Category: Object Relations

Ask people where fear comes from and most will picture a frightening parent, one who shouted or hit. But fear does not need a parent like that. What matters is not whether somebody frightening was in the room, but whether the child was properly looked after. A child who does not get proper care from a parent is left with fear, even if nobody ever hit him or shouted at him. For a child, not being looked after is in itself a frightening situation. What I want to follow here is what that fear does next.

A country at war

Once fear has settled into a person, the world starts to feel cold and harsh. How do people behave when the world feels like that? They behave the way people do in a country at war. The moment war breaks out, everybody slips into the same state of mind, a paranoid state: people start suspecting each other and stay on guard so as not to be the one who gets hurt. Law and order fall apart, and life is in real danger of sliding back into a primitive, lawless state. One thing produced all of that. Fear did.

The people who commit crimes are people shaking with fear. A person does not become a criminal because he is bad. His crime is the desperate cry of someone struggling to survive, and that cry is what wounds the people around him. This piece follows how the fear a person was made to feel changes direction and ends up aimed at somebody else.

Fear stays inside as one sentence: “Something was done to me”

Being exposed to something frightening is recorded inside a person as a single sentence: Something was done to me. That is the feeling he carries with him from then on.

And people repeat what they have lived through. Good or bad, it gets repeated. So the more fear a person felt as a child, the better he gets at making other people afraid once he is grown and has some strength of his own. He does not stay on the receiving end. The direction flips: the one who was frightened becomes the one who frightens others.

The man who rang only women when he was drunk

There was a case like this: a man addicted to alcohol. Once he was properly drunk he would ring women. He hardly ever rang men. What the women on the other end of the line felt was fear, the kind that sends a chill right through you. Written down, his words would look like ordinary conversation. What frightened them was the sense of threat that came off him, even over the phone. After one of his calls, they were afraid he might turn up in person. That is how strongly one person can pass fear on to another.

As a child, this man had been on the receiving end of just as much fear himself.

He does not mean to frighten anyone

This is the point that matters. He is not handing out fear on purpose. He does not decide to frighten someone and then go and do it. When an old experience repeats itself, it happens unconsciously, without his being aware of it. As far as he knows, he is simply expressing himself, and the way he expresses himself terrifies the people he talks to. In fact, all violence and all destruction come out of the experience of having been frightened.

“It was taken from me, so I have to get it back”

Alongside fear there is a second thing at work: deprivation. Deprivation here does not mean never having had something. It means that something good, such as a parent’s care, was given early on and then taken away.

The feeling of having been robbed creates a very strong urge to get back what was lost. The thinking goes: it was taken from me, so I have every right to take it back. But taking it back can turn into stealing, or someone can get hurt along the way. And what he feels he has a right to take is not only things. For a man it can be women, one after another; for a woman, men. Deprivation also leaves an empty space where the thing that was taken used to be, and he tries to fill it. As he does, greed gets stirred up too, so he ends up taking more than he lost.

Seen from outside, he is plainly intruding on other people, and what he does is violent. But to someone who has been deprived, it feels justified. He does not come up with excuses after he has done it; it already feels right before he does it.

When the brain’s alarm is on, even kind words cannot get in

Back to fear, and to what it does in the body. People are told to stay calm and find some peace of mind, and for good reason: when we are calm, we do not turn aggressive. You can see why in the brain. Deep in the middle of the brain sits a part called the amygdala. It works as an alarm: it sends out the fear signal. Its message is: you are in danger right now, so choose quickly — attack, run, or freeze and do not move. It puts the whole body on high alert. In that state there is no calm left in a person, and no room to take in anything else.

And while that alarm is going, nothing anyone says gets in — not even kind words. Whether it is a husband and wife talking or someone being criticised, the person whose alarm is on stops trying to understand what the other is actually saying. Let somebody criticise you, and all you can think about is how to hit back.

Wanting to hit back when you are criticised is normal for any human being

This reaction is not an illness. It is simply how any normal human being reacts. So if you want to get through to someone, do not criticise him. Criticism sets off his alarm, and from then on he is only thinking about how to hit back. Talk it through with him instead; that is how the two of you actually reach each other. And even when you are not criticising, your words carry a tone. If the tone is aggressive, the other person picks it up at once and starts responding aggressively, whatever the words themselves were.

Related

• Fail to Love Yourself and It Goes Straight to Abuse. There Is No Middle Ground.
• They Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of
• I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me

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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

Stories about addiction usually stop at the drink or the drug, as if what a man reaches for were the whole story. But something comes before it, and it is much older: what a person has already decided he is. He decided it long before the first glass. What I want to follow here is how that conclusion takes hold, and why it never changes.

You decide who you are in the home you grew up in

A person works out who he is from experience, and he starts early. By experience I mean how he was brought up: the home he grew up in. It is there that he decides what he is. This holds for everyone; nobody is an exception.

You may have heard the story of the wolf girl — a child carried off by wolves when she was small and raised among them. Is the wolf girl a human being or a wolf? She never once thinks of herself as human. Those of us looking at her from outside can tell her you are a person, you are human as often as we like, and it never sinks in: she has never spoken a human language, and she has only ever run and played with wolves. So she takes herself to be a wolf. But whatever she believes, what is she in fact — a wolf, or a human being?

Which leaves an odd situation. People do not actually know what they really are. The I that a person thinks of as himself was put together by where and how he grew up. So what he takes to be himself is what his upbringing made of him, not what he actually is.

Gold with muck on it

Put it this way. A lump of gold gets muck on it. Does that make it any less gold? Yet the gold, once muck is on it, thinks it is muck. That is the way human beings think.

What we think we are is not based on what we actually are. But it feels exactly as if it were. A person reasons like this: my parents did not respect me, handled me roughly, left me to myself, abused me, never took my opinions seriously. Therefore I am a useless human being. Therefore I should never have been born. This is how a person builds up his sense of who he is — and then he believes that this is simply what he is.

Once a person has decided what he is, he does not change it

I am muck. I am garbage. I am pathetic. Once a person has decided this about himself, he does not change it.

Which is why nothing shifts even when he is told the truth about himself. If he goes to church, for instance, he hears there that God loves him and that he is precious. He shuts it out. He knows perfectly well it is a good thing to hear. He would like it to be true of him. But he is sure he was not born precious, not the kind of person God could love, so it does not sink in. And a message that does not sink in cannot heal anything. He stays caught in a false belief about himself and lives his whole life by it.

Church does not shatter his belief about himself. It only puts it on hold

He takes that belief — I am muck — with him to church. At church the belief is not shattered; it is only put on hold for a while. What he does there is lose himself in religious activity. While he is at it, he feels faintly connected to God, and that gives him some comfort. But in the end his belief about himself does not change.

