Inner Work Notes

Category: Psychoanalysis

  • Why the Loudest Person in the Room Feels Empty at Home

    You were the loudest one at the table — the biggest laugh, the widest eyes, the gasp that turned heads two tables over. And you meant every bit of it, which is the part that confuses you later.

    Then you got home. Keys in the bowl, coat still on, and somewhere between the car and the kitchen the whole thing drained out of you. The quiet had a sound to it.

    Not sad. Not upset. Flat — as if somebody had reached behind you and pulled the plug out of the wall.

    If you know that drop, this is about the drop, and about what it might be trying to tell you.

    Does a big personality mean a big inner life?

    Some people run at a higher volume than the rest of us. Wide gestures. A voice that swings from a whisper to a shout inside one story. Reactions a size or two bigger than the moment called for. It shows up in men and women alike, and not only in how they talk — the whole body goes up a size with it.

    We keep a kind phrase on hand for them. We say they feel things deeply, and most of the time we mean it warmly.

    Maybe they do. But there is a second question. Is the big expression coming from a feeling that is already there? Or is the person using a louder voice, bigger gestures and other people’s reactions to stir up a feeling they cannot hold on to by themselves? From the next chair you cannot tell the two apart. The difference shows up afterward: one person stays emotionally steady, while the other goes numb as soon as the talk, the laughter and the attention stop.

    What could all that brightness be covering?

    Psychoanalysis explains this kind of liveliness in a way that surprises most people the first time they hear it. When liveliness runs this high, it is best understood as the person stirring themselves up to cancel out a feeling of deadness underneath. Deadness here means a numbness inside: the sense of not being alive, of not quite existing.

    In everyday life it looks like this. The person talks faster, laughs harder, tells one more story and watches the room respond, because each time the room reacts, they feel something again, if only for a moment.

    Read that again, and this time picture yourself as that person, not someone else. The claim isn’t that the liveliness is fake. It’s that the liveliness has a job to do, and the job is to keep you from noticing the numbness underneath.

    Why would anyone need to shake themselves awake?

    Think about a leg that has gone to sleep under you. You press it, knock it against the chair, stamp it on the floor until the pins and needles arrive — and pins and needles hurt, and you want them anyway, because numb is worse than pain. Numb makes the leg feel like it belongs to somebody else.

    Some people live with emotional numbness. Ordinary pleasure barely registers, so they increase the intensity: a bigger laugh, a more dramatic story, a stronger display of delight. The stimulation and the attention from others create a temporary sense of being alive.

    If this is you, it all looks like joy from the outside, and people tell you what good company you are. On the inside, it is closer to asking one question, over and over: Am I still here?

    That is why coming home can feel like a sudden drop. While you were out, you were kept stirred up by the talk, the laughter and other people’s attention. At home all of that stops, and you feel the numbness again, because the laughter never made it go away. The next time, it takes a louder laugh and more attention to get the same sense of being alive. Each time the stirring has to be stronger, and nothing underneath changes.

    This feeling is almost impossible to explain to someone who has never had it. Say you feel dead inside and most people hear sadness. It isn’t sadness. Sadness at least moves, like weather: it comes in, it presses on you, it lifts again. Feeling dead inside doesn’t move. Nothing comes in and nothing lifts. As a therapist, I see it far more often than you would guess, usually in someone who has suffered from it in silence for years without finding the words for it.

    Does too much of something always hide its opposite?

    Here is one rule that will change how people look to you. Wherever there is too much of something, its opposite is usually sitting right underneath it.

    A mood kept unusually high can hide a low one. As long as the music, the talk and the excitement keep going, there is never a quiet moment long enough to feel the low mood underneath. Acting loudly superior can protect a private belief that you are inferior. And someone who keeps announcing how strong they are is often afraid that others will notice how weak and helpless they feel.

    You will recognize the shape once you have the rule. The friend who tells you, unprompted and often, that she is completely over him. The colleague who turns every serious conversation into a joke inside thirty seconds. The uncle who explains at each family gathering how little he cares what anybody thinks of him. None of it is exactly a lie. Each sentence is doing a job: keeping its opposite out of sight.

    So being too much is not a character flaw to be embarrassed about. It’s information — often the best signpost you’ll get to what is hidden underneath. Once you know the rule you can hear it in your own sentences too: not just what you said, but what saying it was supposed to cover.

    Why does saying “I’m weak here” take strength?

    “I’m not good at that part.” “That one still gets to me.” The people who can say sentences like these out loud without flinching are, almost always, the strong ones.

    It sounds backward until you look at what the sentence costs. To name a weakness out loud, you first have to be able to hold it: to let the thought sit in you for a while without setting off an alarm. The words only come after that, never before. It also takes a belief that the people around you will not pull away once they have seen that weak spot.

