Category: Object Relations

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

Then, later, the grown child says the line: “What did you ever do for me?” You thought this one had been easy to raise, and this is what comes back. I don’t hear that sentence as ingratitude. I hear it as a report on delivery. Something left the parent’s hands. It never arrived as love.

Why the phrase self-love sounds faintly wrong to so many people is a whole other question, and I gave it a whole piece of its own already: why self-love feels fake. Today’s question is narrower. It was given. Why didn’t it arrive?

The word self is doing two different jobs

Self-centered — thinking only of yourself — describes a state where a person is still standing where a small child stands. An infantile form. Self-love describes something else: a mature form of love.

They sound like relatives because the same word sits at the front of both. They aren’t slightly different. Followed all the way down, they’re opposites. In the mature form, the love has already left the place where only you are being considered. The love is outside. It’s out there, in another person.

Which is why, when self-love works, you become able to love someone else — and when it doesn’t, you cannot love someone else, not in a thousand years. I’ve written separately about why the order runs from you outward rather than the other way around: I looked after myself, and guilt got there first. What comes after that is where today starts. Whether you can truly love yourself gets settled in an unlikely place — in whether you can meet a person who is not you with real love. In whether you can give your own child real love.

Giving it by your own standard

Love has to be thought out with the other person at the center. Instead, we often give what would feel loving to us. 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 this to each other exactly. 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.

Someone wrote about this not long ago. He had come right up to the edge of divorce, and had some kind of realization in the shower. From that morning on he asked his wife one question every day: what could I do for you that would make you happy? The first time, she got angry. You’re hopeless — nothing you do makes me feel anything. Tell me anyway, he said. The next morning he asked again. And she started naming things. Fine, then do this. He did them, one at a time, small ones. She got happier. 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 she could actually receive as care. That is how love crosses the distance between two people. If you never learn who your wife is or what reaches her, years of effort can still leave her feeling unloved.

You’re good to me, so I like you

So where does the mature form go? What in the other person is it aimed at? One thing has to be cut away here first.

Loving the child who does well at school and is bright. The person who is impressive, who listens, who is devoted. The one who is good to you in particular. I don’t call any of that love.

That is liking. You’re good to me like this, so I like you — that’s the concept we’re actually running, underneath the word. And liking lasts precisely as long as the other person keeps supplying the conditions. The grades wobble and it wobbles with them. The conditions collapse and it collapses with them. There’s nothing wrong with liking. But call it love, and the child has not been loved. The child has been graded.

It goes toward the part you think is inferior

Real love runs in the other direction. It does not disappear when the child is frightened, dependent, jealous, ashamed, or no longer impressive. It reaches the part we are tempted to call inferior. Even when someone is not good to you, you remain a good person in how you meet them. You give them the experience of having encountered a good object, a good person, at least once.

Taken far enough, that direction reaches the neighbor who fell among robbers — someone who has not been good to you — and you spend your own money on him, and your own time on him. Real love starts from yourself, meets love at its source — I meet that source in God — and from there flows outward into another person. Having come that far, it changes form, into something like noble devotion.

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

Then what are you supposed to take hold of, inside? Self-love means taking hold of not your looks, not the competent version of you, but the part of yourself you find genuinely pathetic, the part you consider inferior. That dark, blackened, shadow-side element is the thing that has to be loved.

Light goes into darkness. So love, which is light, has to get into that darkness and find it. And when it never gets in? In session you can see it plainly, and the word for it is: dangerous. People in that position mostly shut their own hearts. Shut, and then a whole life lived that way.

Afraid alone, so we do it in a room 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. Frightening, and frightening alone, so we gather and do it together. Gathered, handing each other courage, handing each other support.

In the self-love program there’s a step in the sequence: make a funny face. The point is to activate the child element. Not to send anyone back to the self-centered place from the beginning of this — to wake the child-like part that has been pinned down underneath. That child element is what we have to meet, and the older you get, the harder it becomes to meet it. So you supply a little stimulus. Children are good at funny faces.

