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  • Wrecking Your Own Body to Be Recognised

    Two people, and nothing about them looks alike. One is a man working his way through a series of women. The other is the person everybody calls selfless — the one who empties himself into helping other people and has nothing left over afterwards. Set them side by side and they look like opposite characters in opposite stories. Both of them are after being recognised. One goes out and collects it. The other gives himself away to earn it.

    What he is actually taking home

    Take the outward direction first. Say the word affair and we reach for sexual desire. But the desire is not the essential part. The essential part is emotion. When the feeling of being recognised is filled in, neither men nor women look elsewhere. That is the hinge. What a man who runs from woman to woman wants out of it is a capacity of his own: that he has appeal as a man. He wants that capacity acknowledged.

    So he meets a woman he does not know, and they spend a night, and what registers inside this man afterwards is how much recognition he has just been given. She was taken with him, she came over to him — so I am recognised as a man. And sex is what gets used to confirm it.

    The son who tore into his father

    Where does a man learn to take it that way? A boy watches, from early on, what the father’s role consists of. If the father was unfaithful, the son may tear into him for it. Then the son arrives at the father’s role himself, and a situation gets built in which the same thing can happen with complete ease.

    Some men set themselves against it hard. My father did that, so I never will. And they don’t — they hold the line. Then, strangely, it turns up in the son’s generation. The injury was never treated. A decision was taken over the top of it instead, and a decision holds for the man who makes it. It does not travel to the boy who grew up beside him.

    Which is why none of this turns on what sort of wife a man has. There are husbands who are unfaithful although their wives have done nothing wrong, and husbands who are not unfaithful although their wives have given them ample reason.

    The illness of going mad because you cannot help

    The other direction runs the opposite way. Codependency is an illness of helping somebody. More precisely, an illness of going mad because you cannot help. Not being able to help another person makes these people ill. So they sacrifice themselves enormously in order to help, they pour everything into it, and then there is nothing left for themselves. At bottom, codependency is a self-abusing illness.

    Neither the minister nor the person doing it knows

    Now put a person carrying a self-abusing illness into a church. “They could be put to superb use.” It has every appearance of strong faith and generous sacrifice, and what it actually is, is an illness. The hard part is that neither side knows. The minister does not know. The person doing the work does not know. So work gets handed out and taken on and handed out again. There is no ill will anywhere in it. It is ignorance, running on both sides at once.

    Addicts of recognition

    So why sacrifice like that? There is another name for codependency. They are addicts of recognition. Recognition is the substance, and once a person is addicted to it they will want it badly enough to wreck their own body getting it.

    Why should recognition weigh that much? Because the person has no value of being that could be recognised. Settle it about yourself that simply existing earns nothing, and the only road left open is doing. Which is how both directions arrive at the same place — the man collecting evidence that a woman came over to him, the helper collecting evidence of sacrifice. Each is trying to obtain, through what he does, some verdict that his existence is acceptable too. What it is like to live with the inside never filled in, I have written about separately in You Got Everything You Needed. So Why Does the Inside Dry Out?

    If I am not performing that sacrifice and devotion, my existence is not permitted. The permission to be here does not come through from inside. So there is anxiety, and then chasing — casting about for something. What can I do?

    Too perfect a double act

    Wives living with an addict are generally spoken of as being on the codependent side of it. Because it is too perfect a double act. The addict goes on living a life that says look after me. The codependent goes on living a life that says yes, I will look after you. The same arrangement can be described as parts in a play, which is how I set it out in They Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of.

    It looks like helping the recovery

    Then suppose the addict breaks the arrangement. I am going to take responsibility for my own life now, as an adult — and off he goes down the road of recovery. What becomes of the codependent? Fear. The person I am supposed to be helping is disappearing.

    So at the exact moment this addict is trying to recover, he gets hit on the back of the head. To knock him down again. He has to stay an addict. It looks like helping the recovery, and what it does in fact is wreck it.

    Opposite lives, one shortage underneath. The one who went outward confirms himself by the other coming over to him; the one who went inward, by the other staying broken.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • I Can’t Do This, and That Is Where It Starts

    Recovery language has the word surrender in it. Said out loud it sounds like taking your hands off. What actually happens at that point is not that.

    A part that insists it owns the whole

    There is a formulation that the ego has to die in front of the Self — the whole of you. The ego does not oblige. It stays alive in us the entire time. What is going on is that the part has shoved the whole aside and is insisting that it is the owner. Jung’s account of the process has this same passage in it.

    So the dying being described is not an instruction to get rid of yourself. It is the part climbing down out of the owner’s seat. What kind of seat that is I have written out separately in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God.

    Settle it at step one and half of it is settled

    What is the first step of the recovery program? In the end it is denying yourself. Without denying yourself, nothing new begins. Ask which step matters most and the answer is step one. Someone who cannot get through step one gets nothing out of moving on to step two, and someone who settles it at step one alone has nearly half of the whole thing settled.

    Denying yourself is not an instruction to hate yourself. What is denied is not your existence — it is the judgment that you can solve this yourself.

    First counselling of his life, and already there

    There is a case of a man who had been using cannabis. It was the first counselling of his life and he had carried out step one before he walked in. What he had arrived at on his own was this: this drug has wrecked me, and I cannot cut it off. And if I cannot cut it off, my life comes apart. Then he went to the prosecutors and wrote out a confession, told his parents everything, confessed to his wife. He had never once been caught. He had worked out that if he could not stop he would die of it, so he settled his mind and came in prepared for prison, with no idea what sentence would land.