    If you can’t hold it, or can’t count on them staying, you don’t say it. You go the other direction instead, and you go fast — louder laugh, harder argument, brighter performance, one more story where you come out of it well. How hard you run is usually a fair measure of how big the thing is that you are running from.

    If you have ever watched someone say a thing like that out loud in front of you, you know the strange relief it brings. The room loosens. Nobody has to keep pretending they haven’t noticed the weak spot, and for the rest of that conversation people say slightly truer things than they had planned to.

    Does this mean cheerful people are all faking it?

    No. And please don’t take this to the next party and start reading the guests.

    Plenty of people are simply lively. Some grew up in a loud, warm house and never had any reason to turn the volume down. Being big and expressive is very often just who a person is, all the way down, and the world is better for having them in it.

    The difference doesn’t show up in the volume anyway. It shows up afterward. This idea earns its keep in one narrow place: when an extreme keeps repeating itself and a strange blank follows it every single time. You laugh hardest at the table, then feel hollow in the car. You keep insisting, in a firm voice, that you’re fine, and feel small the moment the door shuts behind you.

    The height is not the signal. The drop is.

    And you weren’t lying at that table, by the way. The laugh was real while it was happening. The question isn’t whether you meant it. It’s what the laugh was keeping you from feeling.

    Use this idea to look at your own week. Don’t use it to read anybody else’s.

    Write down the loudest minute of your week

    This exercise is small and takes no more than a minute. Pick one moment from the past week when you were too much: the hardest you laughed, the loudest you argued, the most eagerly you put yourself forward. Write it down as one plain line.

    Then, beside it, write the opposite of what you were showing in that moment. If you were being strong, write weak. If you were lit up, write flat. If you were overflowing, write empty.

    Don’t fix it, don’t explain it, and don’t soften it into something you’d rather read back later. Give the opposite its name and close the notebook.

    Name the thing underneath and the extreme loses some of its size.

    One more thing before I let you go. This exercise is reflective writing, not treatment, and it is small — but the flat feeling it can bring to the surface is not small at all. Over time that feeling tends to weigh on you more and more while you notice it less and less, until you barely register it as a problem. If it has been sitting in you for months, or if the noise you make is mostly there to keep you a step ahead of it, don’t leave it in a notebook. Say it out loud to a therapist who knows the difference between flat and sad. Writing the word down was the first move. Make a second one.

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

  • Why Not Understanding Someone Makes You Angry

    Someone is explaining something to you, and the words keep arriving, but nothing is landing. You ask them to go through it once more, and they do, patiently — and you still have nothing.

    Then you notice the heat coming up in your chest.

    Which is strange, when you think about it. Not following someone costs you nothing at all, and nobody gets hurt. You could say “I’m not getting this” and the afternoon would carry on exactly as before. But your jaw sets, your voice comes out with an edge you never planned, and something in you has clearly taken offense.

    That heat is worth a closer look, because what drives it began long before this conversation, when you were a baby.

    Why do grown adults still throw tantrums?

    In the first months of life, a baby’s mind works very differently from an adult’s.

    A baby experiences hunger, cries, and is fed. Because the baby cannot yet understand that a separate caregiver heard the cry and chose to respond, the hunger and the feeding feel like one continuous event. At this stage, the baby cannot yet tell where he ends and the world begins.

    Psychoanalysis calls this early state infantile narcissism. The baby is the center of his own world, and as far as he can tell, things happen the way he wants them to. It is a normal stage, not a fault.

    As a child grows, that self-centered state has to change, slowly, until he can want something badly and still notice that the person fetching it is tired. The trouble starts when that change never happens. Then the baby’s expectation that things will go the way he wants is still at work at ten, at twenty, at fifty. You can see it at an airport gate when a flight is cancelled: a man at the counter, his voice climbing, talks to the agent as though she had grounded the plane herself. Some part of him still expects the world to rearrange itself the moment he asks.

    For some people, this expectation is not just one part of them; it shapes their whole personality. Then it does not stay quietly in the background. It is strong, and it allows no exceptions: things have to go their way, every time. A no does not merely disappoint someone like that. It shakes them.

    What does a baby learn when crying brings milk?

    That early stage comes with a feeling of enormous power. It is not power over other people; the baby does not yet know other people are there. It is simpler and wider than that: I can do anything. Psychoanalysis calls it omnipotence, and the baby feels certain the power belongs to him.

    He feels this because he cannot yet imagine that anything is coming to him from outside. There is hunger, there is crying, and then there is warmth and milk and fullness. From where the baby lies, that sequence can mean only one thing: I made that happen. I produced it myself.

    The illusion holds because the milk arrives soon after the hunger — soon enough that the baby can feel he created it himself.

