How Embracing My Inner Kink Led to Self-Discovery (And Why You Should Try It Too)

 

Existential Kink, a review

The Call to Write: my very first blog post

Well, I wasn’t planning on being here today, but I got a call late last night and thought, 'Why not? I’ve always wanted to start a blog and secular sacrament meeting is a great opportunity to write my first post. I’m writing today about my thoughts on the book Existential Kink. I want to start by focusing on my experience with therapy. 

My first experience with therapy was when I was 18 years old, preparing to go on an LDS mission and tackling my pornography "issue". I found the experience unethical because there was no room for me to genuinely share my thoughts or feelings. It was a faith-based program done with other boys my age, and we went through the same questions each week. We were taught to fight against an adversary, as if we were soldiers in an army like the Sons of Helaman. There were teachings on how our brains worked, how thoughts could be hijacked by feelings, and how, if those feelings weren’t dealt with quickly, Satan would take over, leading to failure. Like anything in life, there was some good advice and lessons. I learned to focus on relationships and routines that helped me. Ultimately, I graduated from the program by lying, as I became disillusioned with the idea that addiction was something I could ever fully overcome.

A Shift in Perspective: From Purity to Embracing the Shadow

Ironically, while this early experiences with therapy were steeped in rigid teachings about purity and resisting temptation, my more recent therapy journey has taken me in the opposite direction—toward embracing the messier, shadowy parts of myself. This shift has opened up space for exploring ideas around sexuality, kink, and the complexity of human desire in a way that feels both challenging and liberating.

More recently, I went through about 14 weeks of therapy with a therapist, whom I'll call Emily. Emily was a relatively new therapist assigned to me after intake. She was LDS, but unlike my earlier experience, she was exactly what I needed. I talked for 80-90% of our sessions, grieving a lot of things in my life. I cried in almost every session. It was refreshing and healing to have someone who shared my religious background but could still listen non-judgmentally and validate beliefs and values different from her own. I eventually took a break from therapy, feeling I had worked through what I needed to. Ultimately, I wanted to find someone with more similar beliefs and values because I needed someone to challenge me on what I call my "bad" beliefs. My new therapist, who I'll call Katie, has suggested I reframe those as "old" beliefs or even "future old" beliefs.

I am anxious about writing this. My style in life tends to be a stream of consciousness, and I love listening to long-form content on YouTube—authors and creatives who pour hours of research into a topic to present something akin to a prepared dissertation. I find that wildly entertaining. I try to remind myself that I’m writing this because I want to, and no one has to read it if I don’t want them to. And it doesn’t matter if anyone does. This is for me. Maybe, just maybe, some of my words will resonate with someone the way other people’s words have touched my own soul.

Though I try desperately to be "normal," the truth is, as the book might say, I’m a kinky little freak.

I came to my session prepared with a few goals, and with a list to remind myself of. But as we started, I was surprised at how quickly Katie cut through what I brought up. She had two books, a blog article, and a couple of tests she wanted me to take to help orient my therapy better. I was anxious because I just wanted to get through my list, but I appreciated how she quickly focused on solutions. I had asked to be challenged, and I got what I asked for.

Katie suggested I read Existential Kink, which was, to say the least, an unusual recommendation after only 10 to 15 minutes of talking. The book aligned with some of the things I had discussed, and in a word the book is eclectic – just like her. Katie mentioned how everyone is a bit neurotic, which I appreciated because of the humorous way she presented it.

Short Review: Insights of Existential Kink

Now, reviewing Existential Kink, I’ll be honest—I hated it while reading. I can imagine Lynsey reading my draft and being surprised that I’d give it a 4 out 5 rating. The book started with many problems, especially after reading reviews on Goodreads, where people criticized the positive spin the book put on the myth of Persephone, a story full of violence and abuse. I found many of the anecdotes unconvincing and worried that the book could lead people down an unethical path. I worried it could encourage traits from the Dark Triad (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism), especially as it promotes the idea of embracing one’s shadow self. That it was promoting life without shame. I ranted and raved to Lynsey about how stupid this book was numerous times.

