Inner Work Notes

English

Category: Relationships

  • Wrecking Your Own Body to Be Recognised

    Two people, and nothing about them looks alike. One is a married man who goes from one woman to the next. The other is the person everybody calls selfless — the one who pours everything into helping other people and has nothing left for themselves afterwards. Set them side by side and they look like opposite characters in opposite stories. Yet both of them want the same thing: to be recognised, to have someone confirm that they are worth something. The man goes out and collects that confirmation from women. The selfless one tries to earn it by using themselves up for other people.

    What the man with many women is really getting

    Take the man first. When people hear the word “affair”, most of them think first of sexual desire. But desire is not the essential part. The essential part is emotional: loneliness, emptiness, the wish to be recognised. When those needs are met, neither men nor women look elsewhere. What a man who goes from woman to woman wants from it all is to have one thing about himself acknowledged: that he is attractive as a man.

    So he meets a woman he does not know and spends one night with her. Afterwards, deep down, he feels he has been recognised. She was drawn to him and gave in, and in his mind that is the proof: I am attractive as a man. Sex is what he uses to get that proof.

    The son who tore into his father

    A man’s hunger for this kind of recognition goes back to his childhood. A boy grows up watching how his father behaves as a husband and a father. If his father was unfaithful, the son may tear into him for it. But the moment the son becomes a husband and father himself, he can find himself cheating too, and it can come all too naturally.

    Some men set themselves hard against it. My father did that, so I never will. And they don’t — they hold the line. Then, strangely, it is their sons who cheat. If the hurt their father caused them had been healed, and that was why they stayed faithful, it would end there. But they left the hurt as it was and only made a decision not to cheat. The decision keeps them faithful. The hurt is still there, though, and it breaks out in their sons. This is how pain like this is passed down through a family.

    Because this comes from the man’s own past, whether a husband cheats does not come down to what kind of wife he has. There are husbands who cheat even though their wives have done nothing wrong, and husbands who stay faithful even though their wives make their lives very hard.

    The illness of going crazy when you cannot help someone

    Now to the second person: the one everybody calls selfless, who goes the opposite way. Instead of collecting recognition from others, this person uses themselves up to earn it. What they have is called codependency. Codependency is an illness of helping somebody — more precisely, an illness of going crazy when you cannot help someone. People like this fall ill when there is someone they cannot help. So they sacrifice a great deal of themselves to help others, pour everything into it, and then there is nothing left for themselves. To keep giving until nothing is left for you is to mistreat yourself. At bottom, then, codependency is an illness of mistreating yourself.

    Neither the minister nor the helper knows it is an illness

    Put people like this into a church, and the church can use them for all they are worth. What they do looks like strong faith and great self-sacrifice, but what it actually is, is an illness. I am not saying anyone here is bad. The hard part is that neither side knows. The minister does not know it is an illness, and neither do the helpers themselves. So the minister keeps handing out work and they keep taking it on, until they break down, mentally and spiritually.

    Addicted to recognition

    So why do they sacrifice themselves like that? Another way to describe codependent people is this: they are addicted to recognition. Recognition is their drug. Once they are hooked on it, they want it so badly that they will wreck their own bodies to get it.

    Why does recognition matter so much to them? Because they have no sense that they are worth anything just for existing. Once a person believes that just being there will never earn them recognition, the only way left to earn it is through what they do. This is where the two people from the beginning meet. The man collects his proof from the women he wins over. The selfless helper collects it through sacrifice. Both are trying, through what they do, to be assured that it is all right for them to exist — that they are worth something.

    In the helper’s mind it goes like this: If I am not sacrificing myself and devoting myself to others, I have no right to exist. They cannot feel, from the inside, that it is all right for them to be here. So they grow anxious and keep looking for something to do, always asking, What can I do?

    Too perfect a match

    When a man is an addict — with a drinking or drug problem, say — his wife is usually the one described as codependent. Why? Because the two make too perfect a match. The addict keeps living a life that says, “Look after me.” His codependent wife keeps living a life that says, “Yes, I will look after you.” It is a contract between them, though neither of them knows they have made it.

    It looks like helping him recover

    Then suppose the addict breaks that contract. He decides, I am going to take responsibility for my own life now, as an adult, and sets off on the road to recovery. What happens to his wife then? She is frightened, because the man she needs to help will no longer need her help.

    So just when he is trying to recover, she trips him up and he falls again. He has to stay an addict, or she will have no one left to help. In the end, she keeps him from recovering. All along she has been the one looking after him, so it looks as if she is helping him recover, but what she is actually doing is wrecking the recovery.

    The man with many women and the selfless helper live lives that look opposite. Underneath, though, both lack the same thing: the sense of being worth something just for existing. The man confirms his worth each time a woman is won over by him. The helper confirms it by helping, and helping needs someone who stays broken.

    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 Can’t Drag Anyone Into Loving Themselves

    In a self-love group, people meet to practise a particular kind of self-love: loving not their looks or the things they are good at, but the parts of themselves they think of as pathetic or inferior. Each person works out their own way of doing this. Sooner or later, you find yourself watching the person sitting next to you. You see how they are going about it, and the thought arrives on its own: so it works when they do it that way. Then: I should try it that way myself. That is how people learn to love themselves. You watch it work for someone and you carry the method home. On your own, you can only come up with so many ways. In a room full of people, you see many more. That is why the group asks members to post in the group chat whatever has worked for them: a way you would never have found on your own becomes one you can follow.

    Then you try it exactly the way they did. It worked for them: doing it that way, they got to the point where they could accept themselves. You do the same, and nothing happens. So is their method wrong, or is something wrong with you? Neither.

    The same method works for one person and not for another

    Do the same practice in the same way, and the result differs from person to person. For one person it works; for the next, doing exactly the same thing, it does not.

    At a seminar on self-love, one participant said the hardest part for them was finding a way to love themselves that actually worked. They had tried one method after another, and it was still hard. Saying kind things to yourself in the mirror, or keeping a gratitude journal, suits some people but not others. So you borrow a method, notice what changes in you, adjust it, and try again. Your own way is built through that repeated trying; it cannot be copied whole from someone else.