    Meanwhile someone is awake at three in the morning, and someone’s back hurts, and the baby knows nothing about it — and at that age he shouldn’t have to.

    He needs that illusion for a while because it creates the first sense that his actions affect the world. Gradually, small delays teach him that another person exists separately and that satisfaction does not always arrive on command. As he learns to bear those waits, the feeling that he can do anything slowly turns into a more realistic confidence. When that learning remains incomplete, the old expectation — whatever I need will come the moment I need it — carries on into adult life. And for an adult, what is needed is often not milk but an answer: “If I need an answer, an answer must exist, and I should be able to get it now.”

    Where does “I have to know everything” come from?

    When we picture that feeling of power, we usually think of the doing side of it: I can handle anything, I can fix anything, just hand it to me.

    But that feeling has a twin, growing from the same root: I can know everything. Psychoanalysis calls this second one omniscience. In adult life it usually sounds like this: I have to know everything.

    You will recognize it immediately if you carry it. Not being able to let a thing go until you work out why someone spoke to you in a certain tone. Reading every review on the internet before buying a kettle. Two in the morning, still searching your symptoms online. Sitting in a meeting where one word goes past you, and feeling something clench.

    Curiosity looks identical from the outside, but curiosity can be put down. You get interested, you get distracted, you are perfectly fine. The need to know everything cannot be put down — it has to be finished.

    And it can never be finished, because we are small and the world is not. Most of what happens near you will never be explained to your satisfaction. Why your neighbor moved. Why a friendship cooled. What your father was really thinking. A great deal will simply stay unexplained. Some people can’t accept that. The missing answer does no harm by itself; the harm comes from refusing to live without one. That refusal keeps them frustrated, and, as the next scene shows, the frustration turns into anger at other people.

    What happens to your voice when you don’t follow?

    Here is the scene where this belief shows itself. Two people are talking, and one of them is getting angry because he does not understand what the other is saying.

    Look at it plainly and it makes no sense at all. The one who didn’t understand is the one who is angry. If that is you, why should missing the point put heat in your chest? “I’m not following you” is a complete sentence, and you are allowed to leave it there and go get a coffee.

    Instead there is the sigh, the clipped tone, the “no, but what do you actually mean.” The temperature in the room climbs two degrees.

    Underneath the sigh sits a sentence nobody ever says out loud: I am supposed to know this. And when the explanation will not go in, the frustration does not stay inside this one conversation. It spreads: this person makes no sense, the news makes no sense, nothing about the way the world works makes sense. There is an easy way out of all of it, one simple thought: there is something here I don’t know yet. And that is precisely the thought that will not come.

    Why does the blame end up on the other person?

    When you do not understand something but believe you should, confusion quickly becomes shame: “If I cannot follow this, there must be something wrong with me.”

    Because that conclusion is painful, the mind looks for another explanation. Anger provides one: the problem is no longer that you do not understand; the problem is that the other person is explaining badly.

    Then that thought comes out as blame.

    Psychoanalysis calls this move projection. When you cannot bear to feel confused or inadequate, you experience your own shame and frustration as something the other person is doing to you. You may even feel they are making it difficult on purpose, or looking down on you. So instead of saying, “I do not understand,” you say, “You are not explaining this properly. You are not making any sense. Anyone would be lost.” The accusation protects you from the shame of not knowing. But from then on, the conversation is no longer about what they meant. It is about what they did wrong.

    Sometimes the complaint is fair. Some people genuinely do explain badly. So use the heat as a signal. When you hear yourself say, hotly, “You’re not making any sense,” stop before you argue any further and ask yourself: am I ashamed, right now, that I don’t know?

    Why is “I don’t know” so expensive to say?

    For most people, most of the time, it costs very little. You say the three words, someone explains, and the world carries on turning.

    But if your self-worth depends on being the person who understands, those three words feel like a threat to who you are. Admitting confusion makes you feel exposed or inferior. Anger feels safer: it lets you keep feeling like the person who understands, and it puts the failure on someone else.

    It all happens very quickly. You miss the meaning. You take that as proof that something is wrong with you. You push that shame away and get annoyed at the speaker instead. By the time you notice you are angry, the earlier steps are already over.

    Have you ever said “I don’t know” and left it there?

    Nobody has ever read a paragraph like this one and thought, right then, I’ll stop needing to know things. The belief does not give way to reasoning, because it formed in infancy, long before you could reason at all.

    It gives way instead to experience, gathered slowly. You didn’t understand, and you said so, and nothing fell apart. You sat with a question that stayed open, and an hour later you were still yourself. Enough of those and the old belief loosens its grip. It never gets defeated — it gets outgrown.

    That means the change comes in very small steps. So start with one small step.

