22 Elliot’s Existential Kink
The fact that Existential Kink is written in an elaborate huxter patois, the kind of language by which you might be taught to
Speak his true name and spellbind him. Make him yours with the power of your Divine Yonic God-self and manifest your dreams in reality!
is an absurd betrayal of its scope, vision, and brilliance. When you dig beneath its banal trappings, what Carolyn Elliot’s Existential Kink really offers is a supremely powerful technique of unio, which in conjunction with Gendlin’s Focusing is sufficient to propel you through the remainder of the Framework Process. As with Gendlin’s book, you need to read the entirety of EK and practice the exercises contained within it; you can buy it here:
https://www.amazon.com/Existential-Kink-Unmask-Embrace-getting/dp/1578636477
Where Focusing is a means of making contact with the repressed elements of the self, Existential Kink is a method for communicating with and integrating them. Elliot refers to her method as the “left-hand path”, an allusion to the Kabbalistic notion of a quicker, more dangerous route to an enlightenment which usually takes decades. While I wouldn’t refer to any part of EK as dangerous— unio without solve is formless gesture, and after solve the waters of motile self run unerringly downhill towards reintegration— in terms of its shocking efficiency, the comparison is apt.
Like Gendlin, Elliot centers her book on a series of exercises— exercises which are valuable, and should be performed— but the value in her notion is really contained in one “Big Idea”. This is, essentially, that giving your subconscious mind explicit, verbal permission to want and do things you think are bad for you is the only way to stop those desires from torturing you.
What’s important to understand about this notion is that it is not a self-paradoxical Buddhist koan. You aren’t hoodwinking your subconscious mind into not wanting these things; rather, you are allowing your subconscious mind to express its desires, and accepting these desires without reservation. This is an essential component of the unio process, and while it proceeds definitionally from the fact that we’re trying to change our personalities here, it’s worth stating explicitly. Unio is not about allowing yourself to feel your repressed desires so that they go away and can be replaced with your conscious agenda. It’s a process by which you accept what you really want, which is neither what your conscious mind wants or what your subconscious mind wants, but the indivisible synthesis of the two.
I could wax on, but first allow me to lay out the steps in EK’s core process, so that you have a bit more context regarding what I’m talking about.
- Get yourself into a relaxed state
- This is a no-brainer
- Create a container for yourself by lighting a candle or setting a 15 minute timer
- This is important because it allows your conscious mind to understand that even if this experience is very painful, it will be brief.
- Identify a situation in your life that your conscious mind, your ego, does not like.
- This should be achieved with Gendlin Focusing
- Identify exactly what feelings and emotions you associate with this situation.
- This should likewise be achieved with Gendlin Focusing
- Gently allow yourself to get in touch with the part of yourself that actually, passionately enjoys the feelings and emotions associated with your “don’t like” situation.
- This is the highest level of Gendlin Focusing
- Get on the side of your shadow (your previously unconscious sense of desire/curiosity/enjoyment) and deliberately, consciously, humbly allow yourself to receive, feel big gratitude for, and get off on the situation your unconscious so brilliantly created.
- This is the essential step of Existential Kink— giving your subconscious mind permission to feel the way it feels and do the things it does
As you can see, the majority of the process involves the same steps as Gendlin’s Focusing, which I feel gives a more expansive view of the technique. The last step, however, is EK’s unique and essential contribution. Elliot frames this as a form of Nietzschean moral inversion, a rejection of the daylight values of good and evil. I think that on a purely rational plane this notion is taken too far by the imperatives of her new-agey tone; but on an experiential plane this is very much what it should feel like. You will be allowing yourself to not only recognize but actively enjoy the very pathological behaviors and constraints which have prompted you to undergo the Framework Process.
Whether the things you give yourself permission to want and do are actually bad is an irrelevant question to the conduct of unio. They’re going to feel like they’re bad; they’re definitely things that you, on the face of it, would like to stop doing.
For instance, a 2o person going through EK might perform the Focusing portion and be told by their lower mind that their repressed desire is to depend upon their parents financially; that this is something that they want to do. That 2o person, despite the fact that they went into the Framework Process looking to end this dependence on their parents, will need to give themselves permission not only to want the thing, but to actually do it.
This permission-granting is not the end of the unio process, but it is the end of the territory covered by Existential Kink. Elliot’s book suggests that in the aftermath of this permission granting, the desire will dissipate, and that this dissipation will allow you to stop doing the thing your subconscious mind wants you to do— that the repression of the desire caused the desire. As we know from the solve portion of the Framework, desires are in fact bundled into discrete levels of sublimation. All of your major desires within the level of sublimation on which you are pathological will need to be addressed and accepted via the EK method before you can actually get around to changing your behavior.
An important thing to remember is that the reason you’re granting your subconscious mind unlimited permission to run the show in terms of your desires is that, being pathologically irrational, you have no way of knowing to what extent your subconscious mind is right about any given thing. In cleaving yourself into a dominant and a repressed mode, you optimized yourself for a situation which does not align with the reality that you have been experiencing in the years since. Some of that reality has been experienced by your upper mind through your dominant mode, and some of that reality has been experienced by your lower mind through your repressed mode. The lack of communication between upper and lower minds is what your pathology consists of, so in order to restore proper communication you need to be prepared to accept anything your subconscious mind tells you.
Accepting does not mean immediately acting on these things! It means being willing to think them, as your own thoughts, without activating your repressive mechanism and pushing them off on your subconscious mind. You have to demonstrate to your subconscious mind that you will fully consider whatever information it has to contribute to your understanding of the world; the combination of Existential Kink and Focusing is how you make this demonstration.
