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In “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack I worked with the idea that there is more than one of you in there. This is the same frame, one step further in. Being divided is not the thing that is wrong with you. What goes wrong sits somewhere else, and it is worth knowing exactly where.

The sentence that needs two of you

When you are frightened you say something to yourself. I’m frightened. You’re frightened right now, aren’t you. It’s alright. The same when sadness arrives. I’m sad. Sad? Very sad, yes.

Stop on the grammar of that, because by rights it should not work. Someone is speaking and someone is listening, and both of them are you. You can speak to yourself because the speaker and the listener are the same person — because you are split. One part says it is sad. Another part answers the sadness. Nothing has gone wrong in that exchange. It happens because a mind comes in pieces, and that is the ordinary condition.

Three of them, before anything has gone wrong

How many of you are in there to start with? Three. In broad outline a person is divided into three, and those three divide again, so the working number runs higher than three.

You have heard of multiple personality. That is what this looks like when it turns into an illness, and it is the same material. And a perfectly healthy person is divided all the same. So the line between health and illness does not run between divided and undivided. It runs somewhere else entirely.

Which changes what knowing yourself would have to mean. You would need to know the state each of those parts is in. Otherwise you cannot hear more than one voice from inside your own mind. Not several voices filed down into one. Several, with some sense of how each one is doing. The work is not to reduce yourself to a single voice and call the rest noise. It is to find out how many there are and what state they are in.

Divided, and still connected

The parts sit separately and they are joined to one another. Connection. That is why being in pieces does not become a real problem.

The frightened part can say, I cannot do this, and another part can answer, You are frightened, but I will stay with you while we decide. The fear has not vanished, yet it no longer acts alone. While that exchange remains possible, you can contain several feelings and still act as one person. A healthy interior is not silent; its parts remain in contact.

When the parts stop reaching each other

Here is where the trouble starts. The distance between the parts opens too wide, and what one of them is living through, the other no longer knows anything about. Inside a single person, an experience belongs to one part and is unavailable to the rest (the clinical term is dissociation). Multiple personality is that, carried the whole way.

When the connection goes, you get pulled toward believing things that are not true. Fantasy takes over. This is where the odd remarks come from, the talk that arrives out of nowhere and keeps arriving. Parts that cannot reach each other cannot correct each other. Nothing is holding it, so it runs.

In Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land and I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First I went into what it takes to bring the divided parts back together. This is the other level of the same subject: you can stay divided, as long as the line between the parts is live.

You only ever watch how other people treat you

There is a way you treat yourself. Hardly anyone looks at it. What gets looked at is the other direction — how is that person treating me. Putting it like that, is he looking down on me? He is. Why would he say that to me? And you stay there, on him, going around the same lap.

What is actually snagging you is the way you treat yourself.

Because you are the one dismissing you

If you tell yourself all day that you are incompetent, an ambiguous remark from a colleague is likely to sound like proof that they also look down on you. The outside remark catches because it matches the treatment already happening inside. When you hold yourself as worth something, you can evaluate the same remark instead of automatically turning it into a verdict.

So the state your mind is in comes down almost entirely to this: how you treat yourself. Not what was done to you.

Attention has to land before you can see it

The you that is doing the treating does to you what your parents did to you. The very thing you could not stand. That is present when you are worn out and lonely and in pain.

The method your parent used on you is the one you are running on yourself now. That is the thing that has to be found and recognised. But recognition does not come first. Attention does. Attention is love. Your attention has to go to your own mind first, to whatever is going on inside it — recognition comes after that. Not: see it, then take an interest. Take an interest, and then you see.

This is the thing my parent hurt me with, and here I am doing it to myself. Once you can see it that far down, the direction can change. Right. I will love myself instead. What that turns into in practice I have set out in “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack.

Why am I running myself down like this? Why do I keep telling myself I cannot do it? The criticising stops there. What starts in its place is a different way of dealing with yourself, and it sounds like this.

What one part says to the other

You don’t have to be good at it. A mistake that size is allowed. It does not kill you, and it does not make you worthless to anyone else.

