If you ask me how to begin loving yourself, my answer starts with this: there is a small child hidden inside you. If I had to put an age on this child, I would say somewhere from four to seven or eight. This child is not a memory. The child is here now, living in your feelings: when you are irritated, sad or angry, it is usually this child who is feeling it.
Your irritation is not coming from the adult you are now
Someone says something to you today, and you feel as small, helpless or rejected as you did as a child. In that moment you are not only reacting to what was said. You are seeing it the way you learned to see such moments back then. So irritation rises, and you may want to be difficult on purpose: to stop listening, to hold back affection, or to make life hard for your partner and your children, so that they feel the hurt you have no words for. This is what I mean when I say the child is hidden, and in control: an old feeling is deciding how you respond today.
Calling it a child is a figure of speech, but it is more than a figure of speech. The child you actually were at four is still there, as the feelings you had at that age. Those feelings have kept the form they had then, and they live on inside what you feel today. When they come up, you feel what you felt at four: just as small, just as helpless.
Using illness and guilt to get someone to do what you want
Here is a tactic many mothers use. The mother is unwell and lets it show how worn out she is; the child sees it and feels guilty. Then the guilt does the work, and the child does what the mother wants. I am not raising this so you can blame your mother. I raise it so you can look at whether you are the one doing this now, to your own partner or children.
When a mother does this, it is her own hidden child that is in control. So it is not only the person being manipulated who is run by a hidden child; the person doing the manipulating is too. A hidden child is behind these as well: the remark meant to wound, the sneer, the grumbling, the comment twisted so that it stings, going out of your way to put someone in a bad mood. And why put someone else in a bad mood? Because your own mood is bad. When you feel bad yourself, it is hard to be good to anyone else.
If you have not yet noticed this child behind reactions like these, then all this time you have been leaving this child unattended. Whatever other people did or failed to do for you, the one who can notice this child now is you. Ignore this child, and you will get badly hurt.
Nobody scolded you, and you heard scolding
Left unattended, the child keeps seeing today through what happened back then. If you were scolded constantly between four and seven or eight, a neutral question from your partner can sound like criticism. Your partner asked what happened; inside, you heard that you had failed again. Nobody scolded you, and you felt scolded.
Hear scolding where there was none, and of course your mood drops. That matters, because the point of loving yourself is to feel good: to be at peace, happy, pleased with yourself, satisfied.
So your mood can tell you something. A mood that stays bad is a sign that, right now, you are not loving yourself. It is not a judgement on your character, and it is not a measure of how badly someone treated you today. It tells you that there is a part of you — this child — that you still need to find. And what you need to find is not a part of you that needs correcting. It is a child who needs soothing.
When anger piles up until it turns into action
Go long enough without looking for this child and you slowly drift towards something I can only call wicked. Yet I do not believe there are bad people in the world. There are none. There are only people who have gone far too long without ever feeling good. Live for years without peace, without happiness, without any sense of your own worth, unloved, as if shut in a cave day after day, and anger at the world starts to rise, until thoughts like “I’ll kill them all” come surging up.
Having thoughts like that for a while does not mean you act on them the next day. They pile up, and pile up, and pile up. Picture a gauge: when it fills to the line, that is when it all comes out as action. Nobody becomes a criminal overnight. People become criminals because this piling-up has gone on for too long.
Not “completely released.” Just “I can soothe it.”
Someone once asked me this: “You say we have to go and meet the child inside us. Does that child have to be completely released from the hurt? How would that even work?”
My answer: it is not about “completely.” It is about soothing, about being able to say, “I can soothe this.” That is the standard. There is no “completely released” or “not yet.” Recovery does not hand you a form with two boxes, one for fully released and one for not yet released, and ask you to tick one. The only real question is whether you can soothe yourself right now.
This makes a big difference. If your standard is “completely released,” then the first time the feeling comes back, it looks as if everything you have done was for nothing, and you stop looking after the child inside you. The child is left unattended again. If your standard is soothing, the feeling coming back cancels nothing. It is simply another chance to soothe the child.
You just soothe the child again
Say you have found this child in yourself and soothed the child well. Then, at some point, the feeling suddenly comes up again. What you must not tell yourself at that moment is: “Here I go again. I still haven’t changed.” That one line undoes the soothing you have already done.
You just soothe the child again. Once that becomes the pattern — the feeling comes back, and you soothe the child again — there is no serious problem. The more hurt the child is, the less likely it is that one round of soothing will be enough.
Until you are able to soothe yourself
Before you can soothe, you have to meet the part of you that is crying. That is less strange than it sounds. Even in a healthy person the self is divided into parts, which is why you can talk to yourself at all. One part of you says to another, “You’re scared right now, aren’t you? It’s all right.” That is what meeting a crying part of you looks like. And because the self is divided like this, there is more than one crying part, and some are crying harder than others. How long do you keep meeting them? Not until you have met every last one, but until the ability to soothe has formed in you. Once you have that ability, whichever crying part you meet, you can soothe it. Even someone who has been badly damaged, who has reached the state I called wicked, can come to soothe themselves once that ability has taken hold in them to some degree.
Building this ability takes time. Soothing is not easy work. The child is already carrying a lot of hurt, so it takes a long stretch of acknowledging the child’s feelings and soothing them, and of staying with the child through it all. It is slow, and that time is what the ability is built from.
You have to be able to cry for yourself, and to say you are angry
This ability does not arrive while you sit and wait for it. You have to be able to cry out of compassion for yourself, to cry because you are sad, and to admit fully how angry you are and say so. Doing these things, you soothe yourself, and you do it every day.
When you can cry for yourself and say you are angry, the feeling does not have to come out as action. When you cannot, action is exactly how it comes out. This is what is called acting out: a feeling coming out as something you do. And acting out is not only the kind of crime that shocks a whole country. Harshly criticising your children, hitting them — that is all acting out too. The scale is different; a crime that makes the national news is in another league. But both are acting out.
So think of something you said that you still feel uneasy about: a cutting remark, a sneer, harsh words to your child. The part of you that said it is not a part that needs correcting. It is the hidden child, and the child needs soothing. And soothing is not something you finish once and for all. You just soothe the child again.
Related
- There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
- As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad
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