Inner Work Notes

English

Category: Psychoanalysis

  • Reveal and Express Yourself Little by Little, and Set Yourself Free

    Where, and how, should you bring out what you have kept hidden?

    The act of hiding is itself what creates shame. So if there is something we are hiding, let us first bring it out into the open. What have you kept hidden in your heart all this time, unable to express it? That does not mean going and telling just anyone. You need to use good judgement. Sometimes telling just anyone only lands you in worse trouble. Express it to someone you can trust, or express it anonymously. Don’t hide it; express it freely.

    If there is a place where you can post anonymously, I encourage you to express there what you have kept hidden and felt ashamed of. Doing it once will not change things in a flash. Even so, it becomes a small spark inside us.

    When you stop hiding the thoughts and feelings that rise up in you and allow them, keep it light and simple. Just allow them: “It’s okay to have a thought like that. It’s okay to feel that way.”

    In fact, it takes great courage to speak about something you have kept tightly hidden. To others it is nothing much, but to the one hiding it, it is enormously shameful, heavy and hard. Even when they post it anonymously and no one knows who wrote it, they themselves know their words are there. That is why even posting it anonymously is hard.

    So go one step at a time. If it feels frightening and hard, don’t pour out a great deal all at once; go slowly, one sentence, two sentences, three sentences. First post it on an anonymous site, and after that, try confessing it in front of people you can trust. That is the beginning. Express yourself little by little like that, and set yourself free.

    Getting it off your chest alone, talking to yourself, is not bad either. But it does not do much to bring out the shame you are hiding. That is because the effect is stronger when you bring it out into the open.

    If it is anonymous, is it all right to vent your anger at someone when it flares up? There is a cunning part in our hearts. Long ago, when I was starting a healing community, I said that we should express and share our feelings honestly and truthfully, and some people used those words as an excuse to blame others. Venting anonymously, somewhere the person you are blaming is not present, is fine. But flinging it out carelessly where the very person you are blaming can see it is probably not a good way for your heart to find its way to peace.

    If I show my weakness, won’t people take advantage of it?

    What if I talk about my shortcomings and flaws, and someone makes fun of me for them? That is really what we are afraid of, isn’t it? If people mock you like that, the problem lies with them.

    And as far as I know, when someone reveals their shortcomings and frailty, communities and individuals alike generally try to make up for what is lacking, and to help and protect that person. They don’t try to take advantage of it. That is basic human nature. Relationships also get a great deal better.

    On the other hand, if you try to be strong, try to be smarter, try to talk more because you don’t want to be looked down on, relationships get worse. You want recognition, but you get even less of it. The more truthfully you say, “I fall short. This is where I’m weak,” the more people truly listen.

    More people than you might think want recognition and attention from others. It is a wish a little like a child’s, but that’s okay. Wanting recognition and attention is good. Get plenty of it. Here is how to get plenty of it. Admit your weakness and confess where you fall short. And say things to others that help them and give them strength. That’s all it takes. It isn’t difficult.

    But you have to do it truthfully. Everyone can see through pretence. Even if it seems they don’t notice, people have an instinct for it, so if you pretend to be what you are not and try to talk impressively, it doesn’t work. It never works. You may have done that all this time in order to survive. I am not blaming you for that. I am telling you the way to get what you want, because I hope you get it.

    What if I don’t know what I am hiding?

    If you don’t know what you are hiding, try calling your shame to mind. If you think about what makes you feel ashamed, you will gradually begin to notice what you are hiding.

    And take it slowly. Rushing causes side effects. You avoid side effects only by going slowly, taking on only as much as you can handle, at your own pace.

    If there is something you are hiding, open it up little by little. And I hope you will take a moment to think about this: “It is the very thing I am trying to hide and cover up that lets shame hold me back.”

    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

  • It Is the Hiding Itself That Creates Shame

    Is it what I did that shames me, or the hiding?

    When we are tormented by shame, it is not only because of something we did. The act itself may be part of what shames us, but we feel more shame in the course of hiding it than from the act.

    When there is something about us that we think makes us less, we try to hide it. We try to hide who we are, and we try to hide what we have said or done. It is at the very moment we try to hide that the shame is felt. So you can take it that the act of hiding is itself what creates the shame.

    If you admit a mistake, have you lost?

    We can make mistakes and get things wrong. We can behave childishly or immaturely too. Every human being does. Accept that as natural, and if you made a mistake or fell short somewhere, admit it. “I made a mistake.” “I fell a bit short.” “I didn’t think it through.” Just say it like that.

    But people who are tormented by feelings of inferiority believe that saying this means losing. So they cannot bring themselves to say that they made a mistake, that they were wrong, that they fell short. That is what is truly pathetic. In fact, the person who says, “I was wrong, I made a mistake,” is the strong one, the one worth admiring.

    Whether I am right or not, take a quiet look at the people you have met over the years in your relationships. The ones people like, the ones who are popular, the ones whose words carry weight, are remarkably free. They do not hide or cover up their mistakes and wrongs; they say straight away, “Ah, I made a mistake. I was wrong.” When they do that, things in the relationship are easily sorted out, and people actually respect someone who talks like that. They feel grateful to them and want to be near them.

    If we cannot do that, it is because we have long told ourselves that doing it would make us look truly pathetic and inadequate, nothing but a bundle of mistakes. In reality it is the opposite.

    Why does it show more, the harder we try to hide it?

    When we want to be recognised, want to put ourselves forward and hate to lose, fights start and conflicts break out. Yet in that very process, the side of us we did not want anyone to see is laid bare instead. What we meant to hide keeps leaking out.

    Try to grab water with your hand and it all runs out of your hand. In the same way, the more we try to hide something and hold on to it, the more it all leaks away. People know. And the more we do it, the more people look at us and think, “How pathetic. How childish.”

    What happens inside us when we hide and cover up?

    Hiding and covering up can make us feel shame, but it also opens up the road to lying. We end up lying. And as we do, we keep wearing away our own worth by our own hand.

    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

  • Then What Is There for Pain in the Mind?