    Finding your own way takes more than one try

    You do not find your own way on the first try. You try one method and keep at it for a while. If it does not work, you try another. That is all there is to it. You find the way that is yours by working through the ones that are not.

    So where is the answer? Inside you.

    The way that works for you is not somewhere out there. It is already inside you. The methods you borrow from other people do not put it there; they are how you find it. You try them one at a time, and along the way you come across what was in you from the start.

    There is one point where people give up: Right — tried that, that does not work either. And they stop there. Stop there, and you will not find it. Not in a lifetime.

    You can see someone hurting themselves, and there is no quick fix

    So far this has been about finding your own way. Now picture yourself as the one watching someone else struggle.

    At the same seminar, a participant asked this. Suppose a person close to you is cruel to themselves — blaming themselves, running themselves down, treating themselves with contempt — or keeps staying in whatever is hurting them. From where you stand, you can see it plainly. How do you help? When you are the one watching, you always want to do something about it — sort it out, change something, step in.

    There is no quick fix. So you are left watching it go on.

    Comfort, then trust, and only then a suggestion

    But there is a place to start. First, you stay with them. You comfort them, you let them know you understand, and trust builds between you. Then you can say something like this is far too much for you to be carrying, and offer a suggestion. The order is the point. Trust comes first; the suggestion comes second, never first. Make it before there is trust, and what comes back is: “What would you know about my pain?”

    You do not drag a person along like a bull on a nose ring

    One person at the seminar described exactly where they stood. They knew who their ideal self was — the person they wished they were — and they kept trying to become that person, with no thought at all of letting that ideal go. Letting it go was what needed to happen, but at that point they could not bring themselves to do it.

    Self-love is something we all want. But our own pain, our own ways of thinking and our own beliefs often keep it from coming, and that person’s grip on their ideal self is one example. When self-love is not happening, you do not put a ring through someone’s nose, like a bull, and haul them along.

    So the state they are in has to be respected: for now, self-love is simply not happening for them. You do not tell someone who cannot love themselves yet to do it right now. Say it anyway, and it can sound less like help than like one more task: they already feel they fall short, and now they are being judged for failing at self-love too.

    We can be a safe place for them. We cannot be the solution.

    Being a safe place for them means offering a relationship in which they are heard, not shamed, and not abandoned when change is slow. You can make that place safer, but you cannot make their decisions, feel their feelings, or practise self-love for them. Beside them, you are a companion, not a problem-solver.

    They may stay with you in that safe place for a long time. It is not that they do not know what needs to change. It is that, for now, the change is not happening. So you keep standing by them, comforting them and staying with them, for as long as you can. Just as you have to find your own way, they have to find theirs, and that takes time. No one can go through that time for them. What you can do is be a safe place for them while they go through 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

  • Help Them Lift It and the Muscle Never Comes

    A parent cannot sit still when their child seems to be suffering. The thought runs like this: my child is hurting this much, and I am supposed to just stand by and watch? At a seminar I gave on loving yourself, someone asked a question that came from exactly that feeling. Some children take the same hurt much harder than others. When a child like that reaches the teenage years, they can easily get stuck in that hurt. How do you help them then?

    The person who asked explained why they were asking about teenagers. An adult who wants to understand their own mind can go and look for help on their own. A teenager has feelings and urges welling up inside, and no idea yet how to manage any of it.

    Here is the picture I gave in reply. Someone is lifting a barbell. If you step in and lift it with them because it looks hard, their muscles never develop. Muscle comes from the strain itself. Adolescence works the same way. A teenager builds emotional strength by feeling distress, making a choice, living with the result, and trying again. If a parent removes every consequence, settles every conflict, or decides every difficult question, the teenager is spared the strain but also loses the practice. The muscle a teenager is building in these years is the strength to handle the feelings and urges rising inside them, and to manage them without a parent doing it for them.

    There is no room for you to intervene

    I am sorry to say it, but there is no room to intervene. Yes, their moods swing wildly, these years are hard, and feelings and urges come surging up. But they have to stumble through all of it themselves, failing and making mistakes, until they have built that strength on their own. That job is theirs, not yours.

    These days, children’s surroundings have a heavy influence on them. Outside the home, school is about the only place where they can learn to manage what rises up inside them. The rest of the world shows them a great deal that is bad for them, and the smartphone keeps bringing it straight to them. Even so, they have to find their own way through all of that and learn for themselves.

    Be there, and talk when they come to you

    Then what is left for the parent to do? Be there; that is enough. Being there means remaining available without taking over: keeping ordinary contact, listening when the child approaches, and helping them think without supplying every answer. If your child comes to you wanting to talk, talk with them about whatever they bring. This is a different season from the years when a small child needed you to set limits (Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller).

    When your teenager says leave me alone, you leave them alone. Being pushed away like that makes a parent anxious: what am I supposed to do while my child grows up shutting me out? But if your child had good care when they were younger, and the two of you can still talk to each other, none of this is going to turn into a big problem.

    You are not going to find what is on their phone

    Take the smartphone. Your teenager has one, and pornography is only a tap away on it. So how are you going to find out what they are looking at? You won’t. Most parents simply tell their child to stay off the phone, and beyond that there are not many methods on offer. So stop trying to find out, and put your energy into loving them instead.

    Even if they do see such things, what keeps them healthy is love. In practice, loving them means treating your relationship with them as the thing that counts, because love needs a relationship to grow in. Take the energy you were going to spend searching their phone and put it into the relationship instead.

    Don’t talk to them about cigarettes

    A school counsellor once put a question to me. The school, working with the local education office, had gathered the students who smoked and was running a stop-smoking program for them, and the counsellor wanted to know how to get these students to quit. This is what I told the counsellor. Don’t talk to those children about cigarettes. Just be friendly with them. Then, in time, they will stop smoking on their own.

    Why would that work? Think back to a teacher you adored at school, maybe even had a crush on. If you really adored that teacher, you tried hard in the subject they taught. Nobody had to tell you to study. Your relationship with that teacher is what moved you.

