Inner Work Notes

Category: Psychoanalysis

  • Then What Is There for Pain in the Mind?

    Addiction takes first place. Once a person is in it, ordinary life gets obstructed around the thing, and the thing is what comes first in the day. For a gambler, gambling is first in line. Drugs cost a great deal of money, and raising that money is how a user ends up a dealer — he needs money to use, so eventually he sells. That is how the vicious circle closes on itself.

    There is a question that arrives before any of the rest: is addiction a sin or an illness? You can hold both at once. What follows looks at the mind of the person who becomes addicted without passing a verdict on him. Not everyone becomes addicted, after all.

    There are a great many kinds. The government in Korea designates four major addictions: alcohol, drugs, gambling, gaming — roughly that list. Sex addiction is widespread. There is exercise addiction, and there is book addiction — reading too much of the time.

    Underneath all of them, becoming addicted is avoiding reality. Running from it. Book addiction sounds like the harmless kind, but the reader stops being able to run his own day. People do ask whether some addictions aren’t good ones. There are no good addictions.

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

    At the beginning it is good, it is fun, it is comfortable. That holds whichever substance got picked. Take gaming. To an adult eye every child looks like a gaming addict; with children in the house you hear yourself saying he plays far too much, he’s addicted to that game (When a Child Stops Listening, You Should Be Clapping).

    Serious gaming addiction, or a child who simply likes games and plays a lot of them — the difference comes out roughly if you ask. Ask a child, ask a young adult. “Because it’s fun.” That one is not an addict. “I just do it.” That one can be read as addiction.

    The deeper gaming addiction runs, the less the playing is about wanting to play. It is done because playing brings the mind a certain amount of peace. Not because it is fun.

    Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt

    Alcohol works the same way. Drink, and the body’s sensation goes numb. Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt, because the sense has been deadened.

    Sit at a game and you lose track of the hours. Every five years or so a news item comes around about someone who died of malnutrition while gaming. The body is supposed to report hunger. The sense is numbed, so the nutrition drains out of him and the hunger signal never reaches him as a sensation. Gaming numbed that sense.

    Self-destruction on the mind’s side, numbness on the body’s

    So read addiction psychologically and it carries an aim of self-destruction; read it physically and it numbs the person’s own senses. That is a purpose as well. It means the thing has a purposefulness in it that wrecks the person’s own life.

    For pain in the body we take a painkiller

    When something hurts in the body, what do we take? A painkiller. A cold, an ache somewhere — a painkiller, and the pain settles down. Pain in the body, painkiller.

    Then what is there for pain in the mind?

    Some people answer that they pray. People with faith say that prayer is where they receive comfort and strength from God.

    But look steadily at what is actually there. People who believe in Jesus get depression. Among people who believe in Jesus there are a great many addicts. Among believers there are a great many with disorders of anger. Every one of those is a sign that there is pain in the mind.

    So why does someone who believes in Jesus, who believes in God, not get comfort and consolation and strength from God? That is the point where the difficulty begins, and it is a serious one to sit with. It stays what it was at the start — a look without a verdict.

    The rescue gets looked for outside

    The mood goes grey, so you go out and start shopping. And that is how a shopping addict gets made. Look at it closely and addiction is the act of looking outside for the rescue that would settle the pain inside. The pain is in the mind, and the solution is hunted for outside. A child is giving you grief, so you have a drink (Not Completely Released. Just Soothed Again.).

    They don’t know they are tense

    Most people have heard of propofol. Part of what addiction offers is a painkilling effect, and drugs of that sort in particular slacken the body.

    And the people who are going to become addicts are tense all the time. The shoulders are always holding something. They don’t know they are tense, so they live every ordinary day that way. Then comes the drink, or the drug, or some behaviour, and it lets go. Oh — comfortable. Oh — that’s all right. Something here is putting me at ease.

    For pain in the body there is a painkiller. For pain in the mind, what is there? The question does not close here. But there is one question that can be set down in front of it first. 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 gets filed under pleasure. He is chasing a good time, the account goes. The account is wrong at the root. Nobody with a quiet mind goes looking for something to quiet it.

