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  • The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head

    Someone sends you a short message. Before long you have decided what it meant, what they think of you, what they would say if you brought it up, and how you would feel afterward. In your head the whole conversation has already happened, and all of it is settled. None of it has been checked with the person.

    Then you do not bring it up. Weeks go by, and you are just as sure as you were at the start. The only thing that changes is that the story in your head gets more detailed every week.

    You cannot find out who you are on your own

    You learn what you are like, and what other people make of you, from how they actually respond when you speak to them. On your own, your guess about what they would say never meets anything that pushes back against it, corrects it, or surprises you. And with nothing new coming in, you cannot tell the difference between what the other person really thinks and what you fear, or hope, they think.

    People often tell a story to make this point: a child raised by wolves. When he is found, he walks on all fours. He is clearly a human being, yet he takes himself for a wolf, because wolves are the ones he grew up among. Real cases like this are few and most are disputed, so take the story as an illustration, not as evidence. But you can see the point in any family: we learn what we are from how the people around us respond to us.

    When you never actually talk to the other person, your mind still supplies their answer. But it builds that answer out of what you already expected, so the answer can only confirm the fear, or the hope, you started with.

    Guessing comes easier than talking things over

    Left alone with a question about someone, a person does not stay undecided. They become more certain.

    “She likes me; that is why she said that.” “That tone was on purpose.” “They are talking about me right now.” The people involved may simply have been saying what they wanted to say and getting on with their day; it may have had nothing to do with you. Still, the guessing runs on and always reaches a verdict, because the one making the guess is also the one judging it.

    We are more practiced at imagining than at talking, because imagining came first: it is with us from the very beginning of life, while talking things over with another person is something we learn later. So when a conversation feels risky, the mind falls back on the older, easier habit. It plays both parts itself, so you never have to let the other person see what you feel, and you never hear an answer you did not make up yourself.

    Notice how comfortable this is. In your head, the other person says only the lines you give them, when you expect them to. Nothing catches you off guard. Nobody asks you a question you were not ready for. You guess, you have your feelings about it, and it ends there.

    The sentence that has to be said out loud

    Say you are fairly sure someone likes you, and you like them too. There is exactly one thing to do with that: go and tell them, in words. “I like you. Do you like me?”

    But you would probably rather not say it. You are afraid that if you do, the other person will run away.

    They might, if they do not feel the same way, and that hurts. But now you know something you could not have known before you asked. Asking out loud matters because it lets the other person give their own answer, which may not be the one you predicted. Until you ask, every new detail comes from you, and the relationship you imagine keeps growing with nothing real to correct it.

    The frustration you were avoiding is the one you needed

    When you finally speak, you may get an answer you did not want, and think, “I thought they liked me. They don’t.” That letdown is what psychologists call frustration: the disappointment of not getting what you hoped for.

    In that disappointment you feel, and not just know, that there is a real world outside your head. The other person turns out to have wishes and feelings of their own that do not follow the script you wrote for them. Frustration that is too great, or that humiliates you, can do real harm. But a disappointment you can bear teaches you two things: that you can survive an answer you did not want, and that the answer tells you something you can use. Meeting reality this way, again and again, is how you learn to live in it.

    D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about the “good-enough mother.” She is not a perfect mother. At first she meets her baby’s needs almost completely. Then, as the baby becomes able to cope, she meets them a little less completely and a little later. Through those small gaps, the child faces the world a little at a time, in amounts it can manage. Heinz Kohut, another psychoanalyst, called frustration of this bearable size optimal frustration. Too much frustration makes it harder for a child to accept reality; the right amount helps the child accept it bit by bit. Neither of them saw this as a parenting failure to be apologized for. A child who is looked after perfectly, one hundred percent of the time, does not mature.

    Adults need this kind of bearable frustration too, and the way to get it is to ask. If you never ask, the guessing simply goes on, and nothing in the guessing itself will ever bring it to a stop.

    Not asking has another cost that is easy to miss. Every conversation you rehearse in your head and never actually have leaves you a little more convinced that you already know what people are like. That makes you a little less likely to try the next real conversation. So, quietly, you grow less practiced at talking with people while you grow more certain about them.

