Inner Work Notes

Category: Object Relations

  • The Child Who Was No Trouble at All

    She waits until the adults have finished before she asks for anything. She takes her plate to the sink without it being mentioned. She has never once had to be told twice, and she does not cut into a conversation, and when the visitors are here she sits where she is put and stays there.

    Nobody in the house finds this strange. She is the one person there who never makes any extra work.

    What state are we in when we are born?

    We are born in pieces.

    What is in pieces is the self. By ‘self’ I don’t mean a name or an age or a list of things you’re good at. I mean the bare sense that you are here at all. And that sense does not come pre-assembled.

    A newborn has sensations and states — hunger, warmth, fear, relief — but does not yet experience them as parts of one continuous self. The sense of “I am the same person across all these moments” develops later.

    At first, the person caring for the baby holds the pieces together for her. When the baby cries, that person finds out why; when she is startled, that person calms her down. Because this happens in the same way, time after time, the baby gets from hunger to being fed, or from a fright to calm, without the hunger or the fright ever becoming more than she can bear.

    We usually picture a baby as a complete person who only needs to grow bigger. The body is complete. The sense of being one person is not. At birth, that sense is like a pot whose pieces have been set in place but not yet glued. A loud noise or a sudden jolt, and the pieces come apart. What glues them, little by little, is care repeated day after day.

    What joins the pieces?

    The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a name for what the caregiver does here: holding. The caregiver shields the baby from what is too much for someone so small — the loud noise, the sudden jolt — and responds reliably enough that separate moments of hunger, distress and comfort start to join up into the experience of being one person.

    Holding has two sides. One is physical: the baby is picked up and carried, and while she is very small, that side matters more. But the emotional side is there from the start too, and that is the side I want to look at here.

    Holding a child emotionally means welcoming her: accepting her as she is, paying attention to her, and letting her see that you are amazed by her.

    Consider the fuss a parent can make over a full diaper. An adult who is otherwise a serious person will pitch her voice up half an octave and announce that this is the most remarkable thing she has seen: “Look at that! Would you look at what you did!” Somebody else is called in to look.

    Now measure the reaction against the event. The baby has not achieved anything. She has not tried. She could not have done otherwise, and she has no idea what the fuss is about. The reaction is wildly, comically out of proportion to what happened — and the very size of the reaction is the message. What it says is not well done. What it says is: what comes out of you is welcome here, and you did not have to earn that.

    And then it happens again, the next day and the day after that, and in between there are a thousand smaller versions of it — the face that lights up when she wakes, the voice that changes register the moment she is picked up. To the adults, these are small, everyday things. Nobody in the house would remember any of them afterward.

    No single moment builds the self. What glues the pieces, one at a time, is the repetition: the baby shows a need, someone notices, and nobody pulls away. Over time, she learns that she can let out what is inside her and still keep the people she depends on.

    The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called the result a cohesive self: a self whose pieces have joined and now hold together.

    None of this means giving a baby everything she wants. It means staying close, in ways she can predict, until whatever she is feeling has come out and she has settled again.

    Growing up in pieces

    Now picture the same scene with a parent who is irritated from the start. The full diaper gets a scolding instead: “You wouldn’t go when I told you to, and now you go in your diaper?”

    Not a cruel parent. An impatient one. The necessary things get done — she is fed, she is changed — but with an air of getting it over with. Later, once she can talk, this parent is already answering before she has finished her sentence, and meets her second question by asking why she is still asking. She is looked after, but never once welcomed.

    In a house like that, the glue never sets. The pieces stay pieces.

    A child whose pieces never joined has to spend her attention holding herself together. Anything new that is asked of her, any strong feeling, even someone coming close, can be too much, so she pushes people away before they can knock the pieces loose. From outside this looks cold or difficult. From inside it is protection against falling apart.

    Where does your attention go when your hand is cut?

    Cut your hand and every bit of your attention goes to that hand. You will find yourself carrying it slightly raised. Walking down an ordinary street you curl it in, in case somebody knocks it. Somebody comes toward you and your whole body turns a few degrees to put the hand on the far side.

    Nobody has touched your hand. You’ve flinched in advance, repeatedly, at nothing.

    You are also, for the duration, extremely poor company. Someone is telling you about their week and you are tracking a stranger’s shoulder at the edge of your vision. You are not being self-absorbed. You are guarding something, and guarding takes everything.

    To anyone else in the room, though, it just looks as if you only care about yourself. A self that is still in pieces is like that hand: guarding it takes all the attention a person has. So when someone seems to think only of themselves, it may be that they are hurting.

    The child who watches the adults

    A small child is entitled to think only of herself. At that age, every child’s self is still fragile, like that cut hand, so all her attention goes to herself. Where would she find any left over for anybody else?

    So when a small child starts paying attention to the grown-ups instead of to herself, something has gone the wrong way round. It can happen, for example, when a parent often blows up or is often depressed. Then the child has to manage the mood of the house, because she is only safe when the parent is calm. Here is what she does.

    She knows which evenings not to ask for anything. She can tell from the sound of the front door how the next hour is going to go, and she adjusts before anyone has spoken. When someone asks one of the adults an awkward question, she answers it before they have to. She never lets other people see her wanting anything.

    Adults are delighted by her. “She’s so grown up,” they say.

    I do not see maturity here. I see a symptom: a sign that this child has been deeply hurt. She has learned that she is safe only if she keeps watch on the adults, so she reads their faces before she has even noticed what she herself needs. She makes sure she is no trouble, because asking, interrupting or wanting might irritate an adult, or cost her the care she depends on.

    The praise covered the wound

    A child who throws tantrums wears the adults out. She is inconvenient, and inconvenience gets investigated — somebody eventually sits down and asks what is going on with her.

    The child who is no trouble is never inconvenient, so nobody investigates. She gets compliments instead. People tell her parents they have done a lovely job. Teachers write that she is a pleasure to have in class. Relatives compare her, out loud and in front of her, to the cousin who is a handful.

    So nobody finds out that she is hurting, and she never gets the chance to find out either. There is praise lying over the sore place, and praise is not a thing anybody thinks to look underneath.

    Worse, the praise teaches her to go on being no trouble. Asking for nothing is what earns her warmth and approval, so, to keep them coming, she holds back more and more of what she needs. She comes to feel that the moment she says “this is hard,” she will let her parents down. And the better she gets at looking as if she needs no one, the less likely any adult is to notice that she is anxious, lonely, or afraid to need anyone.

    If you were a child like this, you may still be hearing the same praise today. That you’re no trouble. That you never need anything. That you always manage. That praise is no proof that you were safe. It is worth asking what you had to hold back to earn it.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — holding.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In Winnicott (1965), listed above. — the child who fits herself to what the adults need.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — the cohesive self.

    Related

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

  • I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me

    Something goes wrong and the heat climbs — past annoyed, past angry, all the way to the top. For one second you want the whole world in pieces on the floor. And if you made a list of everything you want to smash, you would find yourself somewhere on it. Then, before you even notice, the rage can start to turn into a different feeling: that someone is out to hurt you.

    What you actually want to break

    Real rage is not tidy. It feels like your body might come apart at the seams. You want to take the room, the day, the person in front of you, and break all of it into small pieces. And you want to break yourself into pieces along with it.

    Most people carry that quietly, because it sounds like something only a cruel person would feel. So you say nothing and wait for it to pass.

    But it is not something only cruel people have. Every one of us is born with this destructiveness, you included.

    What makes rage like this so frightening is what you find inside yourself. If that much destructiveness is really in you, it might not stop at breaking the room. It might break you too, until nothing of you is left. So what you fear most is not the damage around you. It is being wiped out yourself.

    Because the rage feels dangerous inside you, you quickly start seeing the danger in somebody else. You hear contempt in your partner’s tired tone; you hear an attack in a colleague’s disagreement. Once the threat seems to be coming from them, your own urge to destroy feels like self-defence. This shift — from something dangerous is happening in me to you are dangerous to me — is not a lie you tell on purpose. It happens before you have even noticed your own feeling. Psychoanalysts call it projection: a feeling you cannot bear to accept as yours is felt as if it came from someone else.

    The first thing a baby ever meets

    A baby does not meet a whole person first. He meets the breast — one part of his mother, not the whole of her. Psychoanalysts call it a part-object. An “object”, in their language, is whatever our love and anger are aimed at — usually a person, and here only one part of a person. At the start the breast is simply good. It keeps him alive, keeps him warm and comforts him.

    But the breast is not always there the moment he wants it. When he is left waiting, his hunger and frustration can become too much. He is flooded with his own rage, and that rage is too frightening to keep inside. So it is projected onto the breast, and now the breast itself seems to be attacking him. The breast that felt entirely good while it fed him now feels like a monster that could destroy him. He may turn away from the very breast he wanted a moment earlier, because to him the source of comfort has become the source of danger. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein saw this as one of the most basic ways the human mind works: the rage is pushed outside, and then it seems to come back as an attack. Adults still fall into it under pressure.

