Inner Work Notes

Category: Relationships

  • Wrecking Your Own Body to Be Recognised

    Two people, and nothing about them looks alike. One is a man working his way through a series of women. The other is the person everybody calls selfless — the one who empties himself into helping other people and has nothing left over afterwards. Set them side by side and they look like opposite characters in opposite stories. Both of them are after being recognised. One goes out and collects it. The other gives himself away to earn it.

    What he is actually taking home

    Take the outward direction first. Say the word affair and we reach for sexual desire. But the desire is not the essential part. The essential part is emotion. When the feeling of being recognised is filled in, neither men nor women look elsewhere. That is the hinge. What a man who runs from woman to woman wants out of it is a capacity of his own: that he has appeal as a man. He wants that capacity acknowledged.

    So he meets a woman he does not know, and they spend a night, and what registers inside this man afterwards is how much recognition he has just been given. She was taken with him, she came over to him — so I am recognised as a man. And sex is what gets used to confirm it.

    The son who tore into his father

    Where does a man learn to take it that way? A boy watches, from early on, what the father’s role consists of. If the father was unfaithful, the son may tear into him for it. Then the son arrives at the father’s role himself, and a situation gets built in which the same thing can happen with complete ease.

    Some men set themselves against it hard. My father did that, so I never will. And they don’t — they hold the line. Then, strangely, it turns up in the son’s generation. The injury was never treated. A decision was taken over the top of it instead, and a decision holds for the man who makes it. It does not travel to the boy who grew up beside him.

    Which is why none of this turns on what sort of wife a man has. There are husbands who are unfaithful although their wives have done nothing wrong, and husbands who are not unfaithful although their wives have given them ample reason.

    The illness of going mad because you cannot help

    The other direction runs the opposite way. Codependency is an illness of helping somebody. More precisely, an illness of going mad because you cannot help. Not being able to help another person makes these people ill. So they sacrifice themselves enormously in order to help, they pour everything into it, and then there is nothing left for themselves. At bottom, codependency is a self-abusing illness.

    Neither the minister nor the person doing it knows

    Now put a person carrying a self-abusing illness into a church. “They could be put to superb use.” It has every appearance of strong faith and generous sacrifice, and what it actually is, is an illness. The hard part is that neither side knows. The minister does not know. The person doing the work does not know. So work gets handed out and taken on and handed out again. There is no ill will anywhere in it. It is ignorance, running on both sides at once.

    Addicts of recognition

    So why sacrifice like that? There is another name for codependency. They are addicts of recognition. Recognition is the substance, and once a person is addicted to it they will want it badly enough to wreck their own body getting it.

    Why should recognition weigh that much? Because the person has no value of being that could be recognised. Settle it about yourself that simply existing earns nothing, and the only road left open is doing. Which is how both directions arrive at the same place — the man collecting evidence that a woman came over to him, the helper collecting evidence of sacrifice. Each is trying to obtain, through what he does, some verdict that his existence is acceptable too. What it is like to live with the inside never filled in, I have written about separately in You Got Everything You Needed. So Why Does the Inside Dry Out?

    If I am not performing that sacrifice and devotion, my existence is not permitted. The permission to be here does not come through from inside. So there is anxiety, and then chasing — casting about for something. What can I do?

    Too perfect a double act

    Wives living with an addict are generally spoken of as being on the codependent side of it. Because it is too perfect a double act. The addict goes on living a life that says look after me. The codependent goes on living a life that says yes, I will look after you. The same arrangement can be described as parts in a play, which is how I set it out in They Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of.

    It looks like helping the recovery

    Then suppose the addict breaks the arrangement. I am going to take responsibility for my own life now, as an adult — and off he goes down the road of recovery. What becomes of the codependent? Fear. The person I am supposed to be helping is disappearing.

    So at the exact moment this addict is trying to recover, he gets hit on the back of the head. To knock him down again. He has to stay an addict. It looks like helping the recovery, and what it does in fact is wreck it.