Jesus said that whoever drinks the water he gives will never be thirsty again. I take that to mean this: when the message goes deep enough to shatter what a person already believes about himself, one drink is enough, and he stops thirsting and begging for more. But water only sprinkled on the surface keeps drying off, and a message that stays on the surface leaves him thirsty again. So a man who wants to be worth something, but takes himself to be muck, keeps dropping into a holy place — a church — for a short while. There he can tell himself, at least I’m a halfway decent person. That is how he keeps up his faith, his relationships and the rest of his life, while what he really believes about himself — that he is muck — stays untouched.

The belief sits hidden in his mind, so other people rarely notice it. He even fools himself into believing it is gone. But in his attitude, his behaviour and his relationships, it cannot be hidden. In his relationships all of it comes out: he is always tense, quick to anger, forever worried about what other people think of him. So life starts to get hard. This is distress he cannot resolve, and a drink or a drug relieves it at a single stroke. That is how the addiction takes hold. Going to church, living by the Bible, doing whatever else you like — none of it can win against the addiction. Not for anybody.

The drink is not the idol. The self is

In religious language, an addiction can be called an idol: drink, drugs or money that a person has come to love more than God. Dig further, though, and the drink is not the idol; the self is — the person himself. Why? Because he will not change his belief about himself. He puts his own thinking above the truth. What he believes about himself feels truer to him than what God says about him. So he has put himself above God, and that makes him the idol. And he goes on living his own way, by his own lights.

Here is what living by his own lights looks like. He thinks: if I give in, they’ll take me for a pushover, so I won’t. He refuses, and he gets angry. Why the anger? Because he is afraid they will see him as a fool — as what he secretly believes he is. That is what the anger is for.

Personality is not something you were born with

Personality is not inborn. It is the way a person found, as a child, to survive the home he was raised in — a way that has since set hard. Every living thing is driven by instinct to survive. So a child tries out ways of behaving on his mother and father, again and again, and keeps the one that proves safest in the home he happens to be in.

For example: Mum, it hurts — and what comes back is be quiet. The child told his mother plainly what was going on inside him, and got told off for it. Parents used to scold children 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 showing what is inside him gets him punished. He hides them. And once he hides them, he gets told off less often than when he kept crying to her. Hiding works best, so it stays. He tells himself: if I say what I feel or what I want, I only lose out and get into trouble, so I had better handle it on my own. People who have learned this stop speaking up. They stay silent even when they need to speak. Their personality set in that shape to protect them.

The more you hold your feelings down, the more you need to break loose

But a personality like that keeps a person’s feelings held down. People need to talk with one another and share what they feel in order to be happy; someone like this is stopping himself from doing that, so he feels stifled and in pain. Then he has one drink, and the man who never had anything to say suddenly has a great deal to say. The alcohol numbs his senses, he loosens up, and what he had been forbidding himself comes out. As it comes out, for a moment he feels he can breathe again. Every way of breaking loose, from a drinking binge to a shopping spree, works like this: for a moment, the stifled feeling lifts. Which is why the more a person holds his feelings down, the more he needs to break loose.

Seen this way, a person with an addiction is someone living with this much pain and distress who has found something that frees him from it within moments.

Taking away the painkiller while the pain is still there

So getting rid of an addiction is not a matter of telling the person to stop. The addiction works like a painkiller for the pain inside him. When the real source of that pain is found — where it started — and the pain can be dealt with, he stops taking the painkiller. He stops on his own.

But if the pain is still there and you tell him not to take the painkiller, he may die. He may reach for something worse than what he had. Addiction is bad, granted. But what he turns to instead may be more extreme still — even taking his own life.

Related

• Your Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending
• Chiron’s Wound: When the Lid Stops Holding
• The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head

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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

In “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack I wrote about the idea that there is more than one of you inside. This article takes that idea one step further. Being divided is not something that needs fixing. The problem lies somewhere else, and it is worth knowing exactly where.

The sentence that needs two of you

When you are frightened, you might say something like this to yourself, silently: I’m frightened. And then: You’re frightened right now, aren’t you? It’s alright. It is the same when you are sad: I’m sad. Sad? You’re very sad, aren’t you.

Look closely and these are strange sentences. They only work if one of you is speaking and another is listening, and both of them are you. One part says it is sad, and another part answers the sadness. You can talk to yourself at all only because you are split into more than one part. That is not a sign that something is wrong with you. Every one of us is split like this to begin with.

Being divided is not an illness

How many parts of you are there, at the most basic level? Three. In broad outline a person is divided into three, and each of those three divides again, so in practice there are many more than three. The exact number is not what matters here.

You have heard of multiple personality disorder. That is what being divided looks like when it becomes an illness. But a perfectly healthy person is divided too. So the line between health and illness is not whether you are divided. It runs somewhere else.

Because everyone is divided, knowing yourself means knowing what state each part of you is in: for example, that one part of you is frightened right now and another is trying to comfort it. Then you can hear the different voices inside you, not just one. The aim is not to tidy yourself into a single voice and get rid of the rest. It is to know which parts are there and what state each one is in.

Divided, and still connected

The parts are separate, and yet they are connected to one another. That connection is why being divided does not turn into a real problem.

Suppose the frightened part says, I cannot do this, and another part answers, You are frightened. I will stay with you while we work out what to do. The fear has not gone away, but it is no longer on its own: another part knows about it. As long as the parts can talk like this, you can have several feelings at once and still live as one person. A healthy person is not healthy because everything is quiet inside. They are healthy because the parts know what is going on with one another.

When the parts lose touch with each other

The trouble starts when the gap between the parts grows too wide. One part goes through something, and the other parts know nothing about it. The experience stays with that one part and never reaches the rest of the person. The clinical term for this is dissociation. Taken all the way, it becomes multiple personality disorder.

When the connection is cut this far, a person gets pulled toward believing things that are not true as if they were fact. Fantasy takes over. This is why someone in this state keeps saying strange, off-the-wall things that seem to come out of nowhere. The parts no longer know about each other, so no part is there to catch those thoughts and hold them back. With nothing in control, they keep coming out.

That is the extreme end, and it is a clinical condition. Having several parts inside you, as everyone does, is something else. In everyday life, parts losing touch looks more like this. If you treat the angry part of you as if it did not exist, the anger can come back as a sudden outburst or as sarcasm. If you push away the part of you that wants recognition, because you are ashamed of it, you may find yourself clinging to other people’s praise. A feeling you push down does not disappear. It comes back through other things you do.

You can stay divided, then, as long as the connection between the parts stays alive.

You only ever watch how other people treat you

Each of us has a way of treating ourselves, and hardly anyone looks at it. What we look at instead is how other people treat us. Someone says something to you, and your mind goes: Why did he put it like that? Is he looking down on me? He is. Why would he say that to me? And you stay stuck on him, going over the same thoughts again and again.