    The next time somebody loses you completely, say it out loud — I don’t know what you mean — and then stop there. Don’t ask them to explain it again, and don’t tell them they’ve explained it badly. Don’t turn it into a joke, and don’t attach a reason about being tired or the room being loud. Just the sentence, and then quiet.

    Then watch what your body does with the quiet. Maybe nothing much. Maybe a small squirm, an urge to fill the silence, or to give the excuse you promised yourself you wouldn’t give. If discomfort turns up, don’t argue with it, because the discomfort is the useful part. It shows you that the oldest part of you, the part formed in infancy, is still at work, still expecting the world to explain itself to you.

    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

  • Mourning the Parent You Never Had

    You’re driving home from work when you catch yourself mid-argument, out loud, with your father. What you’re saying is what you should have said to him in the hospital, and you’ve said it to an empty passenger seat a few hundred times by now. He died four years ago, the house sold last spring, and everybody agrees you handled the whole business remarkably well.

    Or maybe your situation is different. Both parents are alive and healthy and texting you about the weather, and something in your chest still goes cold whenever anybody mentions them.

    From the outside it all looks settled. But your life keeps drifting somewhere you never actually chose, and you get close to something good and then trip yourself up on the way to it. You skip meals, you stay awake until three in the morning for no particular reason, you let the small repairs pile up until they turn expensive.

    You thought you’d let go of the past. Have you?

    What do you picture when somebody says grief?

    Most people picture a funeral, somebody who died, and the years since. They think of someone saying, “It’s been six years and I still can’t let my father go.”

    But grieving someone, or mourning them, is more than being sad. It is your mind finally accepting that the person is really gone — not just as a fact you can mention at dinner, but so deeply that you no longer half-expect it to be them when the phone rings.

    Crying hard doesn’t finish it, and neither does time. Mourning asks for more than either. In your ordinary day, the person you lost is still the one whose number you never had to look up, the one you keep arguing with in the car on the way home, the one you were always going to prove something to. Mourning means noticing each of these, one by one, and learning to get through your day without that person in it. When that work stalls halfway, the loss never moves into the past. It stays in the present tense: years later, it is still happening to you.

    Why do you start turning into the person you lost?

    When mourning stalls, you may keep the lost person present by copying them rather than accepting that the relationship has ended.

    You start using their phrases. You hold your cup exactly the way they held theirs. You feel what they felt and want what they wanted. You never decide to do any of this; it simply happens. Some part of you is keeping them alive by becoming them. There’s a name for this: identification.

    That sounds tender, and usually it is. The trouble starts when mourning stops there and goes no further.

    Because now the two of you overlap, and whatever was happening to them keeps happening inside you. If they were going downhill, you go downhill with them. And because they died, some part of you wants to die as well. That’s why depression settles in and stays for people who never finished mourning, and why some of them, in the worst cases, attempt suicide.

    From the outside, skipping meals, refusing help, or damaging a stable life can look unrelated to the loss. From the inside, getting better may feel like disloyalty: if the person you lost suffered, recovering can feel as though you are abandoning them. Continuing to suffer becomes a way of staying connected.

    Not every depression, and not every wish to die, comes from unfinished mourning. If you feel deeply depressed, have thoughts of dying, or can no longer manage everyday life, get professional help now. Your safety comes before any explanation of why you feel this way, including the ones in this piece.

    But what if your parents are still alive?

    Here’s the harder case. The grief that costs people the most is usually not for somebody who died, but for parents who are alive, well, and picking up the phone on the second ring.

    You’ll want to argue with that. How do you mourn somebody who is sitting right there in front of you?

    You can, because the one you have to let go of is not the person sitting there. It’s the parent from your childhood — the one who stood in the kitchen when you were nine and said something you’ve never repeated to anybody. And harder still, it’s the parent you made up back then, the one you wished you had. The mother who would have noticed what was happening to you. The father who would have come when you needed him.

    Neither the parent from your childhood nor the one you wished for is the tired, older parent across the table asking whether you’ve eaten. You already know this, and you ignore it anyway. You look at the tired parent in front of you and keep expecting the one you wished for, and afterward you wonder why every visit ends in the same disappointment.

    Everybody carries a picture in their head of the parent they needed. It isn’t a memory of what happened. You drew it as a child, out of longing: a mother who would notice, a father who would protect you, a parent who would apologize and mean it.

    Even when the real parent lets you down again and again, the hope you had as a child can hang on. So you visit again, hoping that this time they’ll understand. You explain yourself one more time, and you leave hurt by the same response. The disappointment keeps repeating because part of you is still waiting for the real parent to become the parent in the picture.

    So what you may not be able to let go of isn’t only your actual parent. It’s the expectation that this person will someday give you what was missing.

    What’s left when you let go of the parent you wished for?

    Only when you let go of the parent you wished for do you get to meet the parent you actually have.