    Once a person is addicted, the addiction becomes his top priority, and ordinary life suffers for it. For a gambler, gambling comes before everything. Drugs cost a great deal of money, and some users, trying to raise that money, end up dealing: they need money to use, so eventually they sell. That is how a vicious circle forms.

    At this point a question usually comes up: is addiction a sin or an illness? It can be seen as both. But here I want to set that question aside and look at the mind of the person who becomes addicted without passing a verdict on him either way. The point is simply to see why a person becomes addicted, since not everyone does.

    Addiction comes in many kinds. In Korea, the government names four major addictions: alcohol, drugs, gambling and gaming. Sex addiction is also common. There is exercise addiction too, and even book addiction, which means reading too much.

    Underneath all of them, addiction is basically a way of avoiding reality, of running away from it. Why run? Because living in reality is painful. Facing it is too hard, so the person throws himself into one thing. Book addiction sounds like the harmless kind, but someone addicted to books reads so much that he can no longer manage daily life. People sometimes ask whether some addictions are good ones. There are no good addictions. In the end, every addiction is self-destructive: people addicted to exercise keep working out even after their knees are ruined.

    “Because it’s fun,” or “I just do it”

    Whatever a person gets hooked on — drink, drugs, a game — it starts out good, fun and comfortable. Take gaming. To an adult’s eye, every child looks like a gaming addict. If you have children at home, you have probably heard yourself say it: “He plays far too much. He’s addicted to that game.”

    Is it a serious gaming addiction, or does the child simply like games and play a lot? You can get a rough answer by asking. Ask your child, or any young person you think plays a lot, why he plays. If the answer is “Because it’s fun,” he is not an addict. If it is “I just do it,” you can take that as a sign of addiction.

    Why does that answer point to addiction? Because the deeper his gaming addiction goes, the less his playing comes from wanting to play. He keeps at it because the game gives him some peace of mind, not because it is fun.

    Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt

    Now take alcohol. Drink, and the body’s senses go numb. Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt, because the drink has deadened the feeling.

    Gaming numbs the senses too. Once you are in a game, you lose track of time. Every few years there is a news story about someone who kept gaming until he died of malnutrition. The body is supposed to tell a person when he is hungry. But gaming had numbed that sense in him, so even as his body ran out of nourishment, he never felt hungry.

    Self-destruction in the mind, numbness in the body

    So, psychologically, addiction pushes the person toward self-destruction, toward wrecking his own life. Physically, it numbs the person’s own senses, and that numbing is no accident: it is part of what he is after.

    For pain in the body we take a painkiller

    When something hurts in the body, what do we take? A painkiller. If you have a cold, or an ache somewhere, you take a painkiller and the pain settles down. For pain in the body, we have painkillers.

    Then what is there for pain in the mind?

    Some people answer that they pray. And that is right: people of faith pray, and in prayer they find comfort and strength from God.

    But look squarely at what actually happens. Christians, people who believe in Jesus, still get depression. There are many addicts among them, and many people with serious anger problems. Every one of these is a sign of pain in the mind.

    So why do these people, who believe in Jesus and believe in God, not get comfort and consolation and strength from God? This is the hard question, and it deserves serious thought. As at the start, the aim is not to judge anyone but to see what is happening. When a person can bring the pain in his mind to God and be comforted, he does not become addicted. But when that does not happen, and his mind is still hurting badly, he picks some other way to soothe it.

    Looking for rescue outside yourself

    You feel low, so you go out and start shopping. Keep doing that, and in time you become a shopping addict. Look closely, and addiction is the act of looking outside for the rescue that would settle the pain inside. The pain is in the mind, but the answer is sought outside. The same goes for the drink you pour because your child is giving you grief: you are angry and hurt, and the drink is there to soothe that.

    Tense all the time, without knowing it

    You may have heard of propofol, the anaesthetic used to put patients to sleep for surgery, which some people become addicted to. Whatever a person gets hooked on has some painkilling effect, and drugs like propofol in particular make the body relax.

    And the people who are going to become addicts are tense all the time. Their shoulders are always tight. The tension is so constant that they don’t even know they are tense; that is simply how they live every ordinary day. Then comes a drink, or a drug, or some activity such as gaming or shopping, and the tension eases. “Ah, that’s better. Ah, I’m all right. Something about this gives me peace.” Once a person starts finding comfort for his troubles this way, he does it again and again, and as it gets worse, he becomes an addict.

    For pain in the body there is a painkiller. For pain in the mind, what is there? That question stays open for now. But there is one question you can ask yourself first, about whatever you keep going back to: Am I doing this because it’s fun, or do I just do 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

  • One Drink, and You Cannot Hear It

    Addiction looks like pleasure-seeking. We assume the person who keeps drinking is chasing a good time. That is not what is going on. Nobody with a quiet mind goes looking for something to quiet it.

    Without inner pain, nobody becomes an addict

    A person with no inner pain cannot become an addict. Why? Because the point of an addiction is to calm yourself down, and a mind already at peace has nothing that needs calming. There is no work there for a drink to do.

    So we have to go one step further back and ask: where does inner pain come from?

    The root cause is that a person is criticising himself

    I have looked carefully for the answer over years of counselling work, and this is what I found. The root cause of a person’s inner pain is that he is criticising himself.

    Inside his head, it sounds like this: “You are trash. As if you could ever do anything. You stupid thing. You fool.” He says this to himself. He has passed that judgement on himself and decided that this is who he is.

    Some know they are doing it. Some never notice at all.

    Some people are aware that they do this: they know they think of themselves as a fool. Others never become aware of it at all.

    Whether you are aware of it or not, think what it feels like to regard yourself as a fool. You feel low, and at times you feel angry. And you are always tense, because underneath runs the question: what if people see me as a fool? People who are forever checking how others see them, ruled far too much by what others think of them, carry exactly this belief inside: “I am a fool.”

    “You are a fool. You are a fool.” Every hour of every day.

    The thought “I am a fool” does not come once and then stay put, tucked away like something in a pocket. It keeps repeating. He keeps planting the message in himself; no one else is putting it there.