    It works the same way at home. When a child’s relationship with their mother and father is healthy, they may stray a little, but they know what their parents want, and they do it for them, the way you worked hard for that teacher.

    Give love instead of trying to block bad things

    None of this means you have to keep your mouth shut. You can speak up. You can tell them you are worried. What you cannot do is actively stop what they are doing. Telling them how you feel and trying to stop them are two different things. What matters is giving love, not blocking bad things. And what does it take to give love? You have to love yourself first. Without loving yourself, you cannot give love in a healthy way (I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First).

    Push love on them on your own terms and they feel intruded on

    Here is what love looks like when it is not given in a healthy way. Go back to the question from the seminar. If what you are looking for is a way to step in and fix things for your hurting teenager, then you are offering love on your own terms and pushing it onto your child. And your child pushes back: why are you taking my freedom away from me? Why don’t you respect me? That is how a fight breaks out.

    You are clearly thinking of your child. You are doing this because you love them. But the child feels intruded on, invaded, disrespected. It is the same action, but one side calls it love and the other calls it an intrusion.

    The same pattern carries on into the child’s marriage

    Say the child raised that way is a son. He marries, and now the same kind of complaint is aimed at his wife: why do you dismiss everything? He feels as disrespected by her as he once felt at home, and the same kind of fight breaks out. He took the pattern from his parents’ house and carried it into his own marriage. That is how a pattern like this gets passed down from one generation to the next.

    So what the parent of a teenager has to hold on to is not a better way to block bad things. It is being there. It is talking with them when they come to you. And it is loving yourself first, so that what reaches them is love given in a healthy way. The barbell is theirs to lift.

    Related

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

  • I’ll Do This for You, So You Do This for Me

    There are people nobody speaks to carelessly. Picture someone who says careless things to others whenever the mood takes them. Put that person in the same mood in front of one of these people, and the careless words do not come out.

    These are people who love themselves. Something about them protects them. Call it an aura, if that is the right word. It cannot be seen or touched, but it shows in how they behave. They notice disrespect, do not laugh it off, say so, and leave if it keeps happening. Because they will not go along with being treated carelessly, even someone who usually mistreats other people finds it hard to do it to them. Their love for themselves has become a boundary that other people can feel.

    If people treat you carelessly, where should you look?

    If loving yourself keeps careless treatment away, then being treated carelessly may be telling you something. Say that lately people seem to treat you as though you do not count. The first impulse is to work out what kind of people they are. Before you do that, look closer to home.

    Do you love yourself? Or are you mistreating yourself, blaming and criticising yourself in a voice that never takes a day off? If you are, then when someone treats you badly you are likely to decide it is your own fault, and to find it hard to walk away. So the careless treatment goes on, and in the end people treat you just as badly as you treat yourself.

    Two people who cannot love themselves find each other

    People who do not love themselves are drawn to each other, and once together, they abuse each other easily. At the slightest bump between them, hurtful words fly out: a remark that belittles the other person, or one aimed at exactly the spot where it will hurt.

    The hard part is that neither of them notices what they are doing. Each one wounds the other and does not realise it.

    I’ll do this for you, so you do this for me

    Being treated carelessly is not the only thing that hurts you. There is a second kind of hurt, harder to name because it looks like kindness. Someone is good to you, and you come away feeling worse. They did you a favour and meant it as one. Help is supposed to make you feel better. Instead you feel sour, and you cannot say what went wrong, because on the surface nothing did.

    What went wrong is that the favour carried an unspoken contract: I’ll do this for you, so you do this for me. The giver never asks whether you accept the contract, but later expects something in return: obedience, gratitude, attention or sacrifice. You take the help, and with it a debt you never agreed to. That is why what looks like kindness feels like pressure and control.

    Don’t do it for me, Mum. I won’t take it.

    Children are the first to sense this hidden contract. Their mother does something for them and then keeps waiting for something back. So the children refuse to take anything at all. Don’t do it for me, Mum. I won’t take it.

    The child is not being rude. The reason lies underneath, where the child cannot put it into words: if I take this, I will have to do something in return, and that feels like a burden. So the child refuses it.

    Real love gives and wants nothing back

    In real love, the giving is the end of it. You give, and you want nothing back from the person you gave to. But some people are good to you and still leave you feeling bad. They give, and then they wait for something back. That waiting is what turns a gift into control.

    So the person receiving feels bad, and on top of that feels confused: They are being good to me. So why do I feel like this?

    The giver believes it is real love

    The receiver is not the only one who is confused. So is the giver. People who give like this do not know what real love is, and they believe that what they are doing is truly for your sake. That belief is mistaken. They do not mean you any harm.

    Even so, the real message gets through. The giver never says ‘I’ll do this for you, so you do this for me’ out loud, yet you hear it all the same. That is why you cannot accept the help comfortably and simply be grateful.

    People like this do not love themselves, and they seem to love only others instead. But look at what is really happening, and they are not loving the others either. What they give has the outward shape of love, with nothing inside it. That is why, however much of their love you take in, you never feel restored by it, and nothing in you is healed.

    It is hard for anyone to keep being good to others while feeling bad inside. Once or twice, out of consideration, a person can manage it: ‘I feel bad, but I can still do this for you.’ But when that is how someone lives all the time, it is no longer consideration. It is a sickness. A person who is struggling inside can never truly welcome someone else or make room for them.

    Someone controlled for years is not easily soothed

    Someone who has received this kind of controlling help for years is not easily comforted. They carry many wounds, and the wounds are still raw. It takes a long time of having their feelings acknowledged, of being comforted, of having someone stay beside them.

    During that long time, their feelings come out twisted. They make sarcastic, barbed remarks. They put other people in a bad mood. They even hurt the person who has been accepting and comforting them. This is not bad character finally showing itself. They feel bad, and this is what comes out of someone who feels bad.

    It all begins and ends with self-love

    The order runs like this. For you to be loved, you have to love yourself first. That love lets you express yourself as you are: say honestly what you feel, without attacking the other person. Then you can love another person in a healthy way, and then you can be loved.