    Opposite lives, one shortage underneath. The one who went outward confirms himself by the other coming over to him; the one who went inward, by the other staying 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

    At the group, sooner or later, you find yourself watching the person sitting next to you. You see what they are doing with themselves, 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 on someone and you carry the method home. On your own the range of methods is narrow. In a room full of people it widens.

    And then you try it exactly as they did it, and you learn something. That person reached the point of being able to receive themselves by doing that. You do it and nothing happens. So is their method wrong, or are you the one who is short of something? Neither.

    The method travels. The application does not.

    Run the same practice, the same way, and it comes out differently from person to person — the application does. It takes on one person and it does not take on the next. There are people who try it that way and it still does not work.

    Someone at the seminar said this was the hard part: handling themselves. They had tried one method after another and it was still difficult. A practice that helps one person name anger may make another feel watched or artificial. So you borrow a method, notice what changes in you, adjust it, and try again. Your own version is built through that repeated testing; it cannot be copied whole from someone else.

    It does not land on the first try

    And the version you make does not hit on the first try. You try this one. You stay with it a while. It does not take, so you try that one instead. That is the entire procedure. You find what is yours by running through the ones that are not.

    So where is the answer? Inside you.

    Which is to say: the answer is inside you. You find the answer that is already in there by taking the practices one at a time and putting them through. What you are really doing is locating an element that was in you from the start — I have come at the same thing from another direction in There Is Nobody There to Love Yet.

    There is one place where people stop. Right — tried that, that does not work either. And they stop there. Stop there and you do not find it. Not in your whole life.

    You can see the whole thing and there is no particular way to help

    That was the work of finding your own. Now move one seat over, to the person watching somebody else try.

    A question came up. Suppose there is someone near you who has taken on the shape of abusing themselves, or who keeps putting themselves back into pain. From where you are sitting it is perfectly visible. How do you help them? The watching seat always wants to do something about it — arrange something, move something, get in there.

    There is no particular way to help. Which means you go on watching it happen.

    Comfort, then trust, and only then a suggestion

    What you do first is stay alongside. You comfort them, you take in their side of it, and trust builds. Trust running both ways. And then, out of this is far too much for you to be carrying, a suggestion becomes possible to make. The order is the point. Trust comes first. The suggestion is the second thing, never the first.

    You do not run a ring through someone’s nose

    One person described their own position exactly. They had found their ideal self — found it, no question — and were still chasing it, with no intention at all of setting it down. Setting it down is something that needs to happen. And right now their mind cannot do it.

    In a case like that, as things presently stand, it cannot be put down. And when it is not happening, you do not run a ring through someone’s nose and haul them along. Self-love is a thing we all want. But because of my own pain, my own thinking, my own beliefs, there are any number of cases where self-love will not come. Why the act of looking at yourself keeps sliding into attacking yourself, I wrote out in “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack.

    Which means the state itself has to be respected. The state of its not happening. You do not tell someone who cannot do it now to do it now.

    We are the environment. We are not the solution.

    To hold them as an environment means offering a relationship in which they are heard, not shamed, and not abandoned when change is slow. You can make that surrounding safer, but you cannot make the decision, feel the feeling, or practise self-love on their behalf. The seat beside a person is a companion’s seat, not the solver’s.

    And they stay in that environment, and go on staying in it. It is not that they do not know. It is that it is not happening. So you go as far as it goes. The way I have to find my own, they find theirs. You cannot live that stretch of time on anyone’s behalf. You can be what surrounds them while they do.

    Related

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

  • Help Them Lift It and the Muscle Never Comes

    A parent cannot sit still in front of a child who looks like they are suffering. They are in that much pain, and I am supposed to watch? That feeling is where a question at the seminar came from. A child took a wound too hard, and now they are an adolescent, and at that age it is easy for a state like that to set. What do you do for them then?