    A person with no pain in him cannot become an addict

    A person with no pain in his mind cannot become an addict. The purpose the thing serves is to settle him down, and a mind already at peace has nothing that needs settling. There is no work there for a drink to do.

    So the question moves one step back: where does pain in a mind come from.

    The root cause is that he is criticising himself

    Look for it carefully enough, over years of consulting-room work, and this is what turns up. The root cause of pain in a human mind is that the person is criticising himself.

    You are trash. What could you possibly do. You stupid thing. You fool. He passed that judgement on himself, set his identity there, and left it standing.

    Some know they are doing it. Some cannot make it conscious at all.

    Some people can bring it to consciousness — they know they are holding themselves as a fool. For others it never becomes conscious at all.

    Conscious or not, ask what it feels like to hold yourself as a fool. It feels low. Some of the time it comes out as anger. And it is tense, permanently, because of the question underneath: what if people take me for a fool. These are the people swung around too easily by what others think of them.

    You are a fool. You are a fool. Every hour of a life.

    The thought that I am a fool does not go into a pocket and sit there quietly once it has been had. It runs again. He keeps planting the message in himself — and he is the one planting it.

    You are a fool. You are a fool. You are a fool. That is what is going on in there. And he has no idea that it is going on. You are a fool, so of course you could not manage even that. You are a fool, so this is the only sort of life available to you. You are a fool, so why would anybody like you. Every hour of a life, every minute inside the hour, this keeps running. Think what it costs to carry that.

    One drink, and you cannot hear it

    And then. He has a drink. Puts a drug in. What happens in the mind at that moment? You fool. You idiot. He cannot hear it. The whole of his attention has gone elsewhere.

    With the voice switched off like that, how is he supposed to stay out of addiction? For that moment the drink saved him. The voice that spends all day calling him a fool has stopped calling him a fool. How is he supposed to not choose that.

    So he does it in order to live

    He chooses it. He is doing it in order to live. In order to live. The pain got so bad that the drink turned into a place he could run to and be out of it for a while.

    And the same wall stops “God loves you”

    Some of the people carrying this are Christians, and the church hands them the message it hands everybody: “God loves you. He went to the cross for you; the son of God gave up his life for one particular person, you.” Taken at face value that says something enormous about the hearer: I must be worth a great deal. More than the whole world is worth.

    And it is not believed. However many times it is said beside him, however central it is to the faith he belongs to, it does not go in. The belief he holds about himself is the truer of the two. God loves you — yes, understood. But that love has nothing to do with me. I am a fool. There is no chance God loves a fool like me.

    So you tell him, and he says: I know. He does not know. He is saying words. He is a fool who has to keep the fool hidden, and you have put in front of him a thing everyone agrees is true and right — can he argue with that? Argue and it comes back as: you idiot, you do not even know that much. So he says I know, and there it ends. Nothing inside him moves, because he already knows God would not love somebody like him. Which is to say: he cannot love himself. What comes next when a person cannot do that, I have written about in Fail to Love Yourself and It Goes Straight to Abuse. There Is No Middle Ground.

    Knowing that you are of worth

    Christians tend to snag here. Surely we are not meant to love ourselves; we are meant to love other people. The two look as though they collide, but sitting inside self-centred thinking and holding yourself as worth something are not the same thing at all. To hold yourself as precious means knowing that you yourself are of worth — knowing it as a fact about you.

    It was because we are of worth, because we were worth that much, that the death on the cross happened. God judged it worth doing, and out of that judgement came the situation meant to save us.

    The verdict you passed on yourself carries more weight than anything said to you from outside. That is why the drink cannot be put down and why “God loves you” cannot get in — one place produces both.

    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 nice people. All of them. Nice as far as anybody could see — the sort of man people describe as someone who “could get along fine without any laws.” And here is the part that gets skipped: they do not start out holding the desire and the urge to kill. It was not issued to them at birth. It was not sitting under the politeness all along, waiting.