But what is really bothering you is the way you treat yourself.

Because you look down on yourself

If you tell yourself all day that you are incompetent, an ambiguous remark from a colleague is likely to sound like proof that they look down on you too. The remark stings because it matches what you are already doing to yourself. It works the other way as well. When you treat yourself as worth something, you can weigh the same remark instead of taking it straight away as a judgement on you. You also start to notice the moments when other people value you, and you can be glad of them.

So the state your mind is in depends almost entirely on how you treat yourself, not on what other people do to you.

First you pay attention, then you see

Now look closely at the you who does the treating, the part of you that speaks to you and judges you. You will find that it treats you the way your parents treated you, even in the ways you could not stand back then. That is why you can end up so worn out, lonely and in pain.

This is what you need to find and see clearly: the way your parents treated you is the way you now treat yourself. But you cannot see it until you pay attention to it. Attention is love. Not loving yourself looks like indifference: not caring what goes on inside you. So turning your attention to your own mind, to whatever is happening in it, is already a way of loving yourself, and it has to come first. You do not see first and then take an interest. You take an interest first, and then you see.

My parents hurt me with exactly this, and here I am doing it to myself. Once you see that much, you can change course. Right. I will love myself instead.

In practice, loving yourself starts with a question. Why am I running myself down like this? Why do I keep telling myself I cannot do it? Ask yourself that, and stop the criticism right there. Then start treating yourself differently, in words like these.

What one part of you can say to another

You don’t have to be good at it. It’s fine to make a small mistake. It won’t kill you, and it doesn’t make you worthless to other people.

If one part of you can say this to another part, it does not matter how many parts you are divided into. The connection holds.

Related

• “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
• Stay Until I Fall Asleep: The Fear That Never Grew Up
• There Is Nobody There to Love Yet

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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

Not loving yourself does not leave you where you are: it walks you into your own suffering. There is no middle ground. Either you love yourself, or you slide into what I call self-abuse. By self-abuse I do not only mean hurting yourself outright. I mean that, without realising it, you set up your life in ways that keep you hurting. A woman is drawn to a man who will turn out to hit her; when she chooses him, she does not call him violent, she calls him forceful, a real man. Or you say you are trying to get out of the pain, but you try only halfway, and when it fails you say, “See, it doesn’t work” — and you stay where it hurts. You may even feel you are protecting yourself, when in fact you are pushing yourself deeper into the pain. Which is why loving yourself is not optional. It is essential.

The suffering that comes from not loving yourself is everywhere in ordinary life; I could talk for a whole day and not run out of examples. It happens between husband and wife. It happens between parent and child. Without ever changing the way they think, people walk of their own accord into situations where they will get hurt. You can see it any day of the week without looking hard.

Not judging yourself, and respecting what you feel

So what does loving yourself actually involve? It starts with not judging yourself: not passing verdicts on yourself like That’s just how you are. In the end, it is verdicts like that, handed down by ourselves, that kill us. Judging yourself like this also changes how you hear other people. Someone says something to you, and you wonder, “Are they looking down on me? Why would they say that to me?” But what is really at work is the way you treat yourself: because you belittle yourself, you feel that others see you that way. When you value yourself, you notice when others value you too, and you can be glad of it.

Then: respecting your own feelings. Whatever you feel, you are allowed to feel it.

Meeting your own needs, as far as reality allows

Then one more thing. You meet your own needs as far as reality allows. If you need rest but cannot leave work, you may cancel one evening obligation, ask for help, or stop demanding a perfect dinner from yourself. You neither grant yourself everything you want nor pretend you want nothing. You identify the need and meet the part that can be met in the circumstances you actually have.

And who meets that need? Not somebody else. You do. You are not waiting for someone to come along who will finally notice what you need. You do it for yourself, here, in the life you actually have.

Putting yourself somewhere good for you

Self-love also means choosing places and paths that are good for you. It is not only a decision inside your head; you can see it in where you actually go. Joining a group where people meet to learn to love themselves, for instance, is already an act of self-love. If you treat yourself abusively, you do not go to places like that. You go instead to the places and situations where things can go wrong: where an accident could happen, where a fight could break out.

Self-love also means taking an interest in what I call the other you. What does that mean? Even in a healthy person, the mind is not one solid piece; it is divided into parts. This is not multiple personality disorder; nothing is wrong with you. It is simply why you can talk to yourself at all: “You’re scared right now, aren’t you? It’s all right.” One part of you is speaking, and another part is listening. Taking an interest in the other you means noticing the part of you that is scared or sad, and speaking to it like that.

You told your child to play alone, and your heart only got heavier

There is one situation in which people often cannot tell whether what they are doing is self-love or selfishness.

You are tired. Loving yourself, you think, ought to mean not letting yourself get this worn out. But your child keeps asking you to play. You may also have heard that not playing with a child is a form of abuse; I will come back to that. So you feel you must respond, and you have nothing left.

A mother once asked me about exactly this. The day before, she had said to her child, I can’t do it, I’m too tired. I’m getting angry. I’d like you to play on your own for now. She sent the child off to play and felt heavy at heart — and the heaviness did not lift. It grew. She had said no to look after herself, and still she kept asking, “Shouldn’t I have played anyway?” She knew that self-love is meant to come first and love for the child after it. But when she said no because she had nothing left, was that self-love, or was it selfish? Isn’t a mother supposed to play with her child at least some of the time, however tired she is? I told her that some of this genuinely is unclear. There are cases that sit right on the line.

“Mum is too tired today” means today, and only today

Broadly speaking, self-love comes first. Suppose you say, Mum is too tired today, so I can’t play with you. That sentence is about today, and only today.

The same goes for other things. If I am worn out today and say I can’t cook dinner tonight, then I don’t cook it, and that is allowed. No law says I have to be the one who cooks it. Once or twice, I can leave something undone. When I am this tired, nothing requires that it be done tonight, by me.

“I’m never playing with you again” is self-abuse

The sentence to watch out for is a different one. Because I am tired, because I have had enough, I say: I am never playing with you again. That one has to be taken seriously. It hurts the child, and it is also self-abuse. It takes a single tired day and turns it into a life sentence.

Saying it feels like protecting yourself. In fact it drops you into suffering. It is exactly what I described at the start: without realising it, you set up your life in a way that keeps you hurting. That mother’s heart grew heavier after saying no just once. “Never again” shuts your own child out for good, and you cannot be at ease living like that. Which brings the question back to where it started: what does it really mean to love yourself?

If not playing is abuse, how can one day without play be fine?

I do say it plainly: not playing with a child is abuse, even if nobody ever raises a hand. Play is something a child cannot do without, and a child left without it is being harmed, even before anything shows. Yet here I am saying that a day without play is survivable. It can sound as though I am taking that back.