    “You are a fool. You are a fool. You are a fool.” That is what goes on inside him. And he does not notice that it never stops. “You are a fool, so of course you can’t even get this right. You are a fool, so this is the only sort of life you will ever have. You are a fool, so why would anybody like you?” Every hour of his life, every minute of every hour, this keeps running. Imagine how painful it is to live with that.

    One drink, and you cannot hear the voice

    Then he has a drink. Or takes a drug. What happens in his mind at that moment? He can no longer hear the voice saying “You fool, you idiot,” because all his attention has gone to the drink or the drug.

    Once the voice goes quiet like that, how could he not get hooked? For that moment the drink saved him. The voice that calls him a fool all day long has stopped. How could he not choose that?

    So he drinks in order to survive

    He chooses it. Not for a good time: he does it to survive. The pain has grown so bad that the drink has become a place he can run to, somewhere to escape it for a while.

    And the same “I am a fool” keeps “God loves you” from sinking in

    Some of the people living with this voice are Christians, and the church gives them the message it gives everyone: “God loves you. Jesus died on the cross for you. The Son of God gave his life for one person: you.” Taken seriously, that message should lead the hearer to think: “The Son of God died for me, so I must be worth a great deal. I must be worth more than the whole world.”

    But a person like this cannot believe it. However often the people around him say it, however central it is to his own faith, it does not sink in. To him, what he believes about himself is truer than what the church tells him. Inside, it goes like this: “‘God loves you’ — yes, I understand that. But that love has nothing to do with me. I am a fool. God would never love a fool like me.”

    So when you tell him, he says, “I know.” He does not really know it. He is just saying the words. He believes he is a fool, and he has to keep that hidden. If he answered, “God does not love me,” he would be contradicting you, and contradicting something everyone around him holds to be true and right. He would expect to hear: “You idiot, don’t you even know that much?” Then people could see him as the fool he believes he is. So he says, “I know,” and that is the end of it. Nothing changes inside him, because he is already sure God would not love someone like him. In his own eyes he is not worth loving. Which is to say: he cannot love himself. He dislikes himself, even loathes himself, and that is the pain the drink was quieting. Someone who loves himself cannot become an addict.

    Knowing that you are precious

    Many Christians get stuck on the idea of loving yourself. Surely, they think, we are not meant to love ourselves; we are meant to love other people. So loving yourself seems to clash with the faith. But when the Bible talks about self-love, it means being stuck in self-centred thinking, as a small child is, and that is not the same thing at all as valuing yourself. Valuing yourself means knowing that you yourself are precious, knowing it as the plain truth about you.

    Christ died on the cross because we are precious, because we are worth dying for. God judged that we were worth it, and so he acted to save us.

    The verdict a person has passed on himself carries more weight than anything anyone says to him from outside. That one verdict, “I am a fool,” is why he cannot put the drink down, and it is also why “God loves you” does not sink in.

    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

  • They Were All Nice People. Nobody Starts Out Wanting to Kill.

    Serial killers are, almost all of them, nice people — nice as far as anybody around them could see: the sort of man people describe as someone who “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” And here is the part people tend to miss: they do not start out wanting to kill. They were not born with it. The wish to kill was not sitting under the politeness all along, waiting.

    So something carried a person from being the nice man everyone saw to being a killer. At a seminar, someone in the audience asked about exactly this, and it was the right question.

    We in this room carry emotional wounds too. Everybody does. But being wounded doesn’t make a person kill, and not having been loved doesn’t make a person kill — and yet people who do it keep appearing. Is it how badly they went unloved? Is it the environment around them? What, above all, drives the ones who take their hurt out on other people?

    I think the answer is all of those things together. But to see how they fit, you have to start further back, with what a wound actually is.

    A wound means not being loved enough to grow up healthy

    To be wounded is to have missed out on being loved: not necessarily to have had no love at all, but not enough of it to grow up healthy. And the wound does not stay the same size. It keeps growing, and what grows is the person’s sense that he was not loved.

    Then a second thing forms on top of the wound, and it is what keeps the wound growing. The child may well have received some love, and even felt it. But when a child is frightened, neglected or humiliated again and again, a belief takes shape that is stronger than the love he did receive: I was not loved. From then on, everything new that happens is taken as more proof of it.

    So he ends up like a man who owns a fortune but spends his whole life sure he is penniless. He lives not on the love he actually received but on his belief about it, and in that belief the love is smaller than it really was. The belief never checks the balance. It just keeps repeating the same verdict: that he was not loved.

    A person who cannot love himself drifts toward destruction

    A person who carries that wound, sure that he was not loved, cannot love himself. And a person who cannot love himself always heads toward destruction: the destruction of his own life, and sometimes of other people’s. If nothing gets in the way, that is where his life drifts.

    Which is worth saying slowly, because it sounds like an accusation and is not one. Hardly anyone sets out to wreck his own life. What happens is this: a person carrying a great deal of pain will keep creating the very circumstances that bring him more of it, and end up sunk in what he created. A few do this knowingly. Most have no idea they are doing it.

    So love, beginning with love for yourself, is not a nice extra to get round to some day. We have no choice but to love, because love is what keeps our lives from running toward destruction.

    Then why do only some wounded people turn violent toward others?

    First there is the degree of the wound. Wounds come in different sizes. The deeper the wound, the more a person keeps recreating the same painful circumstances, and so the more new hurt he takes on.

    Then there is a second factor: he cannot handle the anger and hatred inside him. Handling them would mean admitting to himself that he is angry, being able to tell someone about it, and calming himself down afterwards. He cannot do any of this, because nothing around him ever taught him how. So each new hurt is never dealt with; it simply piles on top of the last one, like a gauge filling up. When some later stress finally breaks through his self-control, what bursts out is not only that day’s anger but everything that has piled up behind it.

    Not inherited — environmental

    Is that inability to handle anger and hatred something a person is born with? I don’t see it as genetic. It comes from the environment. He has never lived among people who dealt with anger and hatred in those ways, and has never even seen it done, so instead of being dealt with, his anger and hatred grow stronger. Nothing around him ever showed him what to do with what he felt.