    What Klein meant by the paranoid-schizoid position

    Klein gave this state of mind a name: the paranoid-schizoid position. The words sound clinical, but what they describe is simple.

    The “schizoid” part means split: the mind keeps good and bad strictly apart, and nothing is allowed to be both at once. For the baby, the breast is all good while it feeds him and all bad while he is left waiting. In adults, this splitting shows up as seeing someone as either an angel or an enemy. Then comes the “paranoid” part: all of the badness is out there, and I am the one being attacked.

    Notice the word “position”. It is not a place you leave behind for good when you grow up. It is a place where anyone can be standing: a baby before he has any words for it, or you, this afternoon, in a meeting.

    Listen to who your sentences are about

    Here is what it looks like in adult life. You are already in a bad mood, and the person nearest to you gets the brunt of it. Think back to what actually comes out of your mouth on days like that.

    “You’ve got no sense at all.” “Why can’t you ever see how people feel?” “Why can’t you think any further than that?” “You’re so selfish.”

    Every sentence is about the other person, but the bad mood was already in you before they spoke. Some ordinary mistake of theirs gives the mood an explanation: I feel this bad because you are selfish, insensitive, or dismissive. Once the bad feeling has been pinned on them, you no longer have to notice what you brought into the room.

    So when you are in the middle of blaming somebody, you are standing exactly where the baby stood when he turned away from the breast. It is the same paranoid-schizoid position, only now it has adult words: all the badness is over there, and I am the one under attack.

    When someone brushes you off, where is the brush-off, exactly?

    Let me ask you a single question, and I would like you to answer it slowly.

    When you say “she brushed me off”, where is the brush-off? Point to it. Is it stuck to her face, or sitting somewhere in her tone of voice?

    I think much of it is already in you. If you walked into the room already afraid of being overlooked, a distracted glance can feel like proof that you do not matter. You read the brush-off into her face, then react to her as though she put it there on purpose. What began as a fear inside you now feels like an attack from outside.

    Admitting that is uncomfortable. That is why most of us would rather leave the brush-off where we see it: on her face. And as long as we leave it there, we spend one more day standing in the paranoid-schizoid position.

    The other place you can stand

    Some people do something different with the bad feeling. They do not push all of it onto the other person; they let part of it stay theirs. Klein called the place where they stand the depressive position.

    The name does not mean clinical depression. In the depressive position you see that some of the badness is on your side too: you can be angry even with someone you love, and you have harmful sides as well as good ones. Facing that brings sadness and guilt, and that is where the word “depressive” comes from. It feels heavier than blaming someone else. Still, it is a more grown-up place to stand.

    The difference between the two positions comes down to two sentences. One says: the badness is entirely theirs. The other says: some of it came from me. The person who can say the second sentence can bear knowing this about themselves.

    Owning your part is not the same as attacking yourself

    I want to be careful here, because this gets misread constantly. Remember the list at the start — everything you wanted to smash, with you somewhere on it. It is easy to hear “some of it is mine” and turn that into one more reason to attack yourself.

    That is not what it means. It does not mean hating yourself for having the rage in the first place. It means you stop insisting that every bad thing lives out there, without piling every bad thing onto yourself instead. You apologise for the hurtful thing you said, and you set a boundary where the other person overstepped.

    Try it on something small. A colleague answers you in a flat voice, and the heat starts. In the paranoid-schizoid position, you have decided before you say a word: she brushed me off, and that is simply what happened. In the depressive position, there is a pause first, and in that pause you can tell yourself: “Some of this is hers. Some of it is what I walked in carrying.”

    Owning your part feels heavier because you can no longer solve the problem simply by proving the other person wrong. Yet it also gives you back some control. If all the danger belongs to them, you must keep watching and defending yourself. If part of the reaction came from what you carried in, you can soothe that part, check what actually happened, and respond to the person in front of you rather than only to the fear you brought in.

    Before you argue, check which position you are in

    The heat will come back — maybe tomorrow, maybe later this week. It will arrive with the same flat certainty: she brushed me off.

    When it does, take your eyes off her face for a moment. Before you work out what to say to her, work out which position you are standing in.

    There are two: the one where all the badness is hers, and the one where some of it is yours. Which one are you standing in right now?

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — the paranoid-schizoid position.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — the depressive position.

    Related

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

  • Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries

    The bedroom door opens without a knock. She asked him not to do that — more than once. He walks in the way he always does, carrying a question that apparently cannot wait. By dinner he is warm and funny, as if the man who pushed in that morning had been someone else.

    Everyone notices the moods first

    When I work with someone who never developed a clear inner line — a sense of where they stop and the next person starts — the moods are the first thing I notice. Feelings swing hard and fast. Warm at nine, flat at noon, cold by three. The person laughing over breakfast can look like a stranger by lunch.

    So the people around them — maybe you are one of them — reach for easy words. He’s moody. She runs hot. He’s just an intense guy. Those words explain nothing, and they leave you waiting for better weather that never quite comes.

    The swings are not simply temperament. When a person can’t clearly tell their own feelings apart from yours, what you feel doesn’t stay on your side of the line. If your mood turns bad, theirs turns bad too, before they have even heard what is wrong. So every small shift between you shakes them. To them, your silence feels like rejection, your need for privacy feels like abandonment, and an ordinary disagreement feels as if the whole relationship has changed.

    Why someone with no line of their own crosses yours

    Someone with no firm line inside is often the one who crosses yours. Think of the markers a surveyor puts in the ground between two yards: your grass ends here, mine starts there. Because of those markers, each neighbor knows how far their own yard goes. People carry a line like that in the mind, too: up to here is me, past here is you. When that line is blurred inside a person, they can’t see yours either. They just walk in.

    They open your door without knocking. They read your phone while you’re washing the dishes. They go through a wallet that isn’t theirs and see nothing odd about it. Ask them about it later and they’re honestly puzzled: “What’s the big deal? We’re close.”

    These are the small things we file under privacy. Not secrets — just the ordinary corners a person keeps to themselves. A closed drawer. A phone lying face down. A door that takes one knock before it opens. They don’t see any of these as yours to keep.

    They open conversations you closed, too. You said you’d rather not get into it. Later that night it starts again: “Why won’t you tell me? What are you keeping from me? Why do you shut me out?”

    Everyone needs a certain distance to feel safe, even with the people closest to them, and hopes those people will respect it. But to them, being close means keeping nothing from each other, so your closed door or face-down phone looks like a secret, or like being pushed away. They don’t see it as distance you have every right to keep. So they open the door, ask the question again, or check the phone, trying to win back a closeness they feel is being taken from them.

    When an argument sweeps you both away

    An argument with them rarely stays on the subject. They feel criticized, raise their voice, and insist that you are attacking them. You become defensive and raise your voice in return. Within seconds, each person is reacting to the other person’s reaction rather than to the issue that began the conversation.

    It isn’t only your room and your wallet they get into. Feelings cross the line too. When you get angry, they are angry at once. In the heat of it, neither of you has a moment to sort out, “This is my fear, and that is your anger,” so the feelings run together. Their anxiety sets off yours. When you pull back, they get more anxious, and each round is worse than the last. By the end, both of you feel invaded: their feelings have poured into you, and yours into them.

    That’s what makes these fights so hard to resolve. You can’t sort out a feeling you never had a chance to look at. By the time you’re calm enough to ask yourself what you actually think, the evening is gone.

    Help that lands like a shove

    They cross your line not only when they are suspicious or angry, but just as much when they are trying hard to be good to you.

    They help, and the help goes too far. They answer a question that was put to you. They rearrange your kitchen while you’re out. They tell a friend what you’re going through, because they want the friend to understand and go easier on you.

    The intention may be genuinely warm. But when they answer for you, rearrange your belongings, or tell your story without asking, they make choices that were yours to make. That is why their help can feel like being pushed. The problem is not the wish to help. It is that they have no clear sense of where helping ends and pushing in begins.

    You keep redrawing a line that won’t stay drawn

    So far this has been about what they do. Now look at what it does to you, the one whose line keeps being crossed.

    Living with them, you spend your week putting a line back where it was. You ask them to knock, and the door opens anyway. You say you don’t want to talk about something, and the question comes back. You explain calmly. Then you explain with an edge in your voice. The calm version and the sharp version get the same result.

    It’s the same small fight on a loop. The line is clear to you, but not to them, so nothing stays settled. You are always on edge, and whatever peace of mind you had is gone.

    What wears you out is not one big intrusion. It is having to say the same thing again and again, because the last conversation didn’t stick. Each time looks small. But you spend the day watching for the next open door, the next question, the next intrusion, so your body stays braced for a fight from morning to night. That is why you get tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch.

