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
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
- There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
- I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
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