You can reach me through the form at the bottom of this page. It asks for four things: your name, an email address so that a reply can find you, a subject line, and your message. Once you submit it, the message comes straight to me.
Before you write, it may help to know what this form can do and what it cannot. Both are set out below, as plainly as I can put them.
What kinds of messages are welcome?
Quite a few, and none of them need an apology at the top.
- Questions about something you read here. If a passage was unclear, or a concept seemed to contradict something in another post, that is worth saying. Depth psychology has a vocabulary that resists summary, and it is entirely possible that a sentence was clearer in my head than on the page.
- Topic suggestions. If there is a pattern or a concept you keep looking for and cannot find written about carefully — the difference between guilt and shame, what a particular Jungian term actually means, why a certain kind of relationship keeps repeating — you can suggest it. Not every suggestion becomes a post, but they do shape what gets written.
- Corrections. These are genuinely welcome. If a concept has been attributed to the wrong theorist, a term has been used loosely, or a claim has drifted beyond what the source supports, please say so. Accuracy matters more here than looking authoritative, and a correction is a favor rather than a complaint. If you can name the specific passage in your message, that helps a great deal.
- Permission to quote or translate. Requests to excerpt, translate, or reprint a piece — for a newsletter, a course, a training handout, or another publication — should come through the form. Details on how that usually works are further down.
- Professional correspondence. Practitioners, students, and translators are welcome to write. Conversations about theory, about how a concept is taught, or about how something reads to someone trained differently are among the more interesting messages that arrive.
You do not need to write formally. A few sentences are enough. A clear subject line makes a message easier to find again later, but nothing more is required.
What can this form not do?
This is the most important part of the page, so it is stated plainly, without hedging.
I cannot provide personal counseling, assessment, or diagnosis through this form. That includes interpreting your dream, telling you what a partner’s or parent’s behavior means, evaluating whether a pattern you recognize is clinically significant, or advising you on a decision you are facing. If you write with a question of that kind, you will receive a considerate reply — but it will point you elsewhere rather than answer the question.
The reason is not caution for its own sake. Clinical work depends on things a written message cannot carry: history, context, tone, the chance to ask a second question, and above all a relationship that continues over time. A message describes a moment, and a person’s life is not a moment. Anything resembling clinical guidance offered on the strength of a few paragraphs would be a guess dressed up as expertise, and a confident guess about your inner life is worse than no answer at all.
Using this form does not create a therapeutic or professional relationship. Nothing exchanged here is treatment, and nothing on this site should be read as care tailored to you. Inner Work Notes is educational writing about psychological concepts — that is its whole scope, and the boundary is the same in correspondence as it is in the posts. Please do not send detailed personal case material or ask for a diagnosis. It cannot be answered here, and it is better saved for someone who can work with it properly.
This is also not a crisis service. Messages are read when I am able to read them, which may be days after they arrive. No one is monitoring the form around the clock. If you need someone now, please use the resources in the next section rather than waiting for a reply that cannot come quickly enough.
If what you are looking for is real support with your own history, the thing worth doing is to find a qualified therapist or counselor in your own country — someone who can see you over time, in your language, and who knows what help is available where you live. That is not a smaller version of what you wanted. It is the larger one.
What if you need help right now?
If you are in crisis, or thinking about harming yourself, please do not use this form. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which operates 24 hours a day. If life is in immediate danger, call 911. Outside the United States, emergency and crisis numbers differ by country — please look up the emergency number and the national crisis or helpline service where you live, and use it now rather than later.
Calling a stranger on a crisis line is not a failure of self-reliance, and it is not reserved for people whose situation is severe enough to qualify. Those services exist for the ordinary human moment when the night is long and you cannot carry it alone. Understanding can wait. Safety cannot.
How long does a reply take?
Honestly: it varies, and sometimes it is slow.
This site is written alongside clinical work, and in a second language, so messages tend to be answered in whatever quiet hours are left over. A reply may take a week or two — occasionally longer, if the question deserves a considered answer rather than a fast one.
Nearly everything is read. Not everything can be answered individually, particularly messages asking for personal guidance, which arrive most often and are exactly the ones this form is least able to help with. If you do not hear back, please do not take it as indifference. It is far more likely that the honest answer is already written on this page.
Corrections and permission requests are usually prioritized, since they affect other readers.
Can you quote or republish something from here?
Short quotations with attribution and a link back are welcome and do not require asking. If you are writing an article, a newsletter, or a paper and want to quote a paragraph, please attribute it to Inner Work Notes and link to the original post.
Republishing a whole piece without permission is not allowed. For anything larger than a short quotation — reprinting an entire post, translating one into another language, or including material in a course, a workbook, or a training handout — please ask first through the form. Such requests are usually welcome and usually granted. Asking simply makes it possible to know where the writing has traveled, and to decline in the rare case where the context would misrepresent it.
Who is writing back?
Kim Hyung-keun — an object relations supervisor with twenty-six years of clinical practice, and the director of the Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute (서울중독심리연구소) in South Korea. He holds a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) in pastoral counseling, is a certified addiction counseling specialist, and serves as a supervisor with the Korean Association of Christian Psychological Counseling (한국기독교심리상담학회). A fuller account of his background, and of what this site is for, is on the About page.
One small thing before you write
If you are about to send a message, take one minute first and read back what you have written with a single question in mind: am I asking for information, or am I asking to be known?
Both are entirely legitimate. But only the first can be answered here, and noticing which one you are actually carrying tends to be useful in itself. If the honest answer is the second — if what you want is for someone to understand what has been happening to you — that is worth taking seriously, and worth taking to a person who can stay with it. Send the message anyway if you like. Then consider making one more inquiry today — to someone in your own country who can offer the kind of attention that lasts longer than a reply.
The form is below. Thank you for reading this far before writing.