    So something carried a person from the first place to the second. A question came from the floor at a seminar, and it was the right one to ask.

    We were wounded too. Everybody was wounded. Being wounded doesn’t make a person do that, and not having been loved doesn’t make a person do that — and yet people who do it keep appearing. Is it the intensity of the love they didn’t get? Is it the environment outside them? What is the large factor in the ones who put it outward?

    I think everything that question contains is in the answer. But to get at it you have to start further back, with what a wound actually is.

    A wound is the shape of not having been loved

    To be wounded is to have missed the experience that goes by the name of love. The wound is that shape — the shape of not having been loved — and it keeps growing in that shape, enlarging as evidence for the same conclusion. Not loved enough, in any case, to grow up healthily on what arrived.

    Then a second thing attaches, and this is the one that does the long work. Some love may have been given and may even have reached the child. But repeated experiences of fear, neglect, or humiliation organise those memories around a stronger belief: I was not loved. From then on, new events are read as further evidence for the same conclusion.

    From that point the person is no longer living off what he received. He is living off the belief about what he received, and the two are not the same size. You can hold a fortune and spend your life certain you are penniless — I have written about that elsewhere, in The Safe You Don’t Know You Own. The belief never checks the balance. It only keeps issuing the sentence.

    Where a person cannot love himself, it runs destructive

    Where there is a wound, the person cannot love himself. And where a person cannot love himself, it always goes destructive. Let it run and that is the direction it runs in.

    Which is worth saying slowly, because it sounds like an accusation and is not one. Nobody sits down and decides to wreck his own life. This is what the slope does when nothing is put in its way. A person carrying a great deal of pain will, without knowing that he is doing it, keep arranging the environment that produces more of it, and end up sunk in the thing he arranged. Some do it knowingly. Most have no idea at all.

    So loving is not a nice extra to get round to. We love in order not to go the other way. That is the whole of the argument for it.

    Then why does only one of them go outward?

    First there is the degree of the wound. A wound has a size, and not every wound is the same size. And the degree of the wound is itself what drives the person to repeat that environment.

    Then a second element sits on top of the first. He cannot name anger, bring it to another person, or calm himself without denying it, because no environment taught him how. Each injury therefore joins the last one instead of being processed. When a later stress breaks the restraint, the response carries not only that day’s anger but everything that accumulated behind it.

    Not inherited — environmental

    Is that inability to handle anger and hatred something a person is born with? I don’t look at it as genetic. It is environment. He has not been in an environment where such things can be handled, has never been exposed to one, and so the anger and the hatred amplify instead. Nothing around him ever showed him what to do with what he had.

    The wound at two, and whatever happens to be lying around

    From here the road forks, and one fork is addiction. When we look at how somebody became an addict, we look at one, two, three years old. A wound taken past one, around two, raises the chance that the road runs toward addiction.

    Then the wound does its work. The person is anxious, he is frightened, and at exactly those moments he gets exposed to something in his surroundings. Note the order, because people reverse it. The wound comes first. The exposure comes second. The substance did not go looking for him.

    Say an older cousin is sniffing glue and the boy keeps finding himself around it. Sooner or later: shall I have a go. Sex, alcohol, cigarettes — he meets them the same way, lying about in the places he lives. He goes in that direction, and then the decisive thing happens. His basic anxiety is relieved by it. After that he concentrates on it at speed, because while the addictive act is running he does not feel the anxiety, or the depression, or the sadness (All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode).

    So he keeps going further in. And far enough in, the addiction produces an addiction of its own — a second addiction laid over the first, the two mixed together and carrying on. Trace it back far enough and the addiction, too, began at a wound.

    Ordinary, until the day it is not

    The other fork goes outward. Day to day this man is fine. Nobody near him sees a problem and there is no problem to see; the ordinary life holds. Then life delivers one hard piece of stress, and that becomes the trigger. The job is gone. The relationship has ended.

