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  • That isn’t love, that’s liking

    A lot of parents describe the same thing. They loved the child. Really loved — poured it on, gave everything they had to give. And then one day they look up and something has gone wrong with the child. From the inside it makes no sense at all. The love was given, as far as they can see. And that feels like an injustice.

    Then, later, the grown child says the line: “What did you ever do for me?” You thought this one had been easy to raise, and this is what comes back. I don’t hear that sentence as ingratitude. I hear it as a report on delivery. Something left the parent’s hands. It never arrived as love.

    Why the phrase self-love sounds faintly wrong to so many people is a whole other question, and I gave it a whole piece of its own already: why self-love feels fake. Today’s question is narrower. It was given. Why didn’t it arrive?

    The word self is doing two different jobs

    Self-centered — thinking only of yourself — describes a state where a person is still standing where a small child stands. An infantile form. Self-love describes something else: a mature form of love.

    They sound like relatives because the same word sits at the front of both. They aren’t slightly different. Followed all the way down, they’re opposites. In the mature form, the love has already left the place where only you are being considered. The love is outside. It’s out there, in another person.

    Which is why, when self-love works, you become able to love someone else — and when it doesn’t, you cannot love someone else, not in a thousand years. I’ve written separately about why the order runs from you outward rather than the other way around: I looked after myself, and guilt got there first. What comes after that is where today starts. Whether you can truly love yourself gets settled in an unlikely place — in whether you can meet a person who is not you with real love. In whether you can give your own child real love.

    Giving it by your own standard

    Love has to be thought out with the other person at the center. Instead, we often give what would feel loving to us. A parent offers advice when the child needs to be heard. A spouse earns more money when the other is asking for time together. The giver can honestly say, I gave everything I had, while the recipient can honestly say, you never gave me what I needed. The effort left one person, but it did not arrive as love in the other.

    Husbands and wives do this to each other exactly. He works hard at his own version of love. She doesn’t experience one bit of it as love. She works hard at hers. Both of them are giving. Neither of them is receiving.

    Someone wrote about this not long ago. He had come right up to the edge of divorce, and had some kind of realization in the shower. From that morning on he asked his wife one question every day: what could I do for you that would make you happy? The first time, she got angry. You’re hopeless — nothing you do makes me feel anything. Tell me anyway, he said. The next morning he asked again. And she started naming things. Fine, then do this. He did them, one at a time, small ones. She got happier. So did he.

    What that man changed was not how much he gave, but how he decided what to give. He stopped assuming that his own idea of care should satisfy his wife and began asking what she could actually receive as care. That is how love crosses the distance between two people. If you never learn who your wife is or what reaches her, years of effort can still leave her feeling unloved.

    You’re good to me, so I like you

    So where does the mature form go? What in the other person is it aimed at? One thing has to be cut away here first.

    Loving the child who does well at school and is bright. The person who is impressive, who listens, who is devoted. The one who is good to you in particular. I don’t call any of that love.

    That is liking. You’re good to me like this, so I like you — that’s the concept we’re actually running, underneath the word. And liking lasts precisely as long as the other person keeps supplying the conditions. The grades wobble and it wobbles with them. The conditions collapse and it collapses with them. There’s nothing wrong with liking. But call it love, and the child has not been loved. The child has been graded.

    It goes toward the part you think is inferior

    Real love runs in the other direction. It does not disappear when the child is frightened, dependent, jealous, ashamed, or no longer impressive. It reaches the part we are tempted to call inferior. Even when someone is not good to you, you remain a good person in how you meet them. You give them the experience of having encountered a good object, a good person, at least once.

    Taken far enough, that direction reaches the neighbor who fell among robbers — someone who has not been good to you — and you spend your own money on him, and your own time on him. Real love starts from yourself, meets love at its source — I meet that source in God — and from there flows outward into another person. Having come that far, it changes form, into something like noble devotion.

    The part you’d rather not look at is the part to love

    Then what are you supposed to take hold of, inside? Self-love means taking hold of not your looks, not the competent version of you, but the part of yourself you find genuinely pathetic, the part you consider inferior. That dark, blackened, shadow-side element is the thing that has to be loved.

    Light goes into darkness. So love, which is light, has to get into that darkness and find it. And when it never gets in? In session you can see it plainly, and the word for it is: dangerous. People in that position mostly shut their own hearts. Shut, and then a whole life lived that way.

    Afraid alone, so we do it in a room together

    Meeting that part of yourself is frightening. Of course it is — it means looking straight at what you spent a lifetime insisting was not you. Frightening, and frightening alone, so we gather and do it together. Gathered, handing each other courage, handing each other support.

    In the self-love program there’s a step in the sequence: make a funny face. The point is to activate the child element. Not to send anyone back to the self-centered place from the beginning of this — to wake the child-like part that has been pinned down underneath. That child element is what we have to meet, and the older you get, the harder it becomes to meet it. So you supply a little stimulus. Children are good at funny faces.

    If you loved and the child still came out strange, more of the same won’t solve it. The love that travels outward always passes first through the part of yourself you least want to look at. Love that hasn’t come through there ends up thrown to your own standard, no matter how much of it you pour.

    Related

    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

  • Her Body Never Bruised, and She Hated It for That

    Someone once told me that she likes it when she gets a bruise. She does not cover it up. She goes out with it showing.

    Put like that, it does not add up. A bruise is where something hurt, and most people would rather it were not on display. Then you hear why she says it, and the sentence is exact.

    Her body did not bruise

    Her mother hit her a lot when she was a child. And her body did not bruise.

    For her, the absence of a bruise was not relief. A visible mark might have made her father notice and ask what happened without requiring her to risk telling first. Because the body showed nothing, the violence left no evidence another adult could see, and the child remained alone with it.

    So she said she hated her own body. Not the places she was hit. The body that kept no record of having been hit.

    Telling her father would come back on her

    Telling was not simple either. If her father saw a mark and asked her mother about it, it would come out that her mother had done it, and her mother would be in trouble. And then it came back on the child. She used the word retaliation.

    Both possibilities felt dangerous. A bruise might expose the mother and bring retaliation against the child. No bruise meant there was nothing to support the child’s account. Because disclosure seemed likely either to fail or make the violence worse, she remained silent.

    A memory with nowhere to go gets shut away

    She put the next part plainly herself. The painful memories get shut away, because a child who went on remembering them would go out of her mind. Shut away somewhere she cannot reach either — the unconscious.