    What the avoidance costs later

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung summed up what avoiding pain costs in a sentence worth keeping: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Legitimate suffering is the pain a person simply has to go through in the course of living. Neurosis, meaning lasting anxiety and other symptoms, is what grows in its place when that pain is avoided.

    Addiction works the same way. There is a specific pain — a conversation you dread, a loss, a refusal, a limit you have to accept — and instead of going through it, you reach for something that stops the feeling for a while, the way a painkiller does. That original pain had a cause, and it could have come to an end. But each time you avoid it, new problems pile up on top of it: you come to depend on what you reach for, you start keeping secrets, and all of this causes trouble of its own. So the suffering that comes later is larger than the pain you put off.

    What you use does not have to be alcohol or a drug. The phone does it. Work does it. So does a relationship that exists only inside your own head, where the other person always behaves, is always available, and has never once said anything you did not write for them.

    Asking takes about four seconds

    There is nothing wrong with a mind that runs ahead. It is a good mind and a quick one. The only trouble is that no one ever contradicts it, and ideas that are never contradicted drift further and further from what is really happening.

    So the fix is not more rehearsal. If the other person is not someone who insults or threatens you, go to them and say one sentence, a question that leaves room for their answer, and wait to hear it: “When you said that, I thought you meant ___. Did you?” They may say yes, or they may say no. Either way, you hear something you did not write yourself, and the imagined conversation becomes a real one.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. Collected Works, Vol. 11, para. 129. — “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — the graduated failure of adaptation.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — optimal frustration.

    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

  • Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land

    Someone said the thing you had wanted to hear. You heard it. You said thank you and meant it. Ten minutes later nothing of it is left: your mood has not lifted, and there is nothing to go back to and feel again.

    Meanwhile a careless put-down someone made three weeks ago is still with you, down to the tone of voice.

    This usually gets filed under low self-esteem. But that is not an explanation. It only gives what just happened another name. Telling a person with a temperature that they have a fever says nothing about why the fever is there.

    There is an actual reason praise does not stay. Once you can see it, you will also see why years of encouragement have never once worked on you.

    At first, good and bad are kept apart

    The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described a baby’s mind in its first months like this: the baby does not take in experience as one whole. From the start, experience comes in split into two parts, and the parts are stored separately. A baby does not have one mother. He has two — the one who feeds him and the one who leaves him hungry — and he keeps them in separate places and never puts them together. He does the same to himself: there is a good me and a bad me, and those are kept apart too.

    Later the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg laid this out as two pairs: the mother who feeds him is paired with a good me, and the mother who leaves him hungry is paired with a bad me. It is one baby and one mother, but each is stored in two separate places.

    Klein did not see this as the baby getting things wrong. He is simply not yet strong enough to bear knowing that the mother who feeds him and the mother who leaves him hungry are the same person. So he keeps them apart. Psychoanalysts call this splitting. Keeping them apart protects the good: his anger at the mother who leaves him hungry cannot reach the mother who feeds him and destroy her.

    So splitting is not a mistake. It is a solution: dividing the mother into a good one and a bad one is how the baby keeps from losing the good one.

    A drop of ink in a glass

    Why can’t the good and the bad simply be put together? It is easiest to see with water.

    Here is a glass of clear water and here is a bottle of ink. One drop goes in and the glass is ruined. There is no clear water left anywhere in it, not even a mouthful; it has all turned grey. Nothing in that glass survives the mixing.

    So if this one glass is all the clear water you have, you will not let the ink in. You will guard the glass. Keeping the ink out is not stubbornness. It is the only way to keep any clear water at all.

    Now pour the same bottle into a river. The river takes it and stays a river. You would have trouble finding where it went.

    It depends on how much good there is, not on how hard you try

    This is the heart of it. Whether a person can hold the good and the bad in one place and bear it is not a matter of insight or willpower alone. It depends on how much good the person has known, in themselves and in other people. There has to be enough of it that one bad experience does not wipe it all out.

    When there is plenty of this good, the bad goes in the way the ink goes into the river: it mixes in, and the good is still there. Psychoanalysts call this integration. Put into words, it sounds like this: I am a person with faults. My mother loved me and also let me down. My friend is decent and occasionally careless.