    Children and adolescents are not the same kind of problem. Somebody who takes up this sort of study as an adult can walk in on their own feet. An adolescent has things breaking the surface inside them and no idea how to regulate any of it.

    So here is the picture I gave. 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. That is what the weight means: the strength to carry what is coming up inside and regulate it without the parent doing the work for them.

    There is no room for you to intervene

    I am sorry to say it, but there is no room to intervene. The swings are severe. It is hard. The dynamics come surging up. And they have to knock about in it, fail at it, make the mistakes, and shape and build the thing themselves. That is their piece of work, not yours.

    Environment bears down on children heavily now. About the only place a child can learn to handle their own dynamics is school; otherwise the world shows them a great deal that is evil, and the smartphone keeps coming in at them. Even so, they are the one who has to find the way through it and come to it themselves.

    Be there, and talk when they come over

    Then what is the parent for? 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 asks to talk, talk it through with them. This is a different season from the one where you set lines for a small child (Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller).

    When they say don’t touch me, you don’t touch. Sitting there listening to that, a parent gets anxious — they are growing up like this, what do I do. But if there was good parenting behind you, and there is still a space where the two of you can get through to each other, this is not going to turn into a large problem.

    You are not going to find it

    There is a smartphone and there is pornography on it. So how do you find it? You don’t find it. Which is why you stop trying to find it and put your strength into the form of loving them instead. What most people do is say don’t look at that phone, and outside of that there are not many methods on offer.

    What makes it come out in a healthy form even when they do see it is love. Treat the relationship as the thing that counts. Love is built on the ground of a relationship. Take the strength you were going to spend hunting through a phone and spend it there.

    Don’t talk to them about cigarettes

    A school counsellor once put a question to me. Through the education office the school gathers up the children who smoke and runs a stop-smoking treatment for them, and what the counsellor wanted to know was how to get these children to quit. The answer that came back was this. Don’t talk to those children about cigarettes. Just be friendly with them. Then when the time comes, the cigarettes stop on their own.

    Think back to the teacher you had a crush on at school. Whichever teacher it was, if I had a real crush on them, the subject that teacher taught was the subject I tried to do well in. Nobody had to tell me to study. The relationship with that teacher is what moved me.

    Where the relationship with mother and father is healthy, it runs the same way even when a child veers off a little. They know what their mother and father want, so they do it.

    Giving, not blocking

    None of this means sit there with your mouth shut. You can say it. You can tell them their mother is worried. What you cannot do is actively block them. Telling them and blocking them are two different acts. What matters is giving love, not blocking the bad thing. And to give love, what were you told to do? Love yourself first. Without loving yourself you cannot hand over love in a healthy form (I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First).

    Throw your own love at them and they take it as trespass

    If you are a mother carrying this question in this shape, that is also a case of taking your own private love and throwing it at your child. And then the child comes back with: why are you taking my freedom away from me? Why don’t you respect me? The fight breaks out in that shape.

    I am plainly thinking of my child. I am doing this because I love them. And they think they have been trespassed on, encroached on, their respect disregarded. One action, and one side calls it love while the other side calls it trespass.

    The shape carries on into the marriage

    Say the child raised that way is a son. The son marries, and in front of his wife it turns into why do you dismiss everything, and the fight breaks out there. He carried the shape he was handed at home out of the house with him. The marriage takes it up as well. That is how a thing like this gets passed down a line — this shape does.

    So what the parent of an adolescent has to hold on to is not a better method for blocking. Being there. Talking it through when they come over. And loving yourself first, so that what crosses over to them is love in a healthy form. The weight 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. The same person in the same mood, and in front of this one person the sentence does not leave the mouth. It finds no road in.

    Call it an aura, if the word can be borrowed, but it appears in behaviour. She notices disrespect, does not laugh it away, names it, and leaves when it continues. Because she does not cooperate with careless treatment, even a person who usually abuses others finds that the habit does not travel easily in her direction. Her self-love has become a boundary other people can feel.

