Category: Object Relations

A lot of parents describe the same thing. They loved their child, truly, and gave everything they had to give. And then one day they look up and something has gone wrong with the child. From where they stand, it makes no sense at all. The love was given, as far as they can see. And that feels like an injustice.

Later, the grown child says to them: “What did you ever do for me?” After everything they gave, this is what they hear. I don’t hear that sentence as ingratitude. I hear it as a report from the receiving end: something left the parents’ hands, but it never arrived as love.

So here is the question: the love was given, so why didn’t it arrive as love? The answer, as I see it, starts with a phrase that sounds faintly wrong to many people: self-love. It sounds like thinking only of yourself. It isn’t.

Self-centered love and self-love are opposites

Being self-centered means thinking only of yourself. When a person loves that way, their love has stayed at a small child’s stage. It is an infantile form of love. Self-love is something else: a mature form of love.

The two sound related because both begin with the same word. But they aren’t slightly different versions of one thing. In the end, they’re opposites. Mature love starts with you, but it does not stay with you. It has already moved beyond thinking only of yourself, and it reaches outside you, toward another person.

That is why, when self-love works, you become able to love someone else — and when it doesn’t, you cannot love anyone else, not in a million years. So the question of whether you truly love yourself comes down to this: can you truly love someone other than yourself? Can you give your own child real love?

Giving love by your own standard

Love has to be given with the other person at the center. Instead, we often give what would feel loving to us — love in its self-centered form, measured by the giver’s standard. A parent offers advice when the child needs to be heard. A spouse earns more money when the other is asking for time together. The giver can honestly say, I gave everything I had, while the recipient can honestly say, you never gave me what I needed. The effort left one person, but it did not arrive as love in the other.

Husbands and wives do exactly this to each other. He works hard at his own version of love. She doesn’t experience one bit of it as love. She works hard at hers. Both of them are giving. Neither of them is receiving.

A man posted about this on Facebook not long ago. His marriage had come right to the edge of divorce, and then one day, in the shower, something dawned on him. From that morning on, he asked his wife the same question every day: “What could I do for you that would make you happy?” The first time, she got angry: “You’re hopeless. No matter what you do, I can’t be happy with you.” “Tell me anyway,” he said. He kept asking every morning, and she began to answer: “Fine, then do this.” He did what she asked, one small thing at a time. She grew happier, and so did he.

What that man changed was not how much he gave, but how he decided what to give. He stopped assuming that his own idea of care should satisfy his wife and began asking what would actually feel like care to her. That is what it takes for love to reach the other person. If you never find out what reaches the person you love, years of effort can still leave them feeling unloved.

You’re good to me, so I like you

So when mature love reaches out to another person, which part of that person does it go toward? First, I need to set aside something that is often mistaken for love.

Loving only the child who gets good grades and is smart. Loving a person only because they are impressive, do what you say, or are devoted to you. Loving only the people who are good to you. I don’t call any of that love.

That is liking: “You’re good to me in these ways, so I like you.” A lot of what we call love is really this. And liking lasts exactly as long as the other person keeps meeting the conditions. When the grades slip, it slips with them. When the conditions fall apart, it falls apart with them. There’s nothing wrong with liking. But if liking is all a child gets and we call it love, that child has not been loved. That child has been graded.

Real love goes toward the part you think is inferior

Real love goes the other way. Liking goes toward what is good in a person. Real love reaches the part we are tempted to call inferior. It does not disappear when your child is frightened, dependent, jealous, ashamed, or no longer impressive. Even when someone is not good to you, you can still be good to them, and let them know what it is like to be treated well by a good person.

Taken far enough, this is the love in the old story of the Good Samaritan. In that story, a traveler comes across a stranger who has been beaten by robbers and left by the road. The stranger has done nothing for him, yet the traveler spends his own money and his own time on him. Where does love like that come from? It begins with you, but not with the you that other people see. It goes inward first and meets the source of love there — for me, that source is God. From there it flows out to another person, and by then it has become something like noble devotion, the kind the Samaritan showed.

The part you’d rather not look at is the part to love

So when you love yourself, which part of you is that love meant for? Not your looks, and not the capable version of you, but the part of yourself you find genuinely pathetic, the part you consider inferior. That is your shadow side: the dark part of you that you keep out of sight. It is the part that has to be loved.

Love is like light: it has to go into that darkness and find what is there. And when it never gets in? I see this clearly in my sessions with clients, and it is dangerous. Most people in that position shut their hearts and keep them shut for the rest of their lives. The feelings they have pushed down and never acknowledged do not go away. They turn into anger. That anger leaks out as sarcasm and barbed remarks that leave the people around them feeling bad. And if it keeps building for long enough, one day it comes out in what they actually do: they lash out and hurt others.

Too frightening to do alone, so we do it together

Meeting that part of yourself is frightening. Of course it is — it means looking straight at what you spent a lifetime insisting was not you. It is frightening to do alone, so we do it together. In the self-love groups I run, people meet to give each other courage and support as they face it.

The meetings follow a set order, and one of the steps is simply this: make a funny face. The point is to wake up the child in you. Much of the part we keep out of sight is that child: the feelings you had when you were small — irritation, sadness, anger, the urge to be difficult on purpose — which have been pushed down and ignored ever since. This is not a return to the childish, self-centered love I described at the start. It means finally meeting those feelings. The older we get, the harder they are to reach. Children make funny faces easily, so making one gives the child in you a small nudge.

If you loved your child and something still went wrong, more of the same love won’t fix it. Before love can reach another person, it has to pass through the part of yourself you least want to look at. Take a parent who cannot bear their own mistakes and weakness. When their child brings home a low grade, the parent’s own anxiety and shame rise up, and they may rush to fix the child’s failure. If they don’t notice those feelings in themselves, they push the child hard and call it “for your own good.” Love that has not first gone through the part of you that you keep hidden ends up being given by your own standard, however much of it you give.

Related

• Jung’s Shadow: What You Won’t Look At
• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
• When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack

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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 once told me that she likes it when she gets a bruise. She does not cover it up. She goes out with it showing.

Put like that, it does not add up. A bruise is where something hurt, and most people would rather it were not on display. Then you hear why she says it, and it makes perfect sense.

Her body did not bruise

Her mother hit her a lot when she was a child. And her body did not bruise.

For her, the absence of a bruise was no relief. If a bruise had come up, her father could have seen it in the evening. She was not waiting for a chance to tell him herself. She was waiting for him to see it first and ask what had happened to her. But nothing stayed on her body to be seen. What was done to her in the day had left no trace by evening, and she was left alone with it.