    A good man when he smoked

    Cannabis had been, by his own account, a genuine saviour. And he had used a great deal of it. At the beginning there was a flash of something, an ease it handed him. Repeat it long enough, though, and the eyes go loose. Anyone looking at him could see that he was not right. And he came apart in two: a very good man while he was smoking, and, when he was not, irritation and a raw, extreme sensitivity. At home nobody could work out why he was like that. Why a person cannot stop at the line he drew for himself is a separate question, and I have gone into it in Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller.

    I can’t. I am not able to.

    So he reaches it: I am someone who cannot solve this. And he goes down in front of other people. I can’t. I am not able to. That is the posture. And it is when a person goes down like that that a new start actually happens.

    Not turned over — decided to turn over

    The third step of the recovery program comes with a commentary, and that commentary begins from a fact about the addict: his will and his life had already been turned over, to the addiction. It describes the addiction driving that will and that life into extreme despair — and only then did they go looking for another way.

    The sentence that sits in that place is the third step itself. It does not say the will and the life were turned over. It says a decision was taken to turn them over — the step’s own words are “made a decision”. The commentary puts weight on exactly that — “it was not that someone decided for us; we decided.” It calls this the first decision he had made for himself since the addiction took hold, and adds that deciding requires action.

    The clause in front of the word God is not decoration either. It is not God flatly. It is God “as we came to understand him” — which is to say the content of that word is left with each person. The commentary is plain that nobody had to be religious to take this step, and that each person has the right to believe in God as he has come to understand him.

    And it may still be sitting in your hands

    So this step is not a matter of handing the thing to somebody else and walking away. The commentary says that even after you have said you turned it over, your will and your life may still be sitting in your own hands — and that you may find yourself angry that God permitted that to be so. It expects the questions that follow, and writes them down: “If I turn my life over, what on earth is going to happen? Will I become complete?”

    The word to listen for is surrender

    Further on, the passage restates the step without the decision clause: “We turned our will and our lives over completely to the care of a God greater than ourselves.” And then comes a line telling the reader where to put his attention — “listen to the word surrender here”. Then: the helpless despair, the kind that had looked past hope, begins to lift.

    The place where that lifting starts is the place where somebody goes down and says he cannot.

    Surrender is not taking your hands off. A man who has given up does not write out a confession and carry it to the prosecutor.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • I Was Done To: The Sentence Fear Leaves Behind

    Ask where cruelty comes from and most people start with a frightening parent. That is not the concept. The question is not whether somebody frightening was standing in the room. It is whether good care was given. Fail to get proper care from a parent and fear is left behind, by itself. Not having been looked after is already, on its own, exposure to a frightening situation. Why the absence of care counts as harm at all, I have written out separately in No One Hit You, So You Thought It Wasn’t Abuse. What I want to follow here is what that fear does next.

    A country at war

    Once fear has settled in, the world goes bleak. And when the world is bleak, what posture does a person take? Look at a country at war. The moment war breaks out, everybody moves into one state — a paranoid state. From then on people suspect each other, take up a defensive stance so as not to be the one who gets hit, and order and law come apart. The whole thing can go primitive. One thing produced all of that. Fear did.

    The people who commit crimes are the people who are shaking with fear. A person does not become a criminal by being bad. It is the cry he lets out in order to survive that wounds the person next to him. What this piece is after is the turn itself — how fear that was done to a person comes back around and gets pointed at somebody else.

    It registers as one sentence

    Being exposed to a frightening environment registers inside the person as a single sentence. I was done to. That is the feeling it is carried in as.

    And a human being repeats the experience he has. Good or bad, it repeats. So the more fear someone felt, the more the opposite capacity develops: by the time he is grown and has some strength of his own, what has grown in him is the ability to make other people afraid. He does not stay put in the place where it was done to him. The direction flips.

    The man who rang only women when he was drunk

    There was a case like this. A man with alcohol addiction. Once he was properly drunk he would ring women, and only women — men he hardly called at all. What the person on the other end of the line felt was fear, the kind that goes through you. Set the words down on paper and it looks like ordinary conversation. It is what comes off the call that does it. That is how much fear one person can hand to another, and how strongly.

    And this man had taken in that much fear himself, as a child.

    There is no intention in it

    Here is where it divides. He is not handing out fear on purpose. He does not decide that he is going to frighten this person and then go and do it. When an experience repeats itself it runs through an unconscious state. As far as he is concerned he is expressing himself — and the expression terrifies the person in front of him. All violence and all destruction come out of the experience of having been frightened.

    What was taken has to be got back

    There is a second mechanism that stands alongside the first: deprivation. The word says what it is. Something was given, early on, and afterwards it was taken away. That is deprivation.

    The thought of having been robbed produces a very strong pull to get the thing back. I lost it, so I have to recover it. But the recovering can turn into theft. There is a second half to it as well. The space where the thing should have been is standing empty, so the person moves to fill it — and greed is stimulated at that same spot. He takes more than the amount.

    From outside, this is intrusion, and it is violent. To the person who lived through the deprivation, it feels legitimate. Legitimate is the word for it. The feeling is already in place before the act is.