If one part of you can say that to another part, you can be divided into as many as you like. The connection holds.

Related

• “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
• Stay Until I Fall Asleep: The Fear That Never Grew Up
• There Is Nobody There to Love Yet

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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

Here is what happens when you do not love yourself. You would expect it to buy you some ease. It does the opposite: it walks you into your own suffering. Read it psychologically and that is the whole mechanism. The thing you did to guard yourself is the thing that pushes you further in. Which is why loving yourself is not an option. It is required.

That suffering turns up in a life more times than anyone could count. A day of talking would not get through them. It happens between a husband and a wife. It happens between a parent and a child. Somebody keeps the thought they arrived with and walks, on their own legs, toward the side where they get hurt. You can find that any day of the week without looking hard.

Not judging yourself, and respecting what you feel

So what is it, then. It starts with not judging yourself. Not passing sentence on who you are. You are like this. That verdict is what kills us — and this one you nailed up yourself, on yourself.

Then: respecting your own feeling. What you feel is allowed to stand as what you feel.

Your own demand, met at the size reality allows

One more thing goes on top. You meet your own need as far as reality allows. If you need rest but cannot leave work, you may cancel one evening obligation, ask for help, or stop demanding a perfect dinner from yourself. You neither grant yourself everything you want nor pretend you want nothing. You identify the need and meet the part that can be met in the circumstances you actually have.

And who does the meeting. Not somebody else. You do. This is not the position of waiting for a person to turn up who will finally notice what you need. It is the position of doing it for yourself, here, in the reality you have.

A good place, a good road

A good place for me. A good road. Putting yourself down on the side of what is good for you. Self-love is not a decision taken privately somewhere behind your eyes; it shows in where you put yourself. If you have put yourself somewhere you can look at yourself, that is already it. Go the other way and you do not simply drift — you end up at the place where the accident can happen, at the place where the fight can start.

Taking an interest in the other you belongs here too. Not multiple personality, nothing pathological. Even in a healthy person the inside is not one solid piece; it comes divided. That division is why you can speak to yourself at all. There is a you doing the speaking and a you doing the listening.

You sent the child off, and it got heavier

Here is where people lose the thread and cannot tell whether what they are doing is love or selfishness.

You are tired. To love yourself you would have to not be this worn out. And the child keeps asking, keeps wanting to be played with, and not playing with a child is abuse, and you are supposed to answer, and you have nothing left.

Yesterday went exactly like that. I can’t do it, I’m too tired. I’m getting angry. I’d like you to do it on your own for now. Said it, sent the child off — and then the heaviness did not lift. It grew. I did that to love myself, and still: shouldn’t I have done it anyway? Loving yourself comes first and loving the child comes after it, so when I refused at the end of my strength, was that the loving part or the selfish part, and isn’t a mother supposed to manage some of it regardless. There are places in this where the answer is genuinely unclear. There are cases that sit right on the line.

“Mum is too tired today” is only today

In the large frame, self-love gets fed first. Mum is too tired today, so I can’t play with you. Say that and it is only today.

Tired today, and I say I cannot cook tonight — then it does not get cooked. There is no law making me the one who cooks it. Once, twice, I can leave a thing undone. I am worn through, and no rule requires that it be done tonight by me.

“I’m never playing with you again” is self-abuse

The sentence to stop at is the other one. Because I am tired, because I am finished with this: I am never playing with you again. That one has to be taken seriously, and that one is self-abuse. It takes a single day and rules on an entire life.

It feels, saying it, like guarding yourself. It drops you into suffering. It is the move that arranges the conditions in which you can go on suffering. And once you have been wrecked that way there is no version of you that is comfortable. Which returns the question to where it started: what is it to love yourself.

If that sounds like the opposite of what I said before

I have put it down flatly elsewhere: not playing with a child is abuse, and nobody has to raise a hand for it to be that. Here I am saying a day without play is survivable. It can read as though the earlier line is being taken back.

The difference is one day versus a pattern. A parent who says, I cannot play today, but we will make time tomorrow, is naming a temporary limit. A parent who repeatedly refuses, never repairs, and leaves the child alone with the same unmet need creates a lasting condition. One exhausted day is not a verdict on your love; neglect hardened into a way of life is what abuses the child.