So she said she hated her own body. Not the places she was hit. The body that kept no record of having been hit.

If her father found out, it would come back on her

But even if her father had found out, it would not have been simple. If he saw a mark and asked her mother about it, it would come out that her mother had done it, and her mother would be in trouble. After that, the child would be made to pay for it. The word she used was retaliation.

So she was stuck either way. If a bruise showed, her father might find out, and then the retaliation would come. If no bruise showed, there was nothing for him to see, and no way for him to find out at all. Either way, what was happening to her had nowhere to go. And she could not tell him.

A memory with nowhere to go gets shut away

She put the next part plainly herself. If a child went on remembering all of this, she could not bear it; she would go out of her mind. So a child shuts these painful memories away, somewhere even she cannot get at them. That place is what is called the unconscious.

Once the memories are shut away, it looks as if they are gone. But the body keeps doing what it did back then. In her case, it showed in the way she slept.

She had been hit so much, she said, that she did not think she was a person. She thought she was a caterpillar. Until she went through what she calls her healing process, she slept at the very edge of the bed, curled up the way a caterpillar curls. She made small crying sounds in her sleep. As a child she could not cry, because crying got her into trouble, and that crying came out later, in her sleep. Her husband found it hard to watch.

What can a caterpillar do at school?

That was her question, not mine. She was very bad at school and always came bottom of the class.

Her mother made her study with a cane laid down beside her. She could not concentrate. The cane was right there, she never knew when she would be hit with it, and the fear took hold of her. Her dictation tests, where words are read out and the child writes them down, came back at 20 out of 100, every day.

It is easy to get this the wrong way round. The cane was not beside her because she did badly. She did badly because the cane was beside her. The whole time she sat there, all her attention was used up on watching the cane and guessing when she might be hit, and none was left for the words she was meant to write down.

The 95 she was not allowed to put up

In primary school she scored 95 once. In those days marked test papers were hung up for everyone to see, and she wondered aloud whether it was done to shame the children. Down at the bottom there were zeros, and twenties. She put her 95 up at the very top, and her mother would not let her.

The 20 came every day. The 95 came once and was not allowed up there at all. The hitting left no mark on her body, and what she did well was not allowed to be seen. There was nowhere anyone could see what was happening to her, or what she could do. So self-esteem never formed in her: the sense that you are a decent person, a feeling of your own worth.

She passed, and could not take it in

How far does this missing sense of worth reach? All the way to an exam she sat as a grown woman.

A few years ago she passed a counsellor’s examination. When you pass, you simply take it that you passed. She could not. Instead these thoughts came: “The computer marking must have been wrong. They will ring to tell me I failed after all. And if nobody rings, I must have only just scraped through.” She said she caught herself thinking like this.

It was the 95 all over again. When she was a child, her mother would not let her put the 95 up. This time her mother was not there to do it, so she did it herself: she took down her own pass, telling herself it must have been a marking error, or that she had only just scraped through.

A child who could do nothing makes up for it with strength

When she was being hit, her mother was strong and a small child could do nothing. Being in a situation where there is nothing at all you can do — that is powerlessness. Her body, which would not bruise, showed that powerlessness plainly: she was being hit, and not even a mark was left to show it.

A child does not just leave powerlessness as it is. While she was being hit, she could do nothing. So later she went the opposite way: instead of doing nothing, she pushed ahead with all her strength. Making up like this for what you could not do before is called compensation. Through it, a great deal of strength built up in her, a strength that would not give in. That strength is what is called aggression.

Aggression is a word that sounds like a fault. If it is seen as a fault, she becomes someone who has to keep her own strength held down. Then she is once again someone who can do nothing, and the powerlessness comes a second time. Here she mentioned Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, who did not see it that way. He wrote about aggression in a small child as being almost the same thing as activity: not a fault, but a sign of life. In his view, as she put it, aggression is not a bad thing at all; it turns into energy. She said that in her own life this strength is being put to good use, and that she now has energy to spare.

She likes it when she bruises

Back to where this started. She still likes it when she bruises. She does not keep the mark covered; she leaves it showing and goes about her day. She said this comes from never bruising as a child. Back then she hated her body for keeping no mark. Now, as a grown woman, she is glad whenever a bruise comes up.

Once you have heard this much, you can see what keeps coming back. It is not the hitting itself. It is the situation in which there was nothing she could do. It came back as a body curled at the edge of a bed. It came back as 20 out of 100, every day. It came back as a pass she could not take in.

There are things in each of us that are hard to explain to anyone else. Usually they are ways we found as children to get through a situation where we could do nothing. Only the way of getting through stays, and it keeps coming out even in situations that have nothing to do with the old one.

But one more thing came out of that same situation where she could do nothing: strength, the energy she now has to spare. And when she told me about sleeping curled up at the edge of the bed, she said, “until I went through the healing process.” That means she does not sleep that way now.

References

• Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958). — aggression read not as a fault but as energy.

Related

• “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
• What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.
• 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

You took your own share: some rest, some time for yourself, a no to something that went beyond your limit. You said out loud what you wanted, and you did not apologize before saying it. And then, almost at once, a feeling arrived, and it was not relief. It was guilt.

It got there fast, before you had any time to think. What the guilt does next is what I want to look at, because it is not dramatic and it is not loud. It only makes you hesitate the next time. You do not decide to stop looking after yourself. You just put off taking your share, and then put it off again, until in the end there is nothing left for you.

A word nobody wants said about them

I want to use a word we all dislike hearing. Selfish. Say it about someone and it lands as an accusation. Say it about yourself and something tightens.

I am using it on purpose, and I am using it to talk about love, which may seem the last place it belongs. But love is a large subject — loving yourself as well as loving others — and being selfish is one part of it.

Here is the claim I want to make at the start. When you can acknowledge the selfish side of yourself and accept it as natural, you become able, later on, to care for other people. And care that grows out of that acceptance does not empty you out. The problem was never that you give. The problem is giving that uses up everything you have and leaves nothing inside you. What decides which kind you end up with is the order: first you accept the selfish side of yourself, and only after that do you give.

Taking your share and feeling bad about it are two separate events

Don’t look only at the feeling; look at the order in which things happen. First comes an action: you took your share. Then, a moment later, comes the guilt, with a thought attached: Was I only thinking of myself? The two come together so reliably that you no longer notice they are two. They are two.