If you loved and the child still came out strange, more of the same won’t solve it. The love that travels outward always passes first through the part of yourself you least want to look at. Love that hasn’t come through there ends up thrown to your own standard, no matter how much of it you pour.

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 the sentence is exact.

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 not relief. A visible mark might have made her father notice and ask what happened without requiring her to risk telling first. Because the body showed nothing, the violence left no evidence another adult could see, and the child remained 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.

Telling her father would come back on her

Telling was not simple either. If her father 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. And then it came back on the child. She used the word retaliation.

Both possibilities felt dangerous. A bruise might expose the mother and bring retaliation against the child. No bruise meant there was nothing to support the child’s account. Because disclosure seemed likely either to fail or make the violence worse, she remained silent.

A memory with nowhere to go gets shut away

She put the next part plainly herself. The painful memories get shut away, because a child who went on remembering them would go out of her mind. Shut away somewhere she cannot reach either — the unconscious.

Once the memories become unconscious, the child may no longer recall them clearly. But the body continues the protective responses learned then: curling small, suppressing crying, staying at the edge, and remaining alert during sleep.

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 the healing work 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. So there is no concentrating. The cane is there, she does not know when it will be used, and the fear takes hold of her. Her dictation came back at 20 out of 100, every day.

It is easy to reverse the cause and effect. The cane was presented as a response to poor performance, but the threat itself impaired performance. Her attention went to predicting when she might be hit, leaving too little concentration for the dictation task.

The 95 she was not allowed to put up

In primary school she scored 95 once. In those days the marked papers were pegged up on display, and she wondered aloud whether it was done to shame the children. There were zeros down at the bottom, and twenties. She put her 95 up at the top. Her mother would not have it up there.

The 20 came every day. The 95 came once and was not allowed up there at all. What was done to her left nothing on her body, and what she did well could not go up on the wall. There is not one place outside the child where she can be seen. That is how the sense that you are a decent person — self-esteem, a feeling of your own worth — never forms.

She passed, and could not take it in

How far does this go? It goes as far as an exam she sat as a grown woman.

A few years ago she passed a counsellor’s examination. You pass, and then you accept that you passed. That did not happen. The computer marking must have been wrong. The school will ring to say she has failed after all. And if no call comes, then she only just scraped through. She said she watched herself doing it.

The examination repeated the earlier pattern. As a child, her mother removed the evidence that she had done well. As an adult, she had internalized that response and removed the achievement herself by calling it an error or a narrow pass.

Where nothing could be done, force fills in

When she was being hit, her mother was strong and a small child could do nothing. Nothing I can do here, in this spot — that is powerlessness. A body that did not bruise was the place where the powerlessness showed plainly. She was being hit, and the fact of being hit did not even stay on her.

A child does not leave powerlessness alone. Back then nothing could be pushed back. So the force turns around and pushes now instead (compensation). What comes up is a great deal of force. This is what is called aggression.

Aggression is a word that sounds like a fault. Take it as a fault and the person becomes somebody who has to sit on her own force, and then the powerlessness arrives a second time. She said Winnicott did not read it that way — that in his view this force is not a bad thing at all, and turns into energy. Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about aggression in a small child as being almost the same thing as activity: not a fault, but a sign of life. She said that force of hers gets put to good use now, and that she 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. The mark that never came up when she was small has stayed with her. It comes back now, in an adult, as gladness when one does.

Listen that far and you can see what it is that repeats. It is not the number of times she was hit. It is the position in which nothing could be done. It repeats as a body curled at the edge of a bed. It repeats as 20 out of 100, every day. It repeats as a pass that cannot be taken in.

But force came out of that same spot too. Telling me about sleeping curled up, she said until I went through the healing. Which 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. It is pointing at something real — just not where you think.