    Take a wife who wanted her husband’s love and did not get it. She can tell him honestly, ‘I wanted you to love me, and when you stayed away I was very sad.’ That is expressing herself as she is. Or she can say, ‘Call yourself a man? What kind of husband behaves like that?’ That is an attack, and of course it does not bring her the love she wants. Speaking like that is itself a way of mistreating herself.

    It all begins and ends with self-love. Without self-love, a wound lingers; with it, you recover quickly. And when people keep treating you as though you do not count, that too comes from a lack of self-love. Everything comes back to that one thing.

    So if you catch yourself doing this, being good to someone and then waiting for something back, do not stop at feeling sorry about what you did to them. What is missing is love for yourself. Self-love begins with doing two things again and again: sharing what is really going on inside you with other people, and saying honestly what you feel without attacking anyone.

    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

  • Infidelity Is Not a Sexual Problem. It Is a Broken Promise.

    When you hear that there has been an affair, notice which questions come to mind first: How many times? How far did it actually go?

    Both of those questions are about the sex. But the sex is not the heart of an affair. It is only the part that shows on the surface.

    Why it looks sexual

    An affair always shows up as a new relationship with someone outside the couple. That is the first thing anyone sees — the other person, and the fact that it was sexual. So attention goes there and stays there.

    An affair can feel as if it is about sex, but sexual desire is not what drives it. It is not a sexual problem. This matters, because once the cause is taken to be sexual dissatisfaction, every conversation afterwards stays on sex: how often the couple had been having sex with each other, how attractive the other person was. What actually broke — the trust between the couple — goes unexamined. So does the hostility that drove the affair.

    Every affair is an act of hostility, by definition

    Every affair is an act of hostility. By hostility I mean a hatred that has built up over a long time and hardened, until the person it is aimed at is seen as an enemy. Who that person is comes up at the end of this article.

    The claim that every affair is an act of hostility is meant as a definition, and that word matters. It does not mean hostility is the biggest item on a list of causes, and it does not mean hostility is often a factor. It means hostility is the only cause, with no room for any other. Put another way: where there is no hostility, there can be no affair.

    Hostility drives an affair through two forces. One is revenge: the wish to hurt back after being hurt. The other is aggression: the urge to break something — here, the bond between the couple. Sex becomes the means because it is a way of breaking the very promise the relationship rests on. The sex is how the hostility is carried out; it is not where the hostility comes from.

    A book on affairs calls it a broken promise

    One book on the psychology of affairs sums up everything it has to say in two words: broken promise.

    Two people in a relationship have trust between them, and a promise. They gave these to each other. An affair breaks what they gave each other.

    The core of an affair is the betrayal of trust. Hostility is what drives an affair; what the affair actually breaks is trust. The weight does not lie in how many times it happened or how far it went. It lies in one fact: the two of them agreed to keep something, and one of them did not keep it. This is also why the partner who was betrayed is shaken less by the sex than by the betrayal. The person they trusted hid something important and broke a promise the two of them had made together. All at once, everything they believed to be true up to yesterday is thrown into doubt.

    A hard time is one thing; an affair is another

    Take a hard time that really does happen: after a wife gives birth, there is a period when the couple cannot have sex. It is a time when men are quite likely to struggle badly. That part is real, and I do not want to play it down.

    But going from there to having an affair is a separate matter. Lack of sleep, loneliness and sexual frustration explain why a man in that situation is struggling. They do not explain why he chose to break the promise instead of talking about it, waiting, or getting help. Once “it was a hard time” and “so I had an affair” are joined into one sentence, the hard time becomes an excuse.

    Without the hostility, there was more than one road

    Now take a man in that same hard time who has no hostility or wish for revenge inside him. He can get through it without an affair — he might, for instance, throw himself into his work. He does not need someone new in order to cope, and he never did.

    Turn this around, and it is uncomfortable to hear. If a man in that hard time felt there was no other road — that seeing someone else was the only option — then unresolved hostility was inside him, doing the choosing. There was never only one road; he could see only one.

    “Men are all like that”

    There is an old way of talking about this, in which a man’s affairs are treated as a sign that he has what it takes. People say things like “Men are all like that” and “It’s no big deal.” Talk like this goes down easily.

    Psychologically, this way of talking is not healthy. It makes something driven by hostility sound like nothing at all.

    Some of the men who come to my consulting room because of an affair do regret it. Even so, the reasoning they bring with them sounds a lot like that old way of talking. It goes something like this:

    If a man has what it takes, what is actually wrong with being with a lot of women? Those women knew perfectly well I was married and were happy to see me anyway. Why only one wife? That is just how the culture happens to be set up. There are countries where a man may have more than one wife and nobody treats it as a problem. It is only a problem here because this is Korea.

    These are rationalisations: explanations put together after the act to make it look reasonable. They talk about culture and about the other women, and they steer clear of the one relationship in which a promise was made and broken.

    One person is missing from these arguments

    Count who appears in that reasoning: the man himself, and the women he was seeing. The one who never appears is the person he made the promise with: his wife.

    That is why “those women knew I was married” falls apart as an argument. It makes no difference that they knew, because the promise that broke was never made with them. They were not party to it. The broken promise is between him and his wife, and the argument never goes near it.

    The argument about other countries goes wrong as well. It is about the rules of marriage, and it leaves out what drove the affair. Move to another country, and hostility is still hostility, revenge is still revenge.

    Monogamy is only possible for a mature person

    The men’s argument treats having one wife as nothing more than a cultural rule. A book on couples therapy sees it differently: Monogamy is only possible for a mature person.

    The point is that staying with one person is hard — hard enough that only someone who has truly grown up can manage it. And that says something about the people who do stay with one person: they are not doing it because it comes easily.

    Then the question has to change

    If every affair is an act of hostility, then the questions people usually ask are aimed at the wrong place: How many times? How far did it go? What was the other person like? How hard were things back then?

    The question that matters is one the person who had the affair has to ask: Who is the hostility in me aimed at, and where did it come from?

    Sex is only the means by which the promise is broken. What breaks it is the hostility that was already there. That hostility is where to look, and it is not where anybody looks first.

