Some of the people who come to see me for therapy lie down and, before long, fall asleep. I don’t wake them. I don’t clear my throat to move things along. I let them sleep a long while, and when the time is up I say one thing: “Time’s up.”
Nothing got produced in that hour, and the hour was not wasted. If you learned that your worth depends on what you get done, resting without getting anything done will feel wrong, even when your body needs the rest.
Rest also gives something back. While you rest somewhere safe, your body lets go of tension and you start to feel like yourself again. Sometimes a person needs that first, before they can use their own drive: the force to say no, to choose, to start something, and to keep at it. Push someone who hasn’t had enough rest to keep going, and what they do no longer comes from that drive. It becomes one more duty, done to meet someone else’s demands.
Anger may seem to have nothing to do with rest, but it is part of that same force. So when you press anger down the moment it rises, you weaken your drive along with it.
Resting where nobody can poke you
No part of me is thinking we ought to be getting somewhere. The person lying there is doing something that matters. They’re resting in a spot where nobody is going to reach over and poke them.
They are not working on themselves. They are experiencing a relationship in which they can stop performing and still be welcome. In a sense, the room is a mother’s arms. A small child in its mother’s arms doesn’t have to do anything to stay there, and the room holds the person lying there in the same way, without asking them to produce anything.
Being comes before doing
Therapy is not an hour you have to fill. We talk, of course. But the bigger thing on offer is simpler than talking. In the therapy room you get to stop. You get to simply be there without having to justify it to anyone.
The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it plainly: being comes before doing. Being able simply to exist, without having to get anything done, is the ground a person grows from. Doing is built on top of it.
That may sound strange, because most of your week runs the other way. You earn your place by getting things done — inbox cleared, everyone fed, a weekend that somehow arrives with its own to-do list. When there is nothing to get done, something in you starts to fidget. That restlessness is worth noticing. It comes from the belief that you are worth only what you get done.
The silence I leave alone
So when a client goes quiet, I don’t fill the silence. This is not a technique. The quiet itself is that experience of simply being, without having to do anything. Whatever is going on inside the person during it does not need my voice to make it better.
Sitting in silence with another person is harder than it sounds. Think of the last time a conversation went quiet on you, and how fast you reached for your phone or a joke or the weather. That reflex is so quick it passes for good manners.
Two silences I do step into. One is the silence of digging in: “I don’t want to say it, so I won’t.” The other belongs to someone who wants to speak and can’t get the words out. I work with both of those. The rest I leave alone.
What’s left is two people sitting together, doing nothing for each other. No performance, no service, no progress report. Winnicott had a name for this experience when nothing interrupts it: the continuity of being. You simply go on existing, without having to react to anyone’s demands. He stressed it above everything else, because a person needs it first in order to grow into a whole person. When it is interrupted too often, that growth gets hard. Instead you become whoever the person in front of you needs you to be — quick with an answer for anyone who asks, and blank when somebody asks what you want for dinner.
Why does the whole world look like it’s coming at you?
Besides this experience of simply being, Winnicott insisted on a second thing, and it is harder to hear. You have to recognize the aggression in yourself: your anger, and your own wishes to attack, humiliate, or destroy. He was firm that denying these feelings does not get rid of them. If you learned that getting angry ruins relationships, you may not admit, even to yourself, that you are angry. Then you start seeing that anger in other people instead.
The neighbor’s tone. The email with no greeting. The driver who didn’t wave a thank-you. All of it starts reading as aimed at you, and your week fills up with the work of deciding what people meant. You catch yourself thinking, “He looked at me a certain way,” or “She left me out on purpose,” and you get defensive or back off first. When you are that busy finding hostility in other people, some of the hostility you find is your own.
Then one day you admit to yourself: “I have wanted to break something. I have wanted someone to get hurt.” Once you can recognize those wishes as your own, you no longer have to see all the hostility as coming from neighbors, coworkers, or strangers. The world stops looking threatening everywhere you turn, even though nobody out there has changed.
