If Life Feels Hard Right Now, This is the Only Article You need to Read 

 As you read this now, you might be going through something really hard - a career transition, a relationship break-up…

… or just the grind of daily life in our screwy modern society (which is really hard!).

When things don’t go the way we want in life, it’s very understandable to feel like a victim of cruel Fate.

For what it’s worth, you have my fullest sympathies. I really get how much it can suck.

It’s natural to feel very put-upon by the hardships.  At least, I know that I felt really victimized and full of resentment for a long time.

Like millions of other folks, I suffered abuse as a kid, I struggled with opiate addiction as a teenager, and as a young adult in 12-step recovery I learned to be honest, open-minded and willing....

... but I still couldn’t seem to raise myself above the poverty line or find real love.

I let myself get sucked into lousy relationships with violent, controlling guys; I struggled with my health and body image; and I generally felt like the world (and my own brain!) were against me.

Maybe your problems in life have taken a different shape, maybe they’ve been darn similar - either way, I bet that you can relate to feeling like you’re slogging through the world, looking for a ray of hope. 

One day a big ole ray of hope struck me.

In my grad school research, I came across a quote from the pioneering psychotherapist Carl Jung that changed my life as I pondered it:

“Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”

This idea from Jung really got to me and gave me the feeling of some light on the horizon… I began to wonder…

… was all this “cruel Fate” I experienced connected to my own unconscious desires and beliefs?

And could I make those desires and beliefs conscious, and thereby change my Fate?

(It sounded like magic, but I always loved Harry Potter & Disney movies and I knew deep in my heart that magic was real —  and I’m guessing that deep down, you know it, too.)

So I set out to try to make my “unconscious, conscious.”

I figured the place to start would be with what Jung called “Shadow integration” - becoming aware of and owning up to my ego’s dark side. 

However, I soon learned that traditional Jungian work (involving dream analysis and talk therapy) can take decades, and I needed BIG CHANGE in my life way faster than that!

So I applied everything I learned in getting a doctorate in Critical & Cultural Studies…

… and I discovered that contrary to common opinion - it is possible to integrate one’s shadow and create dramatic positive change in one’s life very fast.  

You can do it in weeks or months instead of over decades. 

All you have to do is:

1. understand that the current painful situations in your life reveal your repressed, disowned, previously-unconscious desires…

2. and get humbly willing to deliberately, consciously experience the perverse pleasure that a part of you has been secretly been taking in these situations all along.

In other words, open up to the idea that “having is evidence of wanting” as I like to say.  

And no, I don’t say that to be a mean old victim-blaming jerk, I say it to point out that our dark unconscious desires aren’t some big secret.  They’re written all over our lives.

You don’t have to spend years in therapy to know what your unconscious contains - the unconscious generates the circumstances of your life, from both personal and collective levels.

Just look at your life and you’ll see what your unconscious desires and beliefs must be.

Your unconscious is the film, your awareness is the light of the film projector, and your life is the movie it projects.

To change the movie, you have to know how to change the film. Yelling affirmations or arguments at the screen doesn't do the job.

The Law of Attraction teachers are right - desire generates results.  What they don’t tell you is that most all of us humans have some powerful unconscious desires that are often very, very dark.

Our conscious intentions tend to be quite weak next to our unconscious desires.

Think about it: this is why New Year’s Resolutions almost always fail - because our conscious desire to rise at dawn, do yoga and drink green juice (for example) is just nowhere near as powerful as our unconscious desire to remain the same.

So by February we tend to find ourselves sleeping in, browsing the internet mindlessly first thing in the morning, and eating chocolate croissants.  

Nothing wrong with all that, but it doesn't "flip the script" of the movie of our lives, does it? 

If you unconsciously have a passionate desire to see yourself as “not enough” then everything in your life will reflect “not enough.”

And if you want to change that, then you have to work on the unconscious film so your movie can change. 

This truth can empower you immensely if you have the courage to embrace it.

Absolutely no one is “to blame” for their troubles, but everyone is responsible for healing them from the only place they can be healed - from within.

When you understand this and you get willing to shamelessly revel in your own previously-secret pleasure...

... then you release all the psychic energy that previously went into disowning the “dark side” of your desire…

… and you can now use that newly-released energy to shape amazing new situations in your life.

Within a year of applying these insights to myself I went from being homeless and abused to traveling the world, building a highly profitable business, and falling in love with a truly wonderful man who’s now my husband.

It all sounds very weird, and maybe too-good-to-be-true, I know.

But I’ve taught thousands of other people how to apply the same principles to their own lives and they’ve seen similarly amazing results - you can check out the testimonials below.