    If people are handling you carelessly, where do you look?

    Read that backwards and it gives you something to use. Lately it seems that people treat you as though you do not count. The instinct is to weigh up what kind of person they are. There is a nearer place to look.

    Do you love yourself. Or are you abusing yourself, condemning yourself in a voice that never takes a day off. Whatever you are doing to yourself on the inside sets the terms on the outside. People treat you at exactly the rate you have been treating yourself.

    Two people who cannot love themselves find each other

    Someone who does not love himself and someone who does not love herself are drawn to each other. Then they meet, and they abuse each other easily. Drawn together and colliding, out of the same source. One knock and the words go straight out of the mouth. Something that dismisses the other person comes straight out. Something aimed at the exact spot where it will wound goes straight in.

    The hard part is that neither of them sees it happening. The one doing the stabbing does not register a stab. Why that particular person pulled at you in the first place is a separate layer of the same event, and it is taken up in Everything Checks Out and You Still Feel Nothing and Stay Until I Fall Asleep.

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

    Being handled carelessly is not the only thing that injures you. There is a second kind, harder to name because it arrives looking like kindness. Someone is good to you and you come away worse. They did you a favour and meant it as one. Help is supposed to leave you lighter, and you walk out of the room sour and cannot point at what went wrong, because on the surface nothing went wrong at all. The scene where help is offered and lands as a burden is also taken up in Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries.

    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 does not ask whether you accept the contract, but later expects obedience, gratitude, attention, or sacrifice in return. You receive the help and also inherit a debt you never agreed to. That is why apparent kindness lands as pressure and control.

    Don’t do it, Mum. I’m not taking that.

    Children pick it up before the adults do. Mother does something for them, and then keeps waiting for the return. So the children stop accepting delivery. Don’t do it, Mum. I’m not taking that.

    That is not a rude child. The reason sits underneath, where the child cannot put it into words. If I take this, a weight comes with it — something will have to be done in return. So it does not get taken.

    Love ends in the giving

    Real love ends in the giving. You give, and you want nothing from the person you gave it to. It finishes there. The people who are good to you and leave you feeling bad give, and then they wait. The waiting is what turns a gift into control.

    So the one receiving feels bad, and then gets confused on top of feeling bad. He is good to me. Why do I feel like this.

    The one giving is confused as well

    The confusion does not sit only on the receiving end. The giver is in it too. These are people who do not know what real love is, and who believe that what they are doing is genuinely for your sake. They are mistaken about it. Nobody in this picture set out to be cruel.

    The truth crosses anyway. It goes unsaid and it arrives in full, which is why the hand held out to you cannot be taken comfortably, with thanks.

    Such a person does not love himself, and loves everyone else instead. Look at what is actually taking place and he is not loving anyone else either. The shape of love is there and nothing is inside it. That is why you can eat the love he serves you and come away neither restored nor healed.

    Being good to someone while you feel bad is not work anyone sustains. Twice, three times, out of consideration — my mood is poor, and I can still do this for you. When it is the standing condition of a life, it is an illness. If you are struggling, you can never take another person in comfortably, or make room for them.

    Someone controlled for years is not easily soothed

    Somebody who has been on the receiving end of this for years is not settled by one good afternoon. The wounds are many and still weeping. It takes a long stretch of having the feeling acknowledged, of being soothed, of being walked alongside.

    The mind twists while that stretch runs. They talk in knots. They put other people in a bad mood. They wound the very person who took them in. This is not a bad character finally showing itself. They feel bad, and that is what comes out of someone who feels bad.

    The first of it and the last of it is self-love

    The order runs like this. For you to be loved, you have to love yourself first. Out of that love you become able to express yourself as you are. Then you can love another person healthily, and then you can be loved.

    The first of it and the last of it is self-love. An injury lasts because there is no self-love, and recovery comes fast when there is. People go on treating you as though you do not count for the same reason. All of it sits inside that one thing.