    The road to addiction: a wound around age two, and whatever is within reach

    From the wound, a life can go down two different roads: one leads into addiction, the other turns against other people. Take addiction first. When those of us who treat addiction look at how someone became an addict, we look at what happened to him at one, two and three years old. A wound suffered after the first year, around age two, makes it more likely that his road will lead to addiction.

    Later, as he grows up, the wound does its work. It leaves him anxious and frightened, and just when he is feeling that way, he is exposed to something that happens to be within his reach. Notice the order, because people often get it backwards. The wound comes first. The exposure comes second. The addiction does not start with the drug or the drink.

    Say an older cousin of his sniffs glue, and the boy keeps ending up around it. Sooner or later he thinks: maybe I’ll try it too. Sex, alcohol and cigarettes can reach him the same way, through the people and places around him. He drifts toward one of them, and then the decisive thing happens: it relieves the anxiety underneath everything, the anxiety the wound left him with. After that he is quickly absorbed in it, because while he is doing it he does not feel the anxiety, or the depression, or the sadness.

    So he sinks further in. And far enough in, one addiction leads to another — a second addiction on top of the first — and from then on the two are tangled together and keep going. Trace an addiction back far enough and you find a wound at its start.

    The other road: fine in everyday life, until one hard day

    The other road turns outward, against other people. The man on this road gets along fine from day to day. Nobody near him sees a problem; his everyday life goes on as normal, and the anger piled up inside him stays out of sight. Then life hits him with one heavy blow of stress — he loses his job, or a relationship ends — and that becomes the trigger that sets it all off.

    At some point, as everything piled up inside him bursts out, he kills a person, and in the killing he feels relief. Killing gives him a sense of omnipotence, the feeling of being all-powerful. Once that feeling has kicked in, it drives him to kill again and again.

    Which returns us to where we started. He was nice, and he was not hiding a wish to kill behind it. That urge was not in him at the beginning. What he had was a wound of a certain size, an environment that never let him learn to handle his anger and hatred, and then one hard day that set it all off.

    The same wound does not weigh the same in two people

    Two people can suffer an identical wound and feel it differently. One of them takes it harder. You could call it a kind of tolerance: some people can absorb more of a blow than others. So how big a wound becomes depends not only on the blow but on the person it lands on.

    Every treatment for a wound comes down to love

    Any treatment for a wound comes down, in the end, to love — to a person coming to feel, deep inside, “I am loved. I am respected. I am treated as someone precious.” Once that feeling is established in him, it gives him the strength to push away the negative things he carries, such as the belief that he was not loved, and they lose their grip.

    Without that feeling, the negative things stay stuck to him and will not come away. And in that condition, even trying to love himself is enormously hard work.

    So when someone who was nice to everyone ends up killing, what we need to look at is what lay between the nice man and the killing: a wound of a certain depth; no environment in which his anger and hatred could ever be handled; and no experience of being loved strong enough to push out the belief that he was not loved.

    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

  • The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head

    Someone sends you a short message. Before long you have decided what it meant, what they think of you, what they would say if you brought it up, and how you would feel afterward. In your head the whole conversation has already happened, and all of it is settled. None of it has been checked with the person.

    Then you do not bring it up. Weeks go by, and you are just as sure as you were at the start. The only thing that changes is that the story in your head gets more detailed every week.

    You cannot find out who you are on your own

    You learn what you are like, and what other people make of you, from how they actually respond when you speak to them. On your own, your guess about what they would say never meets anything that pushes back against it, corrects it, or surprises you. And with nothing new coming in, you cannot tell the difference between what the other person really thinks and what you fear, or hope, they think.

    People often tell a story to make this point: a child raised by wolves. When he is found, he walks on all fours. He is clearly a human being, yet he takes himself for a wolf, because wolves are the ones he grew up among. Real cases like this are few and most are disputed, so take the story as an illustration, not as evidence. But you can see the point in any family: we learn what we are from how the people around us respond to us.

    When you never actually talk to the other person, your mind still supplies their answer. But it builds that answer out of what you already expected, so the answer can only confirm the fear, or the hope, you started with.

    Guessing comes easier than talking things over

    Left alone with a question about someone, a person does not stay undecided. They become more certain.

    “She likes me; that is why she said that.” “That tone was on purpose.” “They are talking about me right now.” The people involved may simply have been saying what they wanted to say and getting on with their day; it may have had nothing to do with you. Still, the guessing runs on and always reaches a verdict, because the one making the guess is also the one judging it.

    We are more practiced at imagining than at talking, because imagining came first: it is with us from the very beginning of life, while talking things over with another person is something we learn later. So when a conversation feels risky, the mind falls back on the older, easier habit. It plays both parts itself, so you never have to let the other person see what you feel, and you never hear an answer you did not make up yourself.

    Notice how comfortable this is. In your head, the other person says only the lines you give them, when you expect them to. Nothing catches you off guard. Nobody asks you a question you were not ready for. You guess, you have your feelings about it, and it ends there.

    The sentence that has to be said out loud

    Say you are fairly sure someone likes you, and you like them too. There is exactly one thing to do with that: go and tell them, in words. “I like you. Do you like me?”

    But you would probably rather not say it. You are afraid that if you do, the other person will run away.

    They might, if they do not feel the same way, and that hurts. But now you know something you could not have known before you asked. Asking out loud matters because it lets the other person give their own answer, which may not be the one you predicted. Until you ask, every new detail comes from you, and the relationship you imagine keeps growing with nothing real to correct it.

    The frustration you were avoiding is the one you needed

    When you finally speak, you may get an answer you did not want, and think, “I thought they liked me. They don’t.” That letdown is what psychologists call frustration: the disappointment of not getting what you hoped for.

    In that disappointment you feel, and not just know, that there is a real world outside your head. The other person turns out to have wishes and feelings of their own that do not follow the script you wrote for them. Frustration that is too great, or that humiliates you, can do real harm. But a disappointment you can bear teaches you two things: that you can survive an answer you did not want, and that the answer tells you something you can use. Meeting reality this way, again and again, is how you learn to live in it.