And, as I did more research, I found that this principle of consciously taking taboo pleasure in painful life situations in order to make “the unconscious, conscious” and change our Fate…

… was well-known in the early days of psychoanalysis.

Freud called this taboo pleasure in painful life situations “psychic masochism.”

Lacan, a French disciple of Freud, called it “jouissance” - perverse pleasure so overwhelming that the psyche represses it.

Jung, of course, saw this taboo pleasure embodied in night-time dreams in an archetypal character called the Shadow.

All of these genius therapists knew that a major key to helping people turn their lives around involved gently getting them to deliberately experience their secret pleasure in the very stuff that their conscious mind claimed to hate and feel victimized by.

So I call this process “Existential Kink” which is a new name for it, but this process isn’t a totally new innovation. 

It’s “existential” because it deals with our whole existence and the way we assign meaning to our experiences.

It’s “kinky” because just like in BDSM with whips and chains, it involves creating special time to let ourselves enjoy intense sensations that we’re usually averse to.

As we just discussed, this process of making unconscious pleasure, conscious — was a well-known form of healing amongst the greatest psychotherapists.

So why does it sound so strange?

Well, I think it sounds strange because no one in the popular personal development, psychology, or self-help fields has ever talked about it, and I suspect there’s a reason for that.

The reason is this: this fact that we humans all take unconscious pleasure in the things we consciously dislike is immensely offensive to our egos.

“How dare you imply that I would ever enjoy this awful thing…. Can’t you see I’m being terribly victimized by it?”

The ego has set up a Cult of the Victim, and it’s riding at an all-time high right now. Everyone, on all sides of the political spectrum, wants to vie for the role of Most Oppressed.

And this makes sense.

Our ego, the sense of self that we ordinarily identify with, is geared towards survival above all else.

And as such, our egos are obsessed with “getting the good stuff” that can help us survive including “more oppressed than thou” points.

You don’t have to take my word for it, just glance at Facebook or Instagram.

Isn’t everyone busy trying to get more social status to boost their survival by showing off both all their righteous indignation and all the goodies they’ve got?

I don’t mean to throw any shade, it’s a very human and natural thing to do.

In fact, you can follow me on Instagram at @carolynelliott_ and see my goodies if you want too, LOL, I like to show them off as much as everyone else!

But the thing is, our egos are just not the whole truth of who we are.  

As you know from the magic in your heart, our whole, true Self is divine. 

This means that our True Selves encompass everything - light and dark, good and evil, pleasure and pain. 

And like God, our True Selves simultaneously grieve and rejoice in everything.

Put simply - in order to thrive - to feel really happy and fulfilled - and not just to survive like the ego wants us to do...

... we have to start consciously embracing the larger part of our Selves that divinely enjoys the “bad stuff” as much as the “good stuff”…

… even though the “bad stuff” doesn’t get us anywhere on Instagram, and joyfully embracing it makes us lose those righteous “more oppressed than thou” points 😉

Let’s pause a moment to think about the consequences of relentlessly seeking to only be good and to only have good stuff happen in our lives. 

This is the default program that almost everyone operates on.  We all want to be virtuous, well-loved, disciplined (i.e. “be good”) and we all want to win, to succeed, to come out on top (i.e. “get good stuff.”)

And where does it lead us?

Well, first it pretty much invariably leads to feeling guilty, “not good enough” and “like a failure.”

Why? 

Because at least some of the time you’re not going to succeed at “only being good” (virtuous, healthy) and at only getting good stuff.

You win some, you lose some.

If you’re only allowed to feel really good about yourself when you’re winning, you’re going to feel like a guilty, not-good enough failure at least half the time.

What do people do when they feel like failures?

They start seeking escapes to change their mood and make them feel better. The most popular and accessible escapes include alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sugar, streaming TV and social media.

All of these things are great when they’re a balanced part of life, but I’m sure we all know tons of people who absolutely rely on these to get through a day because otherwise they feel lousy…

… because deep down they feel like failures….

… because their minds tell them that they’re only supposed to be good and do good and get good, and that’s just not humanly possible…

…. so they take in vast amounts of alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sugar, TV, social media…

.... and eventually it ruins their physical and mental health. 

You probably can think of at least ten people in your life right now who are physically ill, depressed, anxious, addicted. 

Life doesn't have to be like this.  We can all thrive in reality instead of reaching for escapes.

Ironic, isn’t it? That wanting to only have and be good ends us up in such rotten shape?

There’s another way.

The other way involves celebrating your wholeness, your good and your evil, your winning and your losing, in a way that playfully rejoices in all of it.

You can learn exactly how to do this in the free first chapters of my acclaimed Existential Kink book.

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