The difference is one day versus a pattern. A parent who says, I cannot play today, but we will make time tomorrow, is naming a temporary limit. A parent who refuses again and again, never makes up for it, and leaves the child alone with the same unmet need creates a lasting condition: the child is turned away every time and never knows when the parent will be there again. That pattern is what I mean when I say that not playing is abuse. One exhausted day is not a verdict on your love; neglect that has become a way of life is what abuses the child.

Self-love comes first

How much weight you give to other people and how much to protecting yourself differs from case to case. But broadly, self-love comes first, because the more you love yourself, and the better you do it, the more you can give yourself to others and the more considerate you can be. Your capacity to give actually grows. When you love yourself, the love that reaches the other person is a healthy kind. Love from someone who cannot love themselves tends to come with strings attached: “I’ll do this for you, so you do that for me.” The person on the receiving end is being helped and yet, strangely, comes away feeling bad, because there is control in it.

Picture your capacity to give as a pocket. If loving yourself has put only about ten in it, then what you can give somebody else is ten — no more than that. If loving yourself has put a hundred in it, the pocket holds a hundred, and you can give that much in devotion and consideration. However much you have loved yourself is how much you have to give anyone else.

You get tired. Living wears people down. The day you said no because you had nothing left was that one day, and nothing more. So, to that mother’s question: saying no on a day like that is self-love, as long as you do not turn it into a life sentence.

Related

• Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
• I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
• You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious

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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

People say, “My parents hurt me so badly.” All right, suppose parents really do hurt children that much. Then follow the idea to its end: if parents are what hurts children, take the parents away. No parents at all. Would the child then grow up unhurt?

No. Growing up with no parents is itself an injury. Nobody had to do anything to the child. The absence alone did the damage.

It is the same with love. Its absence does harm too, even if nobody lays a hand on the child. So not loving is not a neutral state where nothing happens. Not loving is itself a form of abuse. We tend to think we were abused only if someone hit us or yelled at us. So a person says, “I was never abused. My mother just never paid me any attention.” But that is abuse. Even a parent who never plays with a child is abusing that child, because being played with is something a child cannot do without.

And it is no different when the person you are not loving is yourself. Fail to love yourself and you will abuse yourself. There is no place in between, where you neither love yourself nor harm yourself. There is no middle ground.

Self-abuse comes in an acute form and a chronic one

When I was a child, I watched my uncle get into a fight with his wife. When his anger boiled over, he ran at the wall and slammed himself against it. I was small, and it frightened me.

That is self-abuse, and it is the acute kind — sudden, and there for anyone to see. The rest of this article is about the chronic kind. It needs no outburst of anger. It goes on day after day, built into the way a person lives. It takes four forms.

One: building an environment where you can be made to suffer

The first is to start arranging conditions under which you can be hurt. For example, a woman chooses a partner who hits her. A violent man is exactly the kind of man she is drawn to.

I have just called him violent, but she would never use that word while choosing him. What she says is, “Wow, he’s so forceful. Now that’s a real man.” And that forceful man is the one who ends up hitting her.

The violent partner is only one example; the range is much wider. You put yourself in a position to be swindled. You set things up so that you lose a large sum of money. You arrange your life so that you are bound to suffer. None of this is simply bad luck. You set it up, even if you would never describe it that way. And setting it up is one of the ways a person abuses himself.

Two: punishing yourself directly

The second is to punish yourself directly: you do the harm to yourself, with no situation or other person doing it for you.

Every addiction belongs here. Not most of them. All of them, without exception. In every addiction, you are the one harming yourself, directly. The self-harm you hear about among young people today belongs here too — cutting themselves with a blade.

In the first form, you set up a situation and let the situation hurt you. In the second, you hurt yourself directly. The route is different; the result is the same. And both have this in common: the harm can be seen. There is the partner who hits, the money that is gone, the addiction, the cuts. That is what separates them from the next two forms, where nothing shows from the outside. It is also why the next two are harder to see for what they are.

Three: shutting yourself inside your own thinking

The third is to lock yourself inside thoughts that keep you suffering.

You replay one mistake, predict the worst outcome, dismiss every reassuring fact, and call the repetition problem-solving. Each round increases the fear but produces no decision or action. Because the activity looks like careful thinking, you may not notice that your own thoughts have become the room in which you are being hurt.

Seen from outside, nothing has happened. No one struck you. There is no mark to point at, no incident to report. Inside your head, the hurting has gone on all day. And all the while you believe you are thinking a problem through. But nothing gets worked out. You are simply locked in with the same thoughts.

Four: regret

The fourth is regret. Some people live in it, day after day. They regret something, then regret it again, and tell themselves, I did the same thing again.

At night they lie awake, regretting. In the morning they get up and go to work, and while they are busy the regret fades. Then evening comes, work is over, and it starts up again — the same things gone over once more, ending where they ended the night before. Regret takes their evenings and their nights.

All four forms come from not loving yourself. Once you stop loving yourself, you slide into abusing yourself. You do not decide to; there is simply no middle ground where you could stop.

The third and fourth forms are the hardest to see through

All four run on rationalisation: you give yourself a reasonable-sounding explanation for what you are doing, and so you hide from yourself what is really going on. The woman says “he’s forceful,” not “he’s violent.” The person locked in anxious thoughts says, “I’m thinking it through.” In the third and fourth forms, this kind of explanation is especially convincing, both to the person himself and to anyone he tells.

Someone stuck in anxious thinking or in regret will tell you he is working hard to get out, and he is not lying. The effort is real, and he can describe it. But “I am trying” has become his reasonable-sounding explanation. It stops him from seeing that the way he tries leaves him right where he is.

The self-deception lies in how much he tries. He does not try with everything he has; he tries just a little. He makes one phone call to look for help, then never takes the next step. He tries a new habit twice, then stops before it can stick. When he does ask for help, he holds back the part that matters most. The effort is real, but he keeps it small enough that nothing changes. Then the fact that nothing changed seems to prove that change was impossible.

And here is what that little bit of effort leaves him with: “See? It doesn’t work after all.”

He did try — and that is the point of trying a little. It gives him proof: “I tried, and nothing came of it.” And that proof is what keeps him in the pain. So the effort changed nothing, but it did produce the proof.

“I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”

A person caught in this says it again and again: I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.

It sounds like a conclusion drawn from long experience: he has tried hard, and it has not worked. But behind it is a moment when, instead of trying with everything he had, he quietly tried just a little — and a little was never going to be enough.

When love for yourself is missing, its place does not stay empty. Self-abuse moves in. That is why loving yourself is not optional. It is required.