    D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about the “good-enough mother.” She is not a perfect mother. At first she meets her baby’s needs almost completely. Then, as the baby becomes able to cope, she meets them a little less completely and a little later. Through those small gaps, the child faces the world a little at a time, in amounts it can manage. Heinz Kohut, another psychoanalyst, called frustration of this bearable size optimal frustration. Too much frustration makes it harder for a child to accept reality; the right amount helps the child accept it bit by bit. Neither of them saw this as a parenting failure to be apologized for. A child who is looked after perfectly, one hundred percent of the time, does not mature.

    Adults need this kind of bearable frustration too, and the way to get it is to ask. If you never ask, the guessing simply goes on, and nothing in the guessing itself will ever bring it to a stop.

    Not asking has another cost that is easy to miss. Every conversation you rehearse in your head and never actually have leaves you a little more convinced that you already know what people are like. That makes you a little less likely to try the next real conversation. So, quietly, you grow less practiced at talking with people while you grow more certain about them.

    What the avoidance costs later

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung summed up what avoiding pain costs in a sentence worth keeping: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Legitimate suffering is the pain a person simply has to go through in the course of living. Neurosis, meaning lasting anxiety and other symptoms, is what grows in its place when that pain is avoided.

    Addiction works the same way. There is a specific pain — a conversation you dread, a loss, a refusal, a limit you have to accept — and instead of going through it, you reach for something that stops the feeling for a while, the way a painkiller does. That original pain had a cause, and it could have come to an end. But each time you avoid it, new problems pile up on top of it: you come to depend on what you reach for, you start keeping secrets, and all of this causes trouble of its own. So the suffering that comes later is larger than the pain you put off.

    What you use does not have to be alcohol or a drug. The phone does it. Work does it. So does a relationship that exists only inside your own head, where the other person always behaves, is always available, and has never once said anything you did not write for them.

    Asking takes about four seconds

    There is nothing wrong with a mind that runs ahead. It is a good mind and a quick one. The only trouble is that no one ever contradicts it, and ideas that are never contradicted drift further and further from what is really happening.

    So the fix is not more rehearsal. If the other person is not someone who insults or threatens you, go to them and say one sentence, a question that leaves room for their answer, and wait to hear it: “When you said that, I thought you meant ___. Did you?” They may say yes, or they may say no. Either way, you hear something you did not write yourself, and the imagined conversation becomes a real one.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. Collected Works, Vol. 11, para. 129. — “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — the graduated failure of adaptation.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — optimal frustration.

    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

  • Crying at the Television

    Some people cry at small things. They cry at somebody else’s sadness. They cry watching TV, and once they start, the tears keep coming. This happens a lot to people who cannot accept their own feelings — people who hold back what they feel about their own lives.

    Crying like that means a great deal of sadness has built up inside. That sadness comes from a loss in their own life that was never mourned. To mourn a loss is to weep over it until you can accept it and let it go. Because that never happened, the loss is still unresolved, and the sadness from it is still there.

    Why the tears come out in front of a TV drama

    When you cry like that in front of the TV, the tears are not really about the drama. You are crying about your own life.

    When thinking about your own life is too painful or too shameful, you hold the feeling back. In front of a drama, though, you can cry. The sadness moves onto the story on the screen, and you end up watching your own life in it. You cry for the character, but the force of the tears comes from your own loss, which the scene has stirred up. If that loss had been mourned, the sadness would not have to come out through a drama.

    Therapy helps a person accept what they could not bear

    Mourning, then, is about accepting: letting a painful fact in. That is also what therapy does. The tears come from a loss that was never accepted, so therapy helps the person let in the painful fact they have been keeping out.

    People often think therapy works by breaking down a person’s defenses. A defense is the way a person wraps themselves up tight so they do not have to feel something. But the wrapping is there for a reason: at the time, some fact or feeling was more than they could bear. Therapy does not try to strip the wrapping away. Instead, it helps the person accept the very thing the wrapping was keeping out.

    It sounds like a paradox, but that is what heals: accepting the very thing the person could least bear to accept.

    The same scene, every time

    Some scenes are sad for everybody. A child longs to see a parent and cannot. Anyone watching would be moved by that. That kind of crying is ordinary; everybody shares it.

    The crying I am talking about is different. The tears keep coming in one particular kind of situation. Whenever that situation turns up, or anything like it, the tears come again.

    When the tears keep returning to the same kind of scene like that, they are coming from a wound in the person’s own past.

    Knowing a painful fact is not the same as accepting it

    To mourn a loss is to accept that it happened — and you get to that acceptance by weeping over it.

    Say someone did not get their mother’s love. Something that should have come to them never came, and that is a loss. So what they have to accept is this: “I did not get my mother’s love.”

    But that fact will not sink in. In their head, they may know their mother never gave them that love. In their heart, it still does not feel final, because they keep hoping that one day she will change and notice their pain. So each time she lets them down, it does not feel like “that is just how she is.” It feels like being rejected all over again. That is why they keep ending up frustrated and hurt.

    Here is how that looks. A woman said to her mother, “My arm hurts.” Her mother said, “Go to the doctor.” The daughter was upset by that, and the two of them ended up arguing.

    Why did “go to the doctor” upset her so much? Because she was not only reporting a pain. She was asking her mother to care. This mother had never paid her much attention, and the daughter was still hoping for the attention she had missed as a child. So a sensible, practical answer felt like one more refusal. The argument was not really about the arm. Underneath it was an old request that had never been met: “Notice me. Care that I am hurting.”

    The daughter knows her mother is not going to change. She will say so herself, and say she has stopped trying. But in the way she actually lives, she is still clinging to that hope, still asking to be loved. When the love she hopes for doesn’t come, she is hurt, and the asking gets louder. That is how “My arm hurts” turned into an argument.

    Never having had something is a loss too

    People usually distinguish between two things. Deprivation is when something you needed was never there and was never given to you. Loss is when you had something and then it was gone. I count both as loss. An example will make this easier to see.