    So if you have found the trade in your own hands — good to someone, and waiting for the return — do not stop at apologising to them. Self-love begins where you share it and practise it, and share it and practise it again.

    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 somebody tells you there has been an affair, notice which questions arrive first. How many times. How far did it actually go.

    Both of those questions point at the same place. And that place is not the heart of it. It is only where it happened to land.

    Why it looks sexual

    An affair always turns up in the shape of a new meeting between a man and a woman. That is the first thing anyone sees — the other person, and the fact that it was sexual. So attention goes there and stays there.

    The affair may feel sexual to the person involved, but sexual desire is not the engine. It is not a sexual problem. If the cause is defined as sexual dissatisfaction, attention stays on frequency, attraction, and the third person. The broken trust and the hostility toward the partner remain unexamined.

    The definition is hostility

    All infidelity is hostility. By hostility I mean hatred that has been there a long time and has gone hard — the kind that has made an enemy of the other person.

    I want to be exact about the word definition. The word does not mean the strongest entry on a list of causes, and it does not mean hostility is often a factor. It means there is no room inside it for anything else to be the cause. Which is why it holds in reverse: where there is no hostility, an affair cannot be produced at all.

    What drives the affair is the wish to return an injury through revenge and the aggressive force used to damage the bond. Sexual contact becomes the method because it breaks the specific promise on which the relationship rests. The sexual act carries the hostility; it does not create it. On where that second force comes from, see Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From.

    It is written down as a broken promise

    In a book on the psychology of affairs, the phrase written there is broken promise. Two words, and the whole account is folded inside them.

    Two people have trust between them and a promise between them. Nobody handed it down from outside; they gave it to each other. An affair breaks the thing they gave each other.

    The core of it is the betrayal of trust. Not the tally. The count of how many times and how far it went is not the place the weight rests. The weight rests on one fact: what the two agreed to keep, one of them did not keep.

    The hard stretch, and then the separate matter

    A wife gives birth, and for a period afterwards the two of them cannot sleep together. It is a stretch in which men are quite likely to come apart. That much is circumstance, and I will not make it smaller than it is.

    Going on from there to have an affair is a separate matter. Sleep deprivation, loneliness, and sexual frustration explain distress; they do not explain why the person chose to break the promise rather than speak, wait, seek help, or leave. Joining the hardship directly to the affair turns circumstance into an alibi.

    Without the hostility, there was more than one road

    Take the same man in the same stretch, without hostility or the wish for revenge sitting inside him. He gets through it and does not have an affair. He may throw himself into his work and come out the other side that way. Resolving it does not require another person. It never did.

    Read that backwards and it turns cold. If it genuinely seemed there was no other road — that meeting someone was the only thing on offer — then something unresolved was in there doing the choosing. There was never only one road. Only one was visible.

    “Men are all like that”

    There is an old way of talking about this. A man having affairs used to be spoken of as a kind of ability. Men are all like that. It is nothing. That is how the sentence goes, and it goes down easily.

    Psychologically it is not good. The saying makes a thing running on hostility sound like nothing at all.

    Some of the men who end up in my consulting room over this do regret it. Even so, the logic they bring with them is close kin to that old sentence.

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

    Those arguments are rationalisation: explanations constructed after the act to make it appear reasonable. They discuss culture, opportunity, and the third person while avoiding the one relationship in which a promise was made and broken.

    There is a third person missing from it

    Count the people in that logic. There is him, and there is the person he met. Two. The one who is not in the room is the one the promise was made with.

    Which is why the line about those women collapses. That the new person knew he was married has no bearing on anything, because the promise that broke was never made with her. She was not a party to it. The broken promise is somewhere else, and the sentence never goes near it.

    The line about other countries has the same hole. Move countries and hostility is still hostility, revenge is still revenge.

    Monogamy is only possible for a mature person

    In a psychodynamic couple therapy book it is put this way. Monogamy is only possible for a mature person.