Two ways of tipping over

Watch people long enough and they sort into roughly two piles. One kind lives balled up tight around their own position; their case is the only case in the room. The other spends the day reading everyone else’s face — a whole life built out of 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 pile. You need both capacities. What does the damage is the excess — tipping so far one way that the other side is no longer in you at all. Holding your own corner is not a defect; I’ve written about that side of it in Nobody Calls the Lion Evil.

“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 a sentence about the last biscuit or the good seat in the car. It condenses into one line, and the line reads: thinking about myself is wrong.

After repeated often enough, the sentence becomes an internal rule. Each time you want to eat first, rest, or decline a request, the rule interprets your need as wrongdoing. Guilt therefore appears before you have even decided whether the request is reasonable.

The more you give, the more staged your life becomes

Follow that line the way a person actually lives it. If my wanting is the wrong part of me, the repair is obvious: want less, give more, tilt further toward everybody else.

So you say yes with something in you saying no. You pick up the piece of work that belongs to another adult and carry it without mentioning it.

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 self-denial has been practiced for years and 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

Children who were never allowed to want openly may become adults preoccupied with getting their share. Because the need was repeatedly denied rather than satisfied and outgrown, it remains unfinished. Adult attention keeps returning to what was missed, even while the person appears generous.

The reverse holds too, and nobody expects 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. Their own share came in, so there is space left over to notice what somebody else needs. The generosity you keep trying to manufacture comes standard in people who were allowed to want things.

We hand morality to people who can’t read it yet

We hold very small children to adult morals. If you have raised one, you know the scene — the moment you reached for your own standard of what a decent person does and used it to shake your child’s mind out of place.

The trouble is not the standard. The trouble is who is receiving it. A young child’s mind has not joined up into one piece yet; it comes apart in places, or sits in fragments (splitting, fragmentation). So the words do not land as you sent them. What arrives inside the child is bent, and in more places than you would believe.

And notice what is being taught there. Think of your brother. That material is good. These are not bad parents passing on bad instructions; they are decent people passing on decent ones. The child takes in the good lesson with a second thing fastened to the back of it: my wanting is the wrong part of me.

Then you try to come to your senses, and it won’t go through

Run that forward into an adult life. The accommodating thickens. You fit yourself around everyone until you are worn straight through — never receiving, endlessly giving, tired in a way sleep does not reach. I’ve written about how that exhaustion turns into hating the very person you are being good to in You Gave Past Your Limit.

Then some ordinary evening a thought arrives with fight in it. What is this. What am I doing. You decide to look after your own life for once.

That is the precise spot where it jams.

Inside you, selfishness has been equated with badness. Therefore the decision I will protect my own share automatically produces guilt and hesitation. You did not lose your nerve; an old rule classified self-care as a moral failure before you could act.

The belief you keep somewhere you don’t look

Everyone tells you to change your thinking. See it differently. But there is a philosophy sitting in a place you never check, and while it is intact, living the new life is enormously hard. You can want it badly and still not manage it.

I think that philosophy is the one sentence. Thinking about myself is wrong.

Which is why being told does nothing. A seminar, a book, a friend explaining how you ought to be living — none of it moves the sentence, because it was never argued into you and cannot be argued out. You have to come around to it yourself — give the new life your own consent. That is when you start living it with force behind you.

The word never meant 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 that is exactly the feeling it gives you.

But that is not what the word was pointing at. Selfish never meant taking too much.

So if self-love makes you flinch, look again at where the flinch is aimed. Not at self-love. At the meaning you were handed when you were small — and that meaning is still in the room, 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 thing you are not allowed to do.

You will not argue that line out of yourself tonight. But the next time the snag arrives — when you say you’d rather rest, or that you want to go first — name what is snagging. It isn’t self-love. It’s a sentence about 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

A room of parents, each of them there over the one thing with a child that will not come loose. At one point I asked how old the children were. The youngest was in the fourth year of primary school. The oldest was thirty-seven. Someone in the middle said twenty-five.

That is how far apart the ages ran, and still the same room, the same reason for being in it. The question that had brought the room together was this one: is it my child that’s the problem?