    Once the memories become unconscious, the child may no longer recall them clearly. But the body continues the protective responses learned then: curling small, suppressing crying, staying at the edge, and remaining alert during sleep.

    She had been hit so much, she said, that she did not think she was a person. She thought she was a caterpillar. Until she went through the healing work she slept at the very edge of the bed, curled up the way a caterpillar curls. She made small crying sounds in her sleep. As a child she could not cry, because crying got her into trouble, and that crying came out later, in her sleep. Her husband found it hard to watch.

    What can a caterpillar do at school

    That was her question, not mine. She was very bad at school and always came bottom of the class.

    Her mother made her study with a cane laid down beside her. So there is no concentrating. The cane is there, she does not know when it will be used, and the fear takes hold of her. Her dictation came back at 20 out of 100, every day.

    It is easy to reverse the cause and effect. The cane was presented as a response to poor performance, but the threat itself impaired performance. Her attention went to predicting when she might be hit, leaving too little concentration for the dictation task.

    The 95 she was not allowed to put up

    In primary school she scored 95 once. In those days the marked papers were pegged up on display, and she wondered aloud whether it was done to shame the children. There were zeros down at the bottom, and twenties. She put her 95 up at the top. Her mother would not have it up there.

    The 20 came every day. The 95 came once and was not allowed up there at all. What was done to her left nothing on her body, and what she did well could not go up on the wall. There is not one place outside the child where she can be seen. That is how the sense that you are a decent person — self-esteem, a feeling of your own worth — never forms.

    She passed, and could not take it in

    How far does this go? It goes as far as an exam she sat as a grown woman.

    A few years ago she passed a counsellor’s examination. You pass, and then you accept that you passed. That did not happen. The computer marking must have been wrong. The school will ring to say she has failed after all. And if no call comes, then she only just scraped through. She said she watched herself doing it.

    The examination repeated the earlier pattern. As a child, her mother removed the evidence that she had done well. As an adult, she had internalized that response and removed the achievement herself by calling it an error or a narrow pass.

    Where nothing could be done, force fills in

    When she was being hit, her mother was strong and a small child could do nothing. Nothing I can do here, in this spot — that is powerlessness. A body that did not bruise was the place where the powerlessness showed plainly. She was being hit, and the fact of being hit did not even stay on her.

    A child does not leave powerlessness alone. Back then nothing could be pushed back. So the force turns around and pushes now instead (compensation). What comes up is a great deal of force. This is what is called aggression.

    Aggression is a word that sounds like a fault. Take it as a fault and the person becomes somebody who has to sit on her own force, and then the powerlessness arrives a second time. She said Winnicott did not read it that way — that in his view this force is not a bad thing at all, and turns into energy. Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about aggression in a small child as being almost the same thing as activity: not a fault, but a sign of life. She said that force of hers gets put to good use now, and that she has energy to spare.

    She likes it when she bruises

    Back to where this started. She still likes it when she bruises. She does not keep the mark covered; she leaves it showing and goes about her day. The mark that never came up when she was small has stayed with her. It comes back now, in an adult, as gladness when one does.

    Listen that far and you can see what it is that repeats. It is not the number of times she was hit. It is the position in which nothing could be done. It repeats as a body curled at the edge of a bed. It repeats as 20 out of 100, every day. It repeats as a pass that cannot be taken in.

    But force came out of that same spot too. Telling me about sleeping curled up, she said until I went through the healing. Which means she does not sleep that way now.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958). — aggression read not as a fault but as energy.

    Related

    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

  • Infidelity Is Not a Sexual Problem. It Is a Broken Promise.

    When somebody tells you there has been an affair, notice which questions arrive first. How many times. How far did it actually go.

    Both of those questions point at the same place. And that place is not the heart of it. It is only where it happened to land.

    Why it looks sexual

    An affair always turns up in the shape of a new meeting between a man and a woman. That is the first thing anyone sees — the other person, and the fact that it was sexual. So attention goes there and stays there.

    The affair may feel sexual to the person involved, but sexual desire is not the engine. It is not a sexual problem. If the cause is defined as sexual dissatisfaction, attention stays on frequency, attraction, and the third person. The broken trust and the hostility toward the partner remain unexamined.

    The definition is hostility

    All infidelity is hostility. By hostility I mean hatred that has been there a long time and has gone hard — the kind that has made an enemy of the other person.

    I want to be exact about the word definition. The word does not mean the strongest entry on a list of causes, and it does not mean hostility is often a factor. It means there is no room inside it for anything else to be the cause. Which is why it holds in reverse: where there is no hostility, an affair cannot be produced at all.

    What drives the affair is the wish to return an injury through revenge and the aggressive force used to damage the bond. Sexual contact becomes the method because it breaks the specific promise on which the relationship rests. The sexual act carries the hostility; it does not create it. On where that second force comes from, see Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From.

    It is written down as a broken promise

    In a book on the psychology of affairs, the phrase written there is broken promise. Two words, and the whole account is folded inside them.

    Two people have trust between them and a promise between them. Nobody handed it down from outside; they gave it to each other. An affair breaks the thing they gave each other.

    The core of it is the betrayal of trust. Not the tally. The count of how many times and how far it went is not the place the weight rests. The weight rests on one fact: what the two agreed to keep, one of them did not keep.

    The hard stretch, and then the separate matter

    A wife gives birth, and for a period afterwards the two of them cannot sleep together. It is a stretch in which men are quite likely to come apart. That much is circumstance, and I will not make it smaller than it is.

    Going on from there to have an affair is a separate matter. Sleep deprivation, loneliness, and sexual frustration explain distress; they do not explain why the person chose to break the promise rather than speak, wait, seek help, or leave. Joining the hardship directly to the affair turns circumstance into an alibi.

    Without the hostility, there was more than one road

    Take the same man in the same stretch, without hostility or the wish for revenge sitting inside him. He gets through it and does not have an affair. He may throw himself into his work and come out the other side that way. Resolving it does not require another person. It never did.

    Read that backwards and it turns cold. If it genuinely seemed there was no other road — that meeting someone was the only thing on offer — then something unresolved was in there doing the choosing. There was never only one road. Only one was visible.

    “Men are all like that”

    There is an old way of talking about this. A man having affairs used to be spoken of as a kind of ability. Men are all like that. It is nothing. That is how the sentence goes, and it goes down easily.

    Psychologically it is not good. The saying makes a thing running on hostility sound like nothing at all.