As in the last chapter, I’m going to conclude by reconstituting some of my miscellaneous notes about EK. I might wax on further about the similarities and differences between EK’s worldview and that of the Framework; please keep in mind that these differences are subtle, abstruse, and relatively irrelevant. In performing Existential Kink on yourself, you should do it exactly as Elliot tells you to do it; don’t allow my disagreements concerning what is actually happening when you do these things to influence the way you go about doing them.
-Carolyn Elliot does not at all conceive of 3c as a mental illness; most of the practical applications by which she illustrates her book are dedicated to achieving success by climbing the chain of submission and domination in line with a 3c worldview. This doesn’t hamper her portrayal of the technique at all; by this point in the Framework Process you should be self-aware enough that you won’t be engaging in the unio process hoping to become the witchy female Patrick Bateman she depicts.
-Don’t get tripped up by her insistence that you secretly desire “bad things”. This is an artifact of her Nietszchean inversion. Everything you learn you want from EK is going to feel like it’s bad; this is the point of the Framework Process, realigning your understanding of good and bad to better match reality. But you won’t find yourself wanting to strangle puppies or drive your car into a crowd.
-That being said, there is an extent to which your subconscious mind would prefer something that is “actually” bad to an alternative in which it has no outlet for its feelings whatsoever. An example Elliot employs— continuously getting back together with the boyfriend that hits you— is unambiguously bad; in such cases, expressing the desire in the radically accepting way she depicts allows you to channel that desire in healthier directions. Since we’re not doing EK piecemeal but as a program of holistic personality alteration, though, the question is fairly academic.
-Elliot sometimes presents her process as one which culminates in the shadow-self coming out to control you— reincarnating yourself as an avatar of your lower mind. This isn’t what will actually happen; the result of the Framework Process is a synthesis of your upper and lower minds, a return to your “whole self”. For all the Yonic energy pervading the book, it isn’t by its essential nature a manual for instantiating your “female” Thanatos drive against the world’s “male” Eros; that’s just woo set dressing.
-Here are my thoughts on EK’s axioms:
- Having is evidence of wanting.
- This is a brilliant insight and is true.
- We have a choice as to whether we experience a desire as pleasure or as pain.
- This is true within the context of the unio process; it’s a psychotechnology more so than a bit of wisdom. Rendering your hunger pleasurable or your enjoyment painful isn’t going to get you very far if your goal is to be a human being.
- It’s possible to get off on every stroke—and every happening in life is a “stroke”.
- This is an application of the above points to various circumstances.
- Our degree of being “turned on” or “turned off” is a matter of how much we’re willing to totally approve in our life.
- This is an important means of sidestepping the repressive mechanism; “approval” is the opposite of repression. The Eros of Yes reunites the halves split by the Thanatos of No.
- Desire evolves through fulfillment, not denial and repression.
- This is very important, perhaps the foundational attitude-shift of performing unio.
- Shame is the magic-killer.
- This connects the fourth point to woo about synchronicity. If you manage to levitate, cast fireballs, or manifest a cache of gold Krugerrands along your morning jog, be sure to shoot me an email so I can retool my book to focus wholly on this idea.
- The truth is sensational.
- This is how she adds in her version of Gendlin Focusing. I’ve got no idea whether she arrived at the idea independently; she’s brilliant enough to have done so.
Now that you’ve read my summary, it’s time for you to dive into Existential Kink. Your previous mastery of Focusing should propel you quickly along Elliot’s left-hand path. You should begin doing EK on all of the behaviors in your life that you’d like to change. As your affirmations of these behaviors stack up, eventually you will have affirmed all of your repressed contents; at this point, you should try to trigger a type of internal psychic episode. The next chapter, Sasha Chapin’s Deep Okayness Blog Post, describes his account of an episode he experienced which I believe to be the completion of his unio process; it slotted neatly into my understanding of the Framework, and it’s what inspired me to try to produce such a change within myself.
The process of solve and unio by which a person can heal their pathology and transition from one of the eight pathological types to the one healthy type.
Human behavior consists of interacting with collective action problems at discrete levels of increasing complexity and decreasing urgency. These levels of increasing complexity and decreasing urgency- of abstraction- are referred to as sublimation levels. There are three sublimation levels which society has progressed through in the historical record, and two of these levels are still active fields of conflict which human beings develop pathologies on in the modern world.
That which your lower mind craves, because the conditions of your pathological bargain have caused it to be scarce.
A pathological disposition.
The state of mind a pathological person occupies the majority of the time. In this state, your actions are aligned with your pathology in terms of Eros or Thanatos. Your dominant mode feels to you like your "usual self".
A state of mind in which a pathological person's actions are controlled by their lower mind. They are constrained to the opposite of their disposition in terms of Eros or Thanatos. Generally accessed by romantic intimacy or chemical intoxication. In this state, you feel like "the real you".
The conscious mind, the portion of the mind which is accessible to a person in their Dominant Mode. The part of your self which the cracked mind initially apprehends as "you".
The subconscious mind, the portion of the mind which is hidden from conscious awareness by the repressive mechanism when a person is in their Dominant Mode. Controls a person's actions when they are in their Repressed Mode.
The organizing principle of the closed societies, that all human beings within a society are arrayed in intersecting vertical hierarchies of submission and domination which stretch from the lowest, most base individuals to the highest, most exalted ones. Movement along this chain is possible according to one's conformity to that society's ideals.
The process of reintegration by which the repressed contents of the lower mind, having been brought to the attention of the upper mind during the solve process, are accepted and reintegrated into the self.