Related

• Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
• “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
• The Safe You Don’t Know You Own
• All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode

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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

A salmon goes up the river. It works against the current the whole way, and it gets back home, to the place where it was born. A dead fish does not do that. A dead fish goes where the water goes, and it arrives wherever the water was going anyway. It is not choosing the destination.

People can drift in the same way. When you keep ignoring your own fear, exhaustion and limits, you lose the strength to push back against what harms you. You stay where you are treated badly, go along with demands you do not agree with, and tell yourself that putting up with it is your own choice. That is what it means here to drift like a dead fish: you no longer decide where you go; other people’s demands and your circumstances decide for you. This is where you end up if you do not love yourself. And ignoring yourself like this is already a way of abusing yourself.

“My mother never paid any attention to me”

The word abuse gets used far too narrowly.

Some people say: I wasn’t abused. My mother never paid any attention to me. Put that way, it sounds as if nothing bad happened. But that is only because we count what a parent did and overlook what a parent kept failing to do. If you have said this about your own childhood, think about what it means: no one asked what frightened you, noticed when you withdrew, played with you, or came when you needed comfort. None of this left a bruise, so you concluded that nothing happened. But that ongoing neglect is, in fact, abuse.

Listen to the reasoning hidden in those words: nobody hit me, so nothing was done to me. But the second part does not follow from the first. Being ignored was itself something done to you.

So what should we call it when a parent never pays you any attention? Not something you missed out on. Abuse.

The same goes for raising a child without playing with them. Not playing with a child is abuse. Play is not an extra. Children have to be played with.

What my youngest drew was not a person. It was an ear.

Our youngest once told their mom that they could not control their anger: it had got so bad they could hardly hold it in. Their mom passed it on to me: the kid says holding the anger in is exhausting.

I did not hear that as an ordinary complaint. I asked the child to draw a picture.

At first glance the drawing looked like a person. It was not a person. It was an ear: one enormous ear, with the child drawn inside it.

The child said it felt as if words like these kept coming into their ear: What’s the point of living like this? How are you going to go on, living such a dull life? Is this any way to live? They were not real voices; it was a feeling, as if someone kept saying these things. To the child, the words came across as a message telling them to die.

In the middle of the ear there was a devil

The drawing showed where those words came from. In the middle of the huge ear the child drew a devil, with a tail and legs, and the devil was sending the words into the ear: Live like that, and then die.

There was also a black heart on the page, with cracks drawn across it. The heart was broken all the way through. But one small patch of it was still red. That much, the child said, was still alive.

We dote on this child, and we make no secret of how much we adore them. Even so, the words in the child’s ear did not stop.

The child named the cause

It was the child who named the cause of all this: “When I come home, Mom doesn’t play with me.” The child also said that playing alone only goes so far: something about it feels very empty, and the emptiness does not go away.

It is easy to think abuse means hitting and scolding and nothing else. No one had hit this child, and this child was openly loved. What the child pointed to was something else: they were not being played with. And behind that one plain complaint lay an enormous ear, a devil, and a cracked black heart.

Rather than leave them playing alone, give them a smartphone

So this is what I say to parents: if your child is going to be left to play alone like that, give the child a smartphone. If it comes down to a phone or playing alone, the phone is better.

This advice comes with a condition, and everything depends on it: given that you are not playing with them. It is meant for homes where nobody plays with the child, not for homes where someone does. If you are reading it as permission to hand children phones, read the condition again. We have all heard that children should not have smartphones, so we keep telling the child no: “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” But if we do that and nobody plays with the child either, the child is simply left alone. That is what really abandons a child.

Before the damage shows up as symptoms

Not playing with a child is abuse. It damages the child’s mind. Our youngest was, in fact, in serious trouble.

The trouble had not yet shown up as symptoms. Give it time, though, and trouble like this comes out as symptoms of illness. So catch it early, before it shows. With our youngest, it was caught through a complaint about anger that was not brushed aside. Once you have noticed it, put more care into playing with the child.

When they come home, sit with them over their homework. Join in when they play with their toys. When they ride their bike, go out with them. Be there with them. With them.

Withholding love is itself the abuse

As long as nobody was hit, we say there was no abuse. But being there with a child, playing with them, is part of loving them, and even an adored child can go without it. When love is withheld, the withholding itself is the abuse.

And this does not stop at children. Think back to the dead fish at the beginning. When you can no longer love yourself, you end up abusing yourself the way a neglectful parent abuses a child: you pay no attention to your own fear, exhaustion and limits, and you leave yourself to deal with them alone. You have never done anything violent to yourself, so you conclude you have never abused yourself. And all that time, you are drifting like the dead fish, going wherever the water takes you.

Related

• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
• You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious
• Her Body Never Bruised, and She Hated It for That

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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

If you ask me how to begin loving yourself, my answer starts with this: there is a small child hidden inside you. If I had to put an age on this child, I would say somewhere from four to seven or eight. This child is not a memory. The child is here now, living in your feelings: when you are irritated, sad or angry, it is usually this child who is feeling it.

Your irritation is not coming from the adult you are now

Someone says something to you today, and you feel as small, helpless or rejected as you did as a child. In that moment you are not only reacting to what was said. You are seeing it the way you learned to see such moments back then. So irritation rises, and you may want to be difficult on purpose: to stop listening, to hold back affection, or to make life hard for your partner and your children, so that they feel the hurt you have no words for. This is what I mean when I say the child is hidden, and in control: an old feeling is deciding how you respond today.

Calling it a child is a figure of speech, but it is more than a figure of speech. The child you actually were at four is still there, as the feelings you had at that age. Those feelings have kept the form they had then, and they live on inside what you feel today. When they come up, you feel what you felt at four: just as small, just as helpless.

Using illness and guilt to get someone to do what you want

Here is a tactic many mothers use. The mother is unwell and lets it show how worn out she is; the child sees it and feels guilty. Then the guilt does the work, and the child does what the mother wants. I am not raising this so you can blame your mother. I raise it so you can look at whether you are the one doing this now, to your own partner or children.

When a mother does this, it is her own hidden child that is in control. So it is not only the person being manipulated who is run by a hidden child; the person doing the manipulating is too. A hidden child is behind these as well: the remark meant to wound, the sneer, the grumbling, the comment twisted so that it stings, going out of your way to put someone in a bad mood. And why put someone else in a bad mood? Because your own mood is bad. When you feel bad yourself, it is hard to be good to anyone else.

If you have not yet noticed this child behind reactions like these, then all this time you have been leaving this child unattended. Whatever other people did or failed to do for you, the one who can notice this child now is you. Ignore this child, and you will get badly hurt.

Nobody scolded you, and you heard scolding

Left unattended, the child keeps seeing today through what happened back then. If you were scolded constantly between four and seven or eight, a neutral question from your partner can sound like criticism. Your partner asked what happened; inside, you heard that you had failed again. Nobody scolded you, and you felt scolded.