So let me say it plainly. You must be able to take your own share, and you must not treat the guilt as proof that you did something wrong. Taking your share meets a real need you have now. The guilt attaches itself to that action automatically, and it comes from somewhere older: a rule you learned earlier in life, that protecting yourself means hurting someone else.

Why keep the two apart? Because before long the guilt stops coming after the action and starts coming before it. The next time, you are no longer deciding whether to take your share. You hesitate before you even get that far.

Being selfish is the foundation

Selfishness, in the sense used here, is the capacity to protect your own life, needs, and limits. Care for other people has to be built on that capacity instead of replacing it.

The order is the same as when you build a house. You lay the foundation first and put the walls up on it. Here the foundation is looking after yourself: resting, eating, making time for yourself, refusing what goes beyond your limit. The walls are what you do for other people. Built in that order, your help is something you choose, not something guilt squeezes out of you.

Reverse the order and you get walls with no foundation under them. From outside it looks like a house, but the person who lives in it cannot hold out for long. The same happens when you give before you have looked after yourself. From outside it may look generous, but you are spending what you do not have. The result is exhaustion, resentment, and in the end pulling away from the very people you meant to love.

If you have ever helped somebody and afterward felt not fulfilled but empty inside, you probably took that as a sign that you do not care enough. It may not be that. It is closer to that house with walls and no foundation: you gave before you had looked after yourself, and the emptiness is what that feels like from the inside. For your generosity to be really yours, rather than paid for out of something you did not have, the foundation has to go in first.

The strength to hold on to what is yours

People often misunderstand what be selfish means. They hear it as look out only for yourself. That is not what it means. It means having the strength to hold on to what is yours.

I mean the strength to hold your ground when your share is being pushed aside.

Looking out only for yourself and holding on to what is yours look alike from the outside, and you mix them up yourself. That is why, even when you are only holding on to what is yours, it can feel to you like greed. But holding on to what is yours is not a milder form of greed. It is something different in kind: you are protecting what is already yours, not reaching for more.

The order runs outward from you

Looking after yourself and caring for others come in an order, and the order starts with you: first you, then other people. Love works the same way: it starts with loving yourself.

Someone who cannot love themselves cannot get love across to another person. Not will not — cannot. From outside, it may still look devoted, and the money, time, and work really are given. But when the giving comes from fear, obligation, or the need for approval, the person receiving it feels pressure, not love.

Love gets across only when the giver is sincere: giving freely, not out of fear, obligation, or a need for approval.

And it was never only about you

Now a correction, because all of the above can be read the wrong way. Loving yourself is not only about you. You and the people in your life are tied together: not separate things standing side by side, but one.

So self-love does not mean splitting yourself off and loving only that piece. It means loving the whole: you and the people in your life together, because you are already bound together.

Here is why the difference matters. Everything you can see is made of separate parts, and that is why things come apart in the end: they were in pieces to start with. The parts come together, hold a shape, and look like a single object, but that is all an object ever is. The same is true of people.

The one thing that does not split is love. Love takes everything in; it holds things together by including them, not by pushing them away. To love is to become one, and love does not create division. When you start to love, you accept what is there and take it all in. When you stop loving, the splitting begins: people draw apart, take sides, and then there is conflict.

So division, fear, pain, and conflict come from a choice: the choice not to love. But that is never how it feels. It does not feel chosen. It feels as though what makes your life hard is the situation around you and the people around you, and whether or not you love seems to have nothing to do with it.

If the world looks appalling to you, as if everyone is out only for themselves and the strong simply eat the weak, I am not going to argue that people do not behave that way. They do. But that behavior is what comes out of a lack of love. It is not what the world really is.

Where people are split apart, that is where the wars and the fights break out, and where the talking stops. The talking stops because you have already decided you know the other person completely, so you hear only what you already knew. Love is also this: listening hard for what someone is actually trying to say.

So taking your own share is not pushing anybody away. You and the people in your life are still bound together; it is only that, in the order of things, you come first.

Your own share, first

Love yourself first. Look after yourself first. Take your own share first. The reason is simple: it makes you happy, and it brings you joy.

So the next time guilt shows up before you have even taken your share, you do not have to read it as a signal to stop. Start where it all starts: acknowledge the selfish side of yourself and accept it as natural, without arguing with yourself about it. That selfish side, the part of you that looks after your own needs, is the foundation. The giving you build on it afterward is the kind that does not empty you out.

Related

• Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries
• Why Taking Orders Feels Like an Insult
• What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.

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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

Say the words self-love out loud and watch what crosses people’s faces. Something pulls back — not disagreement exactly, a flinch. Press on it and the objection is nearly always the same. Isn’t that artificial? Working up a feeling that was never there, pretending to be fond of yourself. It arrives sounding like a performance, and nobody wants to be caught giving one.

I want to take that flinch seriously. Something in your life really is artificial — but it is not self-love.

Two ways of leaning too far

Watch people long enough and they sort into roughly two kinds. One kind is too selfish: they think only of their own side of things and hold on to it tight, as if no one else’s side counted. The other kind is too selfless: they spend the day reading everyone else’s face, a whole life built around what other people needed. They give and give and cannot take a thing in return.

I am not telling you one of those is the bad kind. You actually need both: looking out for yourself and looking out for others. What does the damage is the excess — leaning so far one way that the other one is no longer in you at all.

“Why are you only thinking of yourself? Think of your brother.”

You heard that before you were old enough to answer it. Hear it enough times and it stops being about the last biscuit or the good seat in the car. What stays with you is a single sentence: thinking about myself is wrong.

That sentence goes on working like a rule inside you. Each time you want to eat first, rest, or say no to someone, the rule tells you that wanting it is wrong. So guilt shows up before you have even asked yourself whether what you want is reasonable.

The more you give, the more artificial your life becomes

Follow that sentence into everyday life. If wanting things is what is wrong with you, the fix seems obvious: want less, give more, lean further toward everybody else.

So you say yes while something in you says no. You take on work that another adult should be doing, and you carry it without a word.

That is the artificial life. You say yes while feeling no, give what you resent giving, and hide the cost so that others continue to see you as good. Looking after yourself feels fake because you have practiced self-denial for years, and self-denial now feels natural. The unfamiliar act is not necessarily the false one.

The child who never got to be selfish becomes the adult who can’t stop being selfish

Children who were never allowed to want things for themselves often grow into adults who cannot stop thinking about getting their share. They never got it as children, so the need never went away. On the outside they may look generous, but inside, their attention keeps going back to what they missed.

