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Find Pleasure in Life’s Painful Moments: It’s Time to Embrace ‘Existential Kink’
This unusual tactic transforms wallowing into a powerful mental health exercise
Given frustrations, anxieties, and fears coming up during Covid-19, you may have been searching for coping methods that don’t include TV bingeing or reaching for another glass of wine. One you may not be familiar with is “existential kink,” a term coined by author and expert Carolyn Elliott, PhD. Based on concepts like Freud’s pleasure principle and Jung’s shadow, existential kink (EK) allows us to process difficult or “don’t like” emotions by consciously enjoying them.
What does that look like? Let’s take the example of sadness. With EK, you would open the floodgates and really let the emotion expand, taking on mythical proportions, like a profound and beautiful tragedy. You might feel the sadness swelling through your body or pinning you with its weight. Maybe you’d relish the absolute desolation enveloping you and would picture yourself in the company of the saddest poets who ever lived, conveying their despair like a beautiful jewel. With anger, you might feel your rage crackling through your body like electricity and then exploding in lightning that lights up the whole sky. Or you’d envision yourself as an infuriated monster, 50 feet tall and…
