Suppose it is true that parents injure children as badly as people say. Then take the argument at its word and carry it out to the end: remove the parents. All of them. Does the child come through unhurt?
Having no mother is itself the injury. Nothing had to be done to the child. The absence did it.
Which tells you what not loving actually is. It is not a neutral position, a blank where love happened not to be. Not loving is itself a form of abuse. No hand was raised, and that settles nothing — I have written that part out on its own in Her Body Never Bruised, and She Hated It for That.
And the same holds when the person you are not loving is you. Fail to love yourself and you will abuse yourself. There is no third place to stand, no quiet position where you neither love yourself nor harm yourself. There is no middle ground.
There is an acute form and there is a chronic one
When I was a child I watched a man in my family, in the middle of a fight with his wife, reach a certain temperature and turn on himself where he stood. I was small, and it frightened me.
That is self-abuse, and it is the acute kind — visible and sudden. The chronic kind is what the rest of this is about, and it does not run on temper. A person who does not love himself begins arranging the conditions for it, and then keeps them arranged, in a standing daily form. It takes four forms.
One: building an environment where you can be made to suffer
The first is to start arranging conditions under which you can be hurt. You acquire a partner who hits you, say. A violent man is exactly the one who appeals to you.
Violent is not the word anyone uses while choosing. What gets said is oh, he’s got some force about him.
Why that man draws you, and why you stay once you know, is not what I am opening here. It is opened elsewhere — in Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts, in Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak, and in Everything Checks Out and You Still Feel Nothing.
That is one example, and the range is much wider. Conditions under which you can be swindled. Conditions under which the money goes. Conditions under which suffering is the only thing that can come of it. It was built. Building it is one of the ways a person abuses himself.
Two: punishing yourself directly
The second is to carry out the punishment yourself — to be the one who does the harm, with nothing in between.
Every addiction belongs here. Not most of them. All of them, with none left outside. The self-injury you hear about among young people now belongs here too — the cutting, done by hand, to the body that is yours.
The first form sets up a situation and lets the situation do the hitting. The second skips the intermediary and goes straight at the person. Different routes, one destination. And both have this in common: the behaviour shows. Somebody could walk in and see it happening. That is what separates them from the two that follow, and it is why the two that follow are the harder ones to catch.
Three: shutting yourself inside your own thinking
The third is to lock yourself inside thoughts that keep you suffering.
You replay one mistake, predict the worst outcome, dismiss every reassuring fact, and call the repetition problem-solving. Each round increases the fear but produces no decision or action. Because the activity looks like careful thinking, you may not notice that your own thoughts have become the room in which you are being hurt.
Outside, nothing has occurred. No one struck you. There is no mark to point at, no incident to report. Inside, it has been going on all day. And the person doing it believes he is thinking something over. He is not thinking. He is shut in.
Four: regret
The fourth is regret. Some people live in it, all day and every day. They regret, and regret again, and arrive at there I go again.
At night the regretting keeps sleep off. Morning comes and there is work, and while the work goes on it recedes. Then evening comes and you return to your own life, and it starts up again — the same material, gone over once more, arriving where it arrived the night before. Regret ties off both ends of the day, and the only stretch that gets away is the one where you were too occupied to notice.
All of this comes from not loving yourself. Stop loving yourself and you cross over into abusing yourself — not by decision, but because there was nowhere else for the traffic to go.
The third and fourth are where you get fooled
All four are rationalisation — a person deceiving himself. And of the four, the third and the fourth are the ones you will believe.
The person in them will tell you he is working to get out, and he is not lying to you. The effort is real and he can describe it. The rationalising happens further down, where he arranges for the suffering to continue.
The deception sits in the quantity. You make one phone call but avoid the next step, try a practice twice but stop before it can become familiar, or ask for help while withholding the part that matters. The effort is real, but it is kept small enough that the old result is likely to continue. Then the result seems to prove that change was impossible.
And here is what a small amount of effort leaves behind: there — it doesn’t work after all.
You did try. That is the point of trying a little. It produces evidence — I attempted it and nothing came of it — and the evidence is what holds the pain in place. The effort did not fail. The effort was measured out, by hand, in the amount required to purchase the proof.
“I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”
This is the sentence such a person says, over and over. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.
It sounds like a finding — long experience, tested thoroughly, conclusion reached. Behind it stands the moment when full effort was quietly traded for a little, so the finding would be there when it was wanted.
Where love is missing, the space does not sit empty and wait. Self-abuse moves into it. That is why loving yourself is not an option. It is required.
Related
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
- “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
- The Safe You Don’t Know You Own
- All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode
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