The reverse is also true, though few people expect it. A child who got to be thoroughly selfish, who got their portion plainly and without a lecture stapled to it, grows up with room to spare. They already had their own share, so there is space left over to notice what somebody else needs. The generosity you keep trying to manufacture comes naturally to people who were allowed to want things.

We teach adult morals to children who can’t take them in yet

We hold very small children to adult morals. If you have raised children, you will recognise this: the times you took your own standard of what a decent person does and pushed your child to fit it.

The trouble is not the standard. The trouble is who is receiving it. A small child does not yet understand standards like these. Their mind has not yet come together into one piece; it is still split up, in fragments. So it takes in bits of what you say, not the whole of what you mean. What reaches the child is distorted, and in more ways than you would believe.

Here is one of them. “Think of your brother” is a good lesson. These are not bad parents passing on bad instructions; they are decent people passing on decent ones. But the child takes in the good lesson with a second message fastened to it: what I want is wrong.

Then you try to come to your senses, and you get stuck

Now carry that lesson into adult life. You go along with other people more and more. You fit yourself around everyone until you are worn out — always giving, never receiving, tired in a way sleep does not fix.

Then one ordinary evening a thought arrives with fight in it: What is this? What am I doing? You decide that, for once, you are going to look after yourself.

And that decision is exactly where you get stuck.

Somewhere inside you, being selfish has come to mean being bad. So the moment you decide I will protect my own share, guilt and hesitation come with it. You did not lose your nerve. An old rule got there before you could act, and it told you that looking after yourself makes you a bad person.

The belief you keep somewhere you don’t look

Everyone tells you to change the way you think. But you hold a belief in a place you never look. As long as that belief stays unbroken, living differently is enormously hard. You can want to change badly and still not manage it.

I think that belief is the sentence from childhood: thinking about myself is wrong.

That is why advice does nothing. A seminar, a book, a friend explaining how you ought to be living — none of it moves that sentence, because it was never argued into you and cannot be argued out. You yourself have to say yes to living differently. Only then do you live that way with real strength behind you.

The selfishness I mean is not taking too much

It probably never occurred to you that selfish could be a good word. It carries a picture: someone who looks after himself and no one else, who reaches first. Take the word that way and of course it feels bad.

But that is not the selfishness I am talking about. It is not taking too much. It is having the strength to protect what is yours — your rest, your share, your right to say no — without feeling guilty about it.

So if self-love makes you flinch, look again at what you are flinching from. It is not self-love. It is what you were taught the word selfish meant when you were small: that a selfish person is a bad person. That old meaning is still in you, still working. While it stays, you can try as hard as you like and caring for yourself will go on feeling artificial — because something in you keeps filing it under the things you are not allowed to do.

You will not argue that old rule out of yourself tonight. But the next time guilt shows up — when you say you’d rather rest, or that you want to go first — name what is causing it. It isn’t self-love. It’s that old line, “Think of your brother,” still being obeyed.

Related

• Why Someone Warm to Everyone Turns Cold With You
• Why the Loudest Person in the Room Feels Empty at Home
• Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts

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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

I once gave a seminar for parents. Each of them was there because of a problem with their child that they had not been able to resolve. At one point I asked how old their children were. The youngest was in the fourth year of primary school. The oldest was thirty-seven. In between, someone said twenty-five.

The ages were that far apart, and yet everyone in the room was there for the same reason. The title of the seminar was a question: is it my child that’s the problem?

I want to take that question apart. If all that has happened is that your child has stopped doing what you say, I think the answer is no — and I am not saying no just to make you feel better.

What a parent wants is not much

When you are raising a child, a lot of things weigh on you. Of all of them, the hardest is when your child will not do things the way you want.

And what you want is not much. If they are at school: do well in their studies and mind their manners. If they are grown up: earn their own living. And, no matter what, do what their mother and father say. These are ordinary expectations, the kind most parents hold. There is nothing unusual in any of it.

And yet it is on exactly these things that parents and children so often clash.

The difficulty arrives in two layers

One layer is the frustration of not being able to fully understand what is going on in your child’s mind. This layer lies outside you, between you and your child. It is the distance that actually exists between the two of you.

You would like to be close. You would like your conversations to go well — some back and forth, a bit of warmth in them. You would like your child to tell you what they do out of the house and what is on their mind. Mostly, they would rather not tell you any of it.

The other layer is not between you and your child but inside you: an anxiety that comes up from deep within. When your child keeps things from you or brushes off your advice, you may feel more than frustration. You may feel that you are losing control, or that you are no longer needed, or you may fear that your child will make a harmful choice with no one there to protect them.

Puberty can arrive in primary school

Puberty comes early these days. It can start in the third or fourth year of primary school. A child in the fourth year, like the youngest child mentioned that day, is at the age where it begins.

And from then on they really do not listen. Nothing you say gets through. The bickering starts with the first sentence. They do not do what they are told. They go into their room, shut the door and want to be left alone.

To the parent, this seems to come out of nowhere, and to be happening only to their child. That is when parents start to wonder whether their child is the problem.

Before phones, there were comic books

Most of the fights are about phones, games or television — though these days, I am told, hardly anyone fights about television any more. What is left is the phone.

The parents now doing the fighting spent whole stretches of their own childhood with their noses in comic books. Looking back as adults, they cannot really say what was so bad about that.

Children feel the same way about their phones: “What is so terrible about this?” For children today, the phone is what comic books were for their parents. The thing in their hands has changed; the wish to have a world of their own has not. But parents forget what they themselves were like at that age, and they insist: no phone, absolutely not. That insistence is what turns into the fight. And then the fight is no longer only about screen time. It is about who controls the child’s attention.

The son who tells you everything

Daughters will tell you a little about their lives. Sons, on the whole, tell you nothing. And telling you nothing is normal.

Suppose your son does come home and tell you everything that happened to him while he was out, all of it, in order. It is a pleasant thing to be on the receiving end of, but I would still put a small question mark beside it. It is not especially healthy.

When he was small, telling you everything was fine; at that age it is natural. Once puberty begins, he needs some things that are his alone, because that is how he becomes a person separate from you. If, as a teenager, he still reports every thought and every event to you, the closeness may not be a sign of unusual trust. It may be a sign that he is struggling to become separate from you. It is the same scene, but at a different age it means something different.

Not listening and moving outside your control are one and the same

The child who was in your arms grows, and stops listening, and while he is not listening he moves outside the parent’s control.