    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

  • So I Was That Angry Too: The Rage I Couldn’t Name

    What did the memory of being hit by my father leave in me?

    How old would I have been? Probably about seven.

    I don’t remember exactly what I had said, or what I had done, but my father seems to have been angry about something. Right where I stood, without warning, he struck me hard across both cheeks. I can’t remember exactly how many times his hand swung back and forth across my face. I think it was probably ten blows or so.

    In this way, I was treated roughly by an adult who could not take responsibility even for his own feelings.

    But this was only one incident. That kind of “rough treatment” happened again and again, and each time, anger, sadness, and resentment piled up, layer upon layer, deep in my heart.

    How did I endure an anger I didn’t know how to soothe, and how did I face it?

    There came a point when the anger that had piled up this way whirled in my chest and in my head as if it were about to explode. There was always an energy boiling up inside me, so intense that I wanted to swallow something whole and destroy everything. I didn’t know how to soothe that anger. So there was a time in my teens when I endured that anger by going off the rails.

    As a young adult, in a desperate struggle to face that anger, I sought out the sea on days when a storm was raging, a typhoon was blowing, and the water was heaving wildly.

    Why did watching the sea in a storm comfort me?

    Watching the fierce waves surge up and the sea leap and plunge wildly, I felt as if I were looking from the outside at whatever it was that had been boiling up in my chest and in my head. It was as if the anger and sadness, the resentment and destructive energy I could not put into words, had turned into huge waves and were moving out there, outside me.

    Was that why? Watching that sea in the storm, I found comfort, little by little.

    “Yes. So I was that angry too.”

    An enormous energy had been surging up inside me, one that seemed ready to swallow something up, sweep everything away, and destroy it all.

    When I grew small before the vastness of nature, what did I let go of?

    And I think that, without realizing it, as I watched the sea heaving in the storm, I was feeling something with my body.

    Whenever I stood before that vast sea and that storm, my very existence grew smaller and smaller, without end. I had thought myself so important, yet before the immense, majestic movements of nature I was no more than a single tiny speck.

    But strangely, the more I came to accept, little by little, that I was such a small being, the more my heart began to fill with peace instead.

    It was then, I think, that I first realized.

    Resolving this anger was not a matter of pouring it out on the world.

    Rather, it was only when I let go, little by little, of the “I” that I had been holding on to as if I were the center of the world, and accepted that I was a small being in a vast world, that peace finally came.

    I think this was not something I understood with my head, but something I learned, over time, with my body.

    And perhaps, in that place, I was getting ready to meet God.

    When I let go of everything my hand had been clutching, when I had become nothing at all, only then was God standing in that place.

    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 Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of

    You thought things would be all right if the person you live with would change just a little: speak more gently, drink less, keep their promises. You started with the way they spoke. You said just one sentence: “That is not how you talk to people.” For about a week, their tone was better. Then you started asking where they had been. Not accusing, just asking. Then asking again later to see whether the answers matched.

    Then you checked their wallet. You had a reason, and it was a good one. Ten seconds while they were in the shower, and everything went back exactly where it was.

    Then came the talks: the same conversation, in the same order, ending in the same place, until you could both recite it from memory. When you were worn out, you stopped speaking to them altogether. Three days, sometimes five. You were not punishing anyone. You had run out of things to try.

    Now look at what all of this has done. They talk less. Their answers have got shorter and smoother. They keep a little back from you out of habit. Little by little, the person you live with has become more like the person you feared they were when you first began checking up on them: someone who keeps things from you.

    From the outside it looks like being sensitive

    Anyone watching would call you sensitive: highly strung, making too much of small things.

    The word is wrong, and it is worth seeing why. You are not reacting to what is in front of you. You are trying to stop something that has not happened yet. The checking is not a sign that you love them too much, either. It is prevention.

    In your mind, the story runs like this: they will drink or lie again, things will go the way they went the last time they did it, and you will not be able to bear it. All the checking, questioning and controlling is an attempt to stop that from happening before there is any real sign that it has begun.

    But that story usually did not start with the person in front of you. It comes from somewhere much older, often from childhood. This article is not about where it came from. It is about what your efforts to stop that story from coming true do to the relationship over the years.

    Fix one thing and another one moves into view

    Say your efforts work. They drink less. They call when they said they would.

    You expect to feel better, and you do not. This is what confuses people most. Before long something else catches your eye. They look sullen. They do what you asked, but grudgingly, not like someone who means it.

    What they do can set off your fear, but it did not create the older fear underneath. That fear was usually there long before they came into your life. That is why fixing one behavior brings only brief relief. The fear soon settles on another sign — a look on their face, a late reply, a reluctant tone — and the controlling starts again.

    Knowing that controlling them does not work is not enough to make you stop

    Knowing a method does not work is normally enough to make a person put it down. Not here. People who understand perfectly well that controlling does not help still cannot leave the other person alone. Stopping does not feel like dropping a method that failed. It feels like letting the thing you fear happen.

    So the monitoring continues, and the relationship changes. Because letting go feels that dangerous, you stop leaving things to their judgment. Instead of talking things over, you simply decide: where they may go, whom they may contact, what counts as an acceptable explanation. One by one, you take over decisions that were theirs to make. Fear turns a relationship between two adults, each making their own choices, into one where one person supervises the other.

    Two people came together because they loved each other, and now one controls the other. Every act of control treats the other person as less than a person: it overrides their judgment, their choices, their say over their own life. Overriding someone like this is violence, even when your voice stays calm. It is oppression, however good your reasons. What builds up is not safety but conflict, and a relationship that began in love turns destructive.

    Nobody invents this way of treating someone. Usually it is how you learned to deal with people at home as a child. If a parent was unpredictable, or someone in the family drank, keeping watch and trying to stop trouble before it came may have been the only way to bear life at home. Now you are doing the same thing to the person you live with, as if they were the family you grew up with.

    Pressure hands the other person a part to play

    Here is the thing I most want to say.

