (madly, irrationally) celebrate the fulfillment of that dark desire that's happening in my dramas . . . . . . then that previously unconscious desire is free to morph into a desire to feel “good enough,” and I'm free to move on.

I can know right away that anything in my life, any attitude, any feeling, any situation I have shame about, that's an area of my life where I am accidentally suppressing my magic, and seeding the procreation of what we would call negative synchronicities—bad luck. The more you give yourself permission to be shameless, the more the channel of communication between your conscious and unconscious mind opens, and the more effectively you can generate positive results. You are the only one who can grant this permission, at the level of your actual agency.

The fact that “the truth is sensational” matters a lot in Existential Kink practice, because as you explore the possibility that “having is evidence of wanting” you'll begin to notice that when your body is relaxed, it responds strongly.

and as you say that, you notice that you feel a subtle electric jolt of sensation jump from your throat to your solar plexus. That jolt of sensation is important to pay attention to. It means that there's truth in your statement because the (profound, emotional, relational) truth is always sensational. Literally.

This reminded me of psychotherapist Fritz Perls' famous observation: “Fear is just excitement without breath.” In other words, fear is just excitement without embrace and approval for the sensations.

So to emphasize: focus on allowing yourself to take sadomasochistic pleasure in the sensations and emotions stirred up by your “don't like” situation. Don't put your energy into trying to get yourself to like the bare facts of what you “don't like.”

It's impossible to desire something without also fearing it a bit, and it's impossible to fear and dislike something without also desiring it.

Remember, “having is evidence of wanting”—if there's a situation or a feeling that's present in your life, no matter how awful it is, it's present with you not because it's “true” or “real” but because some part of the vast, strange, kinky Self that you are finds it fascinating, compelling, beautiful. And it's time to let that part of yourself and its taboo pleasures come to your conscious agreement and embrace. Softly, temporarily put aside your ego and your usual judgments about who you are and what you want. To increase your self-honesty here, it can help to strongly imagine that the “don't like” situation will be utterly and completely removed from your life in just one month from now, as if “by the hand of God.” Since the “don't like” situation is going to be inevitably, totally removed anyway (you allow yourself to imagine), you can relax, open up, and allow yourself to feel just how very much a secret, taboo part of you enjoys it and cherishes it right now.

So when I really let myself feel that, it helped make it clear to me that my anxiety is something I choose to do to myself instead of some horrible automatic fate I can't control.

The mind tends to say that you'll be allowed to have bliss once you get everything sorted out—once you're fit, financially secure, romantically adored, etc. etc. This is just the mind's hot, fun way of torturing you! The truth is you're allowed to experience bliss all the time, whether you're lying in a gutter, getting yelled at by your boss, getting ignored by your date, whatever. Your unwillingness to let yourself have big fat happy pleasure until you get “the good thing” is the very essence of sado-masochistic self-denial. Starting to see how this works?

So feeling bad/guilty/wrong as an adult doesn't actually improve your odds of physical survival, but it does, however, guarantee the survival of “you as you currently know yourself to be.”

By feeling guilty, do I think I'll somehow change the situation, or at least get the approval of others?

Am I willing to stop trying to use this feeling of guilt to manipulate others into approving of me?

Would it be okay if the ability to use guilt to get approval or control just left me? What would it be like to live my life without ever using the feeling of guilt?

I'm not saying it's all turned to roses. Life is still life. What has changed is my belief in my power to influence life. I feel like I have been truly liberated from suffering.

whatever it is, the problem seems irrefutably to be something that's somehow external to what we have agency over in the present moment. That's how we end up feeling powerless, why it seems that we're just at the mercy of the mean old “out there.”

Here's a truth that can: You don't need a reason to do anything. Your own kinky, hot, fucked-up desire to do it is enough.

When you just own your desire, without trying to prop it up with reference to anything, you gain a sense of responsibility for that desire which can clarify all your actions and slice through the Gordian knot of your conflicts.

Accept that there's no “reason” to pursue this desire. Write it down in your journal: “I have a kinky, weird, fucked-up desire to ________ and I'm going to do it, just ‘cause I'm a nasty freak like that.” So you're deciding, out of sheer absurdity, to go after it with full, gleeful insane zeal. It is your own freaky lil' thing. Want what you want just ‘cause you want it.

The thing about guilt is that most of us continue to use it long after its value expires. There's no automatic alarm bell that goes off when we become able to fend for ourselves that alerts us: “Now is the time to stop mirroring the emotional dysfunctions of your family; continuing to make yourself feel bad for your ‘sins’ will no longer garner the sympathy of your caretakers, it will only drain you of energy and eventually sap you of the will to live.” And even if there was such an alarm, how could it possibly interrupt such an ingrained habit?

The ego/conscious mind may think that it's frightened of failure and humiliation (in matters of wealth, love, body, creativity, etc.), but fear and desire ARE IDENTICAL. In fact, the conscious mind worries about all this “bad stuff” and thinks about how to avoid it, but that worry is secretly (shadowily) a kind of erotic caress, an obsessive dwelling with rapt fascination on the face of the very beloved failure and humiliation.

All you need is honesty. Just be honest with yourself about the subtle erotic joy you get from dwelling on/fearing all the “bad things.”

The more I thought about other people absolutely refusing to highly value me and my work, the more aroused I got. Gradually it dawned on me: Well of course I don't make $1000 an hour; I am so turned on by being devalued and rejected!

A havingness level is a kind of internal imprint based on past family and cultural conditioning that determines the amount and kinds of sensation that you're willing to feel before some part of you unconsciously decides it's “too much” or “too good to be true” and then goes into fight, flight, or freeze—usually for some highly fictional (but seemingly factual) reason. I mention this “highly fictional reason” piece, because usually when a person has a havingness-level freak-out, they don't realize that they're experiencing a havingness level freak-out, that too much hot sensation and too much good stuff is coming their way

I started getting turned on by lots of money, rather than turned off by it. With this new kind of turn-on, I became willing to take mundane actions towards growing my business that in the past I had totally avoided, like building an email list.

As it happens, the way to have profound success in altering your inner state and thereby altering your outer experience isn't through endless “positive thinking”—it's by being willing to look at the darkest, most twisted stuff in your experience and in your own heart and to feel great gratitude for it.

What if whatever “problem” you're hung up about is just a vehicle for numbing yourself to the massive turned-on joy and fulfillment you could otherwise be feeling?

In other words, if the content of your experience feels awful, if your thoughts are grim, your energy leaden, your feelings flush with self-pity: I suggest getting very, very curious about what element of reality you're denying, repressing, and hiding from.