Self-love has the priority

Consideration for other people and protection of yourself carry different weights from case to case. But in the large frame, self-love has the priority, because loving yourself more and loving yourself better is what lets you do more of the devotion and more of the consideration. The capacity itself gets bigger. You love yourself, and what reaches the other person is then a healthy form of it.

Suppose you have loved yourself to about ten. Then what you can spend on somebody else is ten — there is no more than that. Love yourself a hundred and a pocket of a hundred opens up for devotion and consideration, and you can hand out that much. The size you have loved yourself to is the size you have available for anyone else.

You get tired. Living wears people down. A day you put off when you had nothing left is that day, and nothing more than that day. Self-love and selfishness divide at the point where you decline to turn it into a life sentence.

Related

• Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
• I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
• You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious

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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

Suppose it is true that parents injure children as badly as people say. Then take the argument at its word and carry it out to the end: remove the parents. All of them. Does the child come through unhurt?

Having no mother is itself the injury. Nothing had to be done to the child. The absence did it.

Which tells you what not loving actually is. It is not a neutral position, a blank where love happened not to be. Not loving is itself a form of abuse. No hand was raised, and that settles nothing — I have written that part out on its own in Her Body Never Bruised, and She Hated It for That.

And the same holds when the person you are not loving is you. Fail to love yourself and you will abuse yourself. There is no third place to stand, no quiet position where you neither love yourself nor harm yourself. There is no middle ground.

There is an acute form and there is a chronic one

When I was a child I watched a man in my family, in the middle of a fight with his wife, reach a certain temperature and turn on himself where he stood. I was small, and it frightened me.

That is self-abuse, and it is the acute kind — visible and sudden. The chronic kind is what the rest of this is about, and it does not run on temper. A person who does not love himself begins arranging the conditions for it, and then keeps them arranged, in a standing daily form. It takes four forms.

One: building an environment where you can be made to suffer

The first is to start arranging conditions under which you can be hurt. You acquire a partner who hits you, say. A violent man is exactly the one who appeals to you.

Violent is not the word anyone uses while choosing. What gets said is oh, he’s got some force about him.

Why that man draws you, and why you stay once you know, is not what I am opening here. It is opened elsewhere — in Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts, in Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak, and in Everything Checks Out and You Still Feel Nothing.

That is one example, and the range is much wider. Conditions under which you can be swindled. Conditions under which the money goes. Conditions under which suffering is the only thing that can come of it. It was built. Building it is one of the ways a person abuses himself.

Two: punishing yourself directly

The second is to carry out the punishment yourself — to be the one who does the harm, with nothing in between.

Every addiction belongs here. Not most of them. All of them, with none left outside. The self-injury you hear about among young people now belongs here too — the cutting, done by hand, to the body that is yours.

The first form sets up a situation and lets the situation do the hitting. The second skips the intermediary and goes straight at the person. Different routes, one destination. And both have this in common: the behaviour shows. Somebody could walk in and see it happening. That is what separates them from the two that follow, and it is why the two that follow are the harder ones to catch.

Three: shutting yourself inside your own thinking

The third is to lock yourself inside thoughts that keep you suffering.

You replay one mistake, predict the worst outcome, dismiss every reassuring fact, and call the repetition problem-solving. Each round increases the fear but produces no decision or action. Because the activity looks like careful thinking, you may not notice that your own thoughts have become the room in which you are being hurt.

Outside, nothing has occurred. No one struck you. There is no mark to point at, no incident to report. Inside, it has been going on all day. And the person doing it believes he is thinking something over. He is not thinking. He is shut in.

Four: regret

The fourth is regret. Some people live in it, all day and every day. They regret, and regret again, and arrive at there I go again.

At night the regretting keeps sleep off. Morning comes and there is work, and while the work goes on it recedes. Then evening comes and you return to your own life, and it starts up again — the same material, gone over once more, arriving where it arrived the night before. Regret ties off both ends of the day, and the only stretch that gets away is the one where you were too occupied to notice.