    When the alarm is on, nothing good gets in

    Back to the fear, and to where it works in the body. In the middle of the brain sits the amygdala, and what it sets off is the fear signal, the alarm. Our surroundings are dangerous right now, so choose quickly — attack, or run, or stay frozen and do not move. It puts the body into a state of arousal. In that state a person has no room in him.

    And then nothing gets in. No good word gets in, not while that state is running. In a conversation between a husband and wife, or when somebody is criticising you, you make no effort to understand what the person is actually saying. Let somebody criticise you and the only thing going on in you is working out how to hit back. Praise that lands and leaves nothing behind is a different problem, built slowly over years (Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land). What I mean here is narrower than that: the arousal is switched on at this moment, and that is why nothing is getting through.

    That is just the normal shape of a human being

    None of this is an illness. That is just the normal shape of a human being. Which is why you talk to someone rather than criticise them — it is the only way anything passes in both directions. And even with no criticism in it, speech carries a wavelength. Send an aggressive wavelength out and the other person picks it up at once and begins responding aggressively, whatever the words were.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Small Wisdom Will Not Solve a Life

    Think of the ego as clay. If a human being is clay with breath blown into it, then the thing you call I is not the clay at all. It is the breath. The trouble starts when the clay begins announcing that it is the Self.

    This is not the old line about man being dust and nothing better, nor a verdict on your worth in the other direction. It is a question about occupancy — who is sitting in the seat where the breath belongs. What sort of seat that is, I have written about already, in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God. What follows is what a life looks like once the clay has climbed up into it.

    Growing up is the moment the head comes down

    Becoming an adult is the ego meeting the Self. And in that meeting, the head comes down. Before God, before life, before nature, the mind turns humble. Reaching that stage of humility is what being grown up is.

    Ignore the current and anger is what is left

    Whoever cannot lower the head goes the opposite way. There are currents running through a life that we know nothing about, enormous currents, and this person ignores them. I get married when I want to get married. I eat when I want to eat. I take a shit when I want to. And then it does not go the way I wanted it, and the anger arrives. A great many grown adults live at exactly this address, carrying anger and hatred and depression around with them.

    You can read off what the ego is from that. The ego is the part that thinks it is grander than God. Which leaves it no reason to look into the Self. It does not ask, it does not try to make contact, it goes on living by its own lights and its own preferences.

    “That is what the law is”

    The ego runs on its own method. I will try living this way. I will try living that way. Religious life is no exception — do it like this and your faith is good, no, do it like that and your faith is good. Track any of it back and the ego has been driving the whole time.

    There are people who live with real heat, hard and devoted, religious life included. And a person living like that is out of contact with the Self inside him. Out of contact with the Self means not connected to his own inner wisdom. Something moves into the empty place: the ego’s concept of the thing. Live this way and you are a right person, live this way and you are a holy person. That is what the law is. Keep what the world taught you and you will shine, you will be impressive, you will be holy.

    It looks like something, for a while

    Handling reality is the ego’s actual job, so a life run on the ego’s method does look plausible for a stretch. It looks like something is being built. Ultimately it does not hold. You keep going over.

    It relapses, it falls, it repeats. You did not want to live like this and the same situation keeps turning up (Your Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending). You tried to get better. You tried to have better faith, tried to live a holy life, and again it did not take. You can push at that pitch and the freedom inside you never shows up. Real freedom.

    Small wisdom and big wisdom

    The first admission in addiction recovery is a confession — I was powerless over the addiction, and there was nothing I could do about it. Read that as a statement about supply: the ego’s resources have run out.

    Sooner or later you collide with your own life. I tried it with my wisdom and the thing will not come untangled. The weariness of living, the matters that will not resolve — human wisdom cannot get them open. Human thinking is fragmentary to begin with, and extremely narrow. What we manage to assemble inside that narrowness, thrashing about trying to survive, is small wisdom. A life gets solved with big wisdom. Small wisdom will not solve a life. Big wisdom is the wisdom the true Self tells you.

    Somebody hits you once

    So what does small wisdom actually look like, close up? It is a calculation of profit and loss.

    Scripture is paradoxical, and the thing it is paradoxical against is human thinking. A person has worked out that doing it this way will pay, this way will be good for me — and scripture mostly says the reverse. No: do it the other way, and that is where the benefit is. The instructions it hands back are of that kind — sacrifice, give, forgive.

    In human terms, forgiving is a loss. Somebody hits you once, across the face. You are told to forgive. Forgive and you do not get to hit back, so this is a loss, and you are being told to take it anyway. And then you are told the forgiving is to your benefit. On human arithmetic that is very hard to accept.

    The road that helps you gets scored as a loss

    Which is why, nearly every time, the methods we think will benefit us are the ones that bring us harm.

    It runs the same way from the other side. Somebody lays out the road for you — it would do you good, it would make you happier — and you do not take it. There is one reason. You think you will lose by it. The flesh’s way of thinking registers that loss. It is not that the benefit was hidden from you. The loss calculation answers first, before anything else gets a turn.

    Most people scrabble along on the ego for the whole distance and die that way, never having tasted real freedom or real truth, having tried hard after their own fashion, and then finished. And then there are people who got addicted, who are carrying an injury, who went looking for a way to fix it and ran into the truth on the way. It hurt too much to leave alone. So they looked deeper, and deeper again. For them the pain turns out to be the blessing.