    Picture a child who has had no mother from the day he was born. There was never a mother in his life. He is raised somehow, and he grows up. Is that child hurt by having had no mother, or not?

    He is. He carries it with him all his life. The absence of a mother is itself the wound. A growing child needs a mother, and for this child she never came.

    The same goes for babies adopted right after birth, too young to know anything about it. Even for them, the fact that they were adopted will not sink in. Adoptive parents are advised to tell the child early anyway, because children do find out, and finding out later makes it worse.

    An adopted child at least has adoptive parents. A child left without parents at birth and raised by substitute caregivers instead never knows what it is to have a mother in those early years. He never had a mother to lose. Even so, I count that absence as a loss.

    And this kind of loss does not happen only to children with no mother at all. It also happens to a child whose mother was in the kitchen every day and never once looked at him. A child whose mother died can point at the empty chair. This child has nothing to point at — and the hole is the same size.

    So this is a loss too: “I wanted to be loved, and the love never came.”

    This loss has to be wept over

    You have to weep over it — really weep.

    The weeping is about particular moments: “Where were my parents when I needed them? When I was in pain, where were they?” You weep over those moments until you can accept them as they were. Then, little by little, you stop clinging — you stop going back to the same parent again and again for the care they were never able to give.

    If you keep clinging instead, this is what happens. First comes anger at the world, and behind it the thought: “My parents never looked after me.” Then, as that anger keeps coming back, people go different ways. Some sink into frustration. Others hold on even tighter, like the woman with the sore arm, and go on asking to be loved.

    A therapist’s job is to help a person accept that the love they needed never came. But accepting it takes strength. Think what it costs to say out loud that your mother never loved you, and not take it back an hour later — to sit still with it, not phone her, not decide it wasn’t that bad after all. You need to be standing firm inside before you can take in something that heavy. So therapy builds that inner strength first. The weeping comes after.

    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

  • All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode

    I get home and the TV is on before I have put anything down. I could not tell you what is playing. What is playing was never the point. I have lived like this for most of my life.

    It runs while I eat. It runs while I shower. It is still on when I fall asleep.

    What happens if you turn it off?

    Try it tonight. You won’t last long.

    The moment it goes quiet, something starts coming up in you. A feeling, a thought, something from years ago that never got settled. Facing it is painful, and tonight you would rather not.

    So you reach for something to fill the quiet instead. I call this a self-prescription: a remedy you give yourself, with no doctor involved, so that you do not have to feel what would otherwise come up. There are many of these, and the television is the easiest to reach: nowhere to go, nothing to get ready, nobody to call. You press one button, and it keeps going on its own long after you have stopped paying attention.

    If you had it on for the show, you would switch it off when the show ended. So the telling thing is not that you turn the TV on. It is that you keep it on — through meals, through the shower, into sleep — so the house is never quiet long enough for you to feel lonely or afraid, or for an old memory to surface.

    What is the TV holding off?

    The first thing is loneliness.

    Look at older people who live by themselves. Their TV runs all day. Anyone who has visited a grandmother living alone knows what this is like: nobody is watching, and the sound never stops. It runs while she does the dishes. It runs while she is on the phone to someone else. When you arrive, she doesn’t turn it off; she turns it down. And when the talk goes quiet for a moment, the volume is back up before either of you has noticed.

    If you ever ask her why it is always on, she says she gets bored.

    But being bored means having nothing to do, and she keeps the TV on while she is doing the dishes and while she is talking on the phone. The sound is not there to fill empty time. It is there so the house sounds as if someone else is in it. When she says she is bored, she means she is lonely.

    How I lived as a boy

    I went to school and came home, and once I was home I did nothing but watch television. It was my only window on the world.

    I had no friends. At school, the only conversation I could manage with the other kids was retelling whatever had been on TV the night before. For a while that worked: talking about last night’s episode was enough to keep me part of a group. That lasted only as long as the talk stayed on television. The moment it moved on to something else, I had nothing to say. I always saw my silence coming about four seconds before anyone else noticed it. So I kept steering the talk back to television, and I got good at it. But steering a conversation is not the same as taking part in it, and the others could tell the difference.

    That may sound sociable, but it was a way of making sure the talk never turned to me. As long as we were discussing a TV show, I could stay in the group without anyone finding out what I felt, what I wanted, or what I was afraid of.

    So loneliness, for me, had little to do with there being nobody around. There were people around — a whole school full of them. What I lacked was any idea how to turn one of them into a friend. That is something you learn while you are growing up, by getting it wrong many times in front of other people. I spent those years indoors with the TV on.

    In front of the TV, nobody can hurt you

    That is the second thing the TV holds off: fear.

    Get close to a person, and sooner or later you will get hurt. Someone you like may not like you. You may be turned down, or merely tolerated, which is worse. So you go around holding your breath, checking faces, reading meaning into a silence that probably meant nothing.

    And there is the effort. You buy the coffee. You remember what they told you last time and ask about it — which means that back then you were really listening, even though there was nothing in it for you. When somebody takes an interest in you, you return it, even on a day when you have nothing left to give. Relationships run on energy, and you are the one who has to keep supplying it.

    A television asks for none of this. It entertains you without your doing anything, it never turns you down, and it does not leave until you switch it off. While it is on, you do not have to feel how lonely you are, or how afraid. You get something that feels a little like company, without ever having to show anything of yourself, sit through an awkward moment, or find out whether anyone actually wants to be close to you.

    Think of the small lift you get when somebody looks up as you come in, or says your name, or laughs along with you half a second after you start. It tells you that someone has noticed you. A television never gives you that. Nobody on the screen knows there is anyone in the room. The sound fills the silence, but not your need for another person. That is why four hours of it leaves you exactly as lonely as when you started, and four hours older.

    And then it gets worse

    Spend long enough with a television for company, and problems start to show up in your relationships with real people.

    Of course they do. Being with people is learned by doing, and you weren’t doing it. So conversations start going wrong in small ways — a pause you don’t know how to fill, a joke that lands oddly and sits there, an invitation you answer half a beat too slowly so that it sounds like a no.