All of this comes from not loving yourself. Stop loving yourself and you cross over into abusing yourself — not by decision, but because there was nowhere else for the traffic to go.

The third and fourth are where you get fooled

All four are rationalisation — a person deceiving himself. And of the four, the third and the fourth are the ones you will believe.

The person in them will tell you he is working to get out, and he is not lying to you. The effort is real and he can describe it. The rationalising happens further down, where he arranges for the suffering to continue.

The deception sits in the quantity. You make one phone call but avoid the next step, try a practice twice but stop before it can become familiar, or ask for help while withholding the part that matters. The effort is real, but it is kept small enough that the old result is likely to continue. Then the result seems to prove that change was impossible.

And here is what a small amount of effort leaves behind: there — it doesn’t work after all.

You did try. That is the point of trying a little. It produces evidence — I attempted it and nothing came of it — and the evidence is what holds the pain in place. The effort did not fail. The effort was measured out, by hand, in the amount required to purchase the proof.

“I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”

This is the sentence such a person says, over and over. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.

It sounds like a finding — long experience, tested thoroughly, conclusion reached. Behind it stands the moment when full effort was quietly traded for a little, so the finding would be there when it was wanted.

Where love is missing, the space does not sit empty and wait. Self-abuse moves into it. That is why loving yourself is not an option. It is required.

Related

• Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
• “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
• The Safe You Don’t Know You Own
• All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode

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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

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

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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

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

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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

You can be told that this is a room where anything may be said and still find that nothing comes out. The block is not shyness. Somewhere early, you decided that a decent person must never feel hatred, imagine violence, or want revenge. Those experiences were denied words, but they did not disappear. They remained inside you without a form you could examine.

And the unworded thing is the one that eventually comes out as behaviour.

Someone once told me they wanted to take a saw to people

Someone once told me, when the room had finally become safe enough for it, that they wanted to take a saw to certain people. They said it plainly.

And while they were saying it, the thing nobody expects happened. They got calmer. Sentence by sentence, they came back to their senses. I asked who it was they wanted to cut. In that moment a man from their childhood arrived — that man, and that man’s hands. It had been held down the whole time.

Say it and you do not do it

Most people have the order backwards: they assume that putting such a thing into words brings it nearer to happening, so they keep the lid weighted. The opposite is the case. Say a thing like that and you do not do it. Leave it sitting inside with nothing done about it, and that is when it gets done.

Where it gets said is part of what happened, not a detail you can drop. This was a room built for it: anything could be said, and someone in it received the words instead of flinching.

Once the fantasy became words in a safe room, the person could observe it instead of being driven by it. Speaking also revealed its source: the man from childhood and what his hands had done. How the unnamed keeps its grip is the subject of As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad. Here, the important point is that a feeling you can name becomes something you can think about; a feeling you cannot name is more likely to find its way into behaviour.

Sadness as sadness, gladness as gladness

This — the wording of it, and the looking at what got worded — is what loving yourself consists of. You look carefully at what is in you, you care for it, you grant that it is there. Sadness as sadness, gladness as gladness, lowness as lowness. Permitting it and taking it in — that is the process, and the process is what loving yourself means.

Taking sadness as sadness means declining to give it a second name. You are sad and you do not say this is fine. You are sad and you do not say this is weakness.

Bring all of it home, and forgive it first

You may feel lacking, weak, or unable to do what others seem able to do. To bring all of it home means admitting that this is how you experience yourself right now, instead of covering it with praise you do not believe. Then you forgive the self who carries that experience.

When the feeling that you are bad keeps arriving, stop laying good words on top of it. Say instead: yes, I am bad — granted — and I forgive the bad me. An admission with forgiveness attached to it.

It feels like being born was my fault. The more injury there is, the more reliably this shows up. Being born a daughter was my fault. If saying no, it wasn’t has not moved it the first time, there is no use in repeating the correction. Just bring it home. Bring it in and say: being born a daughter is my fault. And then forgive that fault. Only what you own outright is in your hands, and forgiveness needs something in your hands. Left standing outside, it cannot be forgiven at all.

