The Psychological Loop that Haunts Every Would-Be Life Transformation

Break the cycle by finding the hidden payoffs in your patterns of suffering

Let me know if this sounds familiar. You recognize that some habit or behavior pattern isn’t serving you. When this realization hits, you feel energized by a powerful urge to change it.

Yet every time you attempt to break the habit, it isn’t long until you’re rationalizing why it’s okay and even worth continuing.

This dynamic manifests in many forms: procrastination, the struggle to make money, corrosive relationships, substance use issues, etc.

When you feel the negative results of your favorite self-destructive habit — heartbreak, loss of income, broken self-trust, illness, etc. — your suffering often feels familiar, like it’s some primal vortex you’ve swirled around since birth.

But just suppose for a moment that this loop isn’t unique to you. You’re not repeating these patterns because your circumstances are uniquely insurmountable. Instead, you’re contending with a dynamic that haunts nearly everyone as they attempt to transform their life.

This is how you can break it.

Rackets: Psychological Loops that Keep You Safe but Powerless

When you’re repeating habits you know only hurt you, you’re likely confronting what’s known in transactional analysis as an existential position or racket.

Transactional analysis (TA) is a therapy modality created by psychiatrist Eric Berne and clinical psychologist Claude Steiner in the 1950s. TA suggests that all social interactions (transactions) occur within three possible ego states: Parent, Child, and Adult. These ego states also characterize our inner dialogue.

Since we’re malleable in childhood, we carry the injunctions or attributions our parents gave to us in early life. They become fixated in our psyches as part of our Parent ego state.

The Child ego state is essentially who we were before the age of seven. Although our culture warns against child-like behavior, we can see the Child play out in events structured to permit looser behavior, like parties or sports events.

Our Adult ego state is the most level-headed, calm, and balanced part of us. But difficult early experiences resulted in our becoming fixated on our Parent or Child ego states, playing out in patterns like self-criticism, guilt, and other self-destructive tendencies.

These dynamics also make themselves known in counter-productive social encounters (known as games, as described in the TA classic, Games People Play).

Transactional analysis suggests that as we transition between ego states, we also assume one of four existential positions:

• I’m okay; you’re okay. The position that supports self-actualization and a sense of peace and safety in the world
• I’m okay; you’re not okay. Leading to arrogance, distrust, and other forms of conflict.
• You’re okay; I’m not okay. Provoking jealousy, fear of loss/death, and other debilitating emotions.
• I’m not okay; you’re not okay. The position that leads most quickly to total loss of sanity or harm to oneself or others.

For everyone, the basic, foundational sense of trust is the “I’m okay; you’re okay” position. But when a person experiences significant fear, loss, or any kind of abuse in early life, they’re likely to adopt a different position.

The existential position we choose depends on the emotions that gave us the most satisfying payoffs in our early environment. Growing up, we try on all sorts of emotions. We find that our family and friends treat certain emotions with anger, blame, or indifference. But other emotions win us attention or various forms of approval.

The emotions that bring the results we want are known as our rackets.

Because it’s extremely difficult to find a family without some degree of dysfunction, it’s not rare for a chosen racket to be a destructive emotion, like guilt, arrogance, inadequacy, or the like.

Rackets come in all shapes in sizes: the tendency to crave shame-inducing, anxiety-provoking relationships, the belief that your incompetence forever stands in the way of your building wealth, etc.

You become habituated to your racket because it allows you to act out emotional dynamics you’ve become conditioned around since early childhood.

Regardless of how useful a racket may or may not be, they bring us payoffs that confirm our habitual existential position or self-concept. We learn to exploit any situation to continue to justify and perpetuate whatever racket we’ve built an identity around.

Psychologist Dr. Claude Steiner’s Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts gives the following example.

A woman with an “I’m not okay” position elaborated it into a “Nothing I do ever works” racket and would use any situation to feel bad.

Whenever she went to a meeting, she played her racket as follows: If she got there early, she felt bad because she could have used the additional wash at home, if she arrived late, she would feel bad because everybody noticed her with disapproval; and if she came on time, she felt bad because no one noticed her.

Thus, no matter what the situation, she used it to promote her racket.

You’re Not Trapped — You’re Eroticizing Your Existential Position

The example above demonstrates how classic patterns of suffering aren’t products of our circumstances alone. No matter how the external world arranges itself, we will find interpretations that perpetuate the conflicts active within our psyches.

Even though rackets keep us in loops of self-defeating, pain-inducing behaviors, they help us feel safe within the limiting scope of being to which we’ve become habituated.

We can make sense of this habituation from two perspectives: from a neurophysiological level, we build neural pathways around the beliefs and assumptions we cling to most, and the longer we engage these patterns, the more ingrained they become.

Socially, if you’re in the Western world, you grew up against a cultural machine intent on keeping you passively entertained and vaguely worried, believing you require saving from a hopelessly unfair society.

Since these institutions hold their power best with support from co-dependent masses, they trained you to feed on fear and limitation-based assumptions about reality and your place within it.

This tendency runs so deep that even you find solace in your own lack of power.

Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power by Carolyn Elliott describes everyone as having a dual nature: a (light) conscious side, where we house our productivity, our talents, the friendly side of ourselves we show the world, as well as a (dark) shadow side, the home of our repressed, primal nature, home of what she calls our existential kink.

She argues our existential kink drives our repetitive, stuck patterns: our procrastination loops, our inability to make the money we want, or our attraction to people who hurt us. From my perspective, the racket and the existential kink describe the same dynamic.

Although we consciously experience these patterns as burdens, these dark loops also bring subconscious pleasure, a hidden fascination also described by Freud as psychic masochism or French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as jouissance.

Consciously, we feel limited or frustrated by them, but unconsciously they feed the active wounds still present within our shadow. She writes:

“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.”