The main idea of the book is that many of the negative patterns we find ourselves in are self-inflicted. Though we think we don’t want these things, a repressed part of us actually does. The book’s solution is to not only accept this shadow part but to embrace it by loving it.

While I am skeptical of this approach, it did intrigue me. Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow is referenced throughout the book, and as someone who’s spent time learning about ethics and philosophy, I found myself conflicted. The author, Carolyn Elliott, suggests we actually enjoy our suppressed desires, and she offers a method of turning these around through radical acceptance. While I appreciated some of the deeper philosophical ideas, I found other parts, like her advocacy for MDMA therapy and entheogens, to be problematic without disclosing risk.

Elliott suggests that embracing and loving our darker, messier sides can lead to greater empowerment, and while I still have doubts, I found the exercises she suggested to be thought-provoking.

For example, Her second-to-last exercise is titled “How to Stop Torturing Others by Truly Appreciating the Art of Torture.” I think this exercise should have come much earlier in the book. It would have addressed many of my concerns about how these practices could be ethical. She says, “Let’s say you’re always a half-hour late to everything. Obviously, this has negative effects—you lose jobs and relationships. But when you go through this process, you start to notice that underneath your compulsion to be late is a shadowy desire to make other people wait, to put your needs ahead of theirs, to make yourself important.” She adds, “Oh, how awful, you might think! But that’s incorrect. You’re not a psychopath or narcissist. In fact, psychopathic narcissists are so burdened by neurotic shame that they can’t empathize with others. Real shamelessness is feeling your genuine desires.”

She continues, “If you want to troll people on social media, or bad-mouth colleagues to gain leverage at work (both of these I feel so deeply), these are sideways manifestations of the desire for power. This desire to have an impact on the world around you, to be significant, is immensely normal. The fact that you have it doesn’t make you uniquely evil. It makes you just like the rest of us. People who don’t humble themselves and accept their lust for power tend to suppress it into a ‘nice’ persona laced with passive-aggressive behavior, like always being late, or mix it with grandiose resentment.” She goes on to say, “Sadism isn’t necessarily the desire to inflict pain, but the desire to inflict sensation and to be felt.” She suggests that if you’re late all the time as compensation for not allowing yourself to inflict sensation on others in ways that would be fun, like through humor or sexiness, you might want to sign up for burlesque or stand-up comedy classes. That section made me sob.

Finally, she says, “The best artists and leaders are masters of torture. They get us to feel deep emotions, express taboos, and lead us through anticipation, surprise, and revelation. Your problem isn’t that you torture others, it’s that you don’t do it exquisitely enough. So stop shaming yourself for it, and get off on the sensation you create. Find a bigger, bolder game. Make the sensation you lust to inflict an art form. Learn to torture us in a much better, more beautiful, and consensual way.”

She explains that by bringing conscious awareness and joyful embrace, rather than blame or shame, to our unconscious processes, we stop identifying with our sucky conditions. We stop feeling like they define us. This is crucial because humans defend their sense of identity more fiercely than anything else. When we suffer from problems, what we’re usually suffering from isn’t the direct pain of the problem but the story in our heads that says, “I’m awful. I’ve failed. I deserve this. That’s why I’m not earning more money, happy in love, or content with my body.”

She concludes that nothing in our lives is there because we deserve it. It’s there because we enjoy it. The universe isn’t a balance sheet of worthiness; it’s a work of art. She adds that “when you let yourself feel some freaky joy over your problems, the cessation of pain will still be there, but you’re no longer suffering from a sense of deserving it. You’re free to be satisfied by your artful tragedy, and then move on to turning your life into a comedy.”

So, while Existential Kink wasn’t a book I enjoyed reading at first, it did force me to confront some uncomfortable truths about myself like my love of rejection. Yup, I love it now. Maybe that's why my therapist recommended it—it pushed me in ways I wasn’t expecting, and I suspect that’s exactly what I needed.

Perhaps the most powerful takeaway from the book is the idea that our lives aren’t defined by what we deserve but by what we enjoy—whether consciously or unconsciously. And if we can get in touch with those darker, hidden parts of ourselves in a healthy and ethical way, we might just be able to lead more fulfilling lives.