    Treat someone as a person who lies and they begin saying less, even when they have nothing to hide, because every detail will be questioned. You interpret the shorter answer as evidence of concealment and ask more questions. To avoid another interrogation, they omit more. Repeated pressure therefore helps create the secrecy you feared.

    What happens to them is a little like being handed a part in a play, and the play is that old story in your head. You are not writing their lines. But you have made one set of lines much easier for them to say than any other. Keep treating someone as the one in your story who lies, and in time they really start to play that part.

    The British psychoanalyst Joseph Sandler noticed something like this in his work with patients. He saw that therapists sometimes find themselves acting in ways they did not choose, pulled into them by the way a patient treats them. Sandler called this role-responsiveness: slipping into the role the other person casts you in. It does not only happen in therapy.

    The American psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden described the same thing from the other side: the side of the person whose fear is doing the pushing. What you fear about the other person does not stay a picture in your head. Through the questions, the silences and the tone, it is pressed into them until they begin to act it out. Ogden called this projective identification: “projective” because you see what you fear as if it were already in them, “identification” because in time they begin to act as if it were true of them. Neither Sandler nor Ogden was describing something anyone does on purpose. It happens between people who mean well.

    The evidence is real, and you made it

    By the time the change is obvious, the evidence is real: they hide things from you, or go quiet when you walk in. What is difficult to see is the sequence that produced it. Your fear led to pressure, the pressure led to concealment, and the concealment confirmed the fear. Because the last step is something they do, all you see is proof that you were right, not the part you played in getting there.

    So from where you stand, it is extremely hard to see that you had a hand in making it. With that much proof lying around the house, anyone in your place would think, “I was right all along.” This does not mean you caused all of it. If they were already lying or drinking before any of this began, or if they threaten or hurt you, that is their responsibility, not yours, and your safety comes first.

    You can be shaking inside and still not act on it

    I am not going to suggest that you stop feeling the fear. That cannot be done.

    Your body reacts first, the moment something reminds you of that old story. The door does not sound quite the way it usually does, and your heart is already racing before you have decided anything. That is how people are made, and it will keep happening, however old you get.

    One thing can change. Until now, the moment the fear came, you acted on it: you called, you asked again, you searched. That shaking inside felt like a warning, and a warning meant you had to move. But the shaking does not always mean danger has arrived. Your body reacts in exactly the same way when something merely reminds you of what happened long ago.

    So put a pause between the feeling and the action. Ask yourself whether something is actually happening right now, or whether this only reminds you of something from long ago. You can feel the fear without calling, asking or checking their wallet, and wait for your body to settle. If the danger is real and happening now, this does not apply. In that case, the first thing is to get away and keep yourself safe.

    Almost everything people try in a relationship means doing more: saying more, trying harder, being warmer, being firmer. The pause asks for the opposite: not doing what you have been doing. I know of nothing harder. It also changes the question you ask. You stop asking “How do I get this person to change?” That question never had an answer. You start asking “What have I been trying so hard to keep from happening?”

    References

    • Sandler, J. (1976). Countertransference and Role-Responsiveness. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3, 43–47. — a person can be recruited into a role by the pressure the other exerts.
    • Ogden, T. H. (1979). On Projective Identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 357–373. — what is put into the other person, the other person begins to act out.

    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 Won the Argument and You’re No Happier for It

    Three days on, you are still going over the argument in your head, even though you won it. That is the confusing part.

    It started over the route. Not even the route — over whether the road you took was actually faster, which neither of you could have proved sitting in that car. Somewhere in the third exchange it stopped being about the road. You could hear it stop. Your voice changed before your argument did, and so did theirs, and then it was ten minutes of two people who were no longer discussing traffic.

    In the end, they backed down. Fine, they said. You were right. You won — and days later you are not a bit happier for it.

    You weren’t having a conversation. You were settling who ranks higher.

    The reason winning doesn’t make you any happier is simple enough. It wasn’t a conversation.

    In an argument like that, the same few questions are always being asked, though nobody says them out loud. Are you stronger than me? Are you better than me?

    The words on the surface are about the route. Underneath, each person is trying to establish who is more competent and whose judgment should dominate. So even when the argument is over, nothing has really been gained. The only thing it decided was who came out on top.

    This is also why winning brings no lasting relief. If your sense of your own worth depends on being above the other person, one win cannot settle it. The next disagreement puts your place above them at risk again, so the same contest comes back over some other topic. The argument about the road ended. Your doubt about your own worth did not.

    What it costs, day to day

    Once ranking yourself against others becomes a habit, you meet people first as rivals to compete with, not as people to be considerate of. Two things then get difficult, and they are the two things relationships are actually made of.

    The first is respect. Someone sits down across from you and, before either of you has said a word, you have already sized him up. Is he above me or below me? Does he know more? Has he done more? You do not decide to do this. It happens on its own, the way a first impression does, and it shapes how you hear everything he says after. If he comes out above you, you find yourself disagreeing with him before you have even worked out whether you do. If he comes out below you, you expect him to keep quiet and listen to you. Either way, you are no longer listening to what he actually says.

    The second is consideration. Consideration means stepping for a moment into the other person’s position and seeing things from there. If you are always measuring who is above whom, you never have that moment to spare: every exchange is already being used to settle it one more time. A colleague mentions she is struggling with something, and what comes up in you first is not that sounds hard. It is a small relief you would rather not feel: she admitted to struggling and you did not, so for now you are the one above.

    If someone described all this to you out loud, you would not defend it. That is not the same as being able to stop it.

    Where do you learn it?

    Not in any lesson. Nobody teaches it; you pick it up by having it done to you.

    As a child, you said no, and an adult overrode you anyway, with a louder voice and the authority to make it stick. Not by persuasion — you were not persuaded, and you did not come around. You were simply the smaller party. That is not being treated as a person. That is being overpowered.

    When this happens not once or twice but all through childhood, the child comes to a conclusion about what relationships are: a way of deciding who is on top. Every disagreement ended with the stronger person winning, and the child never saw one settled any other way. Children cannot invent a way they have never seen.

    Later, when that child has power of their own, they reach for the same method: press harder, speak louder, or refuse to stop until the other person gives in. They do not need to be out for revenge to do this. It is simply the only way they were ever shown.