Hear scolding where there was none, and of course your mood drops. That matters, because the point of loving yourself is to feel good: to be at peace, happy, pleased with yourself, satisfied.

So your mood can tell you something. A mood that stays bad is a sign that, right now, you are not loving yourself. It is not a judgement on your character, and it is not a measure of how badly someone treated you today. It tells you that there is a part of you — this child — that you still need to find. And what you need to find is not a part of you that needs correcting. It is a child who needs soothing.

When anger piles up until it turns into action

Go long enough without looking for this child and you slowly drift towards something I can only call wicked. Yet I do not believe there are bad people in the world. There are none. There are only people who have gone far too long without ever feeling good. Live for years without peace, without happiness, without any sense of your own worth, unloved, as if shut in a cave day after day, and anger at the world starts to rise, until thoughts like “I’ll kill them all” come surging up.

Having thoughts like that for a while does not mean you act on them the next day. They pile up, and pile up, and pile up. Picture a gauge: when it fills to the line, that is when it all comes out as action. Nobody becomes a criminal overnight. People become criminals because this piling-up has gone on for too long.

Not “completely released.” Just “I can soothe it.”

Someone once asked me this: “You say we have to go and meet the child inside us. Does that child have to be completely released from the hurt? How would that even work?”

My answer: it is not about “completely.” It is about soothing, about being able to say, “I can soothe this.” That is the standard. There is no “completely released” or “not yet.” Recovery does not hand you a form with two boxes, one for fully released and one for not yet released, and ask you to tick one. The only real question is whether you can soothe yourself right now.

This makes a big difference. If your standard is “completely released,” then the first time the feeling comes back, it looks as if everything you have done was for nothing, and you stop looking after the child inside you. The child is left unattended again. If your standard is soothing, the feeling coming back cancels nothing. It is simply another chance to soothe the child.

You just soothe the child again

Say you have found this child in yourself and soothed the child well. Then, at some point, the feeling suddenly comes up again. What you must not tell yourself at that moment is: “Here I go again. I still haven’t changed.” That one line undoes the soothing you have already done.

You just soothe the child again. Once that becomes the pattern — the feeling comes back, and you soothe the child again — there is no serious problem. The more hurt the child is, the less likely it is that one round of soothing will be enough.

Until you are able to soothe yourself

Before you can soothe, you have to meet the part of you that is crying. That is less strange than it sounds. Even in a healthy person the self is divided into parts, which is why you can talk to yourself at all. One part of you says to another, “You’re scared right now, aren’t you? It’s all right.” That is what meeting a crying part of you looks like. And because the self is divided like this, there is more than one crying part, and some are crying harder than others. How long do you keep meeting them? Not until you have met every last one, but until the ability to soothe has formed in you. Once you have that ability, whichever crying part you meet, you can soothe it. Even someone who has been badly damaged, who has reached the state I called wicked, can come to soothe themselves once that ability has taken hold in them to some degree.

Building this ability takes time. Soothing is not easy work. The child is already carrying a lot of hurt, so it takes a long stretch of acknowledging the child’s feelings and soothing them, and of staying with the child through it all. It is slow, and that time is what the ability is built from.

You have to be able to cry for yourself, and to say you are angry

This ability does not arrive while you sit and wait for it. You have to be able to cry out of compassion for yourself, to cry because you are sad, and to admit fully how angry you are and say so. Doing these things, you soothe yourself, and you do it every day.

When you can cry for yourself and say you are angry, the feeling does not have to come out as action. When you cannot, action is exactly how it comes out. This is what is called acting out: a feeling coming out as something you do. And acting out is not only the kind of crime that shocks a whole country. Harshly criticising your children, hitting them — that is all acting out too. The scale is different; a crime that makes the national news is in another league. But both are acting out.

So think of something you said that you still feel uneasy about: a cutting remark, a sneer, harsh words to your child. The part of you that said it is not a part that needs correcting. It is the hidden child, and the child needs soothing. And soothing is not something you finish once and for all. You just soothe the child again.

Related

• There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
• As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad

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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

In a counselling session you can be told you may say anything, and still nothing comes out. It is not shyness that stops you. You have already decided that a decent person never feels hatred, imagines violence or wants revenge — so none of that is allowed to exist in you either. Deciding that does not make those thoughts go away. They stay inside you, never put into words, where you cannot look at them.

And the thoughts you never put into words are the ones that, one day, turn into action.

Someone once told me they wanted to take a saw to people

Someone I was working with in counselling once told me, when the room had finally come to feel safe enough, that they wanted to take a saw to certain people and cut them all up.

And while they were saying it, the thing nobody expects happened. They got calmer. Sentence by sentence, they came back to their senses. I asked who it was they wanted to cut. At that moment a memory came up in answer: a man from their childhood — that man, and what his hands had done. They had been pushing that memory down all those years.

Say it and you do not do it

Many people believe that saying something like that out loud makes it more likely to happen, so they keep it shut away inside. It is the other way round. Say a thing like that and you do not do it. Leave it inside, unspoken, and that is when you end up doing it.

But notice where this happened, because it matters. It was a room set up so that anything could be said, and the person listening heard the words out instead of flinching.

Once the saw fantasy had been put into words in that room, the person could look at it instead of being driven by it. Speaking also revealed its source: the man from their childhood and what his hands had done. What you put into words becomes something you can look at and think about. What you leave inside, unsaid, never becomes something you can look at, and over time that is what turns into action.

Letting sadness be sadness, and gladness be gladness

What happened in that room is exactly what loving yourself is about. Pressing a feeling down and refusing to admit it is there is a way of ignoring yourself. Loving yourself is the opposite: letting what is inside you come out in words, and then looking at what has come out. You look carefully at what is inside you, you look after it, and you acknowledge that it is there. You let sadness be sadness, gladness be gladness, and gloom be gloom. Allowing each of these and accepting it — that process is what loving yourself means.

Letting sadness be sadness means not calling it something else. You are sad, and you do not tell yourself this is fine. You are sad, and you do not tell yourself this is weakness.

Accept all of it as part of you, and start by forgiving yourself

You may feel that something is lacking in you, that you are weak, that you are simply no good at certain things. Rather than denying it, accept all of it as part of you. Admit that this is how you experience yourself right now, instead of covering it with praise you do not believe. Then, before anything else, forgive yourself for it.

When the feeling that you are bad keeps coming back, stop laying nice words on top of it. Admit it instead: “Yes, I am bad — and I forgive the bad me.” An admission with forgiveness attached to it.

Sometimes the feeling is this: It feels like being born was my fault. The more you have been hurt, the more likely this feeling is. For some women it takes this form: being born a daughter was my fault. If saying no, it wasn’t does not change the feeling the first time, there is no point in repeating it. Just accept it as yours. Say it: being born a daughter was my fault. And then forgive that fault. Only when you fully accept it as yours do you have something to forgive. As long as you keep pushing it away as not yours, you cannot forgive it at all.