    What worked yesterday doesn’t work today

    Now go back to the moods we started with. The moods and the way they cross your line come from the same place: the line inside them was never firmly drawn. A line like that gives a person something fixed to go by. Without one, they change with whatever is happening at the moment: one way, then the other, then back again.

    So you adapt. You learn what they are fine with and what upsets them, and you get good at it. Then it all shifts. What worked yesterday lands wrong today, and you start to feel you can’t get anything right in your own home. It isn’t you. There’s nothing steady there to learn.

    To say it plainly: they don’t cross your line or change from day to day to wear you down, and it isn’t meanness. They have no fixed line inside to go by, and so you have nothing steady to go by either.

    Make your own line firm in one place, while the house is calm

    You can’t draw the missing line inside someone else. You can keep your own, though, and you can start by making it firm in just one place.

    Work out how much distance you need in order to feel safe. Then mark it clearly in just one place. Not ten. One. It might sound like this: “This drawer stays shut.” “I’m not ready to talk about this yet.” “The first hour after work is mine, before it belongs to anyone else.” Decide it on a day when nothing is happening. The line isn’t there to change them. It’s there so you still have a place to stand beside someone who changes from one day to the next. Somewhere in the house, one thing stays where you put it.

    Related

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

  • Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From

    Some of the people who come to see me for therapy lie down and, before long, fall asleep. I don’t wake them. I don’t clear my throat to move things along. I let them sleep a long while, and when the time is up I say one thing: “Time’s up.”

    Nothing got produced in that hour, and the hour was not wasted. If you learned that your worth depends on what you get done, resting without getting anything done will feel wrong, even when your body needs the rest.

    Rest also gives something back. While you rest somewhere safe, your body lets go of tension and you start to feel like yourself again. Sometimes a person needs that first, before they can use their own drive: the force to say no, to choose, to start something, and to keep at it. Push someone who hasn’t had enough rest to keep going, and what they do no longer comes from that drive. It becomes one more duty, done to meet someone else’s demands.

    Anger may seem to have nothing to do with rest, but it is part of that same force. So when you press anger down the moment it rises, you weaken your drive along with it.

    Resting where nobody can poke you

    No part of me is thinking we ought to be getting somewhere. The person lying there is doing something that matters. They’re resting in a spot where nobody is going to reach over and poke them.

    They are not working on themselves. They are experiencing a relationship in which they can stop performing and still be welcome. In a sense, the room is a mother’s arms. A small child in its mother’s arms doesn’t have to do anything to stay there, and the room holds the person lying there in the same way, without asking them to produce anything.

    Being comes before doing

    Therapy is not an hour you have to fill. We talk, of course. But the bigger thing on offer is simpler than talking. In the therapy room you get to stop. You get to simply be there without having to justify it to anyone.

    The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it plainly: being comes before doing. Being able simply to exist, without having to get anything done, is the ground a person grows from. Doing is built on top of it.

    That may sound strange, because most of your week runs the other way. You earn your place by getting things done — inbox cleared, everyone fed, a weekend that somehow arrives with its own to-do list. When there is nothing to get done, something in you starts to fidget. That restlessness is worth noticing. It comes from the belief that you are worth only what you get done.

    The silence I leave alone

    So when a client goes quiet, I don’t fill the silence. This is not a technique. The quiet itself is that experience of simply being, without having to do anything. Whatever is going on inside the person during it does not need my voice to make it better.

    Sitting in silence with another person is harder than it sounds. Think of the last time a conversation went quiet on you, and how fast you reached for your phone or a joke or the weather. That reflex is so quick it passes for good manners.

    Two silences I do step into. One is the silence of digging in: “I don’t want to say it, so I won’t.” The other belongs to someone who wants to speak and can’t get the words out. I work with both of those. The rest I leave alone.

    What’s left is two people sitting together, doing nothing for each other. No performance, no service, no progress report. Winnicott had a name for this experience when nothing interrupts it: the continuity of being. You simply go on existing, without having to react to anyone’s demands. He stressed it above everything else, because a person needs it first in order to grow into a whole person. When it is interrupted too often, that growth gets hard. Instead you become whoever the person in front of you needs you to be — quick with an answer for anyone who asks, and blank when somebody asks what you want for dinner.

    Why does the whole world look like it’s coming at you?

    Besides this experience of simply being, Winnicott insisted on a second thing, and it is harder to hear. You have to recognize the aggression in yourself: your anger, and your own wishes to attack, humiliate, or destroy. He was firm that denying these feelings does not get rid of them. If you learned that getting angry ruins relationships, you may not admit, even to yourself, that you are angry. Then you start seeing that anger in other people instead.

    The neighbor’s tone. The email with no greeting. The driver who didn’t wave a thank-you. All of it starts reading as aimed at you, and your week fills up with the work of deciding what people meant. You catch yourself thinking, “He looked at me a certain way,” or “She left me out on purpose,” and you get defensive or back off first. When you are that busy finding hostility in other people, some of the hostility you find is your own.

    Then one day you admit to yourself: “I have wanted to break something. I have wanted someone to get hurt.” Once you can recognize those wishes as your own, you no longer have to see all the hostility as coming from neighbors, coworkers, or strangers. The world stops looking threatening everywhere you turn, even though nobody out there has changed.

    Admitting your own anger does not mean the person who upset you did nothing wrong. Once you can say “I was angry too,” you can look at two things separately: how much of a threat that person really is, and how strong your own feeling is. Then there is room to show your anger by saying no or keeping your distance, instead of through insults or violence.

    A lion runs down a lamb. Where is the evil in it?

    This is where the word aggression misleads. When Winnicott talks about aggression, he does not mean only what you’re picturing — the fist, the shouting, the wreckage afterward. He means energy: the force that moves you toward what you want, pushes obstacles out of the way, and protects you. The wish to hurt someone is one form that energy can take, but only one.

    Picture a lion running flat out and taking down a lamb in front of the lamb’s own mother. Ask yourself honestly: is the lion evil? The body driving forward, the claws, the teeth, the whole act — every part of that is aggression.

    And nobody watching calls the lion bad. We say it’s nature, and we mean it. We know what we are looking at: not evil, but the force of a living thing.

    But when the same force rises in you, you don’t see it that way. You call it a bad feeling and press it down the moment it appears. Same force, worse name, harsher judgment.

    Creativity is aggression that found somewhere to go

    When you accept aggression as part of yourself, you can steer its energy instead of blowing up or pressing it down. Love is what gives the force a direction. You can be angry with someone close to you and still love them. When you can feel both at once, you don’t have to attack the whole person with “I hate you.” You can say, “Stop doing that.” Held together with love like this, the force no longer has to attack anyone. You can use it to take on a problem, protect a boundary, or keep working until something is made.

    Creativity comes out of aggression.

    You probably don’t believe that yet, so stay with it a minute before you argue back. Think of the things we value most: wisdom, insight, recovery, love, gratitude, happiness, plain enjoyment. Every one of them grows out of this same force. None of them shows up in a person who has no force left.

    Think of something you finished that mattered. If there was a stretch in the middle where you were half furious — at the problem, at yourself, at how slowly it moved — that heat was doing work. Take the heat out and you’re left with a nice idea that never got built.

    Winnicott kept coming back to zest. The buzz. The fun of a thing. It’s what has you starting a project on a Saturday morning for no good reason, and it runs on the same force.

    If aggression looks only destructive, what you are seeing is the force without love or responsibility. When the same force is joined to love, it appears as protection, persistence, creativity, and the determination to recover.

    Getting better takes force too

    Think about what getting better actually takes. There is nothing soft about it.

    “I’m going to get through this.” “I’m going to live differently.” “I’m having this treated, whatever it takes out of me.” When a thought like that rises in you, that is force — aggression working on your side.

    And right behind it comes a second voice: “Don’t bother.” “Stay put.” “Who do you think you are?” The push back against that voice is force as well, and so is the whole struggle between the two.

    You can see what happens when this force runs short in people who have spent years swallowing their anger to keep things pleasant at work or at home. They never snap, never argue, never make anyone uncomfortable — and they also can’t get a single day started. Almost nobody, including them, sees that the two are connected: the force they press down to keep the peace is the same force they would need to get going.

    This force is what keeps a life moving. Without it, a life comes to a stop. Nothing appeals. Nothing pulls at you. Nothing gets going in the first place.

    Feeling aggression and attacking someone are not the same act. The feeling is energy inside you, and it carries information: it tells you where your limits are. Turning it on another person is an action, and whether you take that action is your choice. Being angry does not give you the right to hurt anyone. Violence and threats have to stop, and if it is hard to keep yourself under control, step away and get help.

    Before you press your anger back down

    Something will flare up in you today: irritation, the sting of being treated unfairly, an “Oh, come on” that lands in your chest.

    You already know your reflex: press it down, smile, move along. Give it three seconds first. While the feeling is still warm in your chest, ask it: What is this protecting? What does it want to get done?

