A salmon goes up the river. It works against the current the whole way, and it gets back home, to the place where it was born. 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 keep ignoring your own fear, exhaustion and limits, you lose the strength to push back against what harms you. You stay where you are treated badly, go along with demands you do not agree with, and tell yourself that putting up with it is your own choice. That is what it means here to drift like a dead fish: you no longer decide where you go; other people’s demands and your circumstances decide for you. This is where you end up if you do not love yourself. And ignoring yourself like this is already a way of abusing yourself.
“My mother never paid any attention to me”
The word abuse gets used far too narrowly.
Some people say: I wasn’t abused. My mother never paid any attention to me. Put that way, it sounds as if nothing bad happened. But that is only because we count what a parent did and overlook what a parent kept failing to do. If you have said this about your own childhood, think about what it means: no one asked what frightened you, noticed when you withdrew, played with you, or came when you needed comfort. None of this left a bruise, so you concluded that nothing happened. But that ongoing neglect is, in fact, abuse.
Listen to the reasoning hidden in those words: nobody hit me, so nothing was done to me. But the second part does not follow from the first. Being ignored was itself something done to you.
So what should we call it when a parent never pays you any attention? Not something you missed out on. Abuse.
The same goes for raising a child without playing with them. 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.
Our youngest once told their mom that they could not control their anger: it had got so bad they could hardly hold it in. Their mom passed it on to me: the kid says holding the anger in is exhausting.
I did not hear that as an ordinary complaint. I asked the child to draw a picture.
At first glance the drawing looked like a person. It was not a person. It was an ear: one enormous ear, with the child drawn inside it.
The child said it felt as if words like these kept coming into their ear: What’s the point of living like this? How are you going to go on, living such a dull life? Is this any way to live? They were not real voices; it was a feeling, as if someone kept saying these things. To the child, the words came across as a message telling them to die.
In the middle of the ear there was a devil
The drawing showed where those words came from. In the middle of the huge ear the child drew a devil, with a tail and legs, and the devil was sending the words into the ear: Live like that, and then die.
There was also a black heart on the page, with cracks drawn across it. The heart was broken all the way through. But one small patch of it was still red. That much, the child said, was still alive.
We dote on this child, and we make no secret of how much we adore them. Even so, the words in the child’s ear did not stop.
The child named the cause
It was the child who named the cause of all this: “When I come home, Mom doesn’t play with me.” The child also said that playing alone only goes so far: something about it feels very empty, and the emptiness does not go away.
It is easy to think abuse means hitting and scolding and nothing else. No one had hit this child, and this child was openly loved. What the child pointed to was something else: they were not being played with. And behind that one plain complaint lay an enormous ear, a devil, and a cracked black heart.
Rather than leave them playing alone, give them a smartphone
So this is what I say to parents: if your child is going to be left to play alone like that, give the child a smartphone. If it comes down to a phone or playing alone, the phone is better.
This advice comes with a condition, and everything depends on it: given that you are not playing with them. It is meant for homes where nobody plays with the child, not for homes where someone does. If you are reading it as permission to hand children phones, read the condition again. We have all heard that children should not have smartphones, so we keep telling the child no: “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” But if we do that and nobody plays with the child either, the child is simply left alone. That is what really abandons a child.
Before the damage shows up as symptoms
Not playing with a child is abuse. It damages the child’s mind. Our youngest was, in fact, in serious trouble.
The trouble had not yet shown up as symptoms. Give it time, though, and trouble like this comes out as symptoms of illness. So catch it early, before it shows. With our youngest, it was caught through a complaint about anger that was not brushed aside. Once you have noticed it, put more care into playing with the child.
When they come home, sit with them over their homework. Join in when they play with their toys. When they ride their bike, go out with them. Be there with them. With them.
Withholding love is itself the abuse
As long as nobody was hit, we say there was no abuse. But being there with a child, playing with them, is part of loving them, and even an adored child can go without it. When love is withheld, the withholding itself is the abuse.
And this does not stop at children. Think back to the dead fish at the beginning. When you can no longer love yourself, you end up abusing yourself the way a neglectful parent abuses a child: you pay no attention to your own fear, exhaustion and limits, and you leave yourself to deal with them alone. You have never done anything violent to yourself, so you conclude you have never abused yourself. And all that time, you are drifting like the dead fish, going wherever the water takes you.
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