Suffering is not sexy

On the death of Carolyn Elliott

Two months before she died, Carolyn Elliott published a post on her Facebook page confessing all the things that she’d been lying about for the last ten years.

… that magick is always fun
… that deep change can be quick and painless
… that I always get stellar results
… that material success is always a side effect of spiritual growth
… that I'm in charge of my offerings and courses
YUCK.

Then she told her audience what her life actually looked like. Newly divorced. Heartbroken by a new lover. Nearly broke. Her email list dwindled from twenty thousand people to two thousand. Waking up at 3am sobbing. “Humiliated,” she wrote, and “grateful” for the humiliation.

And then, in the same breath, she reframed all of it. The bankruptcy wasn’t failure — it was “calcination,” the alchemical burning away of false roots. The heartbreak was “the secret choice of my soul.” The whole dumpster fire was, in her words, “a very positive magickal result of my heart’s deepest request.”

…and then she invited you to join her new seven-month course about it, aptly titled Babalon (a goddess in the religious and occult system of Thelema). She explained that it was not she who was in charge of this offering, it was Babalon herself, acting through her as a vessel. To help herself and others stop suffering. “To be of service to genuine liberation,” as a self-proclaimed bodhisattva.

For context, Carolyn Elliott wrote a book called Existential Kink that went viral in the new-age world. I don’t remember exactly how I came across it, but it’s no surprise that I did, being deep in shadow work myself at the time. I was home, in one of those waiting periods between trips to India, and it took two chapters to see she was circling the same ideas I'd been living inside of: that you jump into the shadow, let it grow larger than life, alchemize it instead of turning away. Osho taught that the only way to do shadow work is to be total about the shadow. Play with it. Tease it. Make it your bitch.

Elliott took that and gave it a seductive title that won her a bestseller. Her work drew me in and repelled me at the same time. I didn’t appreciate that a white woman was co-opting tantric philosophy and stamping her name on it. The writing was engaging; the philosophy was thin next to what I was already doing. And it all pointed at an outcome I'd never been chasing: manifesting piles of money, becoming, in her words, a "filthy rich witch." That was the part that made my stomach churn. That was never what any of it was for.

To think that I was once her target market for this.

As such, Carolyn Elliott had been on my spiritual-grifter list for a long time. From a cult-survivor-advocate standpoint, I'd call her a genuinely harmful person, entrenched in the exact predatory system that preaches a philosophy for abusers to act on their worst impulses with impunity — which they conveniently call "shadow work."

I’ve written before about the dark side of shadow work and how it attracts spiritual predators. See my piece on Deepak Chopra.

The spiritualized psychopathy of "Enlightened Masters"

It's what makes this whole thing both a tragedy and a crime.

I had to put my phone down for a while after I read her Facebook post because it's never easy to resolve the horror of being right about these things. Being right doesn't feel like a win to me. I don't want people to keep turning into proof that what I warn about in cult dynamics is serious enough to kill someone.

I won’t pretend to know the details of Elliott’s death. But my God, that post paints a picture clear as day to someone who studies these patterns. Underneath the cutesy, self-deprecating narration, underneath the esoteric jargon, underneath the hollow confession, is a woman whose entire identity and income was the persona of magickal success that had just publicly failed — and who has no ordinary self to fall back into, because she spent a decade selling the persona instead of being a person.

Here is a best-selling author, a woman who built a multi-million-dollar empire of self-help rooted in occultism, whose retreats sold for thousands of dollars, in public, in the middle of what looks like a full-blown mental health crisis — and not one person in the comments told her to slow down. To feel her pain in peace. To be a human. To just let her psyche register real loss, human limitation, ordinary defeat.

Suffering is not sexy. And yet the new-age community is so committed to alchemizing every downfall into ascension that there's no longer any scenario in which the psyche is allowed to let pain be pain. A loss is always secretly a win. But sometimes we just fail. Sometimes we just lose. And the only place we have to land is plain old, un-transformed, un-special grief.

That’s the part I find most disturbing about this whole thing. The fact that everyone stood around and just watched someone’s life fall apart in real time and applaud it as “calcination.”

The other disturbing piece about this is the doctrine she lived by. The doctrine that made her rich is the same one that stood between her and her healing. It’s the same doctrine that guarantees she’ll never reach for real help because real help starts with, “I’m suffering and I don’t understand why,” and she is fundamentally, doctrinally incapable of that sentence.

Why?

Because Existential Kink is rooted in the belief that you are the secret author of everything that happens to you. You have total responsibility, no exceptions. It’s not only that you attract bad shit with your energy; it’s that you secretly want it. You get off on psychological suffering. You have a kink for emotional pain. On some level you enjoy your worst patterns and self-sabotage. And the only way to alchemize it into something creative is to consciously savor the shadow. Feel the pleasure in it and own it. And then, freed of your resistance, you can finally manifest what you want.

It’s a seductive idea, and the reason why it worked on me and others is because making friends with the shadow dissolves shame, and there’s real merit in that. But the problem is when shadow work takes healthy guilt down with it—the part of your psyche that says “I did something bad, and I need to take responsibility for it.” This matters especially for the people most drawn to this work: the ones carrying real, unprocessed trauma and an ego they’ve never examined.

There’s nothing more dangerous than a philosophy that tells an unhealed wound its darkest impulses are sacred material to play with. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Without healthy guilt as a guardrail, the pain doesn’t get “alchemized.” The psyche fragments, the pain gets projected, and people get hurt.

That kind of “shadow work” becomes a subtle dissociation strategy that the unexamined ego wraps into a dreamy esoteric narrative. But the trauma never actually metabolizes. It detaches from the person carrying it and goes looking for somewhere else to land. It becomes spiritualized psychopathy.

And if you believe, all the way until the end, that you secretly choose and enjoy every shitty thing that happens to you, one last thing quietly becomes true: there’s no such thing as an abuser anymore—only your own wicked desires, mirrored in another person. This is not a transcendental philosophy, ya’ll. It’s what spiritual predators would tell you if they could say the quiet part out loud: that the abuse was, on some level, the thing you were asking for.

A lot of women came into Elliott’s world already wounded and left more wounded and more broke. And none of it surprises me, because she didn't invent her method. She learned it from her origin sex cult, OneTaste. Her own mentor was Rachel Cherwitz —who was, in her words, "a sales powerhouse.” Cherwitz was convicted of forced-labor conspiracy alongside OneTaste's founder, Nicole Daedone, who was sentenced to nine years in prison. That's the environment Carolyn Elliott came up in. Her roots there explain a lot about what she built: programs with allegations of gaslighting and spiritual abuse, squalid conditions for participants, $10,000 price tags, and terms that admitted in writing that the container wasn’t safe.

OneTaste sex cult leader, Nicole Daedone, got 9 years for "forced labor conspiracy." Here's what the charge leaves out.

Her own curriculum was drawn as a literal pyramid. You enter at "existential kink" and climb, rung by rung, until the top two levels read "Material Wealth: Money" and "Temporal Power." At the highest level, “culture leaders” could apply to become an existential kink coach in 6 months for $6,000.

Obviously, I never wanted her to die. I wanted her to be held accountable. Like, in a real way, not in the imaginary way she staged in that Facebook post—“in my defense, your honor”— where she prosecutes herself for the small, petty crime of telling subtle lies “without quite realizing.” Where she gets to be guilty of self-deception, but redeemed as “a better magick teacher than ever.”

Meanwhile, the students she lied to, the money she extracted, the harm she caused get swallowed up in a machine that she lived inside for so long that she had nowhere left to put her own suffering except a Facebook post that ends as a sexy sales pitch.

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