Since we’re all dual-natured, the more we disown our primal, darker energies, the more trickery they must engage in to get our attention.

When you’re not willing to face the part of you that hates even your most passion-forward work, it can’t help but leak out in procrastination or boredom.

Or as you convince yourself you’re 100% committed to your current partner, the dissonance pours forth in irritation about the way they fold towels or never remember to tuck in the back of their shirt.

Your disowned existential kinks also explain why attempting to manifest a new reality with aspirations or positive thinking alone often sends you lurching toward a brick wall of negativity.

Affirmations work when you’ve processed the darkness still swirling inside of you. When you don’t, your shadow slides beneath the cracks of your affirmations, wearing subtler, yet impossible-to-ignore costumes: hesitation, self-doubt, and frustration.

The great news is that becoming aware of these dynamics is the most powerful step in changing them. When you consider what you’re getting out of your struggles, you’re already ahead of 98% of the blissfully unaware (yet existentially frustrated) population who prefer to disown their darker natures.

As you recognize the way rackets/existential kinks function in your life, you plant seeds that help you identify the subconscious pleasure within even the most burdensome circumstances in your life.

In this way, you’re not a victim of your suffering — you recognize that no matter how walled off it might be, there’s a payoff you’re getting from it.

As inditing as this can feel at first, it allows you to embrace the status of the director of your life rather than the unwitting subject to bad luck or bad circumstances.

How to Embrace the Hidden Desires in Even Your Most Burdensome Problems

“Are you traveling with the beloved or waiting to get home to the beloved? It’s not ‘it’s abundant so I can have it,’ but ‘it’s abundant because I am it.” — Ram Dass

As you investigate your own rackets and existential kinks, you’ll probably feel an opening rather than a certainty.

When I reflect on what I’m getting out of my suffering, I usually don’t find an immediate reason. Instead, I feel a light-hearted sense of possibility, and a desire to playfully explore and embrace what I don’t yet know about myself.

While there isn’t this lucid realization of the suffering’s payoff, right away, I no longer feel held hostage by it or like I’m the powerless, unwitting victim of it. My curiosity turns on, and I befriend my sense of inadequacy, fear, or resistance rather than run from it. I realize that I am a vast and mysterious being, even to myself.

One foundational principle in manifestation is the directive to become a reverse paranoid: searching for the ways everything that happens might be in your best interest, and framing suffering within that light. Getting to know your rackets or existential kinks can be a direct way of engaging in this process.

In her exploration of existential kink, holistic doctor of the soul Kelly Brogan describes how the conventional perspective of the universe as an ever-wise yet testy teacher has an almost paternalistic flavor:

In a Law of Attraction universe of resonance and mirrors, a subtle but palpable masochistic dynamic can take hold. The sadist in this dance is the universe herself — a hard-knocks teacher offering all these lessons ‘for your own good.’

That’s how I’ve sometimes related to the unexpected experiences of adversity or betrayal that come my way. I would submit to my ‘deserved’ experience of pain, grief, shame, and fear and quickly try to extract the meaning. ‘What’s in this for me? Why is this happening? How is this actually serving me?’ […]

However, I started to feel myself bracing against the tough ways I might make the acquaintance of my fears and shadow parts. Like, ‘ok universe, bring it on, I promise I’ll own it and take full responsibility! But also, please be nice to me!’

That’s why, when I learned that the play of kink power dynamics could all be occurring within me — that I myself could be both the sadist and the masochist, something in me laughed with the delight of recognizing an obvious truth.

We pretend that this is all happening to us so that we can have the experience of playing hide and seek with our own consciousness. As Alan Watts describes, we think we want what we want, but what we really want is exactly what’s happening.

This perspective shift illustrates how we bypass opportunities to embrace our power, even in the context of manifestation, which is all about harnessing the creative, life-rearranging force within all of us.

When we believe the universe is testing us, we’re disempowered. We’re subtly assuming the status of victims, even to a wise and benevolent universe.

But when you shift and see yourself as having dual motivations, realizing there’s a part of you served by suffering, you stop displacing your power and suffering, embracing that you (and you alone) are the source of both.

Right now, the media and other cultural forces seem especially intent on sowing panic and crisis. As worried as you might become about problems outside yourself, there’s always a way in which that fear isn’t about what’s “out there” at all — what triggers you lets you know about the wounds creating pressure within your psyche.

And how could it not be? Sure, there are all kinds of objectively disturbing news stories and circumstances, but if it were all about what’s “out there,” why does one crisis occupy your mind more than another? Why does one story bring you to your knees while another only brings foreboding?

Regardless of the reality of suffering or risk in the world outside yourself, your fear, anxiety, or stress has a purpose within the boundaries of your own psychology. This is true whether we’re talking about current events or the disempowering lifestyle loops you find yourself caught within.

When you understand the purpose behind your stuckness, fear, or anxiety, you release energy otherwise devoted to maintaining the illusion of clarity. From here, you can transmute this unburdened energy into a source of forward movement.

By bringing awareness to your creative role within your suffering, you understand and liberate yourself from it. If you don’t, you’ll remain the hapless, nail-biting victim of whatever disturbing circumstance comes your way.

Understanding your repetitive patterns as rackets or kinks gives you the reins over your experience. You find access points to process your grief, anxiety, and even your shadowy pleasures. Instead of being a victim to them, they become stepping stones you use to create a more aligned reality.

When you learn to relate to your joy and your struggle as manifestations of the creative force within you, they stop becoming traps or stumbling blocks and instead become tools for expansion.

They become the driving forces behind your capacity to live from a light-hearted, more integrated perspective.

If you found something in this, I’d love to hear about it — leave a comment and let me know.

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