One thing before we go on. What refuses to come off will not come off by your pulling at it alone. This is where a professional psychological approach is needed, and it is hard for someone outside the field to get it off alone. If you read this today and nothing shifts, that is not another item for the list of things wrong with you.

But it wasn’t my fault, so why forgive it?

The objection comes fast. That was not my fault, so why am I forgiving it? Forgiving what you did not do sounds like agreeing to carry a charge that belongs to someone else.

Look at what is actually happening, though. You are pushing — no, not my fault — and underneath the pushing the feeling goes on reporting that it is yours. The pushing away is the refusal to grant it. The feeling holds its position with exactly the force you use against it.

Psychic reality is stronger than external reality

Knowing in your head that it was not your fault while everything inside you insists that it truly was — that is psychic reality. And psychic reality is stronger than external reality. What is felt inside moves you more, and more often, than what actually took place outside.

So the work here is not correcting the record. Confirm a hundred times that being born was not your decision, and the confirmation stays outside while the feeling stays inside, and the two never touch. The feeling has to be set down as something really there, and then granted rather than denied. Granting is what puts it in your hands, and forgiveness needs it there.

Granting it, or passing sentence on yourself

If bring even the bad me home reads as punish yourself, it runs backwards and does damage. Two different operations. Setting moral judgement aside — that is what “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack asks of you. Bringing I am bad home — that is what this asks. They part company at whatever follows the sentence.

After yes, I am bad, if what comes next is so this is the kind of creature I am, so I deserve what I get, that is self-punishment: one feeling was admitted and a whole person got convicted. If what comes next is and I forgive that bad me, that is granting. The sentence ends at there is this in me right now, and what is in you gets acknowledged. The thing to drop is the verdict. The thing to bring home is the feeling.

Your body, your feelings, your thoughts — and your fantasies

However small a thing you take yourself to be, granting your existence exactly as it stands is the process that amounts to loving yourself. So: your body. Your feelings. Your thoughts. And your fantasies. Most people stop at the fantasies. Fantasy is grotesque, all of it, so it does not get spoken and gets denied instead. No — and the lid goes back on.

Guard against one misunderstanding here. This is not an instruction to go and think such things on purpose. When a picture of putting a knife into a stranger has passed through you, the move is not to judge it as evil but to take it lightly: I am very angry right now — that much is enough to receive. Receiving it does not mean drawing the picture out further. It means letting what passed through stay passed.

Covering it instead — that I could do something so wicked — makes the problem larger. Any human being can have a thought like that. So the process runs the other way: not calling it bad, and loving those fantasies too. Love yourself.

Related

• There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
• Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
• I Had to Be a Good Person, So I Never Expressed a Feeling

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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

“Dammit.” You could call that self-expression. “I’m a little angry.” You could call that self-expression too. And self-expression really is one of the roads into loving yourself — nobody is arguing with that. Both sentences take something that was inside and put it outside. So far they are identical. Where they split is what comes next, and it is worth listening closely here.

“Dammit” is an attack, and it comes back

Say “Dammit” out loud and the person hearing it does not think well of you. Because you attacked. And so you can be attacked in return. The feeling did get out — that part worked — but what is left standing in the place it landed is not the feeling. It is a fight.

So the people who use that sentence end up in an odd position. You put out what was inside you and you are no lighter for it, and the relationship is one notch worse than it was before you spoke. You were attacked back for expressing, so the next time you either say it harder or you close your mouth altogether. Neither of those two roads leaves you with anything.

I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.

The other kind of sentence looks like this. What you said made me sad. I’m angry. It feels like I’m being dismissed. That upset me. You have spoken your heart honestly, and because you did not attack the person standing in front of you, what came out was your actual self.

The difference is whether the sentence attacks the other person or reports your own experience. You never care about anyone gives the listener a charge to defend against. When you left without answering, I felt dismissed and angry names the event and the feeling. Both sentences come from anger, but only the second lets the other person understand what happened inside you without first having to fight the accusation.