    There is one passage to get through before that, though. It is the one where you look at the way the ego has been running your life and admit, plainly, that it was shit. Clay settling back down to where clay goes.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Then What Is There for Pain in the Mind?

    Addiction takes first place. Once a person is in it, ordinary life gets obstructed around the thing, and the thing is what comes first in the day. For a gambler, gambling is first in line. Drugs cost a great deal of money, and raising that money is how a user ends up a dealer — he needs money to use, so eventually he sells. That is how the vicious circle closes on itself.

    There is a question that arrives before any of the rest: is addiction a sin or an illness? You can hold both at once. What follows looks at the mind of the person who becomes addicted without passing a verdict on him. Not everyone becomes addicted, after all.

    There are a great many kinds. The government in Korea designates four major addictions: alcohol, drugs, gambling, gaming — roughly that list. Sex addiction is widespread. There is exercise addiction, and there is book addiction — reading too much of the time.

    Underneath all of them, becoming addicted is avoiding reality. Running from it. Book addiction sounds like the harmless kind, but the reader stops being able to run his own day. People do ask whether some addictions aren’t good ones. There are no good addictions.

    “Because it’s fun,” or “I just do it”

    At the beginning it is good, it is fun, it is comfortable. That holds whichever substance got picked. Take gaming. To an adult eye every child looks like a gaming addict; with children in the house you hear yourself saying he plays far too much, he’s addicted to that game (When a Child Stops Listening, You Should Be Clapping).

    Serious gaming addiction, or a child who simply likes games and plays a lot of them — the difference comes out roughly if you ask. Ask a child, ask a young adult. “Because it’s fun.” That one is not an addict. “I just do it.” That one can be read as addiction.

    The deeper gaming addiction runs, the less the playing is about wanting to play. It is done because playing brings the mind a certain amount of peace. Not because it is fun.

    Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt

    Alcohol works the same way. Drink, and the body’s sensation goes numb. Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt, because the sense has been deadened.

    Sit at a game and you lose track of the hours. Every five years or so a news item comes around about someone who died of malnutrition while gaming. The body is supposed to report hunger. The sense is numbed, so the nutrition drains out of him and the hunger signal never reaches him as a sensation. Gaming numbed that sense.

    Self-destruction on the mind’s side, numbness on the body’s

    So read addiction psychologically and it carries an aim of self-destruction; read it physically and it numbs the person’s own senses. That is a purpose as well. It means the thing has a purposefulness in it that wrecks the person’s own life.

    For pain in the body we take a painkiller

    When something hurts in the body, what do we take? A painkiller. A cold, an ache somewhere — a painkiller, and the pain settles down. Pain in the body, painkiller.

    Then what is there for pain in the mind?

    Some people answer that they pray. People with faith say that prayer is where they receive comfort and strength from God.

    But look steadily at what is actually there. People who believe in Jesus get depression. Among people who believe in Jesus there are a great many addicts. Among believers there are a great many with disorders of anger. Every one of those is a sign that there is pain in the mind.

    So why does someone who believes in Jesus, who believes in God, not get comfort and consolation and strength from God? That is the point where the difficulty begins, and it is a serious one to sit with. It stays what it was at the start — a look without a verdict.

    The rescue gets looked for outside

    The mood goes grey, so you go out and start shopping. And that is how a shopping addict gets made. Look at it closely and addiction is the act of looking outside for the rescue that would settle the pain inside. The pain is in the mind, and the solution is hunted for outside. A child is giving you grief, so you have a drink (Not Completely Released. Just Soothed Again.).

    They don’t know they are tense

    Most people have heard of propofol. Part of what addiction offers is a painkilling effect, and drugs of that sort in particular slacken the body.

    And the people who are going to become addicts are tense all the time. The shoulders are always holding something. They don’t know they are tense, so they live every ordinary day that way. Then comes the drink, or the drug, or some behaviour, and it lets go. Oh — comfortable. Oh — that’s all right. Something here is putting me at ease.

    For pain in the body there is a painkiller. For pain in the mind, what is there? The question does not close here. But there is one question that can be set down in front of it first. Am I doing this because it’s fun, or do I just do it?

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • One Drink, and You Cannot Hear It

    Addiction gets filed under pleasure. He is chasing a good time, the account goes. The account is wrong at the root. Nobody with a quiet mind goes looking for something to quiet it.

    A person with no pain in him cannot become an addict

    A person with no pain in his mind cannot become an addict. The purpose the thing serves is to settle him down, and a mind already at peace has nothing that needs settling. There is no work there for a drink to do.

    So the question moves one step back: where does pain in a mind come from.

    The root cause is that he is criticising himself

    Look for it carefully enough, over years of consulting-room work, and this is what turns up. The root cause of pain in a human mind is that the person is criticising himself.

    You are trash. What could you possibly do. You stupid thing. You fool. He passed that judgement on himself, set his identity there, and left it standing.

    Some know they are doing it. Some cannot make it conscious at all.

    Some people can bring it to consciousness — they know they are holding themselves as a fool. For others it never becomes conscious at all.

    Conscious or not, ask what it feels like to hold yourself as a fool. It feels low. Some of the time it comes out as anger. And it is tense, permanently, because of the question underneath: what if people take me for a fool. These are the people swung around too easily by what others think of them.

    You are a fool. You are a fool. Every hour of a life.