I do not see these as two separate things; they are one and the same. To learn to judge things for himself, a child sometimes has to refuse your judgment and find out what happens. There is no way to keep doing everything you say and, at the same time, move outside your control. So when a child stops listening, it means he has already started moving outside your control.

That is also why the fights about the phone get you nowhere. Through them you are trying to make him do as he is told again, at the very age when not doing as he is told is part of how he grows up.

So you should applaud

When children move outside the parent’s control, the parent should actually applaud. What is happening is an enormously good thing.

That turns the usual worry around. Parents usually worry about the son who no longer tells them everything, but he may simply be keeping a normal amount of privacy. The situation that deserves a second look is the one where parents feel reassured because their son tells them every detail. Those parents should ask themselves whether he feels allowed to have thoughts, relationships and decisions of his own.

If puberty has arrived and you and your child are exactly as close as you always were, then the thing that deserves the applause — your child moving outside your control — may simply not be happening yet.

The question needs to change

Of the two layers, the frustration is at least easy to see. It is aimed at the child, and the child is right there in front of you, being difficult about the phone. The anxiety is harder to see, because it comes up inside you rather than in front of you.

So change the question. Instead of asking only, Why won’t this child listen to me? ask, What do I fear will happen if this child makes a decision without me? The answer may be a fear that he will come to harm, that I will lose my authority, that he will reject me, or that he will no longer need me.

One of the two layers, the anxiety, is always inside the parent. That does not mean the difficulty is the parent’s fault. I want to be exact about that, because when parents hear that part of the difficulty is inside them, they tend to hear that they are to blame. What I am saying is that there is one more place to look — inside yourself — and it is the place that has been getting left out.

If a child who used to do as he was told has stopped doing so, then in that house a child is growing up. The fights about the phone are going to happen anyway, and I will not pretend they can be talked away. Just know, while they are going on, where your child is actually heading: towards judging things for himself, outside your control.

Related

• The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
• 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

There are two children in the house. One of them keeps getting into trouble. The school rings. The stories stop adding up. Money disappears from your purse, and apparently nobody took it.

The other one is quiet. Does what is asked. Stays in her room with the door shut. Says she is fine, the same way every time.

Which of them looks more serious to you?

We rank them by what they cost us

Parents bring their children to me for counselling, and it is nearly always the same one of the two: the child who got into trouble.

The quiet one does not come. There is no reason to bring her. The school does not ring, nothing goes missing, she is home at night. Nothing about her needs seeing to.

Here is the thing I want to point out. When we decide which child is more serious, the measure we actually use is not how much pain is this child in. It is how much is this child costing me.

Most of the time the two questions give the same answer, so nobody notices which one they are really asking. In adolescence, they stop giving the same answer.

In adolescence, the hurts of early childhood come back up

Early in life, every child goes through frustration, disappointment, and times of deprivation, when they do not get what they need. A young child has neither the words nor the support to deal with these, so the child simply carries them and moves on. The feelings do not go away. In adolescence, when aggression runs higher, they come back up.

As they rise, these old feelings start to stir a basic destructive force that every human being has. “Destructive” sounds alarming, and I will explain what I mean by it in a moment. From this point on, the two children go different ways. The child who keeps getting into trouble turns that force outward, into defiance, lying, stealing, or fighting. The quiet one turns it inward, against her own wanting: she goes numb, passive, and out of reach.

Where is the battery?

Think of a toy doll that walks and makes a noise. Somewhere on it, under the feet, on its back or on top of its head, there is a little hatch, and behind it the box the batteries sit in.

So what is a battery? It is energy.

I use the battery to explain aggression and destructiveness, because that is what they are: energy. In themselves they are not bad. Passion and tireless energy come from them. When the doll walks, the battery is working. When the doll does not move, the battery is just sitting in its box. It is the same with a child. When the energy is connected to action, the child can protest, go after what they want, say no, and get moving. When it is disconnected, the child may stop wanting, objecting, or starting anything.

The child who keeps getting into trouble has a battery that is working. The energy has come out in the wrong direction, and I will not be soft about that — lying and stealing break the rules everybody else lives by, and somebody gets hurt. That has to be stopped, whatever else is going on. But the fact that the act happened at all means the force is moving.

The quiet child has not simply held back from using the force. She has switched it off. Often she is a child who has grown up keeping an eye on the adults’ moods, and instead of getting angry or asking for help, she hides herself. She does not argue, does not ask for anything, does not cause trouble, because the wanting itself has been shut down. So her quiet may not mean she is well. It may mean the life in her has gone into hiding. At the extreme, it is as if something in her has died. Yet the battery is still in the box. It is simply not connected to anything, so nothing happens.

How Winnicott saw these two children

The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott looked at the children everybody else had written off as problems and said something nobody else was saying. These ones have hope in them.

I am not stretching his meaning. He wrote it himself, in a 1956 paper: the antisocial act — an act that breaks the rules other people live by, such as lying or stealing — is an expression of hope. What such a child hopes for is the care they missed out on. They have not given up on getting it, and through the trouble they are asking for it again.

It is worth being exact here, because this is easy to misread as saying that the behaviour is healthy. What Winnicott had in mind was not the offence itself but what is going on inside the child that comes out as trouble. He called this the antisocial tendency, and it turns up in ordinary children in perfectly decent homes, not only in young offenders.

He said something else alongside it: most children who keep causing trouble are, to some degree, emotionally unwell. Having hope does not mean the child is fine. It means something in the child is still switched on, something that can be worked with.

Winnicott also wrote about the other child, the quiet one. Being agreeable and well-behaved, he said, can become a shell the child wears on the outside. He saw going along with others as a matter of degree. Doing it reasonably well is something a child achieves, and it is healthy. But when the child must always agree and adapt, the shell grows thick and covers over the child’s own wishes and feelings. Socially she causes no trouble, while inside she may already have collapsed. The distress did not disappear; it just stopped showing.

The Child Who Was No Trouble at All follows that child into adulthood, where she is still being told how little trouble she is. This piece is about her as a teenager, with the shell still on.

No symptom, no appointment

Here is what I am actually trying to say.

The child who turned the force outward has symptoms. The school rings, the money is gone, the adults are furious. It is loud and exhausting. And it is precisely the noise that makes an adult put a coat on and take that child somewhere. Help arrives.

The child who turned it inward has no symptoms anyone has to deal with. Nobody is inconvenienced, so nobody brings her in, and nobody asks whether she has stopped feeling, wanting, or connecting with other people. She may get no help until she is twenty or thirty. By then the emptiness, the depression, or the inability to form close relationships has become unbearable, and she finally opens a counsellor’s door on her own.