    And at some point he kills a person, and in the killing he feels the release. Killing produces a sense of omnipotence. That is what gets switched on, and from there he goes on killing.

    Which returns us to where we started. He was nice. That was not a mask he was wearing. The urge was not in him at the beginning — what was in him was a wound of a certain size, no environment in which anger and hatred could ever be handled, and then a day that pulled the trigger.

    The same wound does not weigh the same in two people

    Two people can take an identical wound and receive it differently. One of them takes it larger. Call it a tolerance, if you like. The blow is not the whole story; what it lands on is the rest of the story.

    Whatever the treatment is, it turns out to be love

    Any treatment for a wound comes, in the end, to love. I am being loved. I am being respected. I am being held as something precious. Once that is established in a person, he can shove the negative thing off him — it loses its grip.

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

    So when somebody who was nice to everyone ends up there, the thing to look at is what stood in between. A wound of a certain degree. No environment in which the anger and the hatred could be handled. And nothing arriving that felt like being loved, to take up the room the belief was occupying.

    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

  • Daydreaming for Hours: In My Head, I Was King

    You sat down to handle one small thing — a form with a deadline on it, a load of laundry, an email that needed four lines. You are still sitting there. Your computer screen has gone dark while you weren’t looking, and somehow it is already late afternoon.

    Your hands never moved the whole time. But you weren’t doing nothing. In your head you were somewhere else, somewhere better, where you were stronger and quicker and everything went the way you decided.

    A hurt child has three ways to go

    When a child is hurt badly at a young age — abused, or scolded and brushed aside every time they try to speak up — the child has to react somehow. The reaction usually takes one of three forms.

    The first is the good child. To make their mother happy, this child does whatever she asks, and does it well. Keeping her pleased becomes the child’s whole job.

    The second is the angry child. This child doesn’t keep the anger inside. It comes straight out, and the child turns defiant and aggressive.

    The third child neither tries to please the adults nor openly fights them. This child shuts the door on the outside world, stops expecting comfort from people, and retreats into an inner world of their own, where the child is in control.

    Why the third child ends up daydreaming

    It is the third child who drifts into daydreams. Not the good one. Not the angry one. The one who went quiet and stayed that way.

    The reason is simple. When being with people keeps ending in scolding, shame, or a fight, the child learns it is safer to look for comfort inside their own head. In real life, the child cannot change so much as the look on a parent’s face. In their head, the child decides what happens, gets the praise real life doesn’t give, and is stronger than anyone. A child who does this for hours at a time, again and again, ends up with a habit: whenever something hurts, the mind slips into a daydream on its own.

    I was the third child

    I was the third one.

    My mother and I could never really talk to each other, and I was scolded and punished constantly. I’d like to tell you that was unfair, but I know how it started. Doing what she told me felt like losing to her, as if I were handing her the win myself.

    So I refused, every time. Refusing got me punished more. The more I was punished, the more everything between us felt like a contest, so I refused even harder. In the end, pulling away from people felt easier than being with them.

    I didn’t become the good child, and I didn’t become the angry one either. I closed myself off and stayed inside my own world.

    My daydream never changed

    I had one daydream. Just the one. The details moved around, but the story underneath never changed.

    In it, I was powerful and capable, and I controlled everything: nothing happened unless I had already decided it would. I had a castle of my own, and in that castle I was king. I was the strongest one in every room I walked into. I knew everything before anyone told me. Whatever I wanted done got done, and it got done immediately.

    In real life, I was the exact opposite of all that. I had no power and nothing of my own, and I was always in trouble with my mother.

    In that daydream I gave myself the comfort I couldn’t get from people. I won’t pretend that comfort was nothing. The daydream was the one place I got to rest, so I kept going back and staying there.

    In the castle, I lost track of time

    The trouble was that once I was inside the castle, I stayed for hours. One thought led to the next, and that one led to another, and nothing in the story ever told me to stop. I had no idea how much time had gone by.