    Some of the men who end up in my consulting room over this do regret it. Even so, the logic they bring with them is close kin to that old sentence.

    If a man has it in him, what is actually wrong with being with a lot of women. Those women knew perfectly well I was married and were glad to meet me anyway. Why does it have to be one wife — that is just how the culture happens to be set up. There are countries where a man may have more than one and nobody treats it as a problem. It is only a problem here because this is Korea.

    Those arguments are rationalisation: explanations constructed after the act to make it appear reasonable. They discuss culture, opportunity, and the third person while avoiding the one relationship in which a promise was made and broken.

    There is a third person missing from it

    Count the people in that logic. There is him, and there is the person he met. Two. The one who is not in the room is the one the promise was made with.

    Which is why the line about those women collapses. That the new person knew he was married has no bearing on anything, because the promise that broke was never made with her. She was not a party to it. The broken promise is somewhere else, and the sentence never goes near it.

    The line about other countries has the same hole. Move countries and hostility is still hostility, revenge is still revenge.

    Monogamy is only possible for a mature person

    In a psychodynamic couple therapy book it is put this way. Monogamy is only possible for a mature person.

    It is not a compliment being handed out. It says that keeping to one person is difficult enough that it takes somebody who has actually grown up to manage it. Which means something for the ones keeping to it: they are not doing it because it came easily. It was held.

    Then the question has to change

    If the definition is hostility, the questions you were asking were aimed at the wrong place — who was she, what did she have, how hard was that stretch.

    The question is this: who is the hostility in me pointed at, and where did it come from.

    A promise does not break in the sexual register. It breaks where the hostility has been sitting. That is the place to look, and it is not the place anybody looks first.

    Related

    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

  • I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First

    You took your own share: some rest, some time for yourself, a no to something that went beyond your limit. You said out loud what you wanted, and you did not apologize before saying it. And then, almost at once, a feeling arrived, and it was not relief. It was guilt.

    It got there fast, before you had any time to think. What the guilt does next is what I want to look at, because it is not dramatic and it is not loud. It only makes you hesitate the next time. You do not decide to stop looking after yourself. You just put off taking your share, and then put it off again, until in the end there is nothing left for you.

    A word nobody wants said about them

    I want to use a word we all dislike hearing. Selfish. Say it about someone and it lands as an accusation. Say it about yourself and something tightens.

    I am using it on purpose, and I am using it to talk about love, which may seem the last place it belongs. But love is a large subject — loving yourself as well as loving others — and being selfish is one part of it.

    Here is the claim I want to make at the start. When you can acknowledge the selfish side of yourself and accept it as natural, you become able, later on, to care for other people. And care that grows out of that acceptance does not empty you out. The problem was never that you give. The problem is giving that uses up everything you have and leaves nothing inside you. What decides which kind you end up with is the order: first you accept the selfish side of yourself, and only after that do you give.

    Taking your share and feeling bad about it are two separate events

    Don’t look only at the feeling; look at the order in which things happen. First comes an action: you took your share. Then, a moment later, comes the guilt, with a thought attached: Was I only thinking of myself? The two come together so reliably that you no longer notice they are two. They are two.

    So let me say it plainly. You must be able to take your own share, and you must not treat the guilt as proof that you did something wrong. Taking your share meets a real need you have now. The guilt attaches itself to that action automatically, and it comes from somewhere older: a rule you learned earlier in life, that protecting yourself means hurting someone else.

    Why keep the two apart? Because before long the guilt stops coming after the action and starts coming before it. The next time, you are no longer deciding whether to take your share. You hesitate before you even get that far.

    Being selfish is the foundation

    Selfishness, in the sense used here, is the capacity to protect your own life, needs, and limits. Care for other people has to be built on that capacity instead of replacing it.

    The order is the same as when you build a house. You lay the foundation first and put the walls up on it. Here the foundation is looking after yourself: resting, eating, making time for yourself, refusing what goes beyond your limit. The walls are what you do for other people. Built in that order, your help is something you choose, not something guilt squeezes out of you.

    Reverse the order and you get walls with no foundation under them. From outside it looks like a house, but the person who lives in it cannot hold out for long. The same happens when you give before you have looked after yourself. From outside it may look generous, but you are spending what you do not have. The result is exhaustion, resentment, and in the end pulling away from the very people you meant to love.

    If you have ever helped somebody and afterward felt not fulfilled but empty inside, you probably took that as a sign that you do not care enough. It may not be that. It is closer to that house with walls and no foundation: you gave before you had looked after yourself, and the emptiness is what that feels like from the inside. For your generosity to be really yours, rather than paid for out of something you did not have, the foundation has to go in first.

    The strength to hold on to what is yours

    People often misunderstand what be selfish means. They hear it as look out only for yourself. That is not what it means. It means having the strength to hold on to what is yours.

    I mean the strength to hold your ground when your share is being pushed aside.

    Looking out only for yourself and holding on to what is yours look alike from the outside, and you mix them up yourself. That is why, even when you are only holding on to what is yours, it can feel to you like greed. But holding on to what is yours is not a milder form of greed. It is something different in kind: you are protecting what is already yours, not reaching for more.

    The order runs outward from you

    Looking after yourself and caring for others come in an order, and the order starts with you: first you, then other people. Love works the same way: it starts with loving yourself.

    Someone who cannot love themselves cannot get love across to another person. Not will not — cannot. From outside, it may still look devoted, and the money, time, and work really are given. But when the giving comes from fear, obligation, or the need for approval, the person receiving it feels pressure, not love.

    Love gets across only when the giver is sincere: giving freely, not out of fear, obligation, or a need for approval.

    And it was never only about you

    Now a correction, because all of the above can be read the wrong way. Loving yourself is not only about you. You and the people in your life are tied together: not separate things standing side by side, but one.

    So self-love does not mean splitting yourself off and loving only that piece. It means loving the whole: you and the people in your life together, because you are already bound together.

    Here is why the difference matters. Everything you can see is made of separate parts, and that is why things come apart in the end: they were in pieces to start with. The parts come together, hold a shape, and look like a single object, but that is all an object ever is. The same is true of people.

    The one thing that does not split is love. Love takes everything in; it holds things together by including them, not by pushing them away. To love is to become one, and love does not create division. When you start to love, you accept what is there and take it all in. When you stop loving, the splitting begins: people draw apart, take sides, and then there is conflict.

    So division, fear, pain, and conflict come from a choice: the choice not to love. But that is never how it feels. It does not feel chosen. It feels as though what makes your life hard is the situation around you and the people around you, and whether or not you love seems to have nothing to do with it.