I want to take that question apart, because on one point I think the answer is no — and the no is not reassurance.

What a parent wants is not much

Raise a child and a great deal of it nags at you. Of everything that nags, the hardest is that it does not go the way you meant it to.

And what you meant is not grand. If they are a student: do well at school, mind their manners. If they are grown: earn their own living. And underneath both of those, do as their mother and father say — no conditions on it. Written out, it is just the ordinary social code, the same code everybody else is holding. Nothing exotic in a single line of it.

Which makes it stranger how much of it does not fit between a parent and a child.

The difficulty arrives in two layers

One layer is the frustration of not being able to understand your child’s mind all the way through. That layer sits between you and a person who is outside you (an external object). It is the real distance between you.

You would like to be close. You would like the talking to go well — some back and forth, a bit of warmth in it. You would like to know what they do when they are out of the house and what they make of it. On the whole they will not tell you any of it.

The other layer is the parent’s anxiety. When the child withholds information or rejects advice, the parent may experience not only frustration but also loss of control, fear of becoming unnecessary, or fear that the child will make a damaging choice without protection.

Puberty can arrive in primary school

It is early now. It can start in the third or fourth year of primary school. A child in the fourth year is at the age where it begins.

And from there they really do not listen. Nothing you say lands. It is bickering from the first sentence. They do not do what they are told, the door of the room closes, and they would rather be behind it on their own.

From where the parent is standing this looks sudden, and particular to their child. That is where the question comes from.

It used to be comic books

The fight breaks out over the phone. Phone, games, television — though nobody seems to fight about television any more. What is left is the phone.

It used to be comic books. The parents now doing the fighting had whole stretches of their own childhood buried in comic books. Look back at it from adulthood and you cannot quite work up the case against it.

The child’s position resembles the parent’s earlier attachment to comic books: “What is so terrible about this?” The object changed, but the wish to enter a private world did not. When the parent forgets that earlier need and insists on total prohibition, the struggle becomes not only about screen time but about who controls the child’s attention.

The house with hard rules and the house that allows everything look like opposites. On the one question that matters here they are standing in the same place: both are trying to keep the child inside the parent’s control. The second house I have written about separately, in You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious.

The son who tells you everything

Daughters give you a little of it. Sons, on the whole, give nothing. And giving you nothing is normal.

If your son does come in and lay out what happened to him out there, all of it, in order — it is a pleasant thing to be on the receiving end of, and I would still put a small question mark beside it. It is not especially healthy.

When he was small, telling the parent everything was developmentally natural. After puberty begins, some privacy is necessary for a separate identity to form. If the adolescent still reports every thought and event, the closeness may reflect difficulty separating rather than exceptional trust.

Not listening and going out of reach are one event

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

Not listening and moving beyond parental control are one developmental process. To form independent judgment, the child must sometimes reject the parent’s judgment and discover what follows. Compliance cannot remain total while psychological separation increases. Resistance therefore shows that separation is already underway.

Which is also why the wrestling over the phone gets you nowhere. Why asking someone repeatedly to stop does not work is the subject of Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries.

So you clap

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

This reverses the usual concern. A son who no longer reports everything may be establishing normal privacy. A parent who feels reassured because an adolescent shares every detail should also ask whether the child feels permitted to have thoughts, relationships, and decisions that remain their own.

If puberty has arrived and you and your child are exactly as close as you always were, then the going out of reach — the part that deserves the applause — may simply not be happening yet.

The question has to move

Of the two layers, the frustration is at least visible. It is pointed at the child, and the child is right there being difficult about the phone. The anxiety is the hard one. It comes up inside you, which is the one location that is hard to get a look at.

So move 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 reveal fear of danger, loss of authority, rejection, or no longer being needed.

One of the two layers is always on the parent’s side. Saying the problem is not only in the child is not the same as saying it is the parent’s fault, and I want to be exact about that, because parents hear the second when the first is said. What it says is that there is one more place to look, and it has been getting left out.

