A salmon goes up the river. It works against the current the whole way, and it gets back to the place it came from. A dead fish does not do that. A dead fish goes where the water goes, and it arrives wherever the water was going anyway. It is not choosing the destination.
People can drift in the same way. When you repeatedly ignore your fear, exhaustion, and limits, you lose the strength to resist what harms you. You stay where you are mistreated, follow demands you do not agree with, and call endurance a choice. That is what it means here to drift like a dead fish. Without self-love, the current decides where you go, and self-neglect becomes self-abuse.
“My mother took no notice of anything”
The word abuse gets used far too narrowly.
Someone will say: I wasn’t abused. My mother took no notice of anything. The sentence sounds like an exemption only because we count what a parent did and overlook what a parent repeatedly failed to do. No one asked what frightened you, noticed when you withdrew, played with you, or came when you needed comfort. The absence left no bruise, so you concluded that nothing happened. In this account, that sustained neglect is the abuse.
Say it in your own voice and listen to what it is claiming. Nobody laid a hand on you, so nothing was done to you. The two halves of that sentence do not connect. What was done was that nobody took any notice.
I wrote about the empty place a parent leaves, and how it is a wound in its own right, in Crying at the Television. What is at issue here is a different question: what that empty place should be called. Not a shortage. Not something you missed out on. Abuse.
And raising a child without playing with them sits under the same word. Not playing with a child is abuse. Play is not an extra. Children have to be played with.
What my youngest drew was not a person. It was an ear.
My youngest said something to us once. That the anger would not stay down. That they could not control their anger, and holding it in was taking everything they had. The child said it to their mother, and their mother brought it to me: says the anger won’t hold, says keeping it down is wearing them out.
I did not let that pass as an ordinary complaint. I asked for a drawing.
What came back looked, for a second, like the figure of a person. It was not a person. It was an ear. One enormous ear taking up the page, and the child inside it.
Inside the ear there were sounds. What are you living like this for. How are you going to keep going, as dull as this. Is this any way to live. Like messages telling the child to die — that was how it was put to me. Not a hallucination. The feeling of being told.
In the middle of the ear there was a devil
All of it was there on the page. Right at the centre of the great ear, a devil — tail, legs, drawn the way a devil gets drawn — and the devil was feeding the sounds into the ear. Live like that, and die.
Beside it, a black heart. Black, with cracks ruled across it. The heart was broken through. And one small patch of it was still red. That much was still alive, the child said.
We make a great deal of this child. Plenty of affection, plenty of open delight in them. The sound inside the ear kept coming anyway.
The child named the cause
The cause came from the child. That when they get home, their mother does not play with them. When they get home. And that playing alone has a limit to it — you play by yourself and something about it stays empty. It works for a while and then it stops working, and what is left over does not fill.
It is easy to let abuse mean hitting and scolding and nothing else. Nobody in that house had raised a hand. This child was loved out loud. The place the child pointed at was the not being played with, and behind that sentence sat an enormous ear, a devil, and a cracked black heart.
Rather than play alone, give them the phone
So here is what I said. If it is going to be playing alone like that, give the child the smartphone. Of the two, that is the better one.
There is a condition standing in front of that sentence, and the condition is the whole of it: given that you are not playing with them. It was not said to a house where somebody plays with the child. It was said to a house where nobody does. If you are reading it as permission, read the condition again. The phone is forbidden, so the day fills up with don’t, don’t, don’t — and the child is left alone the whole time, with nobody playing with them, which is the actual abandonment.
Two different children are in play here, and they must not be read as one. This one is sitting by themselves and coming up empty, at an age where a parent still has to be the one who plays. The other one has a will of their own now, and has started pushing back at you. That second child is the subject of When a Child Stops Listening, You Should Be Clapping. Lay the two stories side by side and both of them get read wrong.
Before it comes out as a symptom
Not playing with a child is abuse. It does damage to the mind. That child is in serious trouble.
Serious, and not yet visible. Let some time go by and it comes out as symptoms. Catch it before then, and play with them more closely than before.
When they come home, sit with the homework. Get down there with the toys. Go out alongside them when the bike comes out. Being there with them. With.
Withholding love is itself the abuse
As long as nobody was hit, we call it no abuse. Withhold love and the withholding is the abuse.
And this does not stop at children. The salmon from the opening comes back here. A person who has lost the ability to love themselves arrives at self-abuse by the same road. Taking no notice of yourself. You have never once raised a hand to yourself, so you conclude you have never abused yourself — and the whole time you are going wherever the water goes.
Related
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
- You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious
- Her Body Never Bruised, and She Hated It for That
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