The Shadow Work: Embracing Messiness and for me - Rejection

 (This is long warning: sorry but not sorry)

Many negative patterns adults find themselves in are, to some degree, self-inflicted. We think we don’t want these things, but there’s a suppressed part of us that actually does. The solution is to not just accept this shadow part of oneself but to embrace it by loving it. In theory, the book is about psychology, and in short, it references Carl Jung a lot. Is Jung science? No. Are his observations interesting? Hell yes. Jung recognized this as the shadow—pleasure that’s so intense we repress it. Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.” Carolyn Elliot says the key to a “magical life” rests in delving into the other end of the spectrum and finding the power of the darkness. I hope one day to find another book that is Jung focused that I can recommend to someone that isn’t this book because man does the book have a narrow audience. Not everyone is into kink or all manner of eclectic bullshit.

In the introduction she says to look into your fears, triggers, and pain, and you might perhaps admit that you “take freaky joy in standing in that pile of shit”. I thought about my son who probably likes sitting in his own shit. He has no shame in it, and it took us seven years to potty train him. I can empathize with him. I tried everything possible to stop wetting the bed as a kid, and yet every morning, I would wake up to it being wet. Maybe it’s possible I liked it. It never really bothered me. Did I want to change? Yes. I wanted so desperately to be fixed and be normal. We tried everything until one day it stopped (normal I found out).

I’ve long had an interest in my shadow and in kink. It’s sad that it’s taken me almost 34 years to really understand why we even feel emotions like shame, guilt, or anger. There are very good evolutionary reasons for these feelings—it was necessary to think in black and white when a wolf was attacking you for instance.

Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Carolyn talks about how taboo, disowned, and repressed desires tend to get fulfilled in your life. The desire to be dependent and taken care of is taboo, so it gets repressed into our unconscious. It’s so far outside our awareness that we don’t even know this desire exists within us. For example, someone might enjoy being a failure and dependent, being in a state of being taken care of by someone might seem perverse and weird—and indeed it is.

Carolyn mentions several other patterns you might find relatable. For example, only being able to earn a certain amount of money each month no matter how hard or how much you work, or only being attracted to partners who bear an uncanny resemblance to your abusive parents or someone who broke your heart. Or maybe you hear the mean voice of your third-grade teacher in your head whenever you sit down to create, so you avoid creating. I probably berated myself as a child - I have very little creative energy. Maybe you struggle with overeating to cover up feelings of guilt, shame, loneliness, or frustration that seems endless. Maybe you dislike yourself or your body, no matter what you do. Or maybe you perpetually feel victimized, like your life would be good if other people would stop messing with you.

I deeply resonate with the problem of having grand plans but never getting around to taking the first concrete steps to realize them. I also resonated with doing things to get people to like me, even when I don’t really like those things. I don’t think I do things I don’t like, but I’m afraid to say no when I’m lukewarm about them. Many of these things have been taken verbatim from the book, and many people aren’t even willing to acknowledge they’re in these patterns. Maybe you can think of people you know who are stuck in relationships, careers, or mindsets that aren’t working for them. Why don’t they take the steps? Existential Kink teaches you to embrace and love your shadow self.

The book mentions many schools of tantric Gnosticism, Hindu, Buddhist, and Western esoteric traditions. I follow a psychiatrist on YouTube called HealthyGamer who comes from an Indian background and has opened me up to the idea of placebo and some Eastern thought, which aligns with me. A great example of why this aligns with me is because I’m not even sure we have free will. Philosophically, the more I study it, the more I’m convinced that the brain gives us the illusion of free will, but that illusion is an important part of our evolutionary journey. Twenty-one pages into the book, and I’m intrigued. Then, the author spends 14 pages on Greek and Roman mythology (meh), and she appeals to the law of attraction crowd, which believes that we always get what we want. She advocates that in reality, we actually always get what we unconsciously want.