    The parent on the receiving end of a child’s no

    When a small child first starts to show who they are, the word they reach for first is no. Saying no is how a child begins to become a person separate from their parents. It is healthy, not disrespectful. What I want to look at here is the parent who hears it.

    Some parents cannot take it. As I see it, a parent like that is weak on the inside: weak enough that a small child’s no feels like an attack.

    Look at the difference between what the word means and how it is heard. The child says no, and what that means is that she is finding out she can want something you do not want and still be your child. That is not remotely how it sounds to you, the parent. It sounds like defiance. It sounds like being talked down to by someone who comes up to your hip and who would not survive a week without you. And on a bad evening, it arrives as the fourth thing that has gone against you since six o’clock.

    The child’s refusal stings the parent’s pride. A parent who hears disagreement as a blow to their authority or their worth cannot simply let the sting pass. So the parent overpowers the child to feel strong again, and wins, because the parent controls the rules, the resources and the consequences.

    But I have never once seen a parent who pushes a child down like that end up happy.

    Some children grow up the opposite way

    Not every child whose no was overridden grows up to push others. Some go quiet instead, and stop speaking up for themselves.

    They are not people who never learned to draw a line. They did draw one, by saying no, and were punished for it.

    What goes wrong for them is small and very specific. Someone like this knows exactly what she does not want, immediately and without any doubt. The trouble is saying it. The sentence is ready; it gets as far as the back of her teeth and does not come out. Afterward she can tell you word for word what she meant to say. She has been saying it over to herself ever since.

    Shut a child’s no down enough times and the humiliation of it hardens and settles in. Shame, we call it. And shame comes down in the end to a single sentence.

    There is nothing in me worth anything.

    When saying no brings ridicule, punishment or withdrawal of love again and again, the child comes to feel that showing what she wants means being humiliated. Later she may know exactly what she wants and still say nothing, because the moment a disagreement begins, her body expects what used to happen next.

    Both began with a child’s no that was overridden

    The person who has to win, and the person who can’t get the sentence out. They look like they have nothing to do with each other.

    In both cases, a child said no and was overpowered. One took on the stronger person’s way of doing things and, once grown, overpowers others in arguments too. The other learned that speaking up is dangerous and keeps the argument inside her own head. They behave in opposite ways as adults, but they started in the same place: a no that was not accepted.

    What to do when a child refuses everything, constantly, is a separate question, and I am not answering it here. Only this: when a parent pushes a child down because their pride is hurt, that is not treating the child as a person. It is simply overpowering her, and what she learns from it is that the stronger one wins. Taking a child’s no seriously does not mean she always gets her way. A parent can say, “You don’t have to like it, but you do need a bath tonight.” The feeling is accepted, and the limit still holds. A child whose no was taken seriously like this does not grow up needing to win every conversation, because for her a conversation was never where it got decided who is on top.

    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

  • What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.

    There is a sentence that climbs up your throat on the bad days. What did I do to deserve this. Some people finish it out loud — to deserve these parents, to deserve being married to this person, to deserve waking up in this exact room again. You can carry that question a long time. It rarely gives you an answer.

    If this were a punishment, it would have a set price

    Think about how punishment actually works. A fine comes with an amount and a due date. A prison sentence comes with a length — this many months, and then the door opens and you walk out. Someone set the price. You pay the price. The account closes.

    Even the harshest punishment is decided in advance. On the day it is handed down, you already know what it is and how long it will last.

    That is what makes a punishment a punishment. A penalty with no set amount and no last payment is not a penalty at all.

    You have paid more than once, and the account is still open

    Now hold your own life next to that. Nobody named a figure. Nobody set a release date. There is no office you can walk into and ask how much is left to pay.

    You have taken more than you ever thought you could take. You have said to yourself, more than once, that you have served your time for whatever this is. You kept a private count. You decided that after this much, surely, the thing would be settled.

    Then a season goes by, and there you are in the same kitchen, in the same argument, saying what you already said the last time.

    Nothing closed. Nothing got crossed off. Something you keep paying and never finish paying is not a punishment — no punishment works that way. And if it is not a punishment, then there is no crime you are paying for either. There is no ledger. Nobody wrote your name at the top of a page and started adding up what you owe.

    A hard life is heavy, and it is still not payment for anything. You are not going through all this because of something you did wrong. That does not mean nobody has hurt you. A parent or partner who was violent, or who failed to look after you, is responsible for what they did. But being treated unfairly does not mean you deserved it.

    Nobody asks what a rich man did to deserve it

    You never hear the question asked the other way round. Nobody looks at a man with money and asks what he did to deserve that. You only ask what you did to deserve something when it hurts. So the question does not show that your life is a punishment. It only shows how much your life hurts right now.

    What the question is really asking

    “What did I do to deserve this?” comes out of pain, but it is not asking how to ease the pain. It is asking who is to blame — who did this, who let it happen, who has to answer for it.

    So you look for somewhere to put the blame. Sometimes you put it on your parents, or on your husband or wife. Sometimes you turn it on yourself. What did I do wrong. What is wrong with me.

    Pick someone to blame and see what happens next

    Once you decide who is to blame, there is no next step.

    Decide it was your parents, and you are left with resentment. Decide it was you, and you are left with self-blame. Both are heavy, and neither one moves you a single inch. Tomorrow morning arrives exactly the same either way. You changed who you blame. Nothing else changed.

    This is how you can tell that the question Who is to blame? will not give you the answer you need. Blaming your parents may explain where the pain began. Blaming yourself may feel easier than living with pain that has no reason at all. If it is your fault, at least there is a reason, and the world feels predictable again, as if you were in control. That control is not real. Neither kind of blame tells you what you need now or what you can do next. The question keeps you looking for a guilty person, when what you actually need is to decide how you will respond.

    Living with someone impossible, or getting rich: both show you who you are

    We learn who we are by living through very different things. Some people learn it by living with someone impossible. Some learn it by getting rich. Nobody would call getting rich a punishment. Living with someone impossible is not a punishment either. It is another way of finding out who you are.