    You may not get an answer. Ask anyway and let the day go on. Looking at your anger even once, instead of pressing it down, makes more of a difference than you might think. A person with no anger left is not calm. That person has run out of force, and nothing gets started anymore.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock. — being and doing.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958).

    Related

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

  • Why Taking Orders Feels Like an Insult

    Your manager stops at your desk and says, “Do this one differently next time.” That’s the whole event. No raised voice, no audience, nothing unfair in the words. But your jaw sets before she’s finished the sentence, and before you’ve even weighed what she said, a thought is already there: Who does she think she is?

    The work isn’t what’s hard. Being told is.

    You’ve probably noticed this in yourself before. When something is your own idea, you do it gladly. When the very same thing comes to you as an instruction, something in you locks up. The work hasn’t changed. The only difference is that someone told you to do it.

    When a child first speaks up for herself, she says “no”

    Babies don’t arrive as separate people. For a long stretch, as far as the baby is concerned, she and her mother are not yet two people. The psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler called this stage symbiosis: mother and baby live as if they were one, with no line yet between where one ends and the other begins.

    Then the child starts to pull away from that oneness, and that is when she begins to push back against her mother. Look at the first words she uses to make her own wishes known.

    Not “I like this,” and not “I want that one.” It’s “no,” and “don’t.” She starts with refusals.

    That isn’t a small child misbehaving. It’s a step she has to take. When a toddler plants her feet and says no to the person she loves most, she is doing something enormous. For the first time, she is someone who is not her mother.

    Each “no” shows her, in action, that her mother wants one thing and she wants another. That is how a child first finds out that she has a will of her own, separate from her mother’s.

    We go through this separation twice, and the second time is louder

    Mahler had a name for this whole process: separation-individuation. You separate from that sense of being one with your mother, and you become an individual, someone who can say “I’m here, I’m me.” It doesn’t happen once and then finish. We go through it twice: once as toddlers, and again in adolescence. Another psychoanalyst, Peter Blos, called the teenage round “the second individuation.”

    The toddler version is small enough to be funny. She marches off across the park as if she’s leaving for good, until her mother catches her by the arm and pulls her back. She looks her mother in the eye and takes one more bite of the very thing she was told not to eat.

    Adolescence is the full-strength version. Now the pushing back comes with real opinions, and with a bigger body and a louder voice. It’s the same job the toddler was doing, on a far bigger scale.

    Why good advice sends a teenager the other way

    A teenager is trying to show that he exists as his own person: that his opinions and choices are his, not his parents’. Going against them is the quickest way to show it.

    That is why even sensible advice can send him in the opposite direction. If he simply does what his parents say, it feels as if he has no mind of his own, as if the choice were theirs and not his. So he goes against it.

    Parents feel wronged by this, and honestly, fair enough. The more they point him toward the good road, the more likely he is to head down the bad one. But he isn’t arguing about the road. He’s arguing about who gave the directions.

    The passcode on the phone

    Adolescence seems to start earlier these days, around fourth grade, at nine or ten. That is when many children begin openly defying their parents. A passcode goes on the phone, and the bedroom door shuts a little harder than it strictly needs to. Both say the same thing: stay out.

    Parents feel their stomach drop, but this is not a disaster. A child has to rebel in some form or other. The toddler’s “no” was small, and in the years since, she has mostly lived by fitting in with what her parents want. Rebelling now is how she breaks out of that and starts living as herself. The passcode isn’t really about the phone. It is a child finding out that there is something she alone gets to decide. Going through this rebellion is what a healthy adolescence looks like.

    So does being a grown-up mean swallowing your feelings and doing as you’re told?

    This is the part that matters. Once the rebellion has done its job and you know you exist as your own person, you become an adult. And an adult can do something a teenager can’t.

    Someone with authority tells you to do a thing, and part of you hears it as an insult. You can do it anyway — not because you caved, but because you know that doing as you’re told won’t make you stop being your own person. That’s an adult.

    Notice that nothing gets swallowed here. You still feel the sting, you still do the task, and one doesn’t cancel the other. The sting is a feeling passing through, not proof that you’ve been crushed.

    But if the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, being told what to do becomes unbearable. Before you’ve even taken in what an instruction says, it feels like an attack on your right to run your own life. Your body braces, the thought “Who does she think she is?” arrives, and you resist even when you agree with the task. Your manager ends up receiving resistance that was first meant for a parent, years ago.

    Why the trouble is always with whoever is above you

    This reaction is strongest in people whose relationship with their father went badly, especially a father who gave orders and allowed no questions. A manager, a senior colleague, anyone above them: there’s always friction, always some version of the same fight, and it doesn’t go away. And the odd part is how specific it is: they bristle only at people above them.

    If your father used his authority to control, humiliate, or overpower you, that wound stays with you. Years later, anyone with authority over you can feel like the same threat. Your manager is not your father. But she stands where he stood, as someone who can tell you what to do. That alone is enough to make your body brace and your jaw set, as it once did with him, before you’ve looked at what is actually happening.

    So on an ordinary afternoon you are angry at your manager, but the strength of that anger comes partly from much earlier, from a time when being told what to do meant being humiliated or losing control over your own life. The anger you couldn’t voice in front of your father comes up along with it.

    When the people and rules above you are wrong

    Growing up comes down to something plain in the end: you accept that the world has an order, that some people and some rules have authority over you. At work, that means a manager. Beyond work, it means laws and government policies. That is reality, whether you like it or not.

    And that order is not always right. A law, a policy, the person above you: any of them can be wrong, and sometimes badly. When that happens, you should be able to see it and say so out loud: “This isn’t right.”

    Where people part ways is in how they respond to something wrong. The mature route uses the proper channels to change it. At work, that means checking the rules and gathering the facts before you raise the problem. With a law or a policy, it means finding the others who see the problem too, researching it, and campaigning for change. Either way, you keep making your case with reasons, and that route asks you to stay with it for a long time.

    The other route wants it settled this afternoon. When the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, or the old wound from your father is still open, you go after the person instead of the problem: “Who do you think you are?” You blame, and you try to win by force rather than by reasons.

    What was said, or the fact of being told

    So the next time your jaw sets, don’t answer right away. Ask yourself one question first.

    Is this about what she said, or about the fact that she’s the one who gets to say it?

    If it’s the content that bothers you, you may have a real point, and a real point can be raised. Don’t stop at “this feels bad.” Work out what the rules say, what the facts are, and what harm the instruction could do, and take that to her. That is the mature route.

    If the content was honestly fine, it’s worth asking whether the person you’re fighting is really the person in front of you. Would you react the same way if a coworker at your own level had said exactly the same words? If not, the reaction may go back to your father, and your manager has simply stepped into the place he once stood.

    References

    • Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books.
    • Blos, P. (1967). The Second Individuation Process of Adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 22, 162–186. — the second individuation in adolescence is Blos’s formulation, not Mahler’s.

    Related

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

  • You Got Everything You Needed. So Why Does the Inside Dry Out?

    There is food in the fridge and the rent went through on time. You answered everything that needed answering. You finished the week, and anybody watching you would have said you were doing fine.

    Then you sit down at the end of it and notice that you feel almost nothing. Good news does not lift you, rest does not restore you, and the people you love feel farther away than they did before.

    It is not exactly sadness. Sadness is usually about something: a loss, a disappointment, a person you miss. This feeling is harder to name because nothing has visibly gone wrong. Your practical needs were met, but you went too long without warm attention, touch, or the feeling that another person was genuinely glad you were there. Many years ago, a doctor visiting hospital wards saw the same gap in babies, in a much starker form: they were fed, but nobody held them.

    What if you don’t already know what you’ll find?

    One thing before the doctor’s story, because it changes how you will read it.

    When you look at yourself, or at anybody else, there are two ways to go about it. You can go in already sure of what you’re going to find, or you can go in assuming there’s something there you haven’t seen yet.

    The first way is faster and almost entirely blind. You end up seeing only what you walked in believing, and quietly bending everything else until it fits the shape you brought with you. The second way is slower, and it’s the only one that ever turns up anything worth having. You go in admitting you don’t know, and so you come out with something you didn’t have before.

    So when you look at yourself or anyone else, the most important work isn’t collecting new ideas. It’s setting aside the ones you already have. Read the rest of this without deciding in advance what you will find.

    Why were well-fed babies wasting away?

    The doctor was René Spitz. He ran a children’s ward himself, and he went from one hospital or children’s home to another, watching infants. In some of those places he kept seeing something that made no medical sense at all.

    The babies were being fed properly, on schedule, as much as they needed. Breast milk, formula, whatever was on hand. And they were fading anyway.

    No illness explained it, and nothing was missing from their diet. Their bodies simply withered: they got thinner and smaller and quieter, week after week, and some of them died. On paper these babies were well cared for, yet they were dying in clean rooms with full bottles beside them.