    Meanwhile I sat perfectly still in a real chair, in a real room, with real work to do.

    The page I never turned

    There was schoolwork waiting for me. There was cleaning waiting. My body stayed exactly where it was.

    In those hours I could have turned one page of the book lying open in front of me. Just one page. I could have put a load of laundry on. I could have washed the dishes already sitting in the sink — not every dish in the house, only those.

    I did none of it. Not one page. Not one load. Not one plate.

    The same thing happens at any age. A daydream makes the feeling of helplessness go away at once, so you keep going back to it. But while you feel strong and comforted in your head, the form, the email and the laundry stay untouched. By the end of the day the task is still there, and now you are also ashamed of yourself for not doing it. So you go back into the daydream, where you are strong again, and the cycle starts over.

    You probably have a castle too

    Your daydream probably doesn’t have an actual castle in it. Mine did, because the castle gave me power, and power was exactly what I didn’t have in real life.

    Whatever happens in your daydream, notice what it gives you. That is usually what you are missing in real life. If you are always being praised there, ask yourself whether you feel that nobody around you ever gives you credit. If you keep picturing yourself making someone give in, ask yourself whether there is anger you have never said out loud to the people in your life, or a line you have never told them not to cross.

    Outside the walls, the day went on without me

    I won’t tell you the daydream was my enemy. It gave me the comfort I wasn’t getting from people. I rested there, and I kept going back.

    Inside the castle I was king. Everything answered to me and nothing could reach me.

    Outside the castle, the day went on. The daydream protected me from feeling powerless, but it also kept me from doing small things, like turning one page or putting on one load of laundry. Real power comes from finishing small things like these. Each one you finish shows you that you can actually make something happen in the real world.

    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 Gave Past Your Limit. That’s Why You Resent Them.

    She goes to her mother’s every day. She listens, she pays for what her mother needs out of her own pocket, and she never once says it is too much for her. Everyone around her says she is a saint. Then she gets in the car. On the drive home a thought comes that she would never say out loud to anyone — something like: that woman is never going to die. It shocks her. On the outside she is the good daughter. So where does such a hateful thought come from?

    The thought that arrives on the drive home

    Being kind to people is a good thing. The trouble starts when kindness turns into a rule you have to obey: “I have to be a good person.” “I have to be the kind one.” Once you live by that rule, you stop asking how much you can actually do. You do what the rule demands — and it demands more than you can give.

    Say the person you look after is your own father — though it could just as well be your husband’s mother, or the neighbor nobody else checks on. You could simply do what you are really able to do. Instead you do more, because you can already hear what people would say if you did less. Doing more than you can is where the resentment starts. From the outside, you are wonderful to him. Inside, a thought forms: he’s past eighty, and he still won’t die.

    That thought does not mean you are a bad person. It means you have been giving more time, money, and attention than you can sustain, with no end in sight. You keep asking yourself how much longer you will be paying for this, and how much longer you will have to go over there every day. You don’t allow yourself to do less, and you can’t say that it is too much. So the tiredness turns into resentment, and the resentment lands on the person you are caring for. That person starts to look like the cause of your exhaustion. The resentment keeps growing until you say, “I can do this much, and no more.”

    Being called selfish hurts less than hating the person you care for

    Now imagine it the other way: you do only as much as you are really able to, and then you step back. People will talk. Some of it will get back to you, and it stings.

    But you are far less likely to end up resenting the person you care for, because you did what you could and stopped at your limit. Other people’s criticism may hurt for a while. Giving more than you can, day after day, does lasting damage: it can turn your affection into hatred, until you can hardly stand to be near the person you set out to care for.

    Who handed you the word “should”?

    “You should do this.” “You should never do that.” Rules like these came from outside you — from your family, the people around you, the times you grew up in. You do need some of them. A life with no rules at all would not work.

    But a rule is not an absolute truth. Keeping one does not make you good, and breaking one does not make you bad. We forget that constantly, because rules look exactly like the truth.

