Content warning: While neither this article nor the book discuss explicit details of child sexual abuse (CSA), the existence of CSA and its resulting trauma is addressed.
I almost didn’t finish this book, and in hindsight I shouldn’t have. This was partly because of the bad writing, but mostly because of its troubling understanding of child abuse. The first few pages establish the central Law of Attraction premise of the book: having is evidence of wanting meaning that everything that happens to us is the manifestation of a conscious or (more often) unconscious desire. Elliott caveats this with the statement that systemic issues like “poverty, racism, sexism” are not entirely the responsibility of our individual unconscious wanting, but part of the “mass ‘collective shadow’ (as Jung would put it).”
However, not 10 pages later, Elliot is applying her narrative to her childhood experience being “molested by a man [she] dearly loved”. Thus, the nascent framework for Existential Kink is born by wondering if “all the bad stuff had manifested because [she] liked it that way?“
I would have given up on the book there, but I wanted some confirmation that others were picking up on the weirdness too. So I read some online reviews1,2 which mostly centered on a few things:
- The writing is terrible, quite awful.
- The practices are incredibly helpful.
- WFT is going on with the childhood molestation theme?
Validated, and lured by the promise of an effective practice3 amidst the dross. I decided to dive back into the book strategically. First, I found a F.A.Q. after the last chapter.4 In it, we learn that Dr. Elliott does not recommend applying Existential Kink to childhood trauma for most people–pointing out the relative powerlessness of children. However, through her own cosmology and EK practice, she came to a personal belief that her pre-incarnation spirit chose to be born into an abusive household so that she could help heal the collective unconscious of the pattern of child abuse. Like a boddhisattva or christ-figure suffering for our collective salvation.
I’m not going to go into detail reviewing or critiquing this book because I think the provided reviews do it justice already. Ultimately, I think this is best categorized as a (questionably) sexy, pop-psychology5, New Age repackaging of tried and true Buddhist and western integrative practices.
Better references for similar work:
- Integrated Family Systems and Parts Theory
- I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it by Cheri Huber
- Feeding your Demons
- https://andrewconner.com/media-diet/existential-kink/ ↩︎
- https://sherif.io/booknotes/Existential-Kink/ ↩︎
- https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-craziest-thing-that-ever-happened ↩︎
- Pro Tip for authors: If you think a book needs a F.A.Q. section, you should simply write those answers into the body of the book ↩︎
- Or, as pop-psychology as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud can be in 2023 ↩︎
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