    Nobody could give a reason for it. The cause was real, and it was right there in the room, but nobody had seen it. Spitz found it by going from place to place and watching the babies.

    This wasting came to be known as hospitalism, because it kept turning up in hospitals and children’s homes.

    Same formula — so why were babies in other wards plump?

    Here’s the observation that cracked it open. In some places nearly every baby wilted, while in others the babies were round and loud and thriving. Same formula, out of the same tins.

    Spitz compared the two kinds of places. They differed in a good many ways, and one of those differences mattered more than all the rest.

    In the wards where the babies faded, the bottle was propped up in the crib and the baby drank alone. In the wards where the babies thrived, a nurse lifted the baby out and held it while it ate.

    The nutrition going in was identical. The difference was a pair of arms.

    Why does being held count for so much?

    A baby can’t understand the idea of being loved; it has no words yet. What it has is skin, and love reaches it first as touch: being picked up, being stroked, being fussed over by someone whose attention, for that moment, is all on the baby. Through that touch the baby’s body takes in a message: something warm is holding me, something keeps coming back for me, so I must be worth coming back for.

    Repeated care gives a baby its first sense of self. Before the child can think “I matter,” the body learns it through being picked up, soothed, fed, and answered when it cries. Psychologists call this first, bodily sense of self the physical self. Whatever you later come to believe about your own worth is built on top of it.

    When no one holds the baby or answers its cries, food alone cannot give it that experience. An adult who goes without warmth still has ways to react: turning bitter, demanding, or withdrawn, or going numb. A baby has none of these yet. All it can take in is that it is in distress and no one comes, and so the lack shows up in its body. That is the wasting Spitz saw: babies who were fed but not held grew thinner and quieter, and some of them died.

    If babies waste away without warmth, why are you still standing?

    Because you are not a baby in a crib any more. Your first sense of self was built in childhood. It may have been built unevenly in places, but it is there, and being left alone all day no longer kills you. Nobody has to notice you or love you today for your heart to keep beating, and an adult can go a remarkably long time with no warmth at all and stay medically fine.

    What changes instead is your capacity to feel connected and alive.

    You still go to work, answer emails, and say the right thing at dinner. But your feelings are slow to come, pleasure fades quickly, and other people begin to feel distant. In a baby, deprivation can show up in the body. In an adult, the daily routine may continue while interest, warmth, and emotional responsiveness gradually weaken.

    You notice it in small ways, if you notice it at all. Weeks blur together. Nothing quite lands. Good news arrives and you register it the way you’d register a fact about somebody else. You can’t remember the last time anything reached you.

    And nothing shows. That’s the part that makes it dangerous. A broken arm gets a cast and a fever gets a thermometer, but there is nothing here to point at, so nobody thinks to ask — including you.

    Why won’t the zombie films stop coming?

    Imagine someone who has died inside, and ask what they would look like to anyone watching. You already have the picture. You’ve seen it hundreds of times. It walks around. It eats. There’s nobody home behind the eyes.

    Zombie films never go away. A series gets a fourth film and a fifth, and then a brand-new one comes out. People keep making them because people keep turning up to watch, and a story only gets that big when it shows us something about ourselves that we can’t say out loud.

    The audience isn’t there for the makeup. Something in them recognizes that figure: a body that keeps going with nobody inside. If there weren’t so many people going hollow inside perfectly ordinary lives, that whole genre would have burned out long ago. Your own inner deadness ends up on a screen where you can look straight at it for two hours and never once realize what you’re looking at. What people can’t say about themselves, they will pay to sit and watch.

    How much attention does a person actually need?

    Transactional analysis, a school of psychotherapy, has a name for any small sign from another person that says, “I see you, and you matter to me.” It calls such a sign a stroke, in the sense of stroking a baby, not the medical kind. A hand on the shoulder counts, and so does your name said by somebody who meant it. People need a steady supply of these, roughly the way we need meals.

    The amount matters too: neither too little nor too much.

    Too little attention leaves you feeling unnoticed and emotionally depleted. Too much attention — constant questions, monitoring, touching, or demands for a response — removes privacy and puts the body on alert. Your jaw tightens, your thoughts narrow, and ordinary contact begins to feel intrusive.

    When that tension has nowhere to go, you may snap at the nearest person even when they did not cause it. The need is not for the most attention possible. It is for steady contact that lets you feel noticed without making you feel watched or controlled.

    Small signs like these are harder to come by now than they used to be, too. Notice how much of an ordinary day can pass without a single one. Coffee ordered through an app, groceries through self-checkout, work conducted in a chat window with people you have never stood next to. You can get from Monday to Friday without one person saying your name out loud, and none of it feels like a loss while it’s happening. It feels like convenience.

    So exchange one stroke with someone today. Only one, and it doesn’t have to be a big one.

    Say somebody’s name and add a sentence that’s genuinely about them — the barista, a coworker, your sister. Not a compliment you’d hand to anybody, but something you noticed about that particular person. If there’s honestly nobody within reach today, put your hand on your own arm and run it slowly down once. It will feel ridiculous, and you should do it anyway. The babies who thrived on those wards weren’t given a treatment. They were held.

    References

    • Spitz, R. A. (1945). Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.
    • Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books.

    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

  • Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller

    It’s a Tuesday evening and nothing has happened. The dishes are done, nobody in the family is angry with you, and tomorrow is just another day at work. And still there’s something running underneath it all — a restlessness that follows you from room to room, and you couldn’t say what it’s about.

    Then there’s the other thing, the one you don’t mention to anybody. You told yourself one drink, or one episode of a show, or ten minutes on the phone — and then you reached the limit you’d set and went straight past it, and afterwards you couldn’t explain why, even to yourself.

    These look like two separate problems. They may be the same one: never having learned where to stop.

    Why do you feel anxious when nothing is wrong?

    The psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg described a pattern he called borderline personality organization. “Organization” here simply means the way a person is put together inside: the ways of coping they fall back on, again and again, whenever something goes wrong. The first mark Kernberg listed for this pattern is anxiety — a low, steady unease that never quite lifts. Feeling this way does not, by itself, mean you have this pattern. The same unease can also come from too little sleep, physical illness, or depression.

    The anxiety Kernberg described is not fear of something in particular. It is fear with nothing to attach itself to — it simply floats — which is why it is called free-floating anxiety. It turns up on quiet evenings and in the middle of an ordinary week, and when you ask yourself what exactly you are afraid of, you can’t find an answer.

    There is a reason for it, though. This kind of anxiety grows when your limits are unclear — when it is hard to say what you want, how far you will let yourself go, or when you will stop. Then, whenever you start something, whether a drink, a show or your phone, you don’t know how much is enough, and part of your attention has to keep checking whether you have already gone too far. And because nothing inside you holds your limits in place, they shift from one day to the next. You can never quite relax, even on an evening when nothing is happening.

    Picture an evening with nothing planned in it at all: nothing you have to do, all of it yours. That sounds like rest, and often it isn’t. What wears you down is not the freedom. It is that nothing tells you when to stop: when to put the phone down, when to switch off the show, when to go to bed.

    Is a limit a cage or a railing?

    Most people notice that a limit removes options, but a limit also removes uncertainty. If you decide before dinner that you will have one drink, the decision has already told you where the drinking ends. Without that limit, each empty glass means deciding all over again whether to have another.

    Stand on a balcony with a solid railing and you’ll lean out over it to look at the view below. Take the railing away and you’ll press yourself back against the wall instead. The railing never gave you the view. It gave you the nerve to go and look. A clear limit works the same way: because you know where it is, you can relax and choose freely inside it.

    The same thing happens with sleep, money, exercise, work, and phone use. A fixed bedtime removes the option of scrolling a little longer, but it also ends the argument you have with yourself every night about when to stop. A rule that part of every paycheck goes into savings limits what you can spend, but it also keeps that money safe from whatever you feel like buying on a given day.

    Why won’t a therapy session run late to make up for lost time?

    A therapy session runs fifty minutes. Say you arrive half an hour late — the trains were cancelled, a crash had the highway at a standstill, every word of your explanation is true and none of it is your fault. The session still ends at the moment it was always going to end. A minute or two over, sometimes. Never thirty.

    Nearly everyone hates this at first. It feels cold, and it feels like the one person who’s supposed to be looking after you is sitting there quietly watching the clock.

    But alongside the hurt, the fixed ending gives you something. If you arrive late, the lost time is gone; if you arrive on time, you get the full fifty minutes. After months of sessions that start and end the same way, you no longer wonder whether a crisis, an apology or an important story might buy you extra time. You know exactly what to expect, and that is part of what makes therapy feel steady and safe.

    Why does saying no settle a child down?

    Telling a child they can’t have what they want is hard, because you’re the one who has to stand there and watch the small face crumple. So you give in, and that’s easier on everybody for about four minutes.