    If the world looks appalling to you, as if everyone is out only for themselves and the strong simply eat the weak, I am not going to argue that people do not behave that way. They do. But that behavior is what comes out of a lack of love. It is not what the world really is.

    Where people are split apart, that is where the wars and the fights break out, and where the talking stops. The talking stops because you have already decided you know the other person completely, so you hear only what you already knew. Love is also this: listening hard for what someone is actually trying to say.

    So taking your own share is not pushing anybody away. You and the people in your life are still bound together; it is only that, in the order of things, you come first.

    Your own share, first

    Love yourself first. Look after yourself first. Take your own share first. The reason is simple: it makes you happy, and it brings you joy.

    So the next time guilt shows up before you have even taken your share, you do not have to read it as a signal to stop. Start where it all starts: acknowledge the selfish side of yourself and accept it as natural, without arguing with yourself about it. That selfish side, the part of you that looks after your own needs, is the foundation. The giving you build on it afterward is the kind that does not empty you out.

    Related

    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

  • Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing

    Say the words self-love out loud and watch what crosses people’s faces. Something pulls back — not disagreement exactly, a flinch. Press on it and the objection is nearly always the same. Isn’t that artificial? Working up a feeling that was never there, pretending to be fond of yourself. It arrives sounding like a performance, and nobody wants to be caught giving one.

    I want to take that flinch seriously. It is pointing at something real — just not where you think.

    Two ways of tipping over

    Watch people long enough and they sort into roughly two piles. One kind lives balled up tight around their own position; their case is the only case in the room. The other spends the day reading everyone else’s face — a whole life built out of what other people needed. They give and give and cannot take a thing in return.

    I am not telling you one of those is the bad pile. You need both capacities. What does the damage is the excess — tipping so far one way that the other side is no longer in you at all. Holding your own corner is not a defect; I’ve written about that side of it in Nobody Calls the Lion Evil.

    “Why are you only thinking of yourself? Think of your brother.”

    You heard that before you were old enough to answer it. Hear it enough times and it stops being a sentence about the last biscuit or the good seat in the car. It condenses into one line, and the line reads: thinking about myself is wrong.

    After repeated often enough, the sentence becomes an internal rule. Each time you want to eat first, rest, or decline a request, the rule interprets your need as wrongdoing. Guilt therefore appears before you have even decided whether the request is reasonable.

    The more you give, the more staged your life becomes

    Follow that line the way a person actually lives it. If my wanting is the wrong part of me, the repair is obvious: want less, give more, tilt further toward everybody else.

    So you say yes with something in you saying no. You pick up the piece of work that belongs to another adult and carry it without mentioning it.

    That is the artificial life. You say yes while feeling no, give what you resent giving, and hide the cost so that others continue to see you as good. Looking after yourself feels fake because self-denial has been practiced for years and now feels natural. The unfamiliar act is not necessarily the false one.

    The child who never got to be selfish becomes the adult who can’t stop

    Children who were never allowed to want openly may become adults preoccupied with getting their share. Because the need was repeatedly denied rather than satisfied and outgrown, it remains unfinished. Adult attention keeps returning to what was missed, even while the person appears generous.

    The reverse holds too, and nobody expects it. A child who got to be thoroughly selfish, who got their portion plainly and without a lecture stapled to it, grows up with room to spare. Their own share came in, so there is space left over to notice what somebody else needs. The generosity you keep trying to manufacture comes standard in people who were allowed to want things.

    We hand morality to people who can’t read it yet

    We hold very small children to adult morals. If you have raised one, you know the scene — the moment you reached for your own standard of what a decent person does and used it to shake your child’s mind out of place.

    The trouble is not the standard. The trouble is who is receiving it. A young child’s mind has not joined up into one piece yet; it comes apart in places, or sits in fragments (splitting, fragmentation). So the words do not land as you sent them. What arrives inside the child is bent, and in more places than you would believe.

    And notice what is being taught there. Think of your brother. That material is good. These are not bad parents passing on bad instructions; they are decent people passing on decent ones. The child takes in the good lesson with a second thing fastened to the back of it: my wanting is the wrong part of me.

    Then you try to come to your senses, and it won’t go through

    Run that forward into an adult life. The accommodating thickens. You fit yourself around everyone until you are worn straight through — never receiving, endlessly giving, tired in a way sleep does not reach. I’ve written about how that exhaustion turns into hating the very person you are being good to in You Gave Past Your Limit.

    Then some ordinary evening a thought arrives with fight in it. What is this. What am I doing. You decide to look after your own life for once.

    That is the precise spot where it jams.

    Inside you, selfishness has been equated with badness. Therefore the decision I will protect my own share automatically produces guilt and hesitation. You did not lose your nerve; an old rule classified self-care as a moral failure before you could act.

    The belief you keep somewhere you don’t look

    Everyone tells you to change your thinking. See it differently. But there is a philosophy sitting in a place you never check, and while it is intact, living the new life is enormously hard. You can want it badly and still not manage it.

    I think that philosophy is the one sentence. Thinking about myself is wrong.

    Which is why being told does nothing. A seminar, a book, a friend explaining how you ought to be living — none of it moves the sentence, because it was never argued into you and cannot be argued out. You have to come around to it yourself — give the new life your own consent. That is when you start living it with force behind you.

    The word never meant taking too much

    It probably never occurred to you that selfish could be a good word. It carries a picture: someone who looks after himself and no one else, who reaches first. Take the word that way and that is exactly the feeling it gives you.

    But that is not what the word was pointing at. Selfish never meant taking too much.

    So if self-love makes you flinch, look again at where the flinch is aimed. Not at self-love. At the meaning you were handed when you were small — and that meaning is still in the room, still working. While it stays, you can try as hard as you like and caring for yourself will go on feeling artificial — because something in you keeps filing it under the thing you are not allowed to do.

    You will not argue that line out of yourself tonight. But the next time the snag arrives — when you say you’d rather rest, or that you want to go first — name what is snagging. It isn’t self-love. It’s a sentence about your brother, still being obeyed.

    Related

    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

  • So I Was That Angry Too: The Rage I Couldn’t Name

    How old was I? Seven, probably. I do not remember exactly what I said or what I did. Whatever it was, my father seemed angry about something, and where I stood he hit me across both cheeks, without warning — back and forth, back and forth. I could not tell you how many times. Ten of them, near enough.