    Not the one in the picture. The one in the chair, smaller than you remember and slower, limited now in ways that aren’t going to change, repeating the same three stories every single time you visit. Somebody who didn’t give you what you needed and is never going to, because they never had it to give.

    Never getting what you needed from them is a loss. A real one, with a weight of its own. Mourn it the way you would mourn any other loss.

    Is that the same as forgiving them?

    No, and the difference matters more than almost anything else here. Nobody’s asking you to understand what they did, or forgive it, or reconcile, or send a warm message on their birthday. You can let go of the picture and still keep every inch of the distance you carefully built. You can even mourn somebody you’ve already decided never to see again.

    Before mourning can begin, it asks one thing of you, and only one. Admit that the parent you wanted isn’t coming. Not next year. Not once you finally do well enough to earn it. Not at the very end, at their bedside, when they finally say the words you’ve been waiting for.

    Admit that, and mourning can finally begin. Refuse, and it can’t even start. You stay stuck in the life this piece began with, the one that quietly works against you: skipped meals, nights awake until three, tripping yourself up just before something good.

    Why does giving up hope hurt so much?

    Because hope has been protecting you from the full loss. As long as you believe your parent may someday understand, apologize, or put you first, you don’t have to face the fact that what you needed as a child may never come from them.

    When you give up that hope, you also give up the future you have been imagining, the one where they finally make up for what happened back then. That is why it hurts the way grief hurts, rather than feeling like a calm, tidy decision. But what you are letting go of is not your love for them. It is the hope that the past can still be put right.

    Two lines on one sheet of paper

    Take one sheet of paper and write two lines, one underneath the other.

    The first line: the parent I wanted would have ______. The second line: my actual parent ______.

    Fill in both lines and cross out neither. Don’t judge either line, and don’t soften the second one by adding that they were doing their best with whatever they were given. Understanding them is a different job for a different day, if it is your job at all.

    Seeing the gap between those two lines with your own eyes is how you start to admit that the parent you wanted isn’t coming. That is where mourning begins. Today, all you have to do is look at that gap. A picture you’ve been holding since you were a child doesn’t drop out of your hand the first time you loosen your grip, and it was never going to.

    I write these pieces as notes to think with, not as treatment. A page can’t see your face or ask you the next question. So, fair warning about the second line: it’s the one that tends to hit hardest. People sit down braced for sadness and get something else instead — a flare of rage at somebody they have spent years defending, or a numb flatness that frightens them more than the rage would have. If that feeling is still with you at bedtime, don’t carry it alone and call that strength. Take the two lines to a therapist and read them out loud, both of them, in the order you wrote them. Half of what makes those lines bearable is that somebody else has finally heard them.

    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 Oedipus Complex Explained: Why Your Partner Isn’t the Problem

    Think back to the last time you were properly angry. Not irritated. Angry — ears hot, hands not quite steady, the same three sentences going round and round in your head.

    You probably knew whose fault it was before the feeling had finished arriving. He said that thing again. She rolled her eyes at exactly the wrong moment. Or you turned the whole thing inward, the way people do at two in the morning, and decided you were too sensitive, too needy, too much. Hold that scene a second, because here comes the uncomfortable part. None of those was the real cause.

    If it isn’t the other person, and it isn’t you, then what is it?

    Psychoanalysis says something that sounds almost rude the first time you hear it. The pain you feel in moments like that doesn’t come from your husband, or your wife, or your children. And it doesn’t come from you being too sensitive, too needy or too much, either. It comes from a fantasy that’s been running inside you the whole time, one you never chose and mostly can’t see.

    Not fantasy in the pleasant sense. Not the daydream you pick up on the train and put down again at your stop. In psychoanalysis, a fantasy is something older: the wishes and fears of early childhood, still at work in the way you read the people closest to you. It works away below your awareness, quietly and steadily, and it has already moved your mood before you notice anything at all.

    The fantasy decides what something means before you have looked at what actually happened. Your partner goes quiet, and you immediately read the silence as rejection. That interpretation produces anger, withdrawal, or desperate attempts to hold on. Because the interpretation feels like a fact, you react to it without checking whether your partner’s silence had another cause.

    You know the sequence even if you have never named it. Somebody says a few words, you add “I don’t matter to them,” and your whole day collapses. The words triggered the reaction, but the meaning you added determined its size.

    Why can’t you tell when you’re caught up in a fantasy?

    As an adult, you can think things through, which sounds like an advantage. You can explain yourself, point to evidence, walk anybody through exactly how you reached your conclusion. That is precisely where the trap is set. Being able to explain it all makes you certain you’re looking at plain facts, so it never occurs to you that you might be looking at a meaning you added yourself.