    The thought that I am a fool does not go into a pocket and sit there quietly once it has been had. It runs again. He keeps planting the message in himself — and he is the one planting it.

    You are a fool. You are a fool. You are a fool. That is what is going on in there. And he has no idea that it is going on. You are a fool, so of course you could not manage even that. You are a fool, so this is the only sort of life available to you. You are a fool, so why would anybody like you. Every hour of a life, every minute inside the hour, this keeps running. Think what it costs to carry that.

    One drink, and you cannot hear it

    And then. He has a drink. Puts a drug in. What happens in the mind at that moment? You fool. You idiot. He cannot hear it. The whole of his attention has gone elsewhere.

    With the voice switched off like that, how is he supposed to stay out of addiction? For that moment the drink saved him. The voice that spends all day calling him a fool has stopped calling him a fool. How is he supposed to not choose that.

    So he does it in order to live

    He chooses it. He is doing it in order to live. In order to live. The pain got so bad that the drink turned into a place he could run to and be out of it for a while.

    And the same wall stops “God loves you”

    Some of the people carrying this are Christians, and the church hands them the message it hands everybody: “God loves you. He went to the cross for you; the son of God gave up his life for one particular person, you.” Taken at face value that says something enormous about the hearer: I must be worth a great deal. More than the whole world is worth.

    And it is not believed. However many times it is said beside him, however central it is to the faith he belongs to, it does not go in. The belief he holds about himself is the truer of the two. God loves you — yes, understood. But that love has nothing to do with me. I am a fool. There is no chance God loves a fool like me.

    So you tell him, and he says: I know. He does not know. He is saying words. He is a fool who has to keep the fool hidden, and you have put in front of him a thing everyone agrees is true and right — can he argue with that? Argue and it comes back as: you idiot, you do not even know that much. So he says I know, and there it ends. Nothing inside him moves, because he already knows God would not love somebody like him. Which is to say: he cannot love himself. What comes next when a person cannot do that, I have written about in Fail to Love Yourself and It Goes Straight to Abuse. There Is No Middle Ground.

    Knowing that you are of worth

    Christians tend to snag here. Surely we are not meant to love ourselves; we are meant to love other people. The two look as though they collide, but sitting inside self-centred thinking and holding yourself as worth something are not the same thing at all. To hold yourself as precious means knowing that you yourself are of worth — knowing it as a fact about you.

    It was because we are of worth, because we were worth that much, that the death on the cross happened. God judged it worth doing, and out of that judgement came the situation meant to save us.

    The verdict you passed on yourself carries more weight than anything said to you from outside. That is why the drink cannot be put down and why “God loves you” cannot get in — one place produces both.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • The Drink Is Not the Idol. The Self Is.

    Stories about addiction usually stop at the substance. The drink, the drug, the money — as if the thing a man reaches for were the whole of the matter. Something stands in front of the substance, though, and it is much older. It is the definition a person has already issued about himself: what he takes himself to be, settled long before the first glass. That definition is what I want to follow here — how it sets, and why it will not move.

    You confirm what you are inside the house you were raised in

    A person works out who he is from experience, and he starts early. Experience here means the environment he was raised in. Inside that environment he confirms his own identity. This holds for everyone; there is nobody it skips.

    You have heard of the wolf girl. Carried off by wolves when she was small, raised among them. Is the wolf girl a human being or a wolf? She never once thinks of herself as human. We can stand outside her and say you are a person, you are human as often as we like, and it does not go in — she has never used a human word, she has run and played with wolves. So the identity she holds is wolf. And her existential identity — wolf, or human?

    Which leaves an odd situation. People do not actually know their own identity. Not the existential one. The I that a person thinks of as himself was assembled inside an environment, so what he is holding is the assembly, not the thing itself.

    Gold with muck on it

    Put it this way. A lump of gold gets muck on it. Is the gold then not gold? The gold takes the muck for its own substance and concludes that it is muck. That is the way human beings think.

    The way we think is not based on substance. And it feels exactly like substance. My parents did not respect me, handled me roughly, left me to myself, abused me, gave nothing I said any weight. Therefore I am a useless human being. Therefore I should never have been born. An identity gets built along those lines, and then the built thing is what the person calls himself.

    Once the definition is issued, it is not revised

    I am muck. I am garbage. I am pathetic. A definition of that kind, once a person has issued it, does not get changed.

    Which is why the good news and the truth can arrive and nothing shifts. They are blocked at the door. He can hear perfectly well that it is a fine thing to be told. He would like it to be true of him. But he was not born the sort of being it is true of — so it does not go in. And what does not go in cannot treat anything. He stays inside something false and lives his whole life there.

    Church does not break the belief. It suspends it

    He is carrying that belief, and he takes it to church with him. At church the belief is not broken; it is put on hold. What grows in its place is religious activity. While the activity is running he feels faintly connected to God, and some comfort comes from that. His belief about himself, finally, is not changed. What sort of seat God occupies inside a mind in the first place is a separate question, and I have written about it in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God.

    Jesus said that whoever drinks the water he gives will never be thirsty again. Read as a statement about belief, that describes something specific: when a message goes deep enough to break the belief system a person is already holding, he stops asking for more and stops going parched. Water sprinkled on the surface dries off. So a man who wants to be a person of some value, and who takes himself to be muck, goes and stands briefly somewhere holy. He goes, and there he can tell himself, at least I am a slightly decent person. On top of that he keeps a religious life, keeps relationships, keeps the whole thing running — with his real belief left intact.