If a child who used to do as he was told has started not doing it, then in that house a child is growing. Wrestle over the phone if you must; it is going to happen anyway, and I will not pretend it can be talked away. Just know, while it is going on, where this child is actually heading.

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 matching. Money goes out of your bag and 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 a child to me, and it is nearly always the same child. The one there was an incident about.

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 at. 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 those two questions give the same answer, which is why nobody notices the substitution. In adolescence they come apart.

In adolescence, what went in early comes back up

A child accumulates frustration, deprivation, and disappointment before having words or support to process them. The feelings do not disappear; they remain available to shape later behavior.

During adolescence, increased aggression and the need for separation give those earlier feelings more force. One child directs the force outward through defiance, lying, stealing, or fighting. Another directs it inward by becoming numb, passive, and unreachable.

What that same rising looks like in an office, with a manager who has said nothing wrong, is a separate piece — Why Taking Orders Feels Like an Insult. I will not go over that ground again here.

This is where the two children separate.

Where is the battery?

Think of a walking doll that takes steps and makes a noise. Turn it over and there is a hatch — under the foot, in the back, on top of the head — and behind it the space where the batteries go.

So what is a battery? It is energy.

The battery represents aggression and destructiveness as energy. When that energy is connected to action, the child can protest, pursue, refuse, and move. When it is disconnected, the child may stop wanting, objecting, or initiating anything.

The child who keeps getting into trouble has the battery working. The direction is wrong, and I will not be soft about that — lying and stealing break the order everybody else lives in, and somebody is harmed by it. That has to be stopped as a separate matter. But the act happening at all means the force moved.

The quiet child has turned the force against its own expression. She does not argue, ask, or cause trouble because wanting itself has been shut down. The absence of outward behavior can therefore mean not health but that vitality has gone into hiding; at the extreme, it has psychologically died.

Why that force is not the ugly thing you were taught it was — why it is a force and not a fault — I have already gone through in Nobody Calls the Lion Evil. I will not repeat that explanation here.

How Winnicott saw these two children

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.

That is not me inflating a mood into a doctrine. It is in his 1956 paper: the antisocial act as an expression of hope.

It is worth being exact, because the sentence is easy to misuse. His subject was not delinquency — not the offence itself — but the movement underneath it, the antisocial tendency, which turns up in ordinary children in perfectly decent houses.

He said the other half in the same breath. Most children who are being troublesome are ill to some degree. Hope is not a clean bill of health. It means something is still switched on to work with.

Winnicott also described compliance that hardens into a false-self shell. Ordinary cooperation is a healthy capacity. But when the child must always agree and adapt, the compliant presentation begins to conceal the child’s own wishes and feelings. Socially she causes no trouble, while psychologically she may be collapsing. The distress did not disappear; it stopped becoming visible to other people.

The Child Who Was No Trouble at All follows that child into adulthood, still being told how easy she is. This piece is about the year she reaches adolescence with the shell still on.

No symptom, no appointment

Here is what I am actually trying to say.

The child who went 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 directs distress inward produces no disruptive symptom for adults to manage. Because nobody is inconvenienced, nobody asks whether the child has stopped feeling, wanting, or connecting. She may not receive help until adulthood, when emptiness, depression, or inability to form relationships finally becomes unbearable.

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

Force moving and a person getting hurt are not the same event

Let me close the obvious hole before somebody falls in. 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 have no softer version on offer.

Expressing something 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 the thing is unfair. Putting a hand on somebody is a different question with a different answer.

What I want to turn over is not the behaviour. It is the measure — the one you reach for when you decide which of your children is the serious case.

If there is a quiet child in your house, ask what the quiet contains. A well child can disagree, ask for help, show preference, and become angry while also spending time alone. A child who has gone out of view says “fine” to everything, asks for nothing, and shows little desire even where desire would be expected. The same quiet appearance can therefore come from two very different inner states.