One thing before we go on. Sometimes a feeling like this will not let go, and working at it alone, again and again, will not loosen it much. A feeling like that needs professional psychological help; loosening it on your own is hard. So if you try this after reading it today and nothing shifts, that is not another item for the list of things wrong with you.

But it wasn’t my fault, so why forgive it?

The objection comes fast. That was not my fault, so why am I forgiving it? If you did nothing wrong, forgiving yourself sounds like agreeing to take the blame for a wrong that never happened.

But look at what is actually happening. You keep pushing the feeling away — no, not my fault — and all the while, underneath the pushing, it goes on feeling like your fault. Pushing the feeling away is itself a refusal to acknowledge it. The harder you push against it, the more firmly it stays where it is.

Psychological reality is stronger than external reality

You know in your head that it was not your fault, and yet inside you it feels as if it truly was. That feeling is what is called psychological reality — what is real for you on the inside. And psychological reality is stronger than external reality: what you feel inside moves you more than what actually took place outside.

So the work here is not to correct the facts, because the facts are not what needs fixing. Someone can assure you a hundred times that being born was not your choice, so it could not have been your fault. That reassurance comes from outside you, the feeling lives inside you, and the two never meet. You have to treat the feeling as something that is really there, and then acknowledge it rather than deny it. Only when you acknowledge it does it become yours, and only once it is yours can you forgive it.

Acknowledging the feeling, or punishing yourself

When you are told to admit even “I am bad”, it can sound as if you are being told to punish yourself. Heard that way, it takes you in the opposite direction: toward punishment instead of forgiveness. Admitting the feeling and punishing yourself are two different things. What tells them apart is what you say next, after “yes, I am bad”.

If what comes next is “so this is the kind of person I am, so I deserve to be punished”, that is self-punishment. Instead of acknowledging one feeling, you have passed a verdict on your whole self. If what comes next is “and I forgive that bad me”, that is acknowledgement. Then “I am bad” means only “this feeling is in me right now” and goes no further, and the feeling gets acknowledged. What you drop is the verdict on yourself. What you accept as yours is the feeling.

Your body, your feelings, your thoughts — and your fantasies

No matter how small you feel, accepting yourself exactly as you are is what truly loving yourself means. That includes your body, your feelings, your thoughts — and your fantasies. The fantasies are where most people hold back. Because fantasies tend to be so grotesque, people do not say them out loud; they try to deny them instead. No, they tell themselves, and cover them up again.

Guard against one misunderstanding here. This is not an instruction to go and think such things on purpose. Suppose a picture of putting a knife into a stranger passes through your mind. Do not judge it as evil. Just notice, calmly: I must be very angry right now. Accepting that much is enough. Accepting it does not mean adding more to the picture. It means letting what passed through your mind simply pass.

If instead you cover it up — how could I be capable of something so wicked? — the problem only gets bigger, because what you cover up stays inside, unsaid. Any human being can have a thought like that. So rather than calling it bad, go the other way: accept even these fantasies as part of you, and love them too. Love yourself.

Related

• There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
• Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
• I Had to Be a Good Person, So I Never Expressed a Feeling

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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

Someone upsets you and you swear at them: “Dammit!” You could call that self-expression. Or you say, “I’m a little angry.” You could call that self-expression too. Letting out what you feel, instead of pushing it down, is one of the ways you come to love yourself. And both sentences do let it out: they take something that was inside you and put it outside. So far they are the same. The difference is in what happens next, and that is the part to pay attention to.

“Dammit” is an attack, and it comes back

Swear at someone like that and they will not look kindly on you. Because you attacked. And so they may attack you back. The feeling did get out — that part worked — but what you get back is a fight.

So if your feelings come out like this, you end up in an odd position. You got out what was inside you, yet you feel no lighter, and the relationship is a notch worse than before you spoke. And because you were attacked back for letting it out, next time you either say it more harshly or keep your mouth shut altogether. Neither gets you anywhere.

I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.

The other kind of sentence looks like this. What you said made me sad. I’m angry. It feels like I’m being dismissed. That upset me. You have told the other person honestly what is going on inside you. And because you did not attack them, what came out was the real you: the sadness and anger you actually feel.

The difference is whether the sentence attacks the other person or reports your own experience. Saying You never care about anyone hands the listener an accusation to defend against. Saying When you left without answering, I felt dismissed and angry names what happened and what you felt. Both sentences come from anger, but only the second lets the other person understand what happened inside you without first having to fight off the accusation.

Some people have never once expressed a feeling of their own

A person who can say “I’m a little angry” has put a feeling into words before. But some people cannot get that sentence out at all. Look closely at these people and you find one thing: they have never once expressed a feeling of their own. Having never done it, not even once, they cannot suddenly do it now.

Why have they never done it? Because where a feeling should be, a rule has taken its place, and the rule always gets there first. Whenever anger or hurt rises up in them, or some strange or violent fantasy crosses their mind, the rule answers: “None of that matters. I have to be a good son. I have to be a good person. I must never think a thing like that. I must never have fantasies like that.” So every feeling is checked against the rule first, and whatever fails the check gets pushed down.

What does it mean when feelings pile up inside you?

Push a feeling down again and again and it does not disappear. It stays where it is, and each new insult, disappointment, or fear piles onto everything that was never said before. Eventually a small event carries the weight of years. That is what it means for feelings to pile up. They pile up like that because they were never given any love. You kept pushing them away in order to be good, and that is indifference: a feeling is right there inside you, and you will not admit it is there.

“Indifference” is a strong word, and here it may sound unfair. You did not push the feeling down because you did not care about yourself; you pushed it down because you wanted to turn out well. But whatever your reason, the feeling itself got no attention and no love. And that feeling is part of you. You set out to become a good person and ended up indifferent to yourself.

What stays pushed down turns cruel, malevolent, destructive

Pushed down again and again and again, the feeling starts to turn aggressive. And “aggressive” is the kind word for it. Once it has nowhere left to go, what is actually in there is cruel, malevolent, destructive. Thoughts like these start circling inside: “Just let someone cross me. Just wait until my moment comes.” It can go as far as wanting to blow up the whole world. All of that had been hiding inside people who spent years telling themselves, “I have to be a good person.”

Push down a great deal of what you feel, and it gets packed tighter and tighter until one day it can burst. And if none of it is ever put into words, then after a year, after two years, at some point it comes out in what you do rather than in what you say. Dismissing your own feelings like this, year after year, is what ends up making a person genuinely malevolent.

