People say, “My parents hurt me so badly.” All right, suppose parents really do hurt children that much. Then follow the idea to its end: if parents are what hurts children, take the parents away. No parents at all. Would the child then grow up unhurt?
No. Growing up with no parents is itself an injury. Nobody had to do anything to the child. The absence alone did the damage.
It is the same with love. Its absence does harm too, even if nobody lays a hand on the child. So not loving is not a neutral state where nothing happens. Not loving is itself a form of abuse. We tend to think we were abused only if someone hit us or yelled at us. So a person says, “I was never abused. My mother just never paid me any attention.” But that is abuse. Even a parent who never plays with a child is abusing that child, because being played with is something a child cannot do without.
And it is no different when the person you are not loving is yourself. Fail to love yourself and you will abuse yourself. There is no place in between, where you neither love yourself nor harm yourself. There is no middle ground.
Self-abuse comes in an acute form and a chronic one
When I was a child, I watched my uncle get into a fight with his wife. When his anger boiled over, he ran at the wall and slammed himself against it. I was small, and it frightened me.
That is self-abuse, and it is the acute kind — sudden, and there for anyone to see. The rest of this article is about the chronic kind. It needs no outburst of anger. It goes on day after day, built into the way a person lives. 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. For example, a woman chooses a partner who hits her. A violent man is exactly the kind of man she is drawn to.
I have just called him violent, but she would never use that word while choosing him. What she says is, “Wow, he’s so forceful. Now that’s a real man.” And that forceful man is the one who ends up hitting her.
The violent partner is only one example; the range is much wider. You put yourself in a position to be swindled. You set things up so that you lose a large sum of money. You arrange your life so that you are bound to suffer. None of this is simply bad luck. You set it up, even if you would never describe it that way. And setting it up is one of the ways a person abuses himself.
Two: punishing yourself directly
The second is to punish yourself directly: you do the harm to yourself, with no situation or other person doing it for you.
Every addiction belongs here. Not most of them. All of them, without exception. In every addiction, you are the one harming yourself, directly. The self-harm you hear about among young people today belongs here too — cutting themselves with a blade.
In the first form, you set up a situation and let the situation hurt you. In the second, you hurt yourself directly. The route is different; the result is the same. And both have this in common: the harm can be seen. There is the partner who hits, the money that is gone, the addiction, the cuts. That is what separates them from the next two forms, where nothing shows from the outside. It is also why the next two are harder to see for what they are.
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.
Seen from outside, nothing has happened. No one struck you. There is no mark to point at, no incident to report. Inside your head, the hurting has gone on all day. And all the while you believe you are thinking a problem through. But nothing gets worked out. You are simply locked in with the same thoughts.
Four: regret
The fourth is regret. Some people live in it, day after day. They regret something, then regret it again, and tell themselves, I did the same thing again.
At night they lie awake, regretting. In the morning they get up and go to work, and while they are busy the regret fades. Then evening comes, work is over, and it starts up again — the same things gone over once more, ending where they ended the night before. Regret takes their evenings and their nights.
All four forms come from not loving yourself. Once you stop loving yourself, you slide into abusing yourself. You do not decide to; there is simply no middle ground where you could stop.
The third and fourth forms are the hardest to see through
All four run on rationalisation: you give yourself a reasonable-sounding explanation for what you are doing, and so you hide from yourself what is really going on. The woman says “he’s forceful,” not “he’s violent.” The person locked in anxious thoughts says, “I’m thinking it through.” In the third and fourth forms, this kind of explanation is especially convincing, both to the person himself and to anyone he tells.
Someone stuck in anxious thinking or in regret will tell you he is working hard to get out, and he is not lying. The effort is real, and he can describe it. But “I am trying” has become his reasonable-sounding explanation. It stops him from seeing that the way he tries leaves him right where he is.
The self-deception lies in how much he tries. He does not try with everything he has; he tries just a little. He makes one phone call to look for help, then never takes the next step. He tries a new habit twice, then stops before it can stick. When he does ask for help, he holds back the part that matters most. The effort is real, but he keeps it small enough that nothing changes. Then the fact that nothing changed seems to prove that change was impossible.
And here is what that little bit of effort leaves him with: “See? It doesn’t work after all.”
He did try — and that is the point of trying a little. It gives him proof: “I tried, and nothing came of it.” And that proof is what keeps him in the pain. So the effort changed nothing, but it did produce the proof.
“I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”
A person caught in this says it again and again: I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.
It sounds like a conclusion drawn from long experience: he has tried hard, and it has not worked. But behind it is a moment when, instead of trying with everything he had, he quietly tried just a little — and a little was never going to be enough.
When love for yourself is missing, its place does not stay empty. Self-abuse moves in. That is why loving yourself is not optional. 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