They have never once expressed a feeling of their own

Now run it backwards. A person who can say “I’m a little angry” is a person who has put a name to a feeling before. And there are people for whom that sentence will not come out at all. Look at how that happened and you find one thing: they have never once expressed a feeling of their own. It has not been done once, so it cannot be done now.

In the place where the feeling belongs, a different sentence has been installed. Never mind anything else — I have to be a good son. I have to be a good person. I must never think a thing like that. I must never hold a fantasy like that. The standard arrives before the feeling does. So whatever comes up from inside gets caught on the standard first, and whatever gets caught gets pressed down.

What does it mean that a feeling has congealed?

Press a feeling down repeatedly and it does not disappear. Each new insult, disappointment, or fear joins what was never spoken before. Eventually a small event carries the weight of years. That is what it means for a feeling to congeal. You kept rejecting it in order to be good, but the rejected part of you experiences that treatment as indifference.

Indifference is a strong word, and here it will sound wrong. You did not press it down because you had no interest in yourself; you pressed it down because you wanted to turn out well. But a feeling that is unmistakably inside you, which you will not grant exists — that is indifference toward yourself. You set out to become a good person and became a person who is indifferent to yourself.

Cruel, malevolent, destructive

Pressed and pressed and pressed, what you pushed down starts turning aggressive. “Aggressive” is the kind word for it. What is actually in there, once it has lost anywhere to go, is cruel, malevolent, destructive. Inside, something walks around saying: just let someone cross me. Just let the moment arrive. And it runs as far as wanting the whole world blown up. All of that was sitting hidden inside the person who had been saying, for years, that he has to be a good person.

Repress a great deal and the feeling condenses, and condensed things can burst later. I wrote about that process on its own in The Self-Prescription: What You’ve Been Taking Every Day. And with nothing expressed, after a year of it, two years of it, at some point it comes out as behaviour instead of words. This act of disregarding yourself is what ends up making a person genuinely malevolent.

I have sat with people who carried that kind of cruelty in them for a long time. The good news is that they have opened their own hearts and are working on it. I have taken the severe end of the range because it shows up plainly there — but it is not only them. I would rather you did not read this and think well, not me. Those elements are in everyone.

The feeling of having been dismissed is enormous

When love does not get through, a person turns aggressive. Look at people who get angry a great deal, people who reach for force, and in every one of them the feeling of having been dismissed is enormous. Dismissed, put another way, means: why won’t you love me. And underneath that sits am I someone not worth loving? Live for years giving no love at all to that centre of yourself, and a great deal goes wrong.

And when looking into what is in there is frightening enough, you go hunting for stimulus outside instead — until eventually there is nothing left for you to love. That one I took on its own in All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode.

You have to watch the degree

So when a feeling starts gathering, put it into words before it has to come out as an outburst or an action. Expressing is self-love, but expression is not permission to do whatever you please. Say what happened, name what you felt, and do it without cornering or condemning the other person. That is what self-love looks like once it is working in a relationship.

Wives especially need to say these things to their husbands honestly. I wanted to be loved by you, and you didn’t come, and it made me very sad. That is the entire sentence. Someone once said it to her husband the other way round instead: “Are you even a man? Is that something a husband does?” And then of course no love comes back from the husband. That sentence abuses you, not him. Say you were sad, and a place opens where the thing you wanted can arrive. Corner the other person, and you close that place with your own hand.

So expression is the road. What splits is which sentence goes out on it. And all those years of pressing it down were not you being patient. They were you being indifferent to yourself — and the first move in withdrawing that indifference is to say it out loud. I’m sad. I’m angry. That upset me.

Related

• The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head
• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
• As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad

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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

You have heard the instruction often enough. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself. And you have probably tried it, the way a person tries a technique, and found that nothing much happened. The usual conclusion is that you did it wrong, or that the whole idea was soft nonsense.

There is a simpler explanation. When you turned around to love yourself, nobody was standing there.

You lose the one the love was meant for

Think about the shape of a life in which you do not show what you actually are. You keep the real thing out of view because you expect other people to criticise it, so you present something else and then live inside the presentation. In that arrangement, loving yourself is not difficult. It is impossible. There is no you in it. You have walked up to the place where the love is supposed to land and found the recipient missing.