    It is not a compliment being handed out. It says that keeping to one person is difficult enough that it takes somebody who has actually grown up to manage it. Which means something for the ones keeping to it: they are not doing it because it came easily. It was held.

    Then the question has to change

    If the definition is hostility, the questions you were asking were aimed at the wrong place — who was she, what did she have, how hard was that stretch.

    The question is this: who is the hostility in me pointed at, and where did it come from.

    A promise does not break in the sexual register. It breaks where the hostility has been sitting. That is the place to look, and it is not the place 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

    How old was I? Seven, probably. I do not remember exactly what I said or what I did. Whatever it was, my father seemed angry about something, and where I stood he hit me across both cheeks, without warning — back and forth, back and forth. I could not tell you how many times. Ten of them, near enough.

    I want to be plain about what that was, because plain is the only useful way to say it. I was handled however he liked, by an adult who could not take responsibility even for his own feelings. That is the whole of it. The feeling was his. The face it landed on was mine.

    And that was only one incident. It happened repeatedly. Each time, I could not protest, escape, or ask the adult to take responsibility. The anger, grief, and resentment therefore had no expression and no witness, so I learned to suppress them and continue as if nothing had happened.

    What is stacked up does not stay still

    Suppressed anger did not disappear. It returned as constant bodily pressure, destructive thoughts, and reactions larger than the immediate situation. I was not responding only to what was in front of me; each new frustration activated the anger from all the earlier times when I could do nothing.

    Here is what I could not do with it: soothe it. I did not know how, and I could not have told you what it was if somebody had asked. So through my teens I went off the rails, and that is how I got through those years. Not by handling the rage. Just by outlasting it.

    Why I went looking for bad water

    Then I was a young man, and I started doing something that must have looked strange from the outside. When a storm came through — a real one, a typhoon, the kind of day when the sea goes wild and heaves — I would go down to the sea.

    I was not there for the view and I was not there to calm down. Going down there was how I struggled to get in front of the thing and look straight at it. There was nothing considered about it. It was a thrashing about rather than a plan.

    The storm gave visible form to an experience I could not name. The violent movement of the waves resembled the pressure in my chest and head, so I could recognize my anger, grief, resentment, and wish to destroy as feelings rather than as an unnamed force taking over my whole mind.

    Perhaps that was why. Watching that sea in the storm, I took some comfort from it, a little at a time.

    The sentence, in front of the water

    And standing in front of it, on one of those days, this came:

    So — I was that angry too.

    That is a man recognizing something. Something enormous had been surging up in me the whole time — a thing that wanted to swallow whatever it met, to sweep the lot away, to break it all. That was what it had been.

    Seeing the rage represented outside me created distance. I could observe it and say, “I was that angry,” instead of experiencing myself as nothing but the anger.

    The other thing that was happening, which I did not notice

    Something else was going on in front of that sea, and I did not clock it at the time. It was not anything I set out to learn. Standing there watching the water heave, I think my body was taking something in while my mind was busy with the waves.

    Standing before a storm also changed my sense of scale. The sea was larger and more powerful than anything I could control, and my grievance was no longer the center of the entire world. I experienced myself as one small human being inside something vast.

    I had expected that smallness to feel humiliating. Instead, it brought peace because I no longer had to maintain the position that my anger, injury, and importance should organize everything around me.

    What settled it was not what I had assumed

    I think that was the first time I understood it.

    What settled the anger was not getting it out. Not pouring it into the world, not finding the right target for it, not discharging it somewhere and walking away lighter.

    What settled the anger was gradually releasing the conviction that my injured self had to remain at the center of everything. Accepting that I am a small person within a reality much larger than me did not erase what my father had done. It removed the demand that the injury must continue organizing my whole life, and that is where peace entered.

    And I want to be exact about how I came to know it, because how matters more here than what. I did not work it out. It was not an insight. I think my body learned it rather than my head — slowly, standing in wind, in front of water that was bigger than anything I had in me.