The author talks about spirituality in a way that triggered me. I tend to see the world through a very scientific, grounded approach. She advocates for, or maybe petitions for, a world where we are all united and part of a greater self. She says there’s a disconnect between our ideals, intentions, and inspirations (our spirit, the masculine protective part of our being) and our embodied emotional, sexual, creative energy (our soul, the feminine part of us). This part of the book I had to read through quickly, the author is eccentric, to the point of being a little insufferable. She recounts the esoteric meaning of the Immaculate Conception, where the receptive feminine (the unconscious, the disowned, the soul) becomes pregnant with the perfect vision of our spirit. She uses the conception and birth of Jesus Christ as a literal and serious topic to demonstrate metaphysical ideas in practice. Her seriousness left me wondering if there was humor in the statement or if she was just that intense. It wasn’t… terribly for me. Maybe you’ll find my own seriousness in writing this long ass post to be similarly… not for you.

Sigmund Freud talked about repression and the world of opposites like masculine and feminine. The author brings up an interesting opposite I hadn’t thought about much: a love of scarcity. In a world that exalts wealth, Carolyn writes that we disown and deny the other polarity. It’s interesting to think about scarcity in even a remotely good way. The book challenged me to see scarcity as something remotely positive in an individual’s life. She talks about Existential Kink being witchy, or a feminine path to enlightenment, which is quite a bit different from the publicly vaunted masculine routes of asceticism, contemplation, and yogic saintliness. I found her lumping together yogic traditions with EK to be particularly strange, considering she uses them as examples of Existential Kink later in the book.

I found her continued use of Eastern philosophy off-putting in the beginning, but the truth is, I have an interest in the idea witchcraft. I’ve always felt deeply feminine and loved a lot of interesting tidbits like spell casting. She says, “Believe it or not, you’re casting spells every moment—your words, your actions, your looks at yourself in the mirror, the looks you give to other people, your clothes, your perfume, your songs, your smiles, your laughter, your reactivity, resentment—all spells. If you want to know who you unconsciously believe you are, just look at your life, your surroundings, your relationships. Your life mirrors those deep beliefs.” I think that’s very true.

She talks about tantric traditions and the left-hand path being the path of lightning, where it destroys who you think you are and changes quickly happen. She says, “You are not who you think you are,” which I imagine is probably true if you haven’t done any shadow work. I found anything related to Carl Jung in the book to be fascinating.

She explains the seven axioms of her method:

1. Having is evidence of wanting.
2. We have a choice as to whether we experience sensation as pleasure or pain.
3. It’s possible to get off on every “stroke of life.”
4. The degree of being turned off or turned on is a factor of approval.
5. Desire evolves through fulfillment, not denial and repression.
6. Shame is the magic killer. The more you shame something, the more unconscious it will become.
7. The Truth is sensational

In these sections she mentions many taboo and wrong things according to societal standards, such as the desire to feel wronged, the desire to feel rejected, the desire to not feel good enough, and the desire to feel offended. She goes through a process in which you can get in touch with your shadow self. I appreciated that before going through these steps, she mentions two disclaimers: one, don’t do this work if you’re depressed, and two, don’t do this work if you haven’t thoroughly grieved the situation.

While explaining this process, she talks about it being important to let kinky enjoyment, pure and simple, be far more important to you than the change you unconsciously want to bring about. She says, “If you’re trying to get off on something just to get rid of it, well, then you’re not really getting off on it, are you? Instead, you’re faking an orgasm to try and appease your unconscious, hoping it’ll stop bothering you and give you the good stuff. That’s manipulation, and it simply doesn’t work. Your unconscious knows you too well for that. You can’t trick it, so let go of your attachment to outcome.” (You can’t induce a placebo on your own! Also women, please stop faking orgasms)

I loved this reminder: “Remember, it’s very possible to have everything and still be miserable. That’s why enjoyment, pure and simple, is what truly matters. Then she adds, “Highly imperfect and fucked up is the signature of duality, and it’s exactly what you came to this realm to experience.”

About a third of the way into the book, she shares three of six total stories from other people, and I found some of these stories troubling. After practicing Existential Kink, things just happened to these people without them doing anything other EK. An abusive grandfather apologizes to one person without them asking. A call comes from an executive at a television company to produce a movie. Someone buys a new car after realizing shame is the magic killer. Not the best examples imo.