    I want to be plain about what that was, because plain is the only useful way to say it. I was handled however he liked, by an adult who could not take responsibility even for his own feelings. That is the whole of it. The feeling was his. The face it landed on was mine.

    And that was only one incident. It happened repeatedly. Each time, I could not protest, escape, or ask the adult to take responsibility. The anger, grief, and resentment therefore had no expression and no witness, so I learned to suppress them and continue as if nothing had happened.

    What is stacked up does not stay still

    Suppressed anger did not disappear. It returned as constant bodily pressure, destructive thoughts, and reactions larger than the immediate situation. I was not responding only to what was in front of me; each new frustration activated the anger from all the earlier times when I could do nothing.

    Here is what I could not do with it: soothe it. I did not know how, and I could not have told you what it was if somebody had asked. So through my teens I went off the rails, and that is how I got through those years. Not by handling the rage. Just by outlasting it.

    Why I went looking for bad water

    Then I was a young man, and I started doing something that must have looked strange from the outside. When a storm came through — a real one, a typhoon, the kind of day when the sea goes wild and heaves — I would go down to the sea.

    I was not there for the view and I was not there to calm down. Going down there was how I struggled to get in front of the thing and look straight at it. There was nothing considered about it. It was a thrashing about rather than a plan.

    The storm gave visible form to an experience I could not name. The violent movement of the waves resembled the pressure in my chest and head, so I could recognize my anger, grief, resentment, and wish to destroy as feelings rather than as an unnamed force taking over my whole mind.

    Perhaps that was why. Watching that sea in the storm, I took some comfort from it, a little at a time.

    The sentence, in front of the water

    And standing in front of it, on one of those days, this came:

    So — I was that angry too.

    That is a man recognizing something. Something enormous had been surging up in me the whole time — a thing that wanted to swallow whatever it met, to sweep the lot away, to break it all. That was what it had been.

    Seeing the rage represented outside me created distance. I could observe it and say, “I was that angry,” instead of experiencing myself as nothing but the anger.

    The other thing that was happening, which I did not notice

    Something else was going on in front of that sea, and I did not clock it at the time. It was not anything I set out to learn. Standing there watching the water heave, I think my body was taking something in while my mind was busy with the waves.

    Standing before a storm also changed my sense of scale. The sea was larger and more powerful than anything I could control, and my grievance was no longer the center of the entire world. I experienced myself as one small human being inside something vast.

    I had expected that smallness to feel humiliating. Instead, it brought peace because I no longer had to maintain the position that my anger, injury, and importance should organize everything around me.

    What settled it was not what I had assumed

    I think that was the first time I understood it.

    What settled the anger was not getting it out. Not pouring it into the world, not finding the right target for it, not discharging it somewhere and walking away lighter.

    What settled the anger was gradually releasing the conviction that my injured self had to remain at the center of everything. Accepting that I am a small person within a reality much larger than me did not erase what my father had done. It removed the demand that the injury must continue organizing my whole life, and that is where peace entered.

    And I want to be exact about how I came to know it, because how matters more here than what. I did not work it out. It was not an insight. I think my body learned it rather than my head — slowly, standing in wind, in front of water that was bigger than anything I had in me.

    Which is the awkward part of writing it down. You can read this page and have the whole idea in your hand by the end of it. Having the idea is not the thing. What changed in me was not what I thought. It was what I had stood in front of.

    And then somebody was standing there

    One more thing, and I will say it the way it happened rather than dress it up.

    Perhaps, in that place, I was getting ready to meet God.

    For a long time, grievance and resentment occupied all my attention, and I approached the world from the certainty that my injury had to be answered first. When I released that position and accepted my smallness, I became able to encounter God. God had not appeared because the past was justified; I could perceive God because anger was no longer filling the whole field of experience.

    That is where it went, for me. It began with a man who could not take responsibility for his own feeling and put it on a child’s face, and it ended in front of a sea in a storm with nothing left in my hands.

    Related

    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

  • When a Child Stops Listening, You Should Be Clapping

    A room of parents, each of them there over the one thing with a child that will not come loose. At one point I asked how old the children were. The youngest was in the fourth year of primary school. The oldest was thirty-seven. Someone in the middle said twenty-five.

    That is how far apart the ages ran, and still the same room, the same reason for being in it. The question that had brought the room together was this one: is it my child that’s the problem?

    I want to take that question apart, because on one point I think the answer is no — and the no is not reassurance.

    What a parent wants is not much

    Raise a child and a great deal of it nags at you. Of everything that nags, the hardest is that it does not go the way you meant it to.

    And what you meant is not grand. If they are a student: do well at school, mind their manners. If they are grown: earn their own living. And underneath both of those, do as their mother and father say — no conditions on it. Written out, it is just the ordinary social code, the same code everybody else is holding. Nothing exotic in a single line of it.

    Which makes it stranger how much of it does not fit between a parent and a child.

    The difficulty arrives in two layers

    One layer is the frustration of not being able to understand your child’s mind all the way through. That layer sits between you and a person who is outside you (an external object). It is the real distance between you.

    You would like to be close. You would like the talking to go well — some back and forth, a bit of warmth in it. You would like to know what they do when they are out of the house and what they make of it. On the whole they will not tell you any of it.

    The other layer is the parent’s anxiety. When the child withholds information or rejects advice, the parent may experience not only frustration but also loss of control, fear of becoming unnecessary, or fear that the child will make a damaging choice without protection.

    Puberty can arrive in primary school

    It is early now. It can start in the third or fourth year of primary school. A child in the fourth year is at the age where it begins.

    And from there they really do not listen. Nothing you say lands. It is bickering from the first sentence. They do not do what they are told, the door of the room closes, and they would rather be behind it on their own.

    From where the parent is standing this looks sudden, and particular to their child. That is where the question comes from.

    It used to be comic books

    The fight breaks out over the phone. Phone, games, television — though nobody seems to fight about television any more. What is left is the phone.

    It used to be comic books. The parents now doing the fighting had whole stretches of their own childhood buried in comic books. Look back at it from adulthood and you cannot quite work up the case against it.

    The child’s position resembles the parent’s earlier attachment to comic books: “What is so terrible about this?” The object changed, but the wish to enter a private world did not. When the parent forgets that earlier need and insists on total prohibition, the struggle becomes not only about screen time but about who controls the child’s attention.

    The house with hard rules and the house that allows everything look like opposites. On the one question that matters here they are standing in the same place: both are trying to keep the child inside the parent’s control. The second house I have written about separately, in You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious.