    He even deceives himself. But in attitude, in behaviour, in relationships, this is not something he can deceive. It comes out, all of it, in the relationships. Life begins to get hard. And what clears that unsolvable distress in one stroke is the addiction. Keeping a religious life, following the word, adding whatever else you like on top — none of it beats this. Not for anybody.

    The drink is not the idol. The self is

    Religious language has a name for the addiction: an idol. Drink is better than God. The drug is better than God. Money is better than God. That is what the word is pointing at. Dig further, though, and the drink is not the idol; the self is. Because the belief does not change. His own thinking is ranked above the truth. And so he goes on living his own way, by his own lights.

    If I do it like that they will take me for an easy mark, so I will not do it like that. And then he gets angry. Why is the anger produced? He is worried they will see him as a fool. That is what he is producing it for.

    Personality is not something you were born with

    Personality is not inborn. It is the method a person found for surviving the environment he was raised in, set hard. An organism has to survive; the instinct sees to that. So it builds the strategy best fitted to the environment it happens to be standing in, and then tries the strategy out.

    Like this. Mum, it hurts — and what comes back is be quiet. The child has plainly communicated what was going on inside him, and he has been told off for it instead. Children used to get told off a great deal for crying. And what have you got to cry about. So the child concludes that feelings are not to be expressed — that putting out what is in him gets him punished. He hides them. He tries hiding, and he is told off less often — fewer scoldings than the whining used to cost him. So hiding is the optimum, and it stays. Saying what I feel, saying what I want, only leaves me out of pocket and in trouble, so I had better carry it myself. People who have arrived there do not speak. They do not speak when speaking is called for either, which I wrote out at length in I Had to Be a Good Person, So I Never Expressed a Feeling. The personality set in that shape for the sake of protection.

    The more you press down, the more breaking out you need

    And that personality is holding the feelings down. Human beings are made happy by communicating with one another and sharing what they feel; here the man is blocking his own side of it, so he is stifled and in pain. Then one drink. The man who had nothing to say has a great deal to say. What he had been forbidding himself comes loose, because the alcohol numbs the senses. It comes loose, and for a moment there is a feeling of the throat opening, of being able to breathe. Every notion of going off the rails belongs in this category. Something in the mind gets aired out. Which is why the more a person represses, the more of this going off the rails he comes to need.

    Look at it squarely and the addiction is this: someone living inside that much pain and distress found the one thing that would release him from it in a very short time.

    The pain is still running and you take the painkiller away

    So getting rid of an addiction is not a matter of telling the person not to be addicted. When the real source of the pain has been located — where it started — and that pain can be dealt with, the painkiller stops being taken. The painkiller here is the addiction. It stops on its own.

    But if the pain is still running and you tell the man not to take the painkiller, there is a possibility that he dies. He makes the choice that is worse than the one he had. Addiction is bad, granted. The more extreme option is where he can go instead.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • You Can’t Drag Anyone Into Loving Themselves

    At the group, sooner or later, you find yourself watching the person sitting next to you. You see what they are doing with themselves, and the thought arrives on its own: so it works when they do it that way. Then: I should try it that way myself. That is how people learn to love themselves. You watch it work on someone and you carry the method home. On your own the range of methods is narrow. In a room full of people it widens.

    And then you try it exactly as they did it, and you learn something. That person reached the point of being able to receive themselves by doing that. You do it and nothing happens. So is their method wrong, or are you the one who is short of something? Neither.

    The method travels. The application does not.

    Run the same practice, the same way, and it comes out differently from person to person — the application does. It takes on one person and it does not take on the next. There are people who try it that way and it still does not work.

    Someone at the seminar said this was the hard part: handling themselves. They had tried one method after another and it was still difficult. A practice that helps one person name anger may make another feel watched or artificial. So you borrow a method, notice what changes in you, adjust it, and try again. Your own version is built through that repeated testing; it cannot be copied whole from someone else.

    It does not land on the first try

    And the version you make does not hit on the first try. You try this one. You stay with it a while. It does not take, so you try that one instead. That is the entire procedure. You find what is yours by running through the ones that are not.

    So where is the answer? Inside you.

    Which is to say: the answer is inside you. You find the answer that is already in there by taking the practices one at a time and putting them through. What you are really doing is locating an element that was in you from the start — I have come at the same thing from another direction in There Is Nobody There to Love Yet.

    There is one place where people stop. Right — tried that, that does not work either. And they stop there. Stop there and you do not find it. Not in your whole life.

    You can see the whole thing and there is no particular way to help

    That was the work of finding your own. Now move one seat over, to the person watching somebody else try.

    A question came up. Suppose there is someone near you who has taken on the shape of abusing themselves, or who keeps putting themselves back into pain. From where you are sitting it is perfectly visible. How do you help them? The watching seat always wants to do something about it — arrange something, move something, get in there.

    There is no particular way to help. Which means you go on watching it happen.

    Comfort, then trust, and only then a suggestion

    What you do first is stay alongside. You comfort them, you take in their side of it, and trust builds. Trust running both ways. And then, out of this is far too much for you to be carrying, a suggestion becomes possible to make. The order is the point. Trust comes first. The suggestion is the second thing, never the first.