    The yardstick keeps changing

    You can tell these rules are not the truth, because they change. A whole society lives by them, and the ones it holds on to hardest shift over time. In Korea, where I work, there was a time when a person without a university degree was hardly treated as a person. Wedding plans could be going well until somebody found out the groom had no degree. From that moment he was seen as a lesser kind of person, though nothing about him had changed.

    Degrees still matter there, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But there are more ways to succeed now, and parents are less fixed on a degree than they used to be. This is what happens as a society matures: the things you can see — money, the name of your university, your job title — lose some of their hold. What starts to count for more is what you can’t see: whether people’s rights are respected, what a person’s character is like, whether they care about anyone besides themselves.

    What happens to the people who lose the fight for power and money

    The less mature a society is, the harder it clings to power and money. In a society like that, people without power or money get treated badly, so everyone rushes to get them. People fight each other bitterly for them. And whoever loses that fight is no longer treated as a person at all.

    A man who loses that fight is left feeling robbed. He carries despair, frustration, and anger at the society that did this to him. He can’t make a decent living the ordinary way. So one day he thinks: to hell with it — one big score and I’ll finally have some money. That is how he falls into gambling.

    The arithmetic that keeps him going back

    Why can’t he stop once he has started? There are deeper psychological reasons as well, and I will come to one of them. But the reason he is aware of is simple arithmetic. By now he is deep in debt, and gambling looks like the only way he could ever pay it off.

    Say he does hard physical labor — hauling, lifting, whatever job pays that week. He works every day for a whole month, and it earns him one paycheck. His debt is hundreds of times the size of that paycheck. He could never pay it off with honest wages, and he knows it.

    So one thought takes hold and won’t let go: if I play it right — just once, if I play it right — I can pay off the whole debt. To him that is not a fantasy. It is the only calculation he has that ends with him out of debt. So he keeps going back.

    The deeper reason lies in the part of his mind he isn’t aware of. There, the aim is not to pay off the debt at all. The aim is to destroy himself, and you can see it in what he does. There are nights when he is ahead. He could stand up and walk out with money in his pocket, and he doesn’t. He is not trying to get out of gambling and failing. Deep down, part of him does not want to get out. It wants to ruin him.

    Addiction starts with refusing to admit your limits

    Every road into addiction has one thing in common: the person refuses to admit the limits of what he can actually do.

    The twelve-step program — the recovery program used by Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups — begins with exactly what the addicted person refuses to do: admitting a limit. Its first step asks you to admit that you are powerless: that you cannot control the drinking, the gambling, or whatever it is by willpower alone.

    The addicted mind is grandiose. Deep inside it sits a conviction: I am somebody special. I can go past any limit. Whatever wall other people hit, I can step over it. Psychology calls this feeling omnipotence — the private sense that nothing is beyond your reach.

    The woman who drives to her mother’s every day and the man who keeps gambling look as if they have nothing in common. But neither will admit a limit. She acts as though her time, money, and patience can never run out. He believes that one good night — “just once, if I play it right” — can pay off a debt that honest work never could. And because neither admits the limit, neither stops at it: she keeps giving until she hates the person she is caring for, and he keeps betting while his losses grow.

    Cut back to what you can actually give

    Pick one thing you are doing right now that is more than you can really manage. Just one, not everything. Choose the one you keep doing because doing less of it feels like it would be a disaster.

    I’m not telling you to stop doing it. Do as much of it as you can really manage, and then step back. Somebody will notice. What comes up in you then is the fear of being called selfish. That discomfort is expected. Stay with it for a week, without going back to doing more just to make the feeling stop.

    Then notice what goes through your head on the way home. Is that hateful thought quieter? If it is, the person you care for has not changed. What changed is how much you chose to give. Once the driving, the paying, and the listening have a clear limit, you can keep helping without feeling that the other person will take and take without end.

    One exception. This exercise is for people who are giving more care than they can. If you or someone in your home is already gambling, an exercise like this is not enough. Find a clinician who treats addiction, and start there.

    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