    The son who tells you everything

    Daughters give you a little of it. Sons, on the whole, give nothing. And giving you nothing is normal.

    If your son does come in and lay out what happened to him out there, all of it, in order — it is a pleasant thing to be on the receiving end of, and I would still put a small question mark beside it. It is not especially healthy.

    When he was small, telling the parent everything was developmentally natural. After puberty begins, some privacy is necessary for a separate identity to form. If the adolescent still reports every thought and event, the closeness may reflect difficulty separating rather than exceptional trust.

    Not listening and going out of reach are one event

    The child who was in your arms grows, and stops listening, and while he is not listening he moves outside the parent’s control.

    Not listening and moving beyond parental control are one developmental process. To form independent judgment, the child must sometimes reject the parent’s judgment and discover what follows. Compliance cannot remain total while psychological separation increases. Resistance therefore shows that separation is already underway.

    Which is also why the wrestling over the phone gets you nowhere. Why asking someone repeatedly to stop does not work is the subject of Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries.

    So you clap

    When children move outside the parent’s control, the parent should actually applaud. What is happening is an enormously good thing.

    This reverses the usual concern. A son who no longer reports everything may be establishing normal privacy. A parent who feels reassured because an adolescent shares every detail should also ask whether the child feels permitted to have thoughts, relationships, and decisions that remain their own.

    If puberty has arrived and you and your child are exactly as close as you always were, then the going out of reach — the part that deserves the applause — may simply not be happening yet.

    The question has to move

    Of the two layers, the frustration is at least visible. It is pointed at the child, and the child is right there being difficult about the phone. The anxiety is the hard one. It comes up inside you, which is the one location that is hard to get a look at.

    So move the question. Instead of asking only, Why won’t this child listen to me? ask, What do I fear will happen if this child makes a decision without me? The answer may reveal fear of danger, loss of authority, rejection, or no longer being needed.

    One of the two layers is always on the parent’s side. Saying the problem is not only in the child is not the same as saying it is the parent’s fault, and I want to be exact about that, because parents hear the second when the first is said. What it says is that there is one more place to look, and it has been getting left out.

    If a child who used to do as he was told has started not doing it, then in that house a child is growing. Wrestle over the phone if you must; it is going to happen anyway, and I will not pretend it can be talked away. Just know, while it is going on, where this child is actually heading.

    Related

    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

  • The Battery Is Still in the Box: Why the Quiet Child Is the Serious Case

    There are two children in the house. One of them keeps getting into trouble. The school rings. The stories stop matching. Money goes out of your bag and nobody took it.

    The other one is quiet. Does what is asked. Stays in her room with the door shut. Says she is fine, the same way every time.

    Which of them looks more serious to you?

    We rank them by what they cost us

    Parents bring a child to me, and it is nearly always the same child. The one there was an incident about.

    The quiet one does not come. There is no reason to bring her. The school does not ring, nothing goes missing, she is home at night. Nothing about her needs seeing to.

    Here is the thing I want to point at. When we decide which child is more serious, the measure we actually use is not how much pain is this child in. It is how much is this child costing me.

    Most of the time those two questions give the same answer, which is why nobody notices the substitution. In adolescence they come apart.

    In adolescence, what went in early comes back up

    A child accumulates frustration, deprivation, and disappointment before having words or support to process them. The feelings do not disappear; they remain available to shape later behavior.

    During adolescence, increased aggression and the need for separation give those earlier feelings more force. One child directs the force outward through defiance, lying, stealing, or fighting. Another directs it inward by becoming numb, passive, and unreachable.

    What that same rising looks like in an office, with a manager who has said nothing wrong, is a separate piece — Why Taking Orders Feels Like an Insult. I will not go over that ground again here.

    This is where the two children separate.

    Where is the battery?

    Think of a walking doll that takes steps and makes a noise. Turn it over and there is a hatch — under the foot, in the back, on top of the head — and behind it the space where the batteries go.

    So what is a battery? It is energy.

    The battery represents aggression and destructiveness as energy. When that energy is connected to action, the child can protest, pursue, refuse, and move. When it is disconnected, the child may stop wanting, objecting, or initiating anything.

    The child who keeps getting into trouble has the battery working. The direction is wrong, and I will not be soft about that — lying and stealing break the order everybody else lives in, and somebody is harmed by it. That has to be stopped as a separate matter. But the act happening at all means the force moved.

    The quiet child has turned the force against its own expression. She does not argue, ask, or cause trouble because wanting itself has been shut down. The absence of outward behavior can therefore mean not health but that vitality has gone into hiding; at the extreme, it has psychologically died.

    Why that force is not the ugly thing you were taught it was — why it is a force and not a fault — I have already gone through in Nobody Calls the Lion Evil. I will not repeat that explanation here.

    How Winnicott saw these two children

    Winnicott looked at the children everybody else had written off as problems and said something nobody else was saying. These ones have hope in them.

    That is not me inflating a mood into a doctrine. It is in his 1956 paper: the antisocial act as an expression of hope.

    It is worth being exact, because the sentence is easy to misuse. His subject was not delinquency — not the offence itself — but the movement underneath it, the antisocial tendency, which turns up in ordinary children in perfectly decent houses.

    He said the other half in the same breath. Most children who are being troublesome are ill to some degree. Hope is not a clean bill of health. It means something is still switched on to work with.

    Winnicott also described compliance that hardens into a false-self shell. Ordinary cooperation is a healthy capacity. But when the child must always agree and adapt, the compliant presentation begins to conceal the child’s own wishes and feelings. Socially she causes no trouble, while psychologically she may be collapsing. The distress did not disappear; it stopped becoming visible to other people.

    The Child Who Was No Trouble at All follows that child into adulthood, still being told how easy she is. This piece is about the year she reaches adolescence with the shell still on.

    No symptom, no appointment

    Here is what I am actually trying to say.

    The child who went outward has symptoms. The school rings, the money is gone, the adults are furious. It is loud and exhausting. And it is precisely the noise that makes an adult put a coat on and take that child somewhere. Help arrives.

    The child who directs distress inward produces no disruptive symptom for adults to manage. Because nobody is inconvenienced, nobody asks whether the child has stopped feeling, wanting, or connecting. She may not receive help until adulthood, when emptiness, depression, or inability to form relationships finally becomes unbearable.

    So the child who gets help late is not the child who caused the trouble.