    Which is the awkward part of writing it down. You can read this page and have the whole idea in your hand by the end of it. Having the idea is not the thing. What changed in me was not what I thought. It was what I had stood in front of.

    And then somebody was standing there

    One more thing, and I will say it the way it happened rather than dress it up.

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

    For a long time, grievance and resentment occupied all my attention, and I approached the world from the certainty that my injury had to be answered first. When I released that position and accepted my smallness, I became able to encounter God. God had not appeared because the past was justified; I could perceive God because anger was no longer filling the whole field of experience.

    That is where it went, for me. It began with a man who could not take responsibility for his own feeling and put it on a child’s face, and it ended in front of a sea in a storm with nothing left in my hands.

    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 this life with this person, to deserve waking up in this exact room again. You can carry that question a long time. It rarely hands anything back.

    If this were punishment, it would have a size

    Think about how punishment actually works. A fine prints an amount and a date. A 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 worst of them has an edge on it. You can stand at the front of it and point at the place where it stops.

    That closing is the whole point. Without it, the word means nothing. A penalty nobody can total up, with no last payment on it, is not a penalty at all.

    You have paid it more than once, and it 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 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. Whatever you keep paying and never finish paying is not a punishment — that shape does not exist inside punishment. And once the punishment goes, the crime behind it goes with it. There is no ledger. Nobody wrote your name at the top of a page and started adding.

    A hard life is heavy, and it is still not payment for anything. None of it is here because of something you did wrong. It looks like somebody’s fault. It is nobody’s fault.

    Nobody asks what a rich man did to deserve it

    You never hear the other version. Nobody looks at a man with money and asks what he did to deserve that. You only reach for crime and payment when something hurts. Which means those words are not describing your life. They are describing how much your life stings right now.

    The word hiding inside why me

    That question is not asking about the pain. It is hunting for a name — who did this, who let it happen, who has to answer for it.

    So you go looking for a place to set the blame down. Outside first — your parents, the person you live with. You build a case against one of them, and it does not hold. So you turn it inward. What did I do wrong. What is wrong with me.

    Pick a name and watch what happens next

    Once you settle on an answer, there is no next step.

    Land on your parents and you are left holding resentment. Land on yourself and you are left holding self-blame. One burns and one freezes, and both of them are heavy, and neither one moves you a single inch. Tomorrow morning arrives exactly the same either way. The name changed. Nothing else did.

    That is the clue that Who is to blame? is not producing the answer you need. Blaming your parents may explain where the pain began, and blaming yourself may create the illusion of control, but neither tells you what you need now or what you can do next. The question keeps you searching for a guilty person when your life requires a response.

    Living beside someone impossible, or coming into money

    We learn who we are by living through very different things. Some people learn it beside someone impossible. Some learn it by getting rich. Nobody would call the second one a punishment.

    So here is how I read it. Joy, pain, and a problem that refuses to resolve each reveal different parts of you. Pressure shows what makes you go silent, what makes you attack, what you can endure, and where you abandon yourself to keep a relationship. The circumstances differ, but each one brings your habitual way of meeting life into view.

    Your particular life is therefore where you encounter yourself. Not because the suffering was assigned as punishment, but because your responses become visible only in the situations you actually have to live through.

    Knowing yourself probably means nothing to you right now

    If I told you to go find out who you are, you would have no idea what to do with Monday. I know. But you are already in the middle of finding out. That is what these years are.

    So watch yourself in the middle of them. What makes you go silent. What makes you say the thing you will regret before midnight. Whose one sentence still takes your legs out years later. What you can carry far longer than you expected to. Where you fold on the first push.

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

    When it climbs up your throat again

    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 this life with this person. Do not cut it short and do not be polite with it.

    Then, when the question has run all the way out, add another one: What does this situation show me about what I fear, what I keep repeating, and what I need to do differently now?

    The circumstances may not change immediately. But the second question gives you somewhere to move. The first searches for someone to charge; 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