The failure gets read as a failure of sincerity. It isn’t. What is missing is not effort but the person.

The you that gets seen is not the only you

When someone tells you to love yourself, notice which self shows up in your mind. Nearly always it is the you that gets seen — the version other people look at, the one you can inspect from outside like a photograph. And that is exactly the self you cannot stop at.

Inside that outer figure is another one you have to travel into: the you that is inside. That is the real you. The outer one is the one other people reach first; the inner one only you can go in and see. And standing between you and it, blocking the corridor, is a single thing. The mask.

The mask is just behaviour that dresses up the surface

The word mask sounds theatrical, but in daily life it is ordinary. You agree while resentment rises, smile while you are afraid, or say you are fine because you expect your need to be criticised. What you show and what you feel become two different things, and you hide the gap. The mask is simply the edited version of you that other people are allowed to see.

None of this comes out of bad character. It comes out of the expectation of blame — which is exactly why the mask is so hard to remove. You assume that the second it comes off, the criticism arrives. People are rarely frightened of the mistake itself; they are frightened of being caught making it.

The cat in the mirror who thinks it is a lion

There is a world made of what can be seen and what can be held in the hand. Call it the physical world. It is a fine standard for objects and a disastrous one for people, because if it is the only standard you own, this happens.

A cat looks into a mirror and experiences itself as a lion. You meet people like this. Nothing about them is as remarkable as they feel it to be, and they go on living inside the impression anyway.

The reverse is just as common: someone convinced their body is far heavier than it is, arguing with anyone who tells them otherwise.

One sees more than is there, the other sees worse than is there, and they look like opposite problems. They are the same problem. Both took what was in the glass to be themselves. Neither was looking at the real thing.

So you chase the version of yourself the physical world can display, and you go on meeting that version — and what it produces is not vanity. It is absence. You never arrive at the real you, and because you never arrive, there is nothing there to love.

You walk the hard road without knowing it is hard

A life lived through the mask makes you choose according to what preserves the image, not according to what you actually need. You stay agreeable in a relationship that hurts, accept work that empties you, or keep saying yes until resentment takes over.

Because each choice looks reasonable from the outside, you may not see why life keeps becoming painful. The pain then seems to come from nowhere. In fact, the same hidden self has been excluded from every decision.

Finding comes before loving

So there is an order here, and it is not optional. Before you can love yourself you have to find yourself. Loving is second. Until you have found the person, the sentence I love myself describes nothing.

This self does not rest on how you look. But appearance is what is available first — the surface, the part you can get your hands on — and starting there is not the mistake. Stopping there is. The road has to pass through the surface and keep going inward. You have to look into your own inside. Mistake the trailhead for the destination and you stop there. Why self-love feels fake takes up the same complaint at length.

You need a reasonable mask

Does that mean taking every mask off? How would you even manage it. Nobody lives in society with nothing on. A reasonable mask is necessary. Saying whatever is inside you in whatever order it arrives is not honesty; mostly it is just unsorted.

But to meet the real thing you also have to be able to take it off — and you must not take it off where it needs to stay on. When it needs wearing, wear it; when it needs removing, remove it. So the real skill is neither removal nor concealment. It is the discernment that tells you what kind of room you are standing in right now.

One place where you can put it down

For that you need at least one place where it can come off. Somewhere you can put it down and pull a ridiculous face like a small child, or dance, and nobody in the room will remark on it. Not a place where you are admired. A place where nothing is being assessed. Without a place like that, the you that is inside never comes out, and you can go a long time without noticing the absence, because the outer one keeps answering for you.

And when you do put it down, somebody shows up in the space it was occupying. Often not a charming somebody. A child with a vicious look on her face. A child who is crying. That is who you have to sit with. Refuse the meeting and you cannot go any further in; it is a sequence, and this is the step.

The order holds. The mask comes off first; then the real one can be found. Loving comes after that. Only once the person is back in the room does the word love have anything to attach to.

Related

• That Isn’t Love, That’s Liking
• I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
• The Child Who Was No Trouble at All

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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