    Joy, pain, and a problem that will not go away each show you something different about yourself. Hard times especially show what makes you go silent, what makes you attack, what you can endure, and where you give up your own needs just to keep a relationship. However different the situations are, each one lets you see how you tend to respond to what life puts in front of you.

    Your own life, exactly as it is, is where you meet yourself. That is not because the suffering was handed to you as a punishment. It is because you can only see how you respond in the situations you actually have to live through.

    You may have no idea what “knowing yourself” even means

    If I told you to go and find out who you are, you would probably have no idea where to start. I know. But you are already in the middle of finding out. That is what you have been doing all these hard years.

    So watch yourself as you live through them. What makes you go silent. What makes you say something you will regret the same night. Whose single remark still knocks you flat years later. What you can carry far longer than you expected to. Where you give in at the first push.

    You are not a fact filed away somewhere, waiting to be looked up. Who you are shows up in how you deal with whatever is in front of you. It comes out in pieces, mostly under pressure.

    When the question comes back

    I am not asking you to stop saying it. Say it. Say the whole thing, out loud if you are alone in the car. What did I do to deserve these parents. What did I do to deserve being married to this person. Do not cut it short and do not be polite with it.

    Then, when you have said all of it, add another question: What does this situation show me about how I respond, what I keep repeating, and what I need to do differently now?

    The circumstances may not change right away. But the second question gives you somewhere to go. The first question looks for someone to blame. The second helps you recognise your pattern and choose your next response.

    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 Safe You Don’t Know You Own

    You’re rinsing a plate, or waiting at a red light, and it starts again. That conversation from years back. You know your lines, you know theirs, and you still lose the argument every time you replay it.

    Then comes the second thought, the heavy one. If I had handled that differently, everything since would look different now.

    Most of us carry two or three scenes like this. The sentence you said at the worst possible moment, to the person who deserved it least. The rest of that year has gone soft and grey, but that one scene stays sharp, right down to where your hands were.

    Everything you lived through taught you something

    Here’s how I see it. Whatever life you’ve lived, you learned something in it — and not only in the good years.

    The good years are the easy case. Ask what one of them gave you and the answer comes straight out. No digging required.

    But there is also the stretch you would never choose again — the one you skip past when somebody asks how you ended up here. Nobody signs up for a year like that. You learned something there anyway.

    If you slow down for a second, you can usually feel that you took something away from that year.

    So no life is a mistake. Nothing you lived through was wasted, because every stretch of it taught you something. That is why I say there is no reason to regret any of it.

    So why won’t the regret leave?

    If regret keeps circling the same event, here is what I think is happening. You did learn something from it. You just haven’t noticed what it was. And instead of noticing it, you keep blaming yourself: “You should have known better.”

    Listen to what regret actually tells you. You were stupid. You should have seen it coming. If you had done one thing differently, none of this would have happened.

    Read those back slowly and you’ll notice that not one of them tells you anything you can use: which warning sign you missed, what fear kept you from saying no, what to check next time. All you are doing is grabbing yourself by the collar. You can punish yourself for the past that way, but it will not change what you do next.

    There’s a safe behind your books

    Picture this. On the shelf in your living room, behind the row of paperbacks nobody has moved in years, there is a small safe. Inside it is a thick stack of cash — enough to change your year.

    You don’t know it’s there, because nobody ever mentioned it. You walk past that shelf every day without a thought.

    So here is the question. Are you a person who has that money, or a person who doesn’t?

    The money is there, and that part is settled whatever you happen to believe about it. Meanwhile you go on living as a person without it.

    Owning the money is one thing. Living as someone who has it is another.

    What you have lived through works the same way. Maybe a painful year taught you to spot manipulation, to say no sooner, or to notice when you are ignoring your own judgment. Whatever it taught you is really there, like the money in the safe. But because you are not aware of it, you conclude, “I learned nothing from that.” And then all that is left is blaming yourself: How could you be so stupid? Why did you make the same choice all over again?

    What changes on the day you find the safe

    Imagine the books coming off that shelf one Saturday, and there it is.

    Nothing new arrived that morning. Not a cent. The only thing that changed is that you know.

    And that changes everything after it, because nobody leaves money sitting in a box once they know it’s there. It gets spent. Plans you put off for years are back on the table, because the reason you put them off has quietly stopped being true.

    Learning works the same way: once you know it is there, you use it. Say you can put what a painful relationship taught you into one sentence: “I now notice when I start making excuses for someone who treats me with contempt.” Then you can act on it in the very next conversation. The past does not change, but the way you use it can.

    Why the same thing keeps happening

    You promise yourself you’ll speak up sooner. Then the next time comes, and you go quiet again. And out comes the usual verdict: I never learn.

    The verdict is the loudest part of that loop — promise, silence, verdict, and round again. Every time the loop comes round, the verdict says the same thing: I never learn. I’m just someone who never changes. But look at what that verdict rests on: the times you went quiet before. You have only ever used those memories one way, as proof that you failed.

    Here is what keeps the loop going. Those times did teach you something, but you never put what they taught you into words. And what you have never put into words, you cannot reach for when you need it. So when the next time comes, you walk in with the same old habits and go quiet again.

    You are not short on experience. The same thing keeps happening not because you learned nothing, but because what you learned is still sitting in the safe, unused.

    Write one line about the regret that comes back most

    Pick the regret that visits you more than the rest — the one you could describe in your sleep. That memory is like the safe in the picture. You go back to it again and again, but you have never once looked inside to see what it holds. Write a single line about it, by hand if you can: “What I know now, because of that, is ___.”

    You will probably get stuck at the blank. That is to be expected. Until now you have used this memory only as proof that you are no good, never as something to learn from. So it may take a while before anything other than “I was stupid” comes to mind.

    If you get even one line down, you have found one thing you thought you never had, and it was there the whole time. And if the line stays empty for now, that is not proof that you never learn. It means your hand is finally on the handle of the safe, even though the door has not opened yet.

    That memory was never evidence against you. It was the safe, and what you learned has been inside it all along.

    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