So the child who gets help late is not the child who caused the trouble.

The force moving is one thing; hurting someone is another

To avoid any misunderstanding, let me be clear about one thing. This is not a piece saying that lying or stealing or hitting is fine. Behaviour that harms another person has to be stopped, and I am not softening that.

Expressing anger and doing damage with it are two different acts, which is the whole argument of You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious. A child is allowed to be angry, allowed to argue, allowed to say out loud that something is unfair. Hitting someone is a different matter: that is what has to be stopped.

What I want to change your mind about is not the behaviour. It is the measure you reach for when you decide which of your children is the serious case.

If there is a quiet child in your house, ask yourself whether she is quiet because she is all right, or quiet because she has hidden herself away. A child who is all right can disagree, ask for help, say what she likes, and get angry, even if she also likes to spend time on her own. A child who has hidden herself away says “fine” to everything, asks for nothing, and seems to want very little, even when you would expect her to want something. At a glance, both are simply quiet. Underneath, they are in very different places. And it may be that nobody has yet asked which of the two she is.

References

• Winnicott, D. W. (1956). The Antisocial Tendency. In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 306–315). London: Tavistock Publications, 1958. — the antisocial act as an expression of hope.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth Press, 1965. — compliance hardened into a shell.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1984). Deprivation and Delinquency. C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd & M. Davis (Eds.). London: Tavistock Publications.

Related

• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
• The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
• 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

Someone mentions a name at dinner, and your body reacts before you have decided what you think. Your chest tightens, your face goes still, and you stop following the conversation. Everyone else has moved on, but you are still arguing with that person in your head.

Later, someone asks what the person actually did to you. You search for an incident and cannot find one large enough to explain the reaction. So you say, Nothing, really. I just don’t like them. The answer feels incomplete, because the strength of your reaction does not come only from this person. It also comes from an older hurt that this person has touched.

Or perhaps what happens to you looks like a different problem altogether. You had decided you were done with something — the drinking, checking your phone at two in the morning, the person you keep going back to. By Thursday you are doing it again, and when someone asks why, you give the same kind of answer: I don’t know. I just do.

These two reactions look unrelated, but both come from the same place: an experience you have not yet been able to put into words. The usual explanation for the dislike is that it is just an old grudge, something you should dig up and let go of. I would put it differently: the dislike is doing a job now. It gives your pain a target, and it keeps you from feeling the grief underneath it — grief over something you needed and never got.

What you cannot name keeps driving what you do

You know you are in a bad mood, but you cannot say what it is about. Something is clearly stirring inside you, and you have no word for it.

When an experience has no name, you cannot recognise it early enough to choose what to do with it. You only notice the result: you become cold toward someone, reach for a drink, check your phone at two in the morning, or return to the relationship you meant to leave. Afterwards you say, I don’t know why I did it. The pattern repeats because the feeling that starts it has never become something you can identify and think about.

The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion explains why this happens, and his explanation is the one I keep coming back to. Some experiences are too much to take in when they happen, and there may be nobody there to help you with them. This can happen in childhood, but also later in life. You cannot digest such an experience, so you swallow it whole, and it stays inside you whole.

Bion said the mind normally digests experience: it turns what happened into something you can feel, put into words and think about. He called this digesting work alpha-function. An experience that could not be digested stays in you as a raw lump, and he called such lumps beta-elements. Think of the difference between a bad thing you can tell somebody about and a bad thing that is still inside you exactly as it was when it happened, with no words for it. The first has been digested. The second has not. Giving an experience a name, which is what the rest of this article is about, is how that digesting happens.

“Oh, so that’s what it was”

Then one day the words for it come, usually partway through a sentence, usually while you are talking to somebody: Oh. So that’s what it was.

Naming does not repair the past, but it changes where the swallowed experience sits. Until now it had been pushing you from behind. Now it sits in front of you, where you can look at it. I hate that person may become I feel dismissed around that person because their tone brings back how invisible I felt at home. The pain is still heavy, but now you can see what set it off. Instead of being driven by a reaction you cannot explain, you are holding an experience you can look at and think about.

Bion saw this as the point where thinking begins. Until what happened to you has been digested into something you can think about, you cannot learn anything from it. You just keep repeating the same reactions.

What comes up once you name the experience is not relief

This is the part I most want to get across. You would think that finally naming it would feel like setting down something heavy. What comes up instead is a deep sadness, and with it regret over what can no longer be undone.

Both come up because you now know what the experience was about: what you needed and did not get, at the age when it would have counted. And in the same moment you learn the harder part: it is not coming. Not later, not from this person, not from anybody. Naming is not a release. It is the moment a loss becomes a fact.

The sadness is usually not about the person whose name came up at dinner. It goes back much further. Mourning means letting something go, and what has to be let go of is the past: the very beginning, when your parents were your whole world, and what you needed from them then and never got.

Hatred is easier to hold than grief

Now go back to the dislike from the beginning, the one you could not explain. Whether you call it dislike or hatred, it is standing exactly where the grief would otherwise be, blocking the way to it.

While you are hating somebody, you do not have to be sad. Hatred has a target and a direction, and there is force in it you can use — rehearsing the argument, composing the sentence that would finish them. Grief has none of that. It simply settles on you, and while it does, there is nothing you can do. Hatred is far easier to bear. When a person keeps a grudge alive for years, it is not because they have a bad character. It is because they cannot yet face what lies underneath the grudge.

And when the person you hate is a parent, the hatred does one more thing: it keeps a hope alive. As long as you go on hating them, you are still waiting for the day they admit what they did wrong and give you the love you should have had. To meet the sadness underneath, you have to give up that hope. That is why meeting it is so hard.

The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein offers a way to understand why hatred is held so tightly. In a 1940 paper she linked mourning with what she called manic states: ways the mind keeps a loss at arm’s length so that it does not have to be felt. They are called manic because they are full of energy and action, and that is exactly what hatred offers in place of the helplessness of grief. Seen this way, holding on to hatred is what a person does while the loss is still more than they can survive.

Only when the hatred stops for a moment — late at night, or when it has tired itself out — does what lies underneath show. The hatred has not gone away. It has stepped aside just long enough for you to see what it was covering: the grief.

Naming rarely happens when you are alone

Another psychoanalyst, Ronald Fairbairn, saw this naming as something that happens inside a relationship. What you could not digest gets its name in front of somebody who can take it in. You bring out something raw and shapeless. The other person stays with it, without pushing it away, until it is no longer unbearable, and then gives it back to you in a form you can keep hold of. Bion called this containing, because for a while the listener holds what you cannot yet hold by yourself.

