“Dammit.” You could call that self-expression. “I’m a little angry.” You could call that self-expression too. And self-expression really is one of the roads into loving yourself — nobody is arguing with that. Both sentences take something that was inside and put it outside. So far they are identical. Where they split is what comes next, and it is worth listening closely here.
“Dammit” is an attack, and it comes back
Say “Dammit” out loud and the person hearing it does not think well of you. Because you attacked. And so you can be attacked in return. The feeling did get out — that part worked — but what is left standing in the place it landed is not the feeling. It is a fight.
So the people who use that sentence end up in an odd position. You put out what was inside you and you are no lighter for it, and the relationship is one notch worse than it was before you spoke. You were attacked back for expressing, so the next time you either say it harder or you close your mouth altogether. Neither of those two roads leaves you with anything.
I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.
The other kind of sentence looks like this. What you said made me sad. I’m angry. It feels like I’m being dismissed. That upset me. You have spoken your heart honestly, and because you did not attack the person standing in front of you, what came out was your actual self.
The difference is whether the sentence attacks the other person or reports your own experience. You never care about anyone gives the listener a charge to defend against. When you left without answering, I felt dismissed and angry names the event and the feeling. Both sentences come from anger, but only the second lets the other person understand what happened inside you without first having to fight the accusation.
They have never once expressed a feeling of their own
Now run it backwards. A person who can say “I’m a little angry” is a person who has put a name to a feeling before. And there are people for whom that sentence will not come out at all. Look at how that happened and you find one thing: they have never once expressed a feeling of their own. It has not been done once, so it cannot be done now.
In the place where the feeling belongs, a different sentence has been installed. Never mind anything else — I have to be a good son. I have to be a good person. I must never think a thing like that. I must never hold a fantasy like that. The standard arrives before the feeling does. So whatever comes up from inside gets caught on the standard first, and whatever gets caught gets pressed down.
What does it mean that a feeling has congealed?
Press a feeling down repeatedly and it does not disappear. Each new insult, disappointment, or fear joins what was never spoken before. Eventually a small event carries the weight of years. That is what it means for a feeling to congeal. You kept rejecting it in order to be good, but the rejected part of you experiences that treatment as indifference.
Indifference is a strong word, and here it will sound wrong. You did not press it down because you had no interest in yourself; you pressed it down because you wanted to turn out well. But a feeling that is unmistakably inside you, which you will not grant exists — that is indifference toward yourself. You set out to become a good person and became a person who is indifferent to yourself.
Cruel, malevolent, destructive
Pressed and pressed and pressed, what you pushed down starts turning aggressive. “Aggressive” is the kind word for it. What is actually in there, once it has lost anywhere to go, is cruel, malevolent, destructive. Inside, something walks around saying: just let someone cross me. Just let the moment arrive. And it runs as far as wanting the whole world blown up. All of that was sitting hidden inside the person who had been saying, for years, that he has to be a good person.
Repress a great deal and the feeling condenses, and condensed things can burst later. I wrote about that process on its own in The Self-Prescription: What You’ve Been Taking Every Day. And with nothing expressed, after a year of it, two years of it, at some point it comes out as behaviour instead of words. This act of disregarding yourself is what ends up making a person genuinely malevolent.
I have sat with people who carried that kind of cruelty in them for a long time. The good news is that they have opened their own hearts and are working on it. I have taken the severe end of the range because it shows up plainly there — but it is not only them. I would rather you did not read this and think well, not me. Those elements are in everyone.
The feeling of having been dismissed is enormous
When love does not get through, a person turns aggressive. Look at people who get angry a great deal, people who reach for force, and in every one of them the feeling of having been dismissed is enormous. Dismissed, put another way, means: why won’t you love me. And underneath that sits am I someone not worth loving? Live for years giving no love at all to that centre of yourself, and a great deal goes wrong.
And when looking into what is in there is frightening enough, you go hunting for stimulus outside instead — until eventually there is nothing left for you to love. That one I took on its own in All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode.
You have to watch the degree
So when a feeling starts gathering, put it into words before it has to come out as an outburst or an action. Expressing is self-love, but expression is not permission to do whatever you please. Say what happened, name what you felt, and do it without cornering or condemning the other person. That is what self-love looks like once it is working in a relationship.
Wives especially need to say these things to their husbands honestly. I wanted to be loved by you, and you didn’t come, and it made me very sad. That is the entire sentence. Someone once said it to her husband the other way round instead: “Are you even a man? Is that something a husband does?” And then of course no love comes back from the husband. That sentence abuses you, not him. Say you were sad, and a place opens where the thing you wanted can arrive. Corner the other person, and you close that place with your own hand.
So expression is the road. What splits is which sentence goes out on it. And all those years of pressing it down were not you being patient. They were you being indifferent to yourself — and the first move in withdrawing that indifference is to say it out loud. I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.
Related
- The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
- As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad
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