    But a child who never gets stopped grows more anxious, not less. Being told no is a surprisingly large part of what makes a child feel safe.

    When you tell a child you’re not buying any more candy, the child may whine, become furious, or lie on the supermarket floor. That reaction means the child has run into a limit, and what you do next is what counts. If you let the child be upset but keep the same answer, and stay loving while you do, the child learns two things: being angry with you does not end the relationship, and not getting what they want right away is something they can live through.

    If you give in because the crying is too hard to bear, the child learns something else: the harder they push, the more the line moves. Instead of learning to stop, the child learns to demand more loudly.

    Is the drink the problem, or the line you crossed?

    Look closely at what addiction actually means, and it turns out to be less about what a person uses than about going past a limit.

    Are drugs bad? Some of the same drugs people get addicted to are part of ordinary medicine. If you’ve given birth with an epidural, it very likely contained an opioid, and some cough and cold medicines contain opioids too. Is alcohol bad? Not by itself — whole countries drink at dinner and then stop when dinner is over. Some substances do carry far more risk than others, especially illegal drugs and misused prescription drugs, but the substance is not what defines an addiction.

    What defines an addiction is going past the point where you meant to stop, again and again. One drink becomes several, ten minutes on the phone becomes three hours, and you keep going even when your health, your work, your finances or your relationships are suffering. You can name the limit before you start. What you can’t do is stop when you reach it.

    Can something healthy turn into a way to hurt yourself?

    Exercise makes this plain. A sensible amount of it does you good, which is why nobody thinks of it as a risk. Now watch somebody who has gone past the line. Their knees and shoulders are ruined, and they keep training anyway, straight through the damage. That isn’t health any more — something else has taken the wheel.

    There’s a name for that something: the superego, the part of you that watches and scolds and keeps score. It doesn’t tell you when enough is enough. It sets a standard, and when you fall short of it, it punishes you. Once it has taken the wheel, you aren’t training to look after your body any more. You’re training to wreck it, and the damage is the punishment.

    So you can’t tell whether something is an addiction by looking at what a person is doing, because the activity on its own tells you almost nothing. Even something good can wreck you once you go past the line, and for some people, wrecking themselves is the point.

    What happens when nobody ever says stop?

    I work as a therapist, and not long ago an elderly couple came to see me about their son. He’s thirty-six, still caught in his addiction, and still coming home some nights and not others.

    In all the years they were raising him, his parents never actually stepped in. When he stole money, nothing whatsoever happened. There were words, plenty of words — don’t do that, do this — and the words were all there ever was. No consequence ever followed them. Plenty of telling. Never any stopping. The line got talked about for years and never once got drawn.

    Where does that lead? A person who is never stopped keeps going, further and further out, until he hits a wall. Sooner or later he always does. The last line left is the law, the edge of what society will accept. He crosses it, and once he has, society can no longer put up with him. So he gets locked up. That is the wall.

    Why would a locked door feel like relief?

    Being locked up is hard, and people hate it, count the days, can’t stand another minute of it. And alongside all of that, something in them quietly settles, because somebody finally drew the line.

    Some of the people who end up in prison know something the rest of us find hard to believe: being inside is easier than being outside. Not better. Not kinder. Easier. Outside, there were no limits anywhere, and for years nothing stopped them. Inside, there are far fewer choices to make, and what happens next has already been decided.

    Under that strange pairing — unbearable and a relief at the same time — there may be a wish they have never put into words: Someone, please, tell me where this ends.

    So who is going to draw your line?

    A locked door can stop a person, but it cannot teach him to stop himself. Nobody drew the line for the son while he was growing up, and nobody is going to draw yours for you either. That is less bleak than it sounds, because it means you get to say where it goes. Draw one tonight, something small: the phone, the run, the work you’d otherwise carry past midnight. Decide where it ends before you start, and then actually stop there when you reach it. If it’s drinking, and you already know that once you start you can’t stop, your line may need to come before the first drink: don’t start at all, and get help, from a professional if you need it.

    The hard part comes after you stop. You may feel empty, deprived, restless, or angry that your own rule has taken away something you could have had. If you go straight back to it, the discomfort disappears and the old habit gets stronger. If you let the feeling stay without crossing the line, you learn that you can want more and still not act on it. Repeat that, and you begin to build the limit of your own that was missing — one that lets you stop yourself before a wall outside has to do it for you.

    References

    • Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson.

    Related

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

  • Why Someone Warm to Everyone Turns Cold With You

    Everyone describes him as warm and easy to talk to. His coworkers say he listens, laughs, and helps without being asked. But at dinner with you, he answers in four words, looks at his phone, and shows no interest in what you are saying. The difference leaves you wondering which version of him is real.

    You ask what he’s thinking about and he says nothing. Later you lie in the dark and do what you always do, which is look for the fault in yourself first. Maybe you need too much. Maybe you heard a tone that was never in the room. Maybe you’re just too sensitive.

    Hold on to that last one for a minute, because there’s an explanation that goes back to the 1940s, and it doesn’t start with you.

    Ronald Fairbairn, a Scottish psychoanalyst, had a name for people who keep others at a distance even while they seem warm. He called the pattern schizoid. The word comes from the Greek for “split.” It can sound like the name of a severe mental illness, but Fairbairn also used it for something he saw in ordinary people: a mind divided in two to keep itself safe. In the man who is warm at work and cold at dinner, his coworkers meet one half, and no one is allowed near the other.

    Fairbairn said this split shows up in three ways. Read them slowly, because each one probably explains an evening you have already lived through. I’ll write “he” throughout; swap it for “she” if that fits your life better.

    Why does nothing you say ever get through to him?

    The first is a quiet, unshakable sense of being right. Fairbairn’s word for it was omnipotence, which literally means being all-powerful, the way God is. The man at your table would never say it out loud, but inside he feels as if he were God, so to him, whatever he knows and believes simply cannot be wrong.

    For a man like this, what he believes does not feel like an opinion. It feels like reality itself. So when you remember something differently, or tell him it felt different to you, he doesn’t hear one more way of looking at it. He hears an attack, as if you had called him a liar, and he defends himself instead of thinking about what you said.

    You already know how that feels from the inside. You went in to talk something through and somehow ended up in a courtroom, where you explained and he defended, you softened and he defended again. You tried explaining it more clearly, and then tried again. But the problem was never how well you explained. He cannot bear the idea that there could be another way of seeing it.

    So why would anybody need to be that right? Fairbairn’s answer is strange, and it’s worth sitting with. In his view, being divided in two and feeling that the world is not quite real are the same condition. People and events never feel fully solid to a man like this. When nothing out there feels solid, the one thing that still does is what goes on in his own head. That is where the feeling of being God comes in: his own thoughts become the one thing he can be sure of. The less real the world feels to him, the harder he has to be right about it.

    Why does he move away as you move closer?

    The second is distance, and underneath it sits fear. Getting close to another person genuinely frightens him. Without realizing it, he expects anyone who gets close either to leave him or to take control of him. Here’s the part that makes it almost impossible to discuss — he doesn’t know he’s frightened at all. Ask him, and he may tell you he has just never needed people much. The fear never looks like fear. Instead he wraps himself in mystery and becomes hard to read.

    You can’t tell what kind of day he’s had, and a real question gets you back a shrug, a joke, or an answer to some other question. Step toward him and he is already a step further back.

    Early in the relationship, the fact that he said so little about himself may have looked like depth. You imagined a rich inner life in him, waiting to be shared, and thought that one day, as you grew closer, he would let you in. Fairbairn saw the mystery as armor. Because he never shows what he feels or why he does what he does, no one can get close enough to hurt him.

    Months later you finally work out what the mystery actually was: a line drawn without a single word. Come this close. No closer.

    The distance also feeds the first feature, the need to be right. Because he never lets anyone all the way in, nothing anybody says really reaches him — not the praise, not the warning, not the apology. With nothing from other people to steady him, all he has left to lean on is being right. The less he takes in from other people, the harder he leans on it, and the longer this goes on, the more certain he becomes.

    Why can a quiet man nod along and still change nothing?

    The third is living entirely inside his own head: his own thoughts and his own view of things count for more than anything anyone says to him. This one surprises people. You would expect it mostly in loud, self-centered types, but quiet, inward people often have more of it.

    The loud version is easy enough to spot. He takes up all the air, fishes for compliments, and wants the whole day arranged around him. Ten minutes in, you have him figured out: he thinks he’s the only person in the room who matters.

    The quiet version is much harder to spot. He does not raise his voice or ask for praise. He listens, nods, and lets you finish. But after an hour of talking, nothing has changed: not what he thinks, not what he does. He never tells you what is on his mind, either, so you walk away not knowing whether he agreed to anything at all. He looked open the whole time, and none of your words got through.

