The Framework that Liberates You from Struggle & Restores Your Faith in Your Boundless Inner Power

Why your life’s dramas are more illusory than you think.

If you’re struggling right now, I promise you this: your circumstances aren’t nearly as punishing as your habitual modes of perception.

How often do you worry, brood over the past, or otherwise feel frustrated with your life?

If you’re like most people, it’s probably often. When we get into sour moods, it’s easy and natural to blame our circumstances for the way we feel.

When I feel unenthusiastic, sometimes I say, “If only my work were more fulfilling,” or “If only my friends truly understood me.”

It also doesn’t help that we’re conditioned by the media, compulsory schooling, and other systems to view ourselves as victims of a cruel fate that seems external and outside of our power to change.

But after reading Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power, I can no longer see my sour moods and downward spirals as consequences of my circumstances.

In fact, blaming your circumstances for the way you feel is the most reliable way to stay stuck.

Why? Because this belief feeds your sense of powerlessness. And it obscures the fact that it’s all a game.

Why Blaming Your Circumstances Never Changes Them

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung

Many of the most well-known voices in psychology — Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and others — viewed the divisions between the conscious and unconscious minds as basic facts of human nature.

Painful patterns repeat in our lives because we’ve relegated the parts of ourselves who see these circumstances as fascinating and compelling into the shadows, or into the unconscious.

According to Jung, the unconscious is the creative aspect of the self, and it has much more power to influence our circumstances than the desires, preoccupations, and aspirations that sit in the conscious mind.

When we blame our circumstances for our negative emotions, we push them deeper into the unconscious, giving them more power to control the course of our lives.

In this sense, the more we reject our fascination with painful circumstances, the more power they hold over us.

The Psychological “Rackets” that Trap You in Fear, Self-Doubt, and Inadequacy

In Existential Kink, Carolyn Elliott points to several ways we can make the unconscious conscious. When we do this, we can create beauty and fulfillment in our lives (and stop feeling like victims of fate).

One of the fastest ways to make your unconscious conscious is to notice what Carolyn calls your havingness levels. She writes:

“Your havingness level is the amount of sensation and energy that you’ll let yourself have before you unconsciously, automatically ‘turn yourself off’ by getting worried, doubtful, judgmental, resentful, having an accident, an argument, a horrible mood…”

You can test your havingness level by remembering the last time you felt happy, free, or light-hearted. Maybe you had a nourishing conversation with a friend. Maybe you felt fulfilled by your work.

Ask yourself: How long were you able to feel good before you found a reason to worry you wouldn’t be able to ‘live up’ to your previous performance? At what point did you start comparing your life course to another person’s?

When you have low havingness levels, “positive” emotions like happiness, expansion, and peace feel threatening.

As strange as it sounds, it feels safer to return to your familiar comfortable homeostasis, which typically consists of self-doubt, anxiety, and fear.

Stress psychologists refer to this phenomenon as your nervous system capacity: when you have a low nervous system capacity, feelings of calmness feel threatening, and the body returns to the more familiar fight-or-flight state as a defensive strategy.

If you get into the habit of noticing your havingness levels — that is, how long you’re able to feel good before you “turn yourself off” — you can dissolve the sense of being controlled by outside circumstances or cruel fate.

Sure, your painful circumstances are there — your mistake-ridden past, your bills, your stifling job. It’s all real.

But by noticing your havingness levels, you can realize how you use these practical circumstances to feel emotions you’re unconsciously fascinated by.

The psychotherapy modality transactional analysis (TA) refers to these as rackets: emotions people exploit every circumstance to feel.

In other words, you may not feel trapped because of your circumstances. Instead, the circumstances that seem to trap you may actually be fulfillments of your unconscious desire to feel constricted, trapped, or limited.

And if your current circumstances weren’t there, as long as you had this unconscious desire to feel trapped, you’d find a different circumstance to justify your feeling of being limited.

Get in Touch with the Unconscious Processes that Shape your Conscious Perceptions

When you notice your havingness levels, you realize you are not the thoughts, the judgments, and the worries that arise from moment to moment. Instead, you are their container.

You’re the larger awareness that witnesses the ever-changing contents of your consciousness.

As Carolyn puts it:

“When you do the work of paying attention to how you turn yourself off, you are shifting your focus from the content (the situations, the emotions, the problems) of your life’s experience to the previously unconscious, subtle processes that shape that content…

When you get very intimate with how subtle (previously unconscious) processes shape the content of your experience, you are much less liable to be taken in by that content, especially by painful dramas and limited perceptions of yourself (and the world and others) that once seemed so real and pressing.”

Going forward, pay attention to how you transition from feeling good to feeling bad. What kinds of sensations, judgments, and habits do you use to ‘turn yourself off’?

Once you notice them, they’ll feel substantially less punishing. You’ll realize you’re under no obligation to feel bad.

You’ll see the way you use your circumstances as instruments to justify feeling limited, inadequate, or powerless, rather than the other way around.

From there, experiment with expanding the amount of time you’re willing to celebrate the good things that happen, no matter how small.

For example, next time you have a fulfilling conversation, what would happen if you stretched out your satisfaction for an entire week, rather than an hour?

What if you kept celebrating its pleasure, even if not-so-fun things also happened?

Even if you can’t quite celebrate good things for longer than an hour or so, see if you can at least use those positive events as the foundation for a sense of lightness and contentment.

If your difficult circumstances still feel punishing, you will at least gain insight into precisely how you move from an expansive to a contracted state.

Then, when those punishing thoughts strike in the future, you’ll see them as mechanisms that help you stay stuck in your familiar modes of perception, rather than accurate windows into how things really are.

The more you can feel at ease despite the ever-changing contents of your life, the more power you access. You’re no longer identical with your sullen moods, your anxieties, or your uncertainties.

Instead, you identify with the larger awareness you are, and circumstances begin striking you as quaint forms of entertainment rather than nail-biting dramas.

Do you want to dissolve your degrading, repetitive patterns, so you can make possible your juiciest, most adventurous intentions for this lifetime?

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