    You would never mention any of this to anyone. You would just rather not go through an evening like that again for a while. Then the while gets longer.

    An evening at home feels safer, because nothing can go wrong in it. But every evening you stay away is practice you miss, and practice is what makes talking to people easier. So the next invitation feels a little harder, staying home looks a little better, and around it goes.

    The TV itself is not what harms you. The trouble is that it is very good at keeping you from feeling lonely or afraid. The alternative to the TV, being with real people, is hard, and for a long time it gives little back before it gets easier.

    The TV still goes on when I come in

    It does. That hasn’t changed much.

    What has changed is that some nights I turn it off and just sit there. When the sound stops, the feelings I spent all those years avoiding are right where they were: the loneliness, the fear of people. Decades later, neither has gone anywhere.

    Usually I end up turning it back on. The difference is that now, before I do, I stop for a moment and notice that they are still there. I never used to do even that.

    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

  • Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak

    There is probably a pen within reach of you. Pick it up, or just look at it.

    You know what it is immediately. That’s worth pausing on, because that knowledge didn’t come from the pen. It came from you. Every scrap of information that let you land on pen was gathered before this moment — years before, most of it. If you’d never seen one, you’d be holding an object you couldn’t name.

    So even when you look at a piece of plastic on a desk, you are seeing it through your past. Before you have had a single thought about it, earlier experience has already told you what kind of thing it is, what it’s called and what it’s for.

    What would it take to see the pen as it is?

    Suppose you could set all of that down — everything you already know about pens. No memory telling you what it is, no name arriving ahead of the object. Just the thing, right now. What would you feel?

    Wonder. You’d be looking at something for the first time in your life.

    But nobody feels wonder looking at a pen. You think pen, register the color, and move on. In that half-second the past has already arrived and done the work for you.

    And notice you can’t catch it happening. There’s no moment where you hold an unnamed object and then supply the name. The name is there the instant you see the object. Whatever the mind is doing, it has finished before you notice anything happening.

    I’m not saying it’s impossible to see a thing as it is. I’m saying it’s very, very hard, and that in ordinary life we almost never do it.

    Why do we judge people so quickly?

    Now put a person where the pen was — someone you have only just met.

    You haven’t even learned their name. A few sentences have gone back and forth, most of them about nothing. And somewhere in there you’ve already made up your mind: this person is fine, or this person is not. If someone asked what this person had done to earn that, you couldn’t say. There’s only the verdict, already in.

    And it isn’t just a yes or no, either. Before the conversation has really started, you have a whole small story about them — what they’re probably like, how the rest of this conversation is going to go, whether you’ll want to be near them again. None of that came from those few sentences. There wasn’t enough in them to build it from.

    That verdict forms the same way the word pen came to you: instantly, and from the past. Something in this person’s face, tone of voice or posture resembles someone you knew before, and your mind reacts to them as if they were that earlier person — before you know enough about the one actually in front of you.

    That is why the judgment arrives quickly and feels certain. You experience it as seeing the new person clearly, not as remembering how an earlier person made you feel.

    Who gathered the information you judge people by?

    The important question is who first decided what people are like. You did, as a child. A child who knows only a few adults may conclude, “Quiet people are angry” or “Confident people will humiliate me,” and carry that conclusion into later encounters.

    Because the conclusion becomes part of how you see people, it never shows up as a belief you could check and correct. It simply looks like the way people are. You notice what fits it and overlook what doesn’t, so the old conclusion keeps feeling accurate.

    The conclusions came in small pieces. So that’s what the world is like. So people don’t like me. Thousands of those, collected quietly, until they settled into one steady view of how things are — a whole private philosophy, put together by you as a child, when you had met perhaps four adults and had no idea that was a small sample. Most of it was in place by the time you were six or seven.

    Why doesn’t that childhood view ever get corrected?

    Because as soon as it was finished, you started looking at the people you met through it — and what you saw seemed to be about them, not something you brought with you.

    That’s the part worth sitting with. The conclusions a child reached weren’t kept as guesses, to be checked later against better evidence. They were kept as settled — as how things are. And a settled view doesn’t wait to be tested. It goes out ahead of you and shapes what you find.

    That settled view works as an expectation, and the expectation shapes what you notice and how you act. If you expect rejection, you notice a delayed reply, miss signs of warmth, and speak more cautiously. The other person responds to that caution, and their response becomes new evidence that people do not want you. Each time this happens, the childhood conclusion feels less like a conclusion and more like simply seeing what is there.

    When someone rubs you the wrong way, you may well be seeing them through that old view.

    Can you stop judging people this fast?

    No. I don’t think you can, and I wouldn’t put effort into trying.

    The judgment isn’t a decision, so you can’t simply decide differently. It arrives finished, the instant you see their face. There’s no moment in between where you could step in.

    Why, then, do I keep saying that what you see is the past? Because something starts to change when a person can admit, plainly and without softening it, that what they’re seeing may not be true. Not that it’s false — you have no way of knowing that for sure. Just that it may not be true. That admission is small, and it isn’t comfortable, but it’s the only place I’ve seen anything actually shift. The first impression still comes. What changes is what the person does with it.

    So let the first verdict come, but don’t take it as the final word on the other person. Take it as information about you: who this person reminds you of, what you expect next, and when you first learned to expect it.

    The next time someone puts you off in the first ten seconds, you don’t have to argue yourself out of the feeling or feel guilty for having it. Just notice that it came too fast to have been about them. Knowing that your picture of them comes from your past won’t change the picture. What it does is make you less likely to decide who they are on the strength of something you concluded as a child. That is most of what you can do.

    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

  • “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack

    The day is done and you go back over it. The meeting. The message you sent too fast. The thing you meant to say and didn’t. By the end of it you are smaller than when you started. Somewhere in the middle a sentence arrived on its own: “Of course I got it wrong. That’s just me.” It arrived so smoothly it sounded like the truth. You would call all of that looking at yourself honestly. But when you look at yourself honestly, you don’t usually come away bruised.

    There is no reason to dislike yourself this much

    Is there really a reason to dislike yourself that much? There isn’t.