Admitting your own anger does not mean the person who upset you did nothing wrong. Once you can say “I was angry too,” you can look at two things separately: how much of a threat that person really is, and how strong your own feeling is. Then there is room to show your anger by saying no or keeping your distance, instead of through insults or violence.
A lion runs down a lamb. Where is the evil in it?
This is where the word aggression misleads. When Winnicott talks about aggression, he does not mean only what you’re picturing — the fist, the shouting, the wreckage afterward. He means energy: the force that moves you toward what you want, pushes obstacles out of the way, and protects you. The wish to hurt someone is one form that energy can take, but only one.
Picture a lion running flat out and taking down a lamb in front of the lamb’s own mother. Ask yourself honestly: is the lion evil? The body driving forward, the claws, the teeth, the whole act — every part of that is aggression.
And nobody watching calls the lion bad. We say it’s nature, and we mean it. We know what we are looking at: not evil, but the force of a living thing.
But when the same force rises in you, you don’t see it that way. You call it a bad feeling and press it down the moment it appears. Same force, worse name, harsher judgment.
Creativity is aggression that found somewhere to go
When you accept aggression as part of yourself, you can steer its energy instead of blowing up or pressing it down. Love is what gives the force a direction. You can be angry with someone close to you and still love them. When you can feel both at once, you don’t have to attack the whole person with “I hate you.” You can say, “Stop doing that.” Held together with love like this, the force no longer has to attack anyone. You can use it to take on a problem, protect a boundary, or keep working until something is made.
Creativity comes out of aggression.
You probably don’t believe that yet, so stay with it a minute before you argue back. Think of the things we value most: wisdom, insight, recovery, love, gratitude, happiness, plain enjoyment. Every one of them grows out of this same force. None of them shows up in a person who has no force left.
Think of something you finished that mattered. If there was a stretch in the middle where you were half furious — at the problem, at yourself, at how slowly it moved — that heat was doing work. Take the heat out and you’re left with a nice idea that never got built.
Winnicott kept coming back to zest. The buzz. The fun of a thing. It’s what has you starting a project on a Saturday morning for no good reason, and it runs on the same force.
If aggression looks only destructive, what you are seeing is the force without love or responsibility. When the same force is joined to love, it appears as protection, persistence, creativity, and the determination to recover.
Getting better takes force too
Think about what getting better actually takes. There is nothing soft about it.
“I’m going to get through this.” “I’m going to live differently.” “I’m having this treated, whatever it takes out of me.” When a thought like that rises in you, that is force — aggression working on your side.
And right behind it comes a second voice: “Don’t bother.” “Stay put.” “Who do you think you are?” The push back against that voice is force as well, and so is the whole struggle between the two.
You can see what happens when this force runs short in people who have spent years swallowing their anger to keep things pleasant at work or at home. They never snap, never argue, never make anyone uncomfortable — and they also can’t get a single day started. Almost nobody, including them, sees that the two are connected: the force they press down to keep the peace is the same force they would need to get going.
This force is what keeps a life moving. Without it, a life comes to a stop. Nothing appeals. Nothing pulls at you. Nothing gets going in the first place.
Feeling aggression and attacking someone are not the same act. The feeling is energy inside you, and it carries information: it tells you where your limits are. Turning it on another person is an action, and whether you take that action is your choice. Being angry does not give you the right to hurt anyone. Violence and threats have to stop, and if it is hard to keep yourself under control, step away and get help.
Before you press your anger back down
Something will flare up in you today: irritation, the sting of being treated unfairly, an “Oh, come on” that lands in your chest.
You already know your reflex: press it down, smile, move along. Give it three seconds first. While the feeling is still warm in your chest, ask it: What is this protecting? What does it want to get done?
You may not get an answer. Ask anyway and let the day go on. Looking at your anger even once, instead of pressing it down, makes more of a difference than you might think. A person with no anger left is not calm. That person has run out of force, and nothing gets started anymore.
References
- Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock. — being and doing.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958).
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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