    That’s a different order of stubbornness. It doesn’t need to win the argument. It simply never has the argument.

    Why is the quiet one’s stubbornness so hard to see, even for him?

    Because the loud one keeps running into things. He charges at the world and the world pushes back — a job ends, a friend stops calling, somebody finally tells him to his face what he’s like. None of that is pleasant, but all of it is a mirror, and one day he might actually look into it.

    The quiet one collides with nothing. He stays polite, stays useful, stays well liked, so nobody ever has a reason to push back. No crash means no mirror. The pattern isn’t any smaller inside him; it has simply never been seen, not even by him, and it lasts longer for exactly that reason.

    Why does it only happen with you?

    This is the part I would underline twice. None of the three has to show up in everyday life, and Fairbairn was careful to say so. A man can know he carries them or have no idea at all. He can seem fine most of the time and then, in one area of his life only, the whole thing switches on.

    Sometimes that area is power. Watch how he handles a boss, or somebody who works under him, and there it is, sitting inside a life that looks fine everywhere else.

    Most often, though, the area is love.

    This is why a man can be generous with strangers, patient with coworkers, and emotionally cold with the person who loves him. Casual relationships do not require him to reveal himself or depend deeply on another person. Intimate love does. So the fear that stays quiet with strangers and coworkers comes up with you, because you are the one who is close.

    That’s why the man his coworkers describe and the man across the dinner table from you will never add up to one person. Neither description is a lie. They see him from a distance, and you see him up close.

    So are you the sensitive one?

    Not necessarily. Other people speaking well of him does not make the coldness you have felt any less real.

    Look at what you’ve been quietly doing each time he goes cold. You count it against yourself — too needy, too watchful, too much. Notice that habit, because the cause you keep looking for in yourself lies somewhere else.

    The trigger is intimacy. He goes cold with you not because you matter less than his coworkers, but because you are close enough that he would have to show his feelings and lean on you. His coldness protects him from that closeness. It is not a measure of your worth.

    But isn’t a bit of this in everyone?

    Yes. And that’s the part to keep.

    These three aren’t a checklist for labeling somebody so you can be finished with him. Being sure you’re right, keeping your distance, living inside your own head — everyone carries some of each, in different amounts, and usually in one particular area of life. If you read this only as an article about him, the same problems will keep coming back between the two of you.

    So go back over today and find one moment when you nodded along while, inside, you were quietly saying no. Just one. Don’t work out who was right; that’s a different job for a different evening.

    Then write it down, one line, in whatever words turn up: “I nodded along about the weekend plans, and inside I was saying no.”

    It’s small enough to feel pointless. It isn’t. Think back to the quiet man. What he carries inside never runs into anything, so it is never seen, not even by him. A no you say only inside your head is the same. Nobody sees it, and even you barely notice it. Once you write it down, it is on the page, where you can see it. That one line is a first step out of your own head.

    References

    • Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1940). Schizoid Factors in the Personality. In Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952). London: Tavistock.

    Related

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

  • Regression Isn’t a Breakdown. Your Mind Is Just Going Home.

    The alarm goes off and you turn the phone face down. Nothing bad has happened. Nobody shouted at you, nothing broke, and the day in front of you is perfectly ordinary. Still, the only thing you really want is to stay under the covers and be nobody for a while.

    The voices in the next room sound far away, as if they were coming through glass. Your list of things to do is sitting right there on the kitchen table, and somehow it feels like somebody else’s. So you ask yourself what you always ask. What’s wrong with me? Am I just lazy?

    Before you call yourself lazy, ask why your mind responds to the ordinary demands of the day, like that list on the table, by withdrawing, putting off decisions, and wanting someone else to take over. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory suggests that this is not random. Under pressure, the mind goes back to a way of coping from much earlier in life, when pulling back made you feel less afraid and someone else carried the responsibility for you.

    Which came first — the world, or your picture of it?

    Most of us assume a baby first gets to know the world as it really is, and only later, with more words and more years behind it, starts to imagine.

    Klein turned that around.

    Long before a baby can speak, she said, its mind is already full of pictures of what the world is like, built from what its body feels. She called these pictures unconscious fantasy, but she did not mean daydreaming or making things up. Fantasy, for her, is how a mind that has no words yet first makes sense of the world. When the baby is hungry, it feels as if no one will ever come. When it is held and fed, the whole world feels safe.

    For the infant, these unconscious fantasies are not occasional thoughts. They shape the baby’s whole experience of hunger and fullness, danger and safety, long before it has words or can check what it feels against what is really there.

    In Klein’s view, then, you did not begin with an accurate understanding of reality and add imagination later. You began with unconscious fantasy and gradually corrected it through experience. Each time someone close to you turned out differently from what the picture inside you expected, and your bond with them survived the surprise, that picture moved a little closer to the world as it really is.

    What does a good home actually give a child?

    If life begins in fantasy, that changes what we mean by a good home. We usually think of how much love a child was given, or whether there was enough money in the house. But part of what makes a home good is how much of the real world it lets a child take in — how often, and how safely, the child can check the picture inside against what is really happening.

    Put plainly: the worse the home, the less of the real world a child can afford to let in.

    That may sound backwards, but the reasoning behind it is simple. Children learn to swim in water they can stand up in. A steady home hands a child small, survivable disappointments — the promise kept a day late, the answer that turns out to be no — and every one of them is a chance to check the picture in their head against what actually happened and find out it was slightly off. Nothing collapses when that happens. The child learns that a disappointment is not the end of the world, corrects that part of the picture, and goes back to playing.

    When home is too painful — when the adults are unpredictable or frightening — a child has no room to calmly check the picture against what is real. Every look on an adult’s face can read as a sign of danger. So the child retreats into the world inside, which at least feels like something they can control. And the more time the child spends in that inner world, the less often the picture inside gets tested against someone safe, and so the less it gets corrected.

    Children are not the only ones who retreat into that inner world. Most of us go there for a while and then find our way back out. At the extreme are people who cannot find their way back out at all. That is the territory of psychosis: in schizophrenia, for example, a person stays shut inside their own private world. This does not mean that a painful home is the single cause of any particular illness. But it can shape how a person handles stress later in life.

    Why is the pull to retreat strongest at certain times in life?

    There are three times in life when people are most likely to feel they are coming apart: the teenage years; the early twenties, when many people leave home; and the years after marriage, or after setting up a household with someone.

    Why those three? Because that is when the demands of real life arrive all at once, from every direction. Your body changes, or your address does. The people around you change, and so does what they expect from you. You’re handed a role that nobody bothers to explain. There are more decisions to make, and more of the blame falls on you when one goes wrong. Worst of all, the way you’ve always coped stops working — quietly, and completely.

    At times like these, there is more to carry than you can manage all at once, and carrying it simply hurts too much. So the mind slides backward, into that inner world of early pictures. Every human mind begins there, which makes it the mind’s first home — a home inside you, not the house you grew up in. When you retreat like this, in a sense your mind is simply going home.

    If this is the year you feel like you’re coming apart, look at where you are in life before you go looking at your character. Check whether this moment falls on one of those three times, or on another big change in your life, such as starting a job, having a baby, or going through a divorce. You may not have gotten weaker at all. Reality may have just started asking for far more than it used to.

    So what is this pull backward, exactly?

    You live out in the real world for a while, it hurts, and something in you wants to be a small child again. No decisions. No judgment calls. Somebody else handling the difficult parts, the way somebody once did.

    The name for this return is regression. The mind is not inventing a new response. It is returning to an earlier state in which withdrawing, becoming passive, or waiting for someone else to act once provided relief.

    Why is it so hard to come back out?

    Regression feels familiar because you learned this way of coping early and used it many times. Avoiding a message, staying in bed, or waiting for someone to tell you what to do takes the pressure off right away. That relief makes the old way hard to leave, even while the unanswered messages and postponed tasks pile up and the anxiety grows with them. The safer it feels under the covers, the harder it becomes to come out.

    It shows up in ordinary ways, too. The afternoon that disappears into your phone. The message you could answer in four lines and somehow cannot. The steady, quiet wish that somebody would arrive and simply tell you what to do next. None of those look like much from the outside, and every one of them is the same short walk back to the mind’s first home. The pull is never loud when it arrives, and it usually comes dressed as tiredness, or as a small and very reasonable decision to deal with the whole thing tomorrow.

    When ordinary tasks feel far away and you want to pull back from every demand, you may be falling back on an old way of protecting yourself, not showing some permanent flaw in your character. Once you see it as regression, you can ask a more useful question: what is pressing on me right now that set this off?

    Does that mean you should get rid of the old picture inside you?

    No, and you couldn’t manage it even if you tried. The picture isn’t a part you can unbolt and throw away — it’s the place you started from. Adult life is the slow work of checking it against whatever is really in front of you and correcting it a little at a time.