    Force moving and a person getting hurt are not the same event

    Let me close the obvious hole before somebody falls in. This is not a piece saying that lying or stealing or hitting is fine. Behaviour that harms another person has to be stopped, and I have no softer version on offer.

    Expressing something and doing damage with it are two different acts, which is the whole argument of You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious. A child is allowed to be angry, allowed to argue, allowed to say out loud that the thing is unfair. Putting a hand on somebody is a different question with a different answer.

    What I want to turn over is not the behaviour. It is the measure — the one you reach for when you decide which of your children is the serious case.

    If there is a quiet child in your house, ask what the quiet contains. A well child can disagree, ask for help, show preference, and become angry while also spending time alone. A child who has gone out of view says “fine” to everything, asks for nothing, and shows little desire even where desire would be expected. The same quiet appearance can therefore come from two very different inner states.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1956). The Antisocial Tendency. In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 306–315). London: Tavistock Publications, 1958. — the antisocial act as an expression of hope.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth Press, 1965. — compliance hardened into a shell.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1984). Deprivation and Delinquency. C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd & M. Davis (Eds.). London: Tavistock Publications.

    Related

    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

  • As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad

    Someone mentions a name at dinner, and your body reacts before you have decided what you think. Your chest tightens, your face goes still, and you stop following the conversation. Everyone else has moved on, but you are still arguing with that person in your head.

    Later, someone asks what the person actually did to you. You search for an incident and cannot find one large enough to explain the reaction. So you say, Nothing, really. I just do not like them. The answer feels incomplete because the intensity belongs not only to this person, but also to something older that this person has touched.

    Or it is the other complaint, which looks like a different problem. You had decided you were finished with it — the drinking, the phone at two in the morning, the person you keep going back to. By Thursday you are doing it again, and asked why, you give the same non-answer. I do not know. I just do.

    These reactions look unrelated, but both are driven by an experience you cannot yet name. The usual reading is that the dislike is merely an old grudge you should uncover and release. I would put it differently: the dislike is doing a job now. It gives your pain a target and keeps you from feeling the grief beneath it.

    Nothing you can point at, and it moves you anyway

    You know the mood is bad, you cannot say what it is about, and there is no word to point at what is moving in there.

    When an experience has no name, you cannot recognise it early enough to choose what to do with it. You only notice the result: you become cold toward someone, reach for the drink, check the phone at two in the morning, or return to the relationship you meant to leave. Afterwards you say, I do not know why I did it. The pattern repeats because the feeling that starts it has never become something you can identify and think about.

    Bion’s account is the one I keep coming back to. Some experiences arrive when nothing in you can break them down — too much at the time, nobody available to help, and not only in childhood — so they go in whole and stay whole. The work that would have turned raw experience into something usable he called alpha-function; what is left when that work fails he called beta-elements. That is the difference between a bad thing you can tell somebody about and a bad thing still in you at its original size, with no words on it.

    So that is what that was

    Then one day the word arrives, usually partway through a sentence, usually while talking to somebody. So that is what that was.

    Naming does not repair the past, but it changes your position toward it. I hate that person may become I feel dismissed around that person because their tone brings back how invisible I felt at home. The pain is still heavy, but now you can see what activated it. You are holding an experience you can examine instead of being moved by a reaction you cannot explain.

    Bion took this to be where thinking starts. Until raw experience is worked into something you can think about, it teaches you nothing. It only runs again.

    What comes up there is not relief

    This is the part I most want to get across. You would think that finally naming it would feel like setting something down. What comes up instead is a deep sadness, and behind the sadness, regret.

    It comes up because you now know what the thing was: what you needed and did not get, at the age when it would have counted. And in the same moment, the worse half. It is not coming. Not later, not from this person, not from anybody. Naming is not a release. It is the moment a loss becomes a fact.

    The sadness is usually not about whoever came up at dinner. Mourning means letting something go, and what has to go is older than whoever is currently annoying you: how it went at the start, with the two people who were the whole environment then.

    Hatred is easier to hold than grief

    That dislike you could not account for is standing somewhere specific. It is standing where the grief would otherwise be.

    While you are hating somebody you do not have to be sad. Hatred has a target and a direction, and there is force in it you can use — rehearsing the argument, composing the sentence that would finish them. Grief has none of that. It comes down, and while it is coming down there is nothing to be done at all. Hatred is by a distance the more bearable. When a person keeps a grudge alive for years, that is not a defect of character. What lies under the grudge cannot be faced yet.

    Klein’s paper pairs mourning with the manic states that keep a loss at arm’s length — that pairing is where this sits. It is what someone does while the loss is more than they can survive.

    You can see it in the gaps. When the anger goes quiet — late at night, or after it has run itself down — something underneath shows. The anger has not gone. It stepped aside long enough for what it stood in front of to be seen.

    The word rarely arrives when you are on your own

    Fairbairn saw this naming as something that happens inside a relationship. Things get named in front of somebody who can take them. You put out something raw and shapeless; the other person holds it until it stops being unbearable, then gives it back in a form you can keep hold of. Bion called that containing.

    This explains why hours of thinking alone can leave you circling the same material. When you speak to someone who listens without recoiling, they can reflect the experience back in words: You sound angry, but also deeply disappointed that nobody came for you. Hearing that response helps the shapeless feeling become recognisable.

    It does not have to happen in a consulting room. What matters is that the listener does not deny the feeling, become frightened by it, or hurry you toward feeling better before you have understood what hurts.

    Not getting rid of it. Getting it out where you can see it

    None of this is advice to sort your feelings out and be done with them; it runs the other way. What you try to get rid of does not leave. It moves, and goes on working from wherever it moved to.

    What can be done is smaller and harder. Bring the thing out, put a name on it, find that the name has grief attached, and stay for that. The grief is not a sign that something went wrong. It is what naming produces: you are sad because you have finally found out what you lost.

    On the day the dislike loosens and you find yourself sad about someone you were certain you hated, nothing has failed. You have arrived at what the hating was for.

    References

    • Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann. — alpha-function and beta-elements.
    • Bion, W. R. (1962). The Psycho-Analytic Study of Thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, 306–310. — containing. Reprinted in Second Thoughts (1967) as “A Theory of Thinking”.
    • Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications. — object experience seen within relationship.
    • Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 125–153.

