Clubbing, especially with drugs, partially serves this role, but it is not integrative. You become lost, but you do not come back better. It is just “fun”. It actually seems to fracture most people, since they now have to contrast the deep ecstasies they felt when dancing while high, with the pedestrian world they occupy most days of most weeks. It actually makes them sad, on balance.
Sex, often combined with clubbing, partially serves this role, if you allow yourself to become fully lost. But it is not integrative, and if the sex is random and conduced in an emotionally detached way, I would argue it actually is alienating for both parties. You achieve connection that is immediately sundered, and thus you become progressively less willing to risk emotionally, less willing to commit emotionally, and thus in many ways more shallow. Unable to risk pain, you feel only muted pleasure.
As I wrote some time ago, though, that if you use sex as a drug, like all drugs you have to go deeper and deeper to get the same effect. BDSM is the logical ending place, as the most horrific and yet poignant and memorable iteration of it. It makes people feel “alive”. They know, intuitively, that they need pain to live, and their lives are comfortable and protected and free, so they have to go seek it out.
What I would like to repeat, here, is that what they are trying to do is seek out deep, hidden emotional realities that have to be accessed SPECIFICALLY. The analogy that occurred to me is that you could compare wounds to a Poker hand. Let’s say a person holds 2 Kings, an 8, a 7, and a 2. If you put up a 6 or a 3, you get nothing. This is the equivalent of undergoing a masochistic experience, and feeling great emotions, and an emotional release, but one which accomplishes no long term result. Nothing is really released on a deep level.
[And I would compare the sadist with the masochist this way: the sadist is less advanced since they feel pain through others; the masochist wants to feel their own pain, but they don’t know how to do it effectively. I think masochism can also become a habit when one is punished often. Cruelty can become the only connection a child has with its parents, and thus being hated and hurt the only sense of CONNECTION it has felt, and which it thus later seeks to replicate.]
Effective long term psychotherapy, of the sort described in the excellent book “Trauma and Recovery” , which I think all the Usual Suspects (you know who you are) should read, gradually establishes what those cards are, and what their effect has been. It is a gradual process of connecting the conscious mind with what is hidden. Things emerge first in a fog, then grow increasingly distinct, then at some point you have a more or less open conduit from the unconscious to the conscious, which is the therapeutic goal.
What I would submit (W)holotropic Breathwork does is facilitate the self emergence of each of those cards, in order of relative importance. We might see in one session the King of Hearts emerge. You say “oh, there it is. I had forgotten that feeling or experience”. Or maybe you don’t even name the experience, but just emit an emotion, perhaps one tied to long term emotional states you had suppressed.
Stan Grof has done many, many sessions, and he said there is usually one thing, one piece, that comes out. It seems to be unitary that way. You don’t get a lot of things, but one important thing, then another in the next session.
This is a strange connection, but what I would submit practitioners of BDSM REALLY want is the sort of release Holotropic Breathwork enables. Certainly if you have misery in your past, and want to find it, it will get you there.
Where the former is concerned, you really simply further life in a dark place, even if you get occasional respites from your obsessive normalcy. Look at the covers of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, (being sold in grocery stores, Target, and other places by the truckload, making this discussion timely and relevant). Is that the sort of life you want? No, it is the sort of life you choose ABSENT ALTERNATIVES, absent a sense that you can in some other way escape your mundane world, where nothing really different or exciting ever happens.