    The difficulty is that an unconscious fantasy does not feel like an interpretation. It feels like simply seeing clearly. You do not think, “I’m adding an old story to this moment.” You think, “Now I finally see what this person really feels about me.” So feeling certain proves nothing about whether you have read the moment correctly.

    The fantasy also started earlier than you’d think. When you were only one or two, before you had words for any of it, your mind was already staging wild, violent scenes between you and the people around you: grabbing and shoving away, swallowing and being swallowed, smashing to pieces. It sounds bizarre, but psychoanalysis says every human being starts out with fantasies like these. They don’t stop when you grow up. You are still strongly influenced by them; you just don’t know it. You may even have caught a trace of them yourself: a flash of wanting to shove somebody out of the way at a dinner table, gone before you’d registered it.

    What happens in the Oedipus story?

    Psychoanalysis has one idea that makes these hidden fantasies much easier to see: the Oedipus complex, named after an old Greek myth. While Oedipus is still a baby, too young to have done anything at all, his father is warned by a prophecy that this son will one day kill him and marry his own mother. The father panics and has the baby left outside to die, but somebody finds him, and he grows up in another household, never knowing who his real parents are.

    Years later he’s out on the road, and at a crossroads he falls into a stupid quarrel with an old man in a carriage. He kills him. He travels on to a city that has just lost its king, answers a riddle nobody else has been able to answer, and the city hands him the empty throne — and, with it, the widowed queen as his wife.

    Then the truth comes out. The old man he killed at the crossroads was that city’s king, and his own father. The woman lying beside him is his mother. Tormented by guilt, he puts out his own eyes.

    The details shift depending on who tells it — who picked the baby up, how he ended up in that particular city, how much anybody knew. The versions disagree, and none of that’s the point. The real question is why a story this ugly refused to die.

    Why do these old stories keep coming back?

    Think of a myth as a picture of the part of your mind you never get to look at directly. Psychoanalysis calls that part the unconscious: the part that had already decided whose fault it was before you had even finished getting angry. A myth is not a lesson or a warning. It is a picture of how that hidden part works. The Oedipus myth is only one such picture. The Greek myths about Zeus, Athena and Poseidon work the same way, and so do the old stories of every other culture that lasted long enough to reach us. These stories survived because they picture something that really goes on inside us, and people kept recognizing it even when they couldn’t possibly have said what it was.

    Line up the stories people never stop retelling and they start to look strangely alike. Many follow the same basic outline as the story of Oedipus. A baby is sent away. A child grows up with the wrong parents, in the wrong house. The truth about where he came from comes out only much later. Think of Moses in the basket, Superman in the rocket, Harry Potter in the cupboard under the stairs, and Luke Skywalker, told his father was dead.

    It isn’t that writers copied one another. The outline matches the way the unconscious works in all of us, so it catches hold and gets told again and again. That is why it keeps turning up in myths, in fairy tales, and in films people watch over and over without quite knowing why.

    Notice which stories catch hold of you like that. If one book or one film gets under your skin far more than it seems it should, it’s worth asking what in you it touched.

    What happens inside a three-year-old?

    At first, your world had room for only two people: your mother and you, a small closed circle. Then you began to notice a third person who belonged in that circle too, usually your father. Mother, father, child — three corners now, and one of them was you.

    From then on, the child feels several things at once, and none of them fit together: love, rivalry, and a quiet wish for somebody to disappear. Freud called this three-cornered tangle the Oedipus complex, after the son in the myth who, without knowing it, kills his father and marries his mother. It usually begins around the age of three or four, a little after the wild, violent scenes of the first two years.

    According to psychoanalysis, a child this age feels a sexual desire toward one parent that is as strong as an adult’s, even though the child’s body is far too young to hold any of it. That is what the term incestuous desire refers to. At its heart is a simple wish: that parent should be mine and nobody else’s, and the other parent, standing in the way, should go. Shame and guilt haven’t developed yet, so nothing tones the feeling down. The child feels it at full strength, draws the desired parent into its fantasies, and enjoys them.

    The words psychoanalysis uses for this stage sound brutal: killing the rival, possessing the parent, incestuous desire. That isn’t an accident. Nobody is trying to shock you. The words are harsh because the child’s feelings are that intense, and softer words would be describing something else altogether.

    And still, nothing happened. Not one of those scenes took place. Hold on to that, because everything else depends on it. All of it runs inside the child’s mind — no event, no moment anybody else could have walked in on. It’s fantasy from the first frame to the last.

    This is where most of us go wrong. We hear that something was only imagined and quietly file the whole business under harmless. For a small child, that’s not remotely how it works. The fantasy is not just a thought; it is something the child actually lives through.

    Why does something imagined leave a real mark?