    You keep running yourself down anyway. The criticism doesn’t ask your permission, and it doesn’t stop just because you decided there was no reason for it. It is still going when you turn off the light.

    So the first step is to notice it while it is happening. Catch the moment when looking back at what you did turns into an attack on who you are: “I sent the message too quickly” becomes “I ruin everything, because this is just who I am.” Once you can say to yourself, “I am attacking myself right now,” you can say the next thing too: “There is no reason for this.”

    That is what it really means to tell yourself “it’s okay.” It does not mean you did nothing wrong. It keeps what you did separate from who you are. One careless remark may call for an apology, but the world doesn’t end because you said it, and saying it doesn’t make you a careless or worthless person. That is true, and that is why you can say “it’s okay” and mean it.

    Looking back is only looking back

    Reflection sounds like a big, serious word. It means one simple thing: you look back.

    Most of the day runs without much thinking. Then you stop for a minute and look into your own mind. “Why did I cut in like that at the meeting?” Sometimes an answer comes up on its own: “Oh — I wanted them to notice my idea first.”

    That’s it. That is all reflection is. You wanted something, or you didn’t want to do something, and now you see it. The answer ends there.

    Look at what an answer like that leaves out. It doesn’t grade you. It doesn’t say what kind of person you are. You wanted something, you can see that you wanted it, and seeing it is the result.

    Transactional analysis, one school of psychology, has a name for the part of you that looks back like this: the Adult. The Adult simply notes what happened, what you wanted and what followed. It says, “I avoided calling her because I didn’t want an argument,” and does not add, “Therefore I am a coward.”

    The Adult works like this all day long. The milk is finished. The train is late. You didn’t enjoy that dinner as much as you expected to. You handle facts like these without adding anything to them.

    Then a second voice says, “Right, you’re so greedy”

    Now take the same small want: “Oh — I wanted them to notice my idea first.” Sometimes, before you have even finished looking, a different line gets there first: “Right, you’re so greedy.”

    That is not reflection. It is what transactional analysis calls the Parent: the part of you that repeats judgments you heard over and over as a child, from your parents or teachers. Nobody has to say them to you anymore; you say them to yourself. And because the criticism now comes in your own voice, it sounds like the truth about you rather than an old judgment.

    But look at what that voice is reacting to. Wanting something is not greed. Wanting is a plain, innocent thing. You wanted them to notice your idea first. You wanted one evening with nothing owed to anyone. You didn’t want to call her and have an argument. Those sentences say what you wanted, and nothing more.

    Then a line gets stapled on the end: “You only ever think about yourself. You’re so selfish.” You call the whole thing self-reflection and go to bed.

    A moral word turns looking into scoring

    What gets stapled on the end is a verdict on what kind of person you are: greedy, selfish. These are moral words — they rate you as a good or bad person. The moment one of them attaches itself, the Parent has taken over.

    “You didn’t want to do it.” That is still looking back. “You didn’t want to do it, so you’re selfish” is something else entirely. The first sentence only watches. The second puts a score on you.

    Observing and judging can feel alike, because both involve thinking about yourself. The difference shows in what you are left with. Observing gives you something specific you can use: “I agreed because I was afraid of disappointing her.” Judging gives you a verdict on your whole self: “I am weak.” Once you have that verdict, there is nothing left to look into.

    So check what you are left with afterward. If you understand why you did it, and you can see what you might do differently next time, you were reflecting. If you only feel smaller and more hopeless, the reflection turned into punishment.

    “I really am selfish” isn’t always a judgment

    Sometimes “I really am selfish” sounds like a judgment and isn’t one. It isn’t reflection either, because it is not about one thing you wanted; it is about who you are. It is a third thing: a realization.

    But isn’t that the same kind of verdict as “You’re so selfish”? The word is the same. What is different is what it is for. A realization isn’t there to blame you or punish you. You simply see a fact — “I really am selfish” — and instead of arguing with it, you accept it.

    Picture a mother or father who has told their children for years, “Everything I did, I did for you.” Then one day they realize what was really going on: “I used them. I used my children for my own sake. I really did live a selfish life.”

    What happens next shows that this was a realization and not an attack. They go to their children and apologize: “I never thought about what was going on inside you. I only thought about myself.” The realization hurts, but it doesn’t end with them beating themselves up. They start listening to their children and treating them differently.

    So the same words, “I really am selfish,” can do two different jobs. Said as an attack, they end in pain, and nothing changes. Said as a realization, they lead you to take responsibility and do something concrete: apologize, or respond differently next time.

    “It’s okay” only works in the right order

    If you learn to say “it’s okay” before you can notice the attack while it is happening, you will slap it on everything. It’s okay, it’s okay — like a bandage you keep in your pocket for every scratch. Underneath, nothing changes, because you never saw the attack in the first place.

    Knowing something in your head and experiencing it yourself are two different things. You could read about “it’s okay” many times, in many places, and it would still only get you as far as “Ah, I see.” That is getting to know the idea. It has not yet become yours.

    It becomes yours on the day you go through the steps yourself, with nobody pushing you: you catch the attack mid-swing, you see there is no reason for it, and “it’s okay” comes out of that — in that order. An “it’s okay” that comes this way carries weight. You can hear the difference in your own voice when you say it.

    Cross out the moral word and read what’s left

    Find one moral word you used against yourself today, one that left you feeling smaller. Greedy. Selfish. Lazy. Then write down the whole sentence it came in.

    Now cross that word out, ask yourself what you actually wanted right then, and write the answer in its place. What you wanted is what is left once the moral word is gone. “I was so greedy today” becomes “I wanted them to notice my idea first.” “I’m so lazy” becomes “I wanted to rest.” “Why am I this selfish?” might become “I wanted someone to look after me a little today.”

    Read the new sentence out loud, once. Then check one thing and nothing else. Is it less savage toward you than the first version was? That is all tonight asks of you. You are not deciding whether it is true, and you are not deciding what to do about it.

    That new sentence is the Adult talking. It tells you what you wanted, and then it stops. Nothing in it is asking you to be sorry.

    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