This is why hours of thinking alone can leave you going round in circles over the same scenes. When you talk to someone who listens without recoiling, they can put your experience into words and hand it back to you: You sound angry, but also deeply disappointed that nobody came for you. Hearing that, you may recognise for the first time what you have been feeling.

It does not have to happen in a therapist’s office. What matters is that the listener does not deny the feeling, does not get frightened by it, and does not hurry you toward feeling better before you have understood what hurts.

Not getting rid of the feeling, but bringing it out where you can see it

None of this is advice to sort out your feelings and be done with them. It is the opposite. What you try to get rid of does not leave. It only moves somewhere else — into a tight chest, a habit you cannot stop, a coldness toward someone — and goes on working on you from there.

What can be done is smaller and harder. Bring the feeling out, put a name on it, discover that grief comes with the name, and stay with that grief. The grief is not a sign that something went wrong. It is what naming produces: you are sad because you have finally found out what you never got.

On the day the dislike loosens and you find sadness where you were sure there was only hatred, nothing has failed. You have reached the grief the hating was holding back.

References

• Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann. — alpha-function and beta-elements.
• Bion, W. R. (1962). The Psycho-Analytic Study of Thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, 306–310. — containing. Reprinted in Second Thoughts (1967) as “A Theory of Thinking”.
• Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications. — on seeing our experience of other people within relationships.
• Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 125–153.

Related

• Mourning the Parent You Never Had
• Why One Person Gets Under Your Skin
• 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

You do not shout. You say yes where you can. And when you do have to say no, you watch your child’s face fall, and before long you have taken it back — not because you were persuaded, but because you could not face the clash that was coming.

You would expect all this to produce a settled child. Instead you are getting the opposite: more clinging, more testing, a shorter fuse over smaller things.

That expectation is wrong, and it is worth seeing why.

It was never mainly about whether you were strict

Of everything a parent does, what makes things hardest for a child is not strictness. It is inconsistency — being one way today and another way tomorrow.

Yesterday it was allowed. Today the same request gets a different answer, and what changed was not the request but how the parent’s day had gone before the child walked in. A child in that house cannot learn the rule, because there is no rule to learn. What he can learn is how to read his parent’s face. So he studies that face, and he studies it hard.

Consistency is usually explained as holding a line. That is true, but it is not the whole story. What matters even more is that it lets a child see what is coming.

In the child’s mind it goes like this: “If I do this, Mum reacts like that. So I know what to do.”

When a child can predict how you will respond, he can prepare for it. When the same thing is allowed one day and punished the next, he cannot. So he watches instead — your face, your tone, your mood — for signs of trouble. With no way to prepare, he becomes anxious, and what looks like clinging or defiance is often that anxiety.

A limit is what makes a thing bearable

We tend to think that a limit hems a person in and makes things harder to put up with. In practice it often does the opposite: it makes things easier to bear.

Picture yourself in a lecture without knowing when it will end. A slightly dull stretch comes along, and suddenly it is close to unbearable — far worse than it really is — because you have no idea how much more is left.

Now suppose you have been told it finishes at nine. The same dull stretch comes along, and you sit through it. It ends at nine, you tell yourself, and you pull yourself together.

Nothing about the lecture changed. What changed is that you knew when it would end, so you could tell how much more there was to get through. A clear limit does the same for a child. Say the rule is one hour of video games today, and you calmly stick to it. He may be angry when the hour is up, but he knew from the start where it would end, and that makes the ending easier to bear.

Here is what parents find hardest to believe: a child who finds he can always make his parents give in does not become free. He becomes anxious, because nothing is holding him steady. In fact, part of him is hoping his parents will hold firm.

Holding the line brings conflict. That is normal

Saying yes to everything will not settle a child. There are moments when a parent has to hold firm, and holding firm has a cost.

Hold firm, and the conflict comes right on cue: anger, tears, accusations that you are being unfair. This is where most parents give in — not out of weakness, but out of a real fear that the conflict itself will hurt the child.

I see it the other way round. The conflict is not what hurts the child; it is where he learns.

Living through that conflict, the child learns two things. First, wanting something badly does not make reality change. Second, anger and disagreement do not end the relationship: you keep the limit, and afterwards you are still there and still close. Each time he goes through this, the limit you held becomes a little more his own: he finds that he can be told no, bear the feeling, and settle down again.

A childhood engineered to be free of conflict does not produce an adult who is at peace. It produces an adult who cannot be in a room where someone disagrees with him.

Warmth in front, firmness standing behind it

If you keep one image from this, keep this one.

Warmth is in front. It is the face the child meets, and it means taking his feelings seriously — really seriously, not as a trick to get him to obey faster. And behind it — not instead of it — stands firmness.

Firmness is not raising your voice. It is almost the opposite. It is calmly making two things clear: this is not allowed in our house, and on this I will not back down. You say it once, you mean it, and when the child tests it, it is still there.

Warmth without firmness makes the child keep testing because every protest may change the answer. Firmness without warmth teaches him that saying what he feels or wants will cost him your closeness, so he stops saying it. The child needs both: “I understand that you are angry” and “the answer is still no.”

Donald Winnicott, a paediatrician who went on to become a psychoanalyst, said that what a child needs in order to grow is not a faultless parent but an environment that holds him. In everyday terms, that means adults who accept his feelings while taking responsibility for the limits on what he does. The word “hold” has two meanings, and a child needs both. To hold a child is to cradle him gently. It is also to hold firm and not give way.

Protesting is allowed. Hitting you is not

One distinction should stay sharp, because parents who are working hard to be gentle sometimes blur it.

A child is allowed to be angry with you. He can argue, demand to know why, and tell you loudly that your decision is unfair. That is him expressing himself, and that is fine.

Hitting a parent is a different matter. That is not expression; it is crossing a line that must not be crossed. And this is where inconsistency does the most damage: if how you respond depends on the kind of day you are having, the child never finds out where the line is, and not knowing is worse for him than a firm answer would have been. What he needs to hear, every time, is something like: “I understand that you’re angry, but I won’t let you hit me.”

What comes first, second and third

First, consistency. The same answer today as yesterday. This one comes before anything else on the list, including the ones that sound more loving.

Second, understanding what he is actually feeling — the warmth in front. You will hear this everywhere, and it still cannot be skipped.