    Dreams make this easy to see. Nothing in a dream is really happening. Now take the plainest example there is: a man has a sexual dream and he actually ejaculates. Crude, perhaps — and that is exactly why it works. His body never stopped to check whether any of it was true. It just reacted.

    Or take the milder version: you dream you’re arguing with somebody, and the bad mood trails you around all morning, long after you’ve remembered there was never any argument.

    A small child’s fantasies work the same way, only they run all day, for years. What the child only imagined still produces real fear, real pleasure, real jealousy and real tension in the body. That experience doesn’t simply disappear as the child grows up. Years later, in your mind, your partner can come to stand where the parent you wanted all to yourself once stood. So when your partner goes silent at the table, you may read the silence through the old triangle — “I’m being replaced” or “someone else matters more” — before you’ve even considered what is happening now.

    Is “he ignored me” something he did, or something you added?

    Separating what is happening now from the meaning the old fantasy adds to it changes what you can do. If the entire cause seems to be your partner, your only options are to change, punish, or leave them. Once you can see what you added, you have another option: examine the interpretation before acting on it.

    So here’s one thing to try, starting today. The next time a strong feeling rushes up and grips your whole chest, take a sheet of paper as soon as you can and fold it down the middle. Fill in both sides. On the left, write what the other person actually said or did — the words, the action, nothing else. No tone, no expression, no guess at what they meant by it. On the right, write the meaning you added.

    “He looked at his phone while I spoke” belongs on the left. “He ignored me because I don’t matter” belongs on the right. “She said she needed an evening alone” belongs on the left. “She’s getting ready to leave me” belongs on the right. You do not have to decide who was right. The point is to see the exact step where an event became a story and the story became a feeling.

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

  • Why Setting Boundaries Causes Conflict Almost Every Time

    Have you ever wanted to say no, heard yourself agree instead, and then spent the evening replaying the conversation? You knew you didn’t want to do what was being asked of you, but the other person’s disappointment felt more urgent than your own answer. By the time you noticed what you wanted, you had already promised to help.

    This is not mainly a problem of finding the right words. The trouble starts earlier, with whether you can tell your own feeling apart from the other person’s. A boundary is what lets you say to yourself: their disappointment belongs to them; my decision belongs to me. When that distinction is unclear, saying no feels less like making a choice and more like harming someone. So you keep handing over your time and energy to protect their mood.

    What do psychological boundaries actually mean?

    In psychoanalytic thinking, a boundary isn’t a matter of manners. It isn’t the polite distance you keep at a dinner party, and it isn’t the same thing as being assertive. It is the line in your mind that says: up to here is me, and beyond here is not me. When that line blurs, what you feel inside starts to pass for what is actually happening outside. So a boundary is less about politeness than about keeping hold of what is real.

    In everyday life, the line comes down to a simple distinction: this feeling is mine, and that reaction belongs to the other person. With that distinction, you can see that someone is upset and still ask, as a separate question, whether you actually did anything wrong. Without it, you start treating feelings as facts. If you feel guilty, you assume you must have done something wrong. If someone becomes quiet, you assume they are angry with you. If you feel anxious about saying no, you conclude that saying no is dangerous.

    That’s why boundaries matter so much for emotional health. Without a clear boundary, you start to lose track of what is real, including what is going on inside you. People who can’t say no often say they are unsure what they want and what they think, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re feeling until someone else names it for them.

    Why does a self need an outline?

    Think of a country on a map. You recognize it by its outline. Without the border line there would be no shape to recognize, only blank paper. A person is the same. Only when a line is drawn around you does the shape of who you are appear, so that you can say, “This is the kind of person I am.” In daily life, you draw that line through small distinctions like these: I like this and dislike that. I can help with this but cannot take responsibility for that. I understand why you are upset, but I do not agree with your conclusion. Each one marks something as yours — your taste, your limit, your view — and so shows where you end and another person begins.

    Without those distinctions, you can feel many things without knowing which feeling should guide your decision. You notice the other person’s anger before your own exhaustion. You can explain what everyone else needs but cannot answer a simple question about what you want. A boundary is what lets you know which feelings and which choices are yours.

    When does the “I” first appear?

    You are not born with boundaries. They form slowly as you grow up, and they begin at the moment you realize that another person is truly separate from you. A small child first learns this from their caregiver, the person who looks after them. The child may be hungry while the caregiver wants to rest. The child may want something, and the caregiver may say no. A boundary develops as the child learns to bear this: the person they depend on is separate from them and has wants of their own.

    This realization comes through small discoveries about someone close to you. Their temperament isn’t yours. What makes them laugh isn’t what makes you laugh. They are someone other than you, and they will not become you. Noticing this is where the line begins.

    Notice the order, because it is the opposite of what we usually assume. We imagine that a fully formed “I” exists first and then learns to recognize other people. It actually works the other way around: only when you realize that someone over there is not you does the outline of your own “I” begin to appear.