    You do not run a ring through someone’s nose

    One person described their own position exactly. They had found their ideal self — found it, no question — and were still chasing it, with no intention at all of setting it down. Setting it down is something that needs to happen. And right now their mind cannot do it.

    In a case like that, as things presently stand, it cannot be put down. And when it is not happening, you do not run a ring through someone’s nose and haul them along. Self-love is a thing we all want. But because of my own pain, my own thinking, my own beliefs, there are any number of cases where self-love will not come. Why the act of looking at yourself keeps sliding into attacking yourself, I wrote out in “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack.

    Which means the state itself has to be respected. The state of its not happening. You do not tell someone who cannot do it now to do it now.

    We are the environment. We are not the solution.

    To hold them as an environment means offering a relationship in which they are heard, not shamed, and not abandoned when change is slow. You can make that surrounding safer, but you cannot make the decision, feel the feeling, or practise self-love on their behalf. The seat beside a person is a companion’s seat, not the solver’s.

    And they stay in that environment, and go on staying in it. It is not that they do not know. It is that it is not happening. So you go as far as it goes. The way I have to find my own, they find theirs. You cannot live that stretch of time on anyone’s behalf. You can be what surrounds them while they do.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Help Them Lift It and the Muscle Never Comes

    A parent cannot sit still in front of a child who looks like they are suffering. They are in that much pain, and I am supposed to watch? That feeling is where a question at the seminar came from. A child took a wound too hard, and now they are an adolescent, and at that age it is easy for a state like that to set. What do you do for them then?

    Children and adolescents are not the same kind of problem. Somebody who takes up this sort of study as an adult can walk in on their own feet. An adolescent has things breaking the surface inside them and no idea how to regulate any of it.

    So here is the picture I gave. A teenager builds emotional strength by feeling distress, making a choice, living with the result, and trying again. If a parent removes every consequence, settles every conflict, or decides every difficult question, the teenager is spared the strain but also loses the practice. That is what the weight means: the strength to carry what is coming up inside and regulate it without the parent doing the work for them.

    There is no room for you to intervene

    I am sorry to say it, but there is no room to intervene. The swings are severe. It is hard. The dynamics come surging up. And they have to knock about in it, fail at it, make the mistakes, and shape and build the thing themselves. That is their piece of work, not yours.

    Environment bears down on children heavily now. About the only place a child can learn to handle their own dynamics is school; otherwise the world shows them a great deal that is evil, and the smartphone keeps coming in at them. Even so, they are the one who has to find the way through it and come to it themselves.

    Be there, and talk when they come over

    Then what is the parent for? Being there means remaining available without taking over: keeping ordinary contact, listening when the child approaches, and helping them think without supplying every answer. If your child asks to talk, talk it through with them. This is a different season from the one where you set lines for a small child (Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller).

    When they say don’t touch me, you don’t touch. Sitting there listening to that, a parent gets anxious — they are growing up like this, what do I do. But if there was good parenting behind you, and there is still a space where the two of you can get through to each other, this is not going to turn into a large problem.

    You are not going to find it

    There is a smartphone and there is pornography on it. So how do you find it? You don’t find it. Which is why you stop trying to find it and put your strength into the form of loving them instead. What most people do is say don’t look at that phone, and outside of that there are not many methods on offer.

    What makes it come out in a healthy form even when they do see it is love. Treat the relationship as the thing that counts. Love is built on the ground of a relationship. Take the strength you were going to spend hunting through a phone and spend it there.

    Don’t talk to them about cigarettes

    A school counsellor once put a question to me. Through the education office the school gathers up the children who smoke and runs a stop-smoking treatment for them, and what the counsellor wanted to know was how to get these children to quit. The answer that came back was this. Don’t talk to those children about cigarettes. Just be friendly with them. Then when the time comes, the cigarettes stop on their own.

    Think back to the teacher you had a crush on at school. Whichever teacher it was, if I had a real crush on them, the subject that teacher taught was the subject I tried to do well in. Nobody had to tell me to study. The relationship with that teacher is what moved me.

    Where the relationship with mother and father is healthy, it runs the same way even when a child veers off a little. They know what their mother and father want, so they do it.

    Giving, not blocking

    None of this means sit there with your mouth shut. You can say it. You can tell them their mother is worried. What you cannot do is actively block them. Telling them and blocking them are two different acts. What matters is giving love, not blocking the bad thing. And to give love, what were you told to do? Love yourself first. Without loving yourself you cannot hand over love in a healthy form (I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First).

    Throw your own love at them and they take it as trespass

    If you are a mother carrying this question in this shape, that is also a case of taking your own private love and throwing it at your child. And then the child comes back with: why are you taking my freedom away from me? Why don’t you respect me? The fight breaks out in that shape.

    I am plainly thinking of my child. I am doing this because I love them. And they think they have been trespassed on, encroached on, their respect disregarded. One action, and one side calls it love while the other side calls it trespass.

    The shape carries on into the marriage

    Say the child raised that way is a son. The son marries, and in front of his wife it turns into why do you dismiss everything, and the fight breaks out there. He carried the shape he was handed at home out of the house with him. The marriage takes it up as well. That is how a thing like this gets passed down a line — this shape does.

    So what the parent of an adolescent has to hold on to is not a better method for blocking. Being there. Talking it through when they come over. And loving yourself first, so that what crosses over to them is love in a healthy form. The weight is theirs to lift.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • They Were All Nice People. Nobody Starts Out Wanting to Kill.