    Stop revising the picture, and your trips back into that inner world get longer and longer. Keep revising it, and your time out in the real world gets longer instead. That is the choice, and the work is never quite finished.

    So pick one scene from the past week that felt heavier than it had any business being. A message that has been sitting there unanswered. A room that went quiet the moment you walked into it.

    Then write down, in a single line, what you were quietly expecting. “He should know without me having to say it.” “After everything I did, somebody should have noticed.” One sentence is plenty. Don’t tidy it up, and don’t argue with it. If the line makes you wince a little, you’ve probably written the real one down instead of the polite version.

    Once it’s sitting there on paper, you can slowly begin to see where it came from — the situation you were actually in, or a much older picture you’ve been carrying since before you had words for anything. Some of those lines will turn out to be fair. Others were formed a long time ago, to fit a house you no longer live in.

    That’s where the revising starts. One line at a time.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174.

    Related

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

  • Why That One Person Gets Under Your Skin

    There’s one person you can’t let slide. Everybody else in the room lets it go — they roll their eyes, they move on, they’ve forgotten about it by the time they get to the parking lot. You haven’t. Something about the way that person takes credit, or opens a sentence with “no offense, but,” goes into you like a splinter and stays there. Their name comes up in conversation and your voice changes, and the strange part is you can hear it changing while it happens. Then you’re driving home and the question arrives: why did I go that hard? Nobody else did.

    That difference between your reaction and everyone else’s matters. The person may really be irritating. But when you react far harder than anyone else, it can be a sign that their behavior has touched something in you — a desire or anger of your own that you find hard to admit. So to understand why you stay angry for hours while everyone else moves on, you have to ask not only what they did, but why it hits you so hard.

    Where does your mind put a feeling it can’t stand?

    Some feelings belong to you and you still won’t look at them straight on. The small ugly jealousy when a friend gets the news you wanted for yourself. The mean, calculating thought you’d never say out loud to anybody. Anger that arrives at a size the situation obviously doesn’t deserve.

    When a feeling is too uncomfortable to admit as your own, the mind may hand it to someone else — and then find it in them. It’s a bit like tossing your own garbage over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, then looking over the next morning and complaining about how filthy their yard is. You feel competitive but accuse a colleague of turning everything into a contest. You want attention but become preoccupied with how desperately someone else seeks it. You haven’t stopped seeing the competitiveness or the hunger for attention. You just see it in them, and only in them.

    This is called projection. Your judgment of the other person feels completely true, partly because it may be true: they may really be competitive, or really hungry for attention. Projection doesn’t need you to make up something that isn’t there. It makes you stare at that trait in them, and keeps you from seeing the same thing in yourself.

    I call this an uncomfortable truth. It isn’t pleasant to hear, and there’s no gentle way to say it. But you can’t see yourself without bearing that discomfort. You can recognize the feelings you’ve been handing to other people only as far as you can stand to know they’re yours. Not an inch past that.

    What did Melanie Klein see in the first months of life?

    The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described in close detail what goes on in the mind of a very young baby. In her account, the first thing in that mind is terror.

    Not fear of something in particular — not dogs or strangers or the dark. A baby has no strength, no words, and no way of making anything at all happen. What it has instead is the raw sense that it could simply stop existing. Blink out, gone, nothing left where it used to be. Klein called this annihilation anxiety. It isn’t a fear of dying the way you or I think about dying, as something that will happen someday. A baby has no sense of “later,” so hunger doesn’t feel like a delay it can wait out. It feels like the end of everything.

    Terror like that is more than a baby can bear, and the baby’s mind finds a way to make it smaller.

    To see how, you need one more piece: there’s also destructiveness inside the baby, and it isn’t mild — hot, wrecking, wanting to smash whatever is nearest. Klein never believed infants were sweet blank pages waiting to be written on. But the baby can’t accept that this fury is its own, any more than it can bear the terror. So the fury gets thrown out, away, into the first outside thing the baby has ever met: its mother’s breast, the one that feeds it. Psychoanalysts call that first outside thing the object — their word for whoever or whatever our feelings are aimed at.

    This is how the terror gets smaller. The fury no longer seems to be inside the baby; now it seems to come at the baby from out there, from the breast. It’s a terrible bargain — the very breast that feeds it now feels threatening — but it is still easier to bear than the alternative. A baby is far too small and too new to hold the thought “this savagery is mine.”

    Why does the fault always seem to be in someone else?

    The habit of throwing out what we can’t bear stays with us into adulthood. In an adult, though, it doesn’t look like throwing anything. It looks like a confident judgment about someone, backed by a list of examples. And because you can list everything that person did, you never ask why this one fault takes up so much of your mind.

    Here’s something that sounds backwards until you check it against your own life: the more badness you find in other people, the more of it may be quietly sitting in you.

    Say “they’re all selfish” often enough, with enough conviction, and you make a rule without noticing you made it: selfishness is a thing other people have. So the next time you take the last of something without asking, the thought can’t arrive as “that was selfish of me.” It has to arrive as “I was in a hurry,” or “they didn’t really want it.” Once selfishness belongs only to other people, your own selfishness has no place to show openly, so you hide it more deeply — even from yourself. The more you hide it, the less of yourself you get to see.

    That’s the real cost of saying “they’re all selfish.” The cost isn’t that you’re being unfair to them. You may be entirely right about them — plenty of people really are selfish, and saying so isn’t a crime. The cost is that you become harder to see. To yourself.

    So who is the mature one here? Not the person with no dark side. Nobody is free of one, and anybody claiming otherwise is bluffing. The mature one is whoever can say, quietly and without making a show of it, “yeah, some of that is in me too.”

    The sentence doesn’t feel good, and saying it fixes nothing on its own — it certainly won’t make you nicer by Tuesday. Saying it takes strength, though. You have to be able to think “some of that is in me” without it flattening you for the rest of the night — and then get up and finish the dishes. When you don’t have that strength yet, the mind falls back on what the baby did: throw it out, find it in someone else, feel better for an hour or so.

    Why does a fight make you more certain instead of less?

    Projection is also why fights break out in close relationships. Two people can do this to each other at the same time: each one places their own unwanted feelings on the other, and then finds them there. Each now sees the badness in the other person, so a clash is hard to avoid.

    Now think of a fight of your own, and watch what happens to both of you as it heats up. You’d expect an argument to introduce a little doubt — more information, more of the other person’s side, more room to wonder. It does the opposite. The louder it gets, the more badly you need to prove the fault is theirs: “That’s not mine. You did this.” Every time you say it, you believe it a little more.

    That’s why an argument about something small, like the dishes, so quickly stops being about the dishes. It turns into a contest over who the bad one is, and neither of you can afford to lose it.

    By this point, each of you is treating a picture in your own head as the complete truth. Psychoanalysis calls this kind of picture a fantasy. In this sense a fantasy is not a lie you’ve made up. To you, the picture feels like plain fact, and that is what makes it so hard to shift. Your mind has arranged what happened so that the other person carries all the badness and you carry none of it. That is why nothing new gets through. Accepting even part of the other person’s side would mean admitting that some of the badness is yours, and that is exactly what the picture protects you from.

    And the firmer that picture becomes, the less you can see of what’s inside you. So the next time you’re absolutely sure about somebody, the certainty itself is worth a second look.

    Were you ever really alone, even as a newborn?

    Here’s the heart of Klein’s idea, and it starts with something almost too obvious to notice.

    Projection needs an object — someone or something to place the feeling in. You can’t throw something at someone who isn’t there. So if a newborn is already throwing its fury into the breast, then someone else is already in the baby’s world from the first weeks of life. The baby’s mind is turned toward its mother from the very beginning, long before it can recognize that the breast it knows belongs to a whole, separate person.

    Klein followed this simple point all the way through, and it led her to disagree with Freud.

    Freud had pictured the newborn as a sealed little world, wrapped up in itself, only bumping into other people later on. Klein said no. We don’t start out alone and then pick up relationships as a skill, the way we eventually pick up walking. We start out already in a relationship. The very first thing a baby ever does with its mind, it does toward somebody.

    That’s where the term object relations comes from. It names this way of understanding people: a person begins life not alone, but in a relationship with an object — someone to aim feelings at. You were never a closed room that later grew a door.

    Who got to you today?

    You know exactly who. Bring that person to mind.

    Name what you couldn’t stand about them, and keep it to a single word, because one word is more than enough. Selfish. Cold. Fake. Careless.

    Then take the word — just the word, not the person, not the history, not the list of everything they’ve done — and ask yourself one question about it: Is any of this in me?

    Now don’t try to answer it — I mean that seriously. If something surfaces on its own, fine, but don’t go hunting for it. Finding an answer matters less than the turn itself: the finger you’ve been pointing at them swings back toward you for one second. For that one second, the picture in your head — all the badness is theirs, none of it is mine — starts to crack. One crack is plenty for tonight.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.

    Related

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