Third, firmness standing behind that warmth: the strength to hold your ground, even while he protests, on the things that really cannot be allowed.

If you and your child keep clashing, do not start by asking whether to become stricter or more lenient. Pick one argument that keeps coming back, look back over the past week, and compare how you answered it each time. If your answer changed with how tired you were, how guilty you felt or how your child reacted, then your child cannot tell what is coming and is always on guard. As long as your answer keeps shifting, he will stay anxious whether you are strict or soft.

References

• Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — cited here for “holding”.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

Related

• The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
• Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Feel Safe
• Why Setting Boundaries Causes Conflict

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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 were set up with someone, and the date went well enough. Steady work, decent to their mother, nothing alarming in their past. Even your friends cannot find anything to object to. And you feel nothing — not dislike, which would at least tell you something, but a flat and slightly embarrassing nothing.

Then there is the other kind of person. Everyone can see that being with them will end badly. You can see it too. And yet in that person’s company something in you unclenches.

It is worth asking what is actually doing the choosing, because it is not the part of you that reads the résumé.

Your type was set long before you chose anyone

Who you are drawn to has a great deal to do with what happened around you before you could describe any of it.

Take a boy raised largely by his grandmother. She dressed the way country grandmothers of her generation did — baggy, elastic-waisted work trousers and no makeup. Twenty-five years later, which women does he find himself turning toward? Again and again, the frumpy ones — the ones nobody would call stylish.

He will describe this as personal taste: plain, natural-looking women make him comfortable, while glamorous women put him on edge or strike him as artificial. But what he calls taste is something he learned very early. His grandmother’s appearance became linked in his mind with safety, so when a woman looks like that, he feels at ease before he knows anything about her. He does not remember learning this, so the preference feels entirely his own.

It works the other way too. Take a boy whose mother was stylish — who liked short skirts and liked being looked at in them. He tends to grow up going for the sexy ones.

Or take a woman who grew up with a father who said very little. She meets a man who is quick and funny and generous with his attention — the kind of man everyone calls a catch. She finds him faintly unbearable. Everyone around her is delighted with him. She cannot say why she is not. She has no reason to give, only the feeling.

You were never choosing the better person

This is the part people tend not to like hearing, so I will put it plainly. What draws you to someone is not whether they are a good person.

We assume attraction begins by sizing up character: Is this person kind, reliable, and capable of intimacy? But before you get to any of that, something you learned long ago has already responded. As a small child, you learned what being close to someone is like — from how people spoke to you, how close or how far away they stayed, and how they showed affection. What you learned stayed with you as a set of expectations. Attachment theory, which studies how our first bonds shape the relationships that come later, calls these expectations an internal working model. Think of it as a template.

When someone gives off the signals you knew back then — the same distance or the same warmth, the same unpredictable moods, the same kind of appearance, the same tone of voice — you feel drawn to them. When their signals are very different, you may feel put off, the way the woman with the quiet father was put off by the talkative man. Either way, it happens before you have begun to think about them at all.

You do not weigh anything up. It takes less than a second.

And when someone fits the template, what you feel is ease. It is like walking into a room you have been in before. This person is a stranger, and yet somehow you do not have to adjust to them at all.

We have a word for that ease. We call it attraction.

Why the sensible choice tends not to hold

Because attraction comes from that early template and not from a list of good qualities, one kind of decision tends to go wrong: choosing a partner because they meet your requirements, when you feel no pull toward them at all.

Their job has to be secure. Their income has to be above a certain figure. The two families have to be able to sit in a room together. You draw up the list, you check the boxes, everything checks out, and you decide to marry.

Marriages made this way tend to struggle, and not because anyone in them behaved badly. The trouble is that a list of requirements can be completely met, and once it has been met, it has nothing more to give you.

Meeting the requirements cannot create an emotional bond that was never there. You may value your partner’s stability and still keep searching for what the list never gave you: a sense of familiarity, of feeling alive, of being understood. That is why, when someone outside the marriage pays you attention, it can stay on your mind long after the moment has passed. A marriage like this does not by itself cause an affair, but it leaves you open to one.

The problem is not that practical judgment is wrong. Whether someone fits your life on paper and whether you feel a real bond with them are two separate questions. A relationship chosen only because it meets your requirements can be sensible and still leave you lonely.

The same mechanism keeps people with the ones who hurt them

Here the pattern stops being merely interesting and starts to do real damage.

Some of you grew up in a house organised around a father’s drinking, or a mother’s gambling, or something else that everyone worked around and nobody named. You learned to read a face from across the room and tell what mood was coming. You learned when it was safe to ask for something. You learned to swallow your disappointment, to smooth things over and to wait, and you learned all of it early, when you were too young to choose not to learn it.

Later, someone as unstable as that parent comes into your life, and you understand them at once. You already know what to do: watch their face, pick your moment to ask, swallow the disappointment, calm things down. The relationship may hurt you. But it gives you a role you already know, so it feels easier to handle than a stable relationship in which you do not know who to be. That is why familiar tension can feel more natural than a calm that is unfamiliar to you.

John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who founded attachment theory, held that the earliest relationship becomes the working model — the template — for the ones that follow. Not the best relationship you have known. The first one.

So is the template fixed?

The template does not go away. I would not promise you otherwise, and I would not build a plan around trying to get rid of it.

What you can do is notice the template working on you while it is happening: as you sit across from someone, you realise that the ease arrived before you knew a single thing about them. Knowing that the template is at work makes more of a difference than it sounds.

If you do not know this, you call it taste: “This is simply the kind of person I like.” You say it every time, for thirty years, and never ask why.

If you do know it, you can ask two questions instead of one.

Is this person easy for me to be with? Is this person good for me — do they treat me with respect and keep their word?

Those are not the same question. Familiarity creates ease, but ease does not prove that the person is safe or good for you. Unfamiliarity creates discomfort, but discomfort does not prove that the person is wrong for you. A stable person may feel emotionally flat to you simply because stability does not match the pattern of closeness you learned as a child.

Bring to mind whoever you are currently drawn to, or whoever you cannot make yourself want. Then ask yourself the awkward question of where that feeling is actually coming from — from the person in front of you now, or from much further back, from the people who raised you. The answer may not come. It does not need to. Just asking the question loosens, a little, the grip of a pattern that has been choosing for you all along without ever being questioned.

References

• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books. — the internal working model.
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory. London: Routledge.

Related

• Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak
• Why the Inside Dries Out
• Codependency: Why I Can’t Leave a Relationship

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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