    Serial killers are nice people. All of them. Nice as far as anybody could see — the sort of man people describe as someone who “could get along fine without any laws.” And here is the part that gets skipped: they do not start out holding the desire and the urge to kill. It was not issued to them at birth. It was not sitting under the politeness all along, waiting.

    So something carried a person from the first place to the second. A question came from the floor at a seminar, and it was the right one to ask.

    We were wounded too. Everybody was wounded. Being wounded doesn’t make a person do that, and not having been loved doesn’t make a person do that — and yet people who do it keep appearing. Is it the intensity of the love they didn’t get? Is it the environment outside them? What is the large factor in the ones who put it outward?

    I think everything that question contains is in the answer. But to get at it you have to start further back, with what a wound actually is.

    A wound is the shape of not having been loved

    To be wounded is to have missed the experience that goes by the name of love. The wound is that shape — the shape of not having been loved — and it keeps growing in that shape, enlarging as evidence for the same conclusion. Not loved enough, in any case, to grow up healthily on what arrived.

    Then a second thing attaches, and this is the one that does the long work. Some love may have been given and may even have reached the child. But repeated experiences of fear, neglect, or humiliation organise those memories around a stronger belief: I was not loved. From then on, new events are read as further evidence for the same conclusion.

    From that point the person is no longer living off what he received. He is living off the belief about what he received, and the two are not the same size. You can hold a fortune and spend your life certain you are penniless — I have written about that elsewhere, in The Safe You Don’t Know You Own. The belief never checks the balance. It only keeps issuing the sentence.

    Where a person cannot love himself, it runs destructive

    Where there is a wound, the person cannot love himself. And where a person cannot love himself, it always goes destructive. Let it run and that is the direction it runs in.

    Which is worth saying slowly, because it sounds like an accusation and is not one. Nobody sits down and decides to wreck his own life. This is what the slope does when nothing is put in its way. A person carrying a great deal of pain will, without knowing that he is doing it, keep arranging the environment that produces more of it, and end up sunk in the thing he arranged. Some do it knowingly. Most have no idea at all.

    So loving is not a nice extra to get round to. We love in order not to go the other way. That is the whole of the argument for it.

    Then why does only one of them go outward?

    First there is the degree of the wound. A wound has a size, and not every wound is the same size. And the degree of the wound is itself what drives the person to repeat that environment.

    Then a second element sits on top of the first. He cannot name anger, bring it to another person, or calm himself without denying it, because no environment taught him how. Each injury therefore joins the last one instead of being processed. When a later stress breaks the restraint, the response carries not only that day’s anger but everything that accumulated behind it.

    Not inherited — environmental

    Is that inability to handle anger and hatred something a person is born with? I don’t look at it as genetic. It is environment. He has not been in an environment where such things can be handled, has never been exposed to one, and so the anger and the hatred amplify instead. Nothing around him ever showed him what to do with what he had.

    The wound at two, and whatever happens to be lying around

    From here the road forks, and one fork is addiction. When we look at how somebody became an addict, we look at one, two, three years old. A wound taken past one, around two, raises the chance that the road runs toward addiction.

    Then the wound does its work. The person is anxious, he is frightened, and at exactly those moments he gets exposed to something in his surroundings. Note the order, because people reverse it. The wound comes first. The exposure comes second. The substance did not go looking for him.

    Say an older cousin is sniffing glue and the boy keeps finding himself around it. Sooner or later: shall I have a go. Sex, alcohol, cigarettes — he meets them the same way, lying about in the places he lives. He goes in that direction, and then the decisive thing happens. His basic anxiety is relieved by it. After that he concentrates on it at speed, because while the addictive act is running he does not feel the anxiety, or the depression, or the sadness (All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode).

    So he keeps going further in. And far enough in, the addiction produces an addiction of its own — a second addiction laid over the first, the two mixed together and carrying on. Trace it back far enough and the addiction, too, began at a wound.

    Ordinary, until the day it is not

    The other fork goes outward. Day to day this man is fine. Nobody near him sees a problem and there is no problem to see; the ordinary life holds. Then life delivers one hard piece of stress, and that becomes the trigger. The job is gone. The relationship has ended.

    And at some point he kills a person, and in the killing he feels the release. Killing produces a sense of omnipotence. That is what gets switched on, and from there he goes on killing.

    Which returns us to where we started. He was nice. That was not a mask he was wearing. The urge was not in him at the beginning — what was in him was a wound of a certain size, no environment in which anger and hatred could ever be handled, and then a day that pulled the trigger.

    The same wound does not weigh the same in two people

    Two people can take an identical wound and receive it differently. One of them takes it larger. Call it a tolerance, if you like. The blow is not the whole story; what it lands on is the rest of the story.

    Whatever the treatment is, it turns out to be love

    Any treatment for a wound comes, in the end, to love. I am being loved. I am being respected. I am being held as something precious. Once that is established in a person, he can shove the negative thing off him — it loses its grip.

    Without it, the negative stays stuck to him and will not come away. And in that condition, trying to love himself is enormously hard work.

    So when somebody who was nice to everyone ends up there, the thing to look at is what stood in between. A wound of a certain degree. No environment in which the anger and the hatred could be handled. And nothing arriving that felt like being loved, to take up the room the belief was occupying.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board