Lessons from Existential Kink

In the second half of the book, she goes through what she calls “lessons,” which I resonated with deeply.

She quotes Marianne Williamson's famous line from A Return to Love: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. God I have always loved that quote. It belongs on my wall.

She has an exercise called “How to Beat Yourself Up (the Fun Way),” She mentions how feeling guilty about things is an unconscious choice—a strategy designed by your child-like mind to get you something, namely the approval of people around you, whom you depend on for survival and security. I had never thought of guilt that way, and it opened my eyes to how we continue to use guilt long after its value expires.

Another exercise titled “How to Dwell on the Luminous Dark” claims that fear and desire are identical. I loved everything about this section.

However, the exercise titled “How to Stop Being Broke” absolutely turned me off and made me feel that it’s easy to become unethical when you accept certain shadowy things about yourself. After graduating with her PhD, she became disillusioned with the academic world and, after letting her English department know some of her beliefs and opinions, ended up out of a job. I found her disdain for “materialistic science” short-sighted and bitter, which took away from her credibility as an author. She then started charging $1000 per hour for her grift. She seriously needed an editor. Maybe like I do? lol

I also thought this quote was deeply insightful: “Most of us are actually quite committed to dodging the most intense pleasurable sensations of life: intimacy, creative inspiration, and being valued with time and money. In order to dodge these intense, wonderful sensations, we turn ourselves off by using worry, doubt, criticism, complaint, resentment, and upsets.”

She has an exercise called “Noticing Your Havingness Level,” which suggests it’s possible to be angry and turned on by it, sad and turned on by it, tired and turned on by it, defeated and turned on by it, grieving and turned on by it, disgusted and turned on by it, scared and turned on by it, self-pitying and turned on by it. If you’re like me and turned on a lot… relatable.

In another exercise titled “How to Feel Your Real Feelings (Not Your Fake Ones),” she mentions how Freud had a profound insight about the defense mechanisms humans use to protect their egos from uncomfortable and unconscious facts. One of these mechanisms is called reaction formation. She points out obvious examples, like feeling offended at the slightest slight, which is a way to cover up our awareness of a masochistic desire to receive insults. Another example is feeling tremendously guilty when you’ve disappointed someone, which covers up an awareness of sadistic desire to inflict pain. Feeling anxious in social situations might cover up budding connections and intimacy, or vicious aggression—usually both. Feeling massively annoyed and put upon by family might cover up vulnerable feelings of love and gratitude.

In “How to Stop Sucking Up Love,” where she talks about rejection, which is something I’ve let control much of my life, I’ll be forever changed by this exercise, especially learning to get off on feeling rejected and unwanted. It’s something I’ve been close to understanding for years—learning not to take rejection so personally and to handle it with love and understanding. It’s not always personal, but as someone who is too serious all the time, it’s empowering to learn to love this deep, dark part of myself.

A Testimony of Self-Love and Empowerment

As I pull out these excerpts from the book, I can’t help but laugh at how much joy it brings me to prepare this post, much like preparing sacrament talks in days of old by plagiarizing other people’s works and ideas. If that makes me a bad person, I don’t care—I enjoy creating and consuming all the beauty the world has to offer. There are thousands of hours of TV shows and movies created by people who sacrificed their lives in the guise of capitalism. I have no shame in enjoying that.  I honestly can’t believe I wrote this. This book has made me feel more creative than ever and following through with the desire to write this blog post has. I dictated for over two hours a draft and used ChatGPT to fix grammar and polish. To all the creatives writhing in pain, please excuse me as I’m not sure there’s an original thought in this world and I’m not sure I can create with pulling from great minds.

I just want to bear my testimony of the power of existential kink. I know that embracing the dark, messy parts of ourselves is true because I've felt it. Through many shadowy moments and awkward discoveries, I've come to realize that life's quirks and kinks are not curses but opportunities for self-love and empowerment. I know that the universe doesn't hand us what we deserve, but what we secretly crave—so why not enjoy the ride? In the name of existential growth and self-discovery, amen."