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
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
- Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts
- Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries
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