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

The introduction went well enough. Steady work, decent to their mother, no obvious wreckage in the history. Your friends have run out of objections on your behalf. And you feel nothing — not aversion, which would at least be information, but a flat and slightly embarrassing nothing.

Then there is the other case. Everyone can see where that one ends. You can see where it ends. And 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.

The shortlist was drawn up a long time ago

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 wore the baggy elastic-waisted work trousers every grandmother of that generation wore, and nothing on her face. Twenty-five years later, which women does he find himself turning toward? Overwhelmingly, the frumpy ones — the ones nobody would call stylish.

He will describe this as personal taste: natural-looking people make him comfortable, while glamour feels tense or artificial. But the preference translates an early association. His grandmother’s appearance became linked with safety, so a similar appearance later produces ease before he knows anything about the woman herself. Because he does not remember learning the association, it feels entirely spontaneous.

Reverse the household and the result reverses with it. A mother who was stylish, who liked a short skirt and liked being looked at in it, tends to produce a son who goes for the sexy ones.

Or take a daughter of a father who said very little. She meets a man who is quick and funny and generous with his attention — by every account a gift. She finds it faintly unbearable. Everyone else at the table is delighted. She cannot say why she is not, and she has no argument to offer, only the fact.

You were never choosing the better person

This is the part that tends to land badly, so I will put it plainly. The sorting is not running on quality.

We assume attraction begins by appraising character: Is this person kind, reliable, and capable of intimacy? But an internal working model formed in early relationships responds first. Familiar cues — distance, warmth, volatility, appearance, or tone — produce attraction or aversion before conscious evaluation begins.

It is not deliberation. It does not take a second.

And when the template is matched, what you feel is ease. The room is one you have been in. A stranger somehow does not require any adjustment from you.

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

Why the sensible choice tends not to hold

The practical consequence shows up in a particular kind of decision: the one made on the specification, with no pull underneath it.

The work has to be secure. The income has to clear a line. The families have to be able to sit in a room together. You draw the list, you check the boxes, everything checks, and you decide.

Those arrangements struggle, and not because anyone in them behaved badly. A specification is a thing that can be satisfied.

Once the practical conditions are met, they cannot create emotional attachment if no attachment was present. You may value the person’s stability yet continue searching for the sense of familiarity, aliveness, or emotional recognition the checklist did not supply. That is why attention from someone else can remain in your mind long after the encounter.

The problem is not that practical judgment is wrong. It is that practical compatibility and attachment answer different questions. A relationship chosen only by criteria may be sensible without becoming emotionally binding.

The same mechanism keeps people beside the ones who hurt them

Here the idea stops being interesting and starts being expensive.

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 the reading of a face from across a room. You learned the timing of a request. You learned to absorb and to smooth and to wait, and you learned all of it early, in the years when learning is not yet optional.

Later, someone with the same instability enters your life and feels immediately understandable. You know how to monitor the face, time the request, absorb the disappointment, and restore calm. The relationship may hurt you, but it gives you a familiar role and therefore feels easier to navigate than a stable relationship in which you do not know who to be.

John Bowlby, who assembled attachment theory out of exactly this kind of observation, held that the earliest relationship becomes the working model for the ones that follow. Not the best relationship available. 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 on trying.

What is available is knowing what the template is doing to you at the moment it does it — noticing, as you sit across from someone, that the ease arrived before you knew a single thing about them. The difference between knowing and not knowing is larger than it sounds.

Not knowing, you call it taste. This is simply the kind of person I like — and there the conversation ends, every time, for thirty years.

Knowing, you get one distinction back. Two questions instead of one.

Is this person easy for me. Is this person good for me.

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. A stable person may feel emotionally flat simply because stability does not match the relationship pattern your body learned first.

Bring to mind whoever you are currently drawn to, or whoever you cannot make yourself want. Then sit with the awkward question of where that feeling is actually coming from — from them, in front of you now, or from somewhere considerably older. The answer may not arrive. It does not need to. Having asked is already a small loosening of a thing that has been running without being asked anything at all.

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