Ask me what the first move is in loving yourself, and I begin here. There is a small child hidden inside you — put an age on her and it is four to about seven or eight. She is not a memory. She is present tense, and most of the time she is the one holding the emotions.
The irritation is not coming from the adult
When a present remark makes you feel as small, helpless, or rejected as you felt in childhood, the adult situation and the child’s old interpretation become joined. You may stop listening, withdraw affection, or make life harder for your family so they will feel the hurt you cannot explain. That is what it means for the child to be hidden, and running the controls from there: an old feeling is directing a present response.
I do not mean this only as an image. The feeling you had at four is still inside your feeling now, in the same shape it had then. Ignore her and you get badly hurt.
Getting sick so that someone will obey
There is a move mothers use often. You are unwell, you are visibly worn down, the child watches it, and guilt gets planted. Then the guilt does the work of making the child obey. I am not raising this so you can hand your mother a bill. I raise it so you can look at whether you are the one using it now.
That is the hidden child running the controls as well. It is not only the one being manoeuvred who has a child in the seat. So does the one doing the manoeuvring. The remark that wounds the listener, the sneer, the muttering, the twisted remark, the campaign to spoil someone’s mood — one origin for all of it. And why spoil someone else’s mood? Because your own mood is bad.
If you have not yet found this child in you, that tells you something plain: you have been leaving her unattended. Whatever the people outside did or failed to do, the person who can recognise her now is you.
Nobody scolded you, and you heard scolding
Left unattended, she keeps interpreting the present through the past. If you were scolded constantly between four and seven or eight, a neutral question from your spouse can sound like criticism. Your spouse asked what happened; inside, you heard that you had failed again. Nobody scolded you, and you felt scolded. Someone praised you and it didn’t land follows that distortion in detail.
Hear scolding where there was none and your mood drops. Now put that beside what self-love is for. It is for feeling good: at peace, happy, pleased with yourself, satisfied.
That lets you read the thing backwards. A mood that stays bad is a report on your situation: you are not loving yourself at the moment. It is not a verdict on your personality, and not an audit of how someone treated you today. You are not failing to find the self that needs correcting. You are failing to find the self that needs soothing.
When the gauge fills
Go long enough without looking for her and the drift is towards something that deserves the word wicked. I do not believe there are bad people in the world. There are none. But live for years without peace, without happiness, without any sense of your own worth, unloved, shut in a cave, and anger at the world starts to come up.
Carrying that thought for a while does not mean it comes out as behaviour the next day. It stacks, and stacks, and stacks, and when the gauge fills to the line, that is when it comes out. What makes a criminal is the length of the stacking. I had to be a good person, so I never expressed a feeling traces how pressed-down feeling turns cruel.
Not “completely.” Just “I can soothe it.”
Someone once asked me this. You say a person has to go and meet the child inside them — does that child have to be completely released? How would that even work?
My answer: the form of it is not “completely.” It is soothing. That I am able to soothe it. That is where the standard sits. There is no completely-or-not-yet. Recovery does not hand you a two-box form — fully resolved, still not resolved — and ask you to tick one. The only live question is whether you can soothe yourself right now.
The difference is not small. Set the standard at completely and the first return of the feeling voids everything you have done, and the child inside you goes unattended again. Set it at soothing and the return is not a cancellation. It is another occasion to soothe her.
You just soothe her again
You picked her out from among everything in you and soothed her. Then, having soothed her well, you hit a moment when the feeling rises again. What you must not think at that moment is: here I go again, I still haven’t changed. That one line of interpretation undoes the soothing you have already done.
You just soothe her again. Make that the process and there is no serious problem. The more injured the child, the less likely one round finishes it.
Until the soothing function exists
To get to the soothing you have to meet the self that is crying. The self is split along several lines, so there is more than one crying self, and some are crying harder than others. For how long do you keep meeting them? Not until you have met every one and reached the end of the list — until the function of soothing is in you. With that function in place, whatever you meet, you soothe it. Even someone who has taken severe damage and reached the state I called wicked gets soothed, once the soothing function has taken hold in them at all.
Building it takes time. Soothing is not easy work. She is already carrying a lot of injury, which means a long stretch of acknowledging her and soothing her and going along with her. It is slow, and that time is what the function is made out of.
You have to be able to cry for yourself, and to say you are angry
The function does not arrive while you sit and wait for it. You have to be able to cry for yourself out of pity, to cry out of sorrow, and to acknowledge the shape of your anger fully and let it out. Carrying those, you soothe yourself daily.
Do that and the feeling does not have to come out as behaviour. Fail to do it and behaviour is exactly how it comes out. And acting out is not only the event that shocks a nation. Cutting your children down, hitting them — that is all acting out too. The sizes differ; the headline case is in a different league. But both are acting out.
So the self that said the thing you are still uneasy about is not the self that needs correcting. It is the self that needs soothing. And soothing her is not something you finish. You just soothe her 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