As a therapist, I have worked with people who carry this kind of cruelty inside them. Fortunately, they came for help, opened up, and have been working on it. I have described the extreme end of it here — the wish to blow up the whole world — because the pattern is easiest to see there. But it is not only them. Please don’t read this and think, well, not me. Everyone has some of this in them.

Behind a lot of anger is the feeling of being dismissed

When people are not loved, they turn aggressive. Look at people who get angry a great deal, people who turn to violence, and every one of them carries an enormous feeling of having been dismissed. Feeling dismissed is another way of saying, “Why won’t you love me?” And underneath that lies another question: Am I someone not worth loving? Go for years without giving any love to the part of you that is asking this, without ever looking at that hurt and admitting it is there, and it turns into the kind of anger and cruelty described above.

And when looking at what is inside you is frightening, you keep reaching outside for something to take your mind off it instead — a drink, drugs, one show after another. Keep looking away like that, and in the end you lose touch with the very thing you needed to love: your own heart.

Express it, but within limits

So as soon as you feel something starting to build up inside, put it into words, before it has to come out as an outburst or an action. Expressing your feelings is self-love, but it is not permission to do whatever you please. Say what happened, name what you felt, and do it without cornering or condemning the other person. That is what self-love looks like in a relationship.

Wives especially need to say these things honestly to their husbands, because many of them turn it into an attack instead. The honest version goes like this: I wanted to be loved by you, and you stayed away, and it made me very sad. That is the whole sentence. What often comes out instead is: “Are you even a man? Is that something a husband does?” And then, of course, the wife gets no love from her husband. That is a form of self-abuse: the words are aimed at him, but she is the one left without the love she wanted. Say you were sad, and you leave the way open for the other person to give you what you wanted. Corner them, and you close that way with your own hand.

So expressing your feelings is a way into loving yourself. What decides whether you are heard or attacked back is which sentence you choose. All those years you spent pushing your feelings down, you thought you were being good. You were being indifferent to yourself — and the first step in ending that indifference is to say it out loud: I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.

Related

• The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head
• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
• As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad

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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 have heard the instruction often enough. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself. And you have probably tried it, the way a person tries a technique, and found that nothing much happened. The usual conclusion is that you did it wrong, or that the whole idea was soft nonsense.

There is a simpler explanation, and it has nothing to do with doing it wrong. The self you were trying to love was not there.

Living as someone else leaves no you to love

Think of a life in which you never let people see what you are really like. You expect them to criticise the real you, so you act like someone else, and then you go on living as that someone else. In a life like that, loving yourself is not difficult. It is impossible. There is no you in it. You set out to love yourself, and the self that was supposed to receive the love is missing.

So when self-love does not work, there is no need to blame yourself for not trying hard enough. What is missing is not effort. What is missing is you.

The you that gets seen is not the only you

When someone tells you to love yourself, notice which version of yourself comes to mind. Nearly always it is the you that gets seen: the version other people see, the one you can look at from the outside. But when it comes to loving yourself, you should not stop at that one.

Inside that outer you is another one, and you have to go inward to reach it: the you that is inside. That is the real you. The outer you is the one other people see. The inner you is the one only you can go in and see. And one thing stops you from meeting that inner you: the mask.

The mask is simply putting on a front

The word mask sounds theatrical, but in daily life the mask is ordinary. You agree while resentment rises, smile while you are afraid, or say you are fine because you expect to be criticised if you admit you need something. What you show and what you feel become two different things, and you hide the gap. The mask is simply the edited version of you that other people are allowed to see.

None of this comes from bad character. It comes from the fear of being blamed. That is exactly why the mask is so hard to take off: you assume that the moment it comes off, the criticism will start. It is the same with mistakes. People are rarely frightened of the mistake itself; they are frightened of being caught making it.

The cat in the mirror who thinks it is a lion

There is a way of judging in which only what can be seen and held in the hand counts as real. You could call it the standard of the physical world. If that is the only standard you judge yourself by, you go looking for yourself in the mirror, and this is what happens.

A cat looks into a mirror and thinks it is a lion. You meet people like this: they are nowhere near as remarkable as they think, yet they live as though they were.

The opposite happens too: someone looks in the mirror and is convinced they are far heavier than they really are.

One sees themselves as better than they are, the other as worse. They look like opposite problems, but they are the same problem: both have taken what the mirror shows to be who they are. Neither is looking at their real self, and no mirror could show it, because the real self is on the inside.

That is the trouble with judging yourself by the physical world alone. You keep going after your outside — how you look, how other people see you — and so your outside is the only self you ever meet. You never reach the real you, and because you never reach it, there is nothing there to love.

Life keeps hurting, and you cannot see why

Living behind the mask makes you lose your way. You make your choices by what keeps up the front, not by what you actually need. You stay agreeable in a relationship that hurts, accept work that drains you, or keep saying yes until resentment takes over.

Because each choice looks reasonable from the outside, you may not see why life keeps hurting. The pain seems to come from nowhere. It does not: in every one of those choices, the real you, the one whose needs you kept hidden, was left out.

Finding yourself comes before loving yourself

So there is an order here, and it is not optional. Before you can love yourself you have to find yourself. Loving is second. Until you have found yourself, the sentence I love myself describes nothing.

The real you is not a matter of how you look. Still, your appearance, the outside you can see, is the first part of you that you can reach, so it is not wrong to start there. What goes wrong is taking the starting point for the destination and stopping there. You have to go past the outside and keep going in. You have to look inside yourself.

You still need a mask, within reason

Does that mean you should take the mask off altogether? How could you? Nobody can live among other people without one. A mask, within reason, is necessary. Out in the world, saying every single thing on your mind, unfiltered, is not the same as being honest.

But you also have to be able to take it off, because you cannot meet the real you while it is on. At the same time, there are places where it has to stay on, and you must not take it off there. When it needs wearing, wear it; when it needs removing, remove it. So the question is not whether you take it off or keep it on. It is whether you can tell what kind of place you are in right now.

One place where you can put the mask down

So you need at least one place where it is safe to take the mask off, with people you can trust: a group, a friend, a counsellor. It should be somewhere you can pull a silly face like a small child, or dance, and nobody will say a word about it. Not a place where you are admired. A place where nobody is judging you. Without a place like that, the you that is inside never comes out.

And when you do put the mask down, someone comes out, and it is often not a playful child. It may be a child with a cruel, vicious look on its face, or a child who is crying. Either way, it is you: the part of you that stayed hidden behind the mask. Feelings you keep pushing down and never show start to turn cruel, and that is where the vicious look comes from. Whichever child comes out, you have to meet it. If you refuse, you cannot go any further inside. It is a step you cannot skip.

So the order is this. First the mask comes off; then the real you can be found. Loving yourself comes after that. Only when there is a you to love does loving yourself become possible.

Related

• That Isn’t Love, That’s Liking
• I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All

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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