    Saying no is often hardest with the people who matter most to you, because with them you most fear that their anger could end the relationship. When someone close to you is upset, you stop checking your own response and start arranging yourself around their reaction. So it is not only that you are afraid to speak. For the moment, you have lost track of what your own answer even is.

    What happens inside when the line goes blurry?

    When a boundary is weak, what is inside you and what is outside you get mixed up. A feeling that rose up in you feels as if it came at you from outside, from another person.

    Most of us know this in mild, everyday forms. You are actually unhappy with yourself, but it feels like this: “I feel bad because that person dislikes me.” Or a harsh thing you have been telling yourself for years suddenly seems to come from someone else: you catch it in their tone of voice, the look on their face, the wording of their text message. Psychoanalysis calls this projection: you feel as if a feeling came from someone else when it actually started in you.

    This is why checking with the other person may not bring relief. You ask, “Are you upset with me?” They say no, but twenty minutes later you want to ask again. Their answer cannot settle the fear, because the fear did not start with them. It started in you, in your own expectation of being rejected. Until you recognize the fear as yours, you will keep asking the other person to remove it.

    Why does setting boundaries cause conflict almost every time?

    Here’s the part almost nobody is warned about. When you start holding a boundary, conflict follows. Not occasionally. Close to always.

    Looked at plainly, this makes complete sense. The other person was used to getting a yes from you, and now they’ve met a “no.” Of course there’s friction. Say you have always done what someone asked, and one day you tell them for the first time, “I don’t think I can this time.” They may be more than disappointed: they may be caught off guard and ask why you have suddenly changed. The longer your yes had been taken for granted, the louder the reaction. A boundary changes the terms of a relationship, and terms don’t get renegotiated quietly.

    At that point most people back down. They take the conflict as proof: I’ve handled this badly. I’ve hurt them. I’ve broken something. So they quietly erase the line, the peace returns, and the old pattern stays in place, ready to repeat the next time.

    But there is another way to read the conflict. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described one of the ways we come to experience another person as truly separate from us, a person in their own right: they survive our anger or attack, neither striking back nor falling apart. Saying no for the first time can feel, to you, like exactly that kind of attack, as if you were hurting them. Surviving it does not mean the other person stays calm; they may well be upset. It means they do not insult you or threaten to end the relationship, and they do not collapse. Then you learn that your no did not destroy them, and that choosing differently from them does not make you a bad person. A relationship that can take a “no” and still stand has become a relationship between two separate people. If you have been keeping the peace in order to stay close, this is hard to accept, because it means the friction you have been avoiding may not be an obstacle on the road to closeness. It may be part of what closeness is built from.

    So the conflict that flares up may not mean the relationship is damaged. It may mean that a line now exists where there was never one before.

    None of this promises that every relationship will survive the change. Nor is it a reason to force a confrontation you aren’t ready for. It is an invitation to look carefully at the friction before you decide what it says about you.

    What if you keep erasing the line to keep the peace?

    So what happens if you don’t hold the line — if fear of conflict wins, as it understandably might for a while?

    The relationship becomes quiet, which is why giving in can feel like success. But every time you agree before checking what you want, you practice ignoring your own answer. Over time you get better at making other people comfortable and worse at knowing what you like, where your limits are, and what you yourself want to do.

    Winnicott used the term true self for your spontaneous reactions: what you feel and want before you adjust it to win someone’s approval. A genuine no comes from this part of you. But when agreeing has become automatic, “Sure, that works” comes out before you have checked whether it actually works for you. The problem is not only that you lacked courage. You agreed so quickly that you did not have time to hear your own answer.

    Growing as a person has an order, and the first step can’t be skipped. People often want to jump straight to the later steps: opening up to others, giving generously. But first there has to be a clear “I”, with its outline drawn. Opening up and giving come after that.

    So if you are uncomfortable right now because you are drawing a line you have never drawn before, that discomfort is not necessarily a step backward. It may be the step you have to take in order to move forward.

    One small thing to try today, if you’d like. Bring to mind the moment from the past day that bothered you most. Then ask yourself one question and write the answer on paper in a single line: Where did this feeling start? If it started in you, write that it’s yours. If it was really the other person’s feeling — their disappointment, their anger — write that it’s theirs. It’s fine if you can’t tell for sure. You’re not solving anything, and not deciding what to do about it. You’re stopping for a moment to tell your feeling apart from theirs and putting one mark on the paper — and that’s how an outline gets drawn.

    This is educational writing about a psychological idea, not guidance for your particular situation. Drawing a boundary is not equally safe in every relationship — if holding one in your own relationship could put you at risk, please talk it through with someone qualified who knows your circumstances before you act on anything here.

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