    Related

    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

  • They Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of

    You thought things would be all right if the person you live with would change just a little: speak more gently, drink less, keep their promises. You started with the way they spoke. You said just one sentence: “That is not how you talk to people.” For about a week, their tone was better. Then you started asking where they had been. Not accusing, just asking. Then asking again later to see whether the answers matched.

    Then you checked their wallet. You had a reason, and it was a good one. Ten seconds while they were in the shower, and everything went back exactly where it was.

    Then came the talks: the same conversation, in the same order, ending in the same place, until you could both recite it from memory. When you were worn out, you stopped speaking to them altogether. Three days, sometimes five. You were not punishing anyone. You had run out of things to try.

    Now look at what all of this has done. They talk less. Their answers have got shorter and smoother. They keep a little back from you out of habit. Little by little, the person you live with has become more like the person you feared they were when you first began checking up on them: someone who keeps things from you.

    From the outside it looks like being sensitive

    Anyone watching would call you sensitive: highly strung, making too much of small things.

    The word is wrong, and it is worth seeing why. You are not reacting to what is in front of you. You are trying to stop something that has not happened yet. The checking is not a sign that you love them too much, either. It is prevention.

    In your mind, the story runs like this: they will drink or lie again, things will go the way they went the last time they did it, and you will not be able to bear it. All the checking, questioning and controlling is an attempt to stop that from happening before there is any real sign that it has begun.

    But that story usually did not start with the person in front of you. It comes from somewhere much older, often from childhood. This article is not about where it came from. It is about what your efforts to stop that story from coming true do to the relationship over the years.

    Fix one thing and another one moves into view

    Say your efforts work. They drink less. They call when they said they would.

    You expect to feel better, and you do not. This is what confuses people most. Before long something else catches your eye. They look sullen. They do what you asked, but grudgingly, not like someone who means it.

    What they do can set off your fear, but it did not create the older fear underneath. That fear was usually there long before they came into your life. That is why fixing one behavior brings only brief relief. The fear soon settles on another sign — a look on their face, a late reply, a reluctant tone — and the controlling starts again.

    Knowing that controlling them does not work is not enough to make you stop

    Knowing a method does not work is normally enough to make a person put it down. Not here. People who understand perfectly well that controlling does not help still cannot leave the other person alone. Stopping does not feel like dropping a method that failed. It feels like letting the thing you fear happen.

    So the monitoring continues, and the relationship changes. Because letting go feels that dangerous, you stop leaving things to their judgment. Instead of talking things over, you simply decide: where they may go, whom they may contact, what counts as an acceptable explanation. One by one, you take over decisions that were theirs to make. Fear turns a relationship between two adults, each making their own choices, into one where one person supervises the other.

    Two people came together because they loved each other, and now one controls the other. Every act of control treats the other person as less than a person: it overrides their judgment, their choices, their say over their own life. Overriding someone like this is violence, even when your voice stays calm. It is oppression, however good your reasons. What builds up is not safety but conflict, and a relationship that began in love turns destructive.

    Nobody invents this way of treating someone. Usually it is how you learned to deal with people at home as a child. If a parent was unpredictable, or someone in the family drank, keeping watch and trying to stop trouble before it came may have been the only way to bear life at home. Now you are doing the same thing to the person you live with, as if they were the family you grew up with.

    Pressure hands the other person a part to play

    Here is the thing I most want to say.

    Treat someone as a person who lies and they begin saying less, even when they have nothing to hide, because every detail will be questioned. You interpret the shorter answer as evidence of concealment and ask more questions. To avoid another interrogation, they omit more. Repeated pressure therefore helps create the secrecy you feared.

    What happens to them is a little like being handed a part in a play, and the play is that old story in your head. You are not writing their lines. But you have made one set of lines much easier for them to say than any other. Keep treating someone as the one in your story who lies, and in time they really start to play that part.

    The British psychoanalyst Joseph Sandler noticed something like this in his work with patients. He saw that therapists sometimes find themselves acting in ways they did not choose, pulled into them by the way a patient treats them. Sandler called this role-responsiveness: slipping into the role the other person casts you in. It does not only happen in therapy.

    The American psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden described the same thing from the other side: the side of the person whose fear is doing the pushing. What you fear about the other person does not stay a picture in your head. Through the questions, the silences and the tone, it is pressed into them until they begin to act it out. Ogden called this projective identification: “projective” because you see what you fear as if it were already in them, “identification” because in time they begin to act as if it were true of them. Neither Sandler nor Ogden was describing something anyone does on purpose. It happens between people who mean well.

    The evidence is real, and you made it

    By the time the change is obvious, the evidence is real: they hide things from you, or go quiet when you walk in. What is difficult to see is the sequence that produced it. Your fear led to pressure, the pressure led to concealment, and the concealment confirmed the fear. Because the last step is something they do, all you see is proof that you were right, not the part you played in getting there.

    So from where you stand, it is extremely hard to see that you had a hand in making it. With that much proof lying around the house, anyone in your place would think, “I was right all along.” This does not mean you caused all of it. If they were already lying or drinking before any of this began, or if they threaten or hurt you, that is their responsibility, not yours, and your safety comes first.

    You can be shaking inside and still not act on it

    I am not going to suggest that you stop feeling the fear. That cannot be done.

    Your body reacts first, the moment something reminds you of that old story. The door does not sound quite the way it usually does, and your heart is already racing before you have decided anything. That is how people are made, and it will keep happening, however old you get.

    One thing can change. Until now, the moment the fear came, you acted on it: you called, you asked again, you searched. That shaking inside felt like a warning, and a warning meant you had to move. But the shaking does not always mean danger has arrived. Your body reacts in exactly the same way when something merely reminds you of what happened long ago.

    So put a pause between the feeling and the action. Ask yourself whether something is actually happening right now, or whether this only reminds you of something from long ago. You can feel the fear without calling, asking or checking their wallet, and wait for your body to settle. If the danger is real and happening now, this does not apply. In that case, the first thing is to get away and keep yourself safe.

    Almost everything people try in a relationship means doing more: saying more, trying harder, being warmer, being firmer. The pause asks for the opposite: not doing what you have been doing. I know of nothing harder. It also changes the question you ask. You stop asking “How do I get this person to change?” That question never had an answer. You start asking “What have I been trying so hard to keep from happening?”

    References

    • Sandler, J. (1976). Countertransference and Role-Responsiveness. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3, 43–47. — a person can be recruited into a role by the pressure the other exerts.
    • Ogden, T. H. (1979). On Projective Identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 357–373. — what is put into the other person, the other person begins to act out.

    Related

    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