The Spooky Axiom that Initiates You into Untold Levels of Psychological Freedom

Create a massive pattern interrupt in your self-concept & life circumstances with one simple, yet eerie line of questioning.

Your degree of psychological freedom depends on one factor: the ability to live outside of the drama triangle.

The drama triangle is a model of human dynamics synthesized by Stephen Karpman. It suggests people narrate their experiences from the perspective of three positions: the Victim, the Rescuer, and the Persecutor.

• The Victim sees herself as the unlucky recipient of a cruel and harsh reality.
• The Rescuer is a helper to the Victim, using their assumptions of the helplessness of the Victim to support their own fragile sense of power.
• Finally, the Persecutor is whatever person, circumstance, or event seems to haunt the sad, confused, and unlucky Victim.

We see this dynamic everywhere: the drama triangle haunts the bible, it haunts corporate media, and it may haunt your inner conversations.

You’re in the drama triangle whenever you see yourself as disadvantaged, put-upon, or enslaved by a circumstance/person/event outside your control.

Of course, with situations that make your blood boil, you can probably list thousands of reasons that justify why you are indeed at the mercy of something outside of yourself, whether it’s time, money, or your past choices.

But I’d like to make a bold and sweeping claim: the reason you struggle with creative blockages, relationships, money, or other issues can all be traced back to the very deep-rooted, culturally conditioned tendency to view your life through the drama triangle lens.

But there are no Victims, just unconscious creators

Most people view themselves as Victims — they believe their lives aren’t working either because a) the world is corrupt and bad, b) they are corrupt and bad, or c) both.

In the fate-altering book, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow & Embrace Your Power, spooky lunar priestess Carolyn Elliott posits that the reason we feel like we’re powerless against a cruel reality— whether it’s money, time, or our own selves — is the division between our conscious and unconscious minds.

She points to a recognition that psychological pioneers like Freud, Jung, and Lacan described in different ways: most human beings have insanely divided wills.

Most people worry about, rail against, and fight their own inner badness or the problems they see “out there.”

They don’t realize that whatever’s driving their pain actually represents long-repressed, not-culturally-approved-of desires buried within their unconscious minds.

That’s right: your ancient, unconditioned, and cosmically naughty unconscious is curious about a range of experiences, including those that threaten your ego. These include scarcity, rejection, anger, earaches, and other kinds of pain.

If you want freedom, creativity, friendship, and other ego-approved things in your life, you can’t repress or manage away the darkness.

Instead, you need to embrace, and even radically approve of your suffering. As Carl Jung famously said,

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.

According to Jungian psychology, the unconscious is the receptive, generative part of your consciousness. For this reason, it has more power to determine the conditions of your life than your ego.

As described in Existential Kink:

The unconscious is generative because the emotions, symbols, and attitudes within it create the synchronicities or meaningful coincidences, that shape your experience.

Whatever desires are in your unconscious, will be “born,” will happen, and the results of those desires will seem to come toward you from some unfathomable outside agency — in other words, “fate.”

This teaching goes against common advice to think positively or focus solely on your desires.

Rather than deny or use control-based tactics to change your situation, you need to embrace, understand, and even celebrate the “difficult” experiences in your life, experiencing them in the same way your unconscious does: as fulfillments, not horrible problems.

The good news: what threatens your ego can also re-arrange the conditions of your life

In the book, Carolyn suggests exploring the axiom that “having is evidence of wanting” in response to any repetitive pattern in your life that you don’t like.

This axiom isn’t meant to trivialize your problems or blame you for having them. Instead, it serves as an “excavation tool” (as Carolyn brilliantly put it) that helps you explore the secret, emotional payoffs these seemingly flawed circumstances bring to you.

While it takes a lot of curiosity, openness, and open-ended exploration to feel how these painful circumstances may be fulfillments of long-buried desires, even being willing to engage in this line of thought has the power to create a significant pattern interrupt.

Ordinarily, in a world of drama triangles, our standard, societally conditioned assumption is to believe the painful emotions are there because our circumstances suck, our relationships are broken, or we live in a corrupt world. Yet this perspective so often hardens into a sense of helplessness.

The notion that “having is evidence of wanting” interrupts this line of thinking and restores your power. It suggests your circumstances are like post-hoc justifications for emotions that are already in your unconscious.

The seemingly bad circumstances in your life aren’t the root of the problem (or problems at all!) — they’re simply games your unconscious is playing to live out the patterns that already exist within you.

Why extending this principle to its absolute extremes is a potent road to personal freedom

“There’s a horribly frightening little passage in Jung somewhere, where he says, The unconscious has a thousand ways to terminate a life that has become meaningless… Meaning, you’ll step in front of a streetcar or something.” — Terence McKenna (quoted in Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin)

This is an eerie, yet weirdly liberating thought. When you die, it’s not because you’re a hapless victim of fate or the pressures of physical reality. Instead, your death, just like the suffering that currently colors your current life, is a choice.

Of course, the You in question isn’t the conscious personality you connect with during your morning walks through the park.

Instead, it’s the Unconscious, the part of you that hasn’t received conditioning that tells you death and suffering are these nightmarish, scary things to avoid at all costs.

The more you can see the scary stuff the way your unconscious does— as delightful adventures — the less polarized, anxious, and ego-attached you become.

Notice that with every experience we’d call painful, there’s the experience itself, then there’s the sociocultural conditioning around its meaning. Suffering is usually the result of the latter, while the former is just a raw sensation.

When you celebrate the painful, unconscious patterns in your life, you un-burden yourself from the conditioning that says you should only feel excited by a narrow range of your experiences.

While the above passage could seem insulting or outlandish, notice how it also restores autonomy, to yourself and to the people you lose in death.

If we accept death as a kind of fulfillment, no longer is it a scary, simple, senseless “tragedy.” It’s purposeful. It has an internal logic.

While that logic may remain outside the grasp of your conscious mind, it’s something you can get curious about; it’s something you can relate to from a place of playful inquiry rather than fearful torment.

It’s this ability to sit with death and suffering — rather than rail against them — that moves you out of the drama triangle and into a place of power. From this vantage point, you can see your experiences as fundamentally elegant and meaningful.

This is mental alchemy — the process of turning lead into gold, suffering into creativity.

And here’s the paradox.

The more you’re able to enjoy your life, even the parts of it you’ve long seen as insufferably wicked, shameful, and unfortunate, the more you’re able to liberate that judging energy, allowing it to fuel creative pursuits, a taste for adventure, or simply a higher baseline level of okay-ness, trust, and acceptance.

This takes you out of Victim consciousness and into psychological freedom: from here, the veil lifts, and your “problems” feel like games. They reveal themselves to be narrative constructs that fall apart the moment you look closely enough at them.

Like Terence McKenna stated,

“If what we’re embedded in is a novel, then you want to figure out who in the novel you are…As a character, the more conscious you become, the more you have free will within the context of the plot.

You can get a lot rowdier than you are; you can make a lot more waves. This will move your character nearer and nearer to the center of the action. The goal is to become the author of the novel, and then you can write any ending you want for your character or any other…

Suddenly you go from being a chest man on the board to the chest master, looking at the board…

Interested in other shifts that help you create inner and outer change that’s actually nourishing? Read on.