    But where there is only about as much good as bad, the person has a glass, not a river. Then the two cannot be put together, because putting them together would spoil all of the good. So they stay split. That is not a symptom to argue someone out of. It is what is holding that person together right now.

    This is why being told you should try to see the good in yourself can feel like an insult rather than a comfort. The advice asks a person to put the good and the bad in themselves together, in one place. If they have only one glass of clear water, that means pouring ink into it.

    Where a compliment gets stopped

    The split into a good me and a bad me does not end with infancy.

    Someone who grew up hearing mostly about what they had done wrong comes into adult life with a picture of themselves as someone who falls short. They also bring a habit of mind that expects criticism and goes looking for it. So when another person says something to them, they are already listening for the criticism in it before they have even weighed whether it is true. This happens the moment the words reach them.

    Picture five people at a table. Four say your presentation went well; one says the middle section was confusing. For the rest of the evening, all you can think about is the middle section. That is not because that person put it harshly, and not because you are unusually thin-skinned. It is because theirs was the only remark that had a place already waiting for it inside you.

    Praise, on the other hand, has to get past that habit of mind first. On the way in, you answer it in your head: “They are just being polite. They want something. They have not seen the real me.” Long before the praise can reach you, it has been written off.

    Criticism does not have to get past anything, because it fits what you already believe: “Something is wrong with me.” So it goes straight in and is remembered in detail.

    So the problem is not simply a poor memory that lets only the good things slip away. There is a place ready for the bad words, and none for the good ones.

    Maturity does not come with age alone

    Here, maturity means one specific ability: taking in what is actually in front of you as it is, instead of through the habits of mind formed when you were small, like the one that expects criticism. The more mature a person is, the more they can take in this way.

    This ability does not come automatically with age. A person of sixty or seventy who has not grown up on the inside still sees the people around them the way they learned to see people in the family home they left fifty years ago. If they were criticized in that home, they feel criticized by the people around them now. A colleague’s compliment does not come through as a compliment; the old habit of mind gets to it first and colors it on the way in.

    There is a simple way to tell how much of this ability you have, and it is not whether you believe the good thing someone said. It is whether you can let it stand for one day, just as it was said, without adding your own “yes, but.”

    Where the water comes from

    If the problem is how much good there is next to the bad, then the answer is not to attack the ink. Most people have already spent years trying to argue their bad picture of themselves down to size, and it has not shrunk. The work is adding water.

    The water comes from real relationships, not only from encouraging things you tell yourself. One compliment is easily brushed off. What makes the difference is hundreds of ordinary hours with people in which nothing bad happens: you make a mistake and no one humiliates you; you turn down a request and the relationship does not end. Slowly those hours add up to evidence against the old picture you have of yourself. As that evidence builds, a criticism can be heard as a comment on one thing you did, not as proof that you are bad through and through.

    So the next time something kind is said and slides straight off, you have not failed at receiving it, and there was no technique you were meant to apply. Your glass is just small for now. More clear water comes from outside, slowly — mostly from staying a little longer with people when you would rather get up and leave.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — splitting, and what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position: the baby’s earliest state of mind, in which good and bad are kept apart.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — what Klein called the depressive position (not depression in the everyday sense): the later state of mind in which good and bad can be held together in one person.
    • Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson. — the inner pictures of a good and a bad self and of good and bad others (self and object representations).

    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

  • You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious

    You do not shout. You say yes where you can. And when you do have to say no, you watch your child’s face fall, and before long you have taken it back — not because you were persuaded, but because you could not face the clash that was coming.

    You would expect all this to produce a settled child. Instead you are getting the opposite: more clinging, more testing, a shorter fuse over smaller things.

    That expectation is wrong, and it is worth seeing why.

    It was never mainly about whether you were strict

    Of everything a parent does, what makes things hardest for a child is not strictness. It is inconsistency — being one way today and another way tomorrow.

    Yesterday it was allowed. Today the same request gets a different answer, and what changed was not the request but how the parent’s day had gone before the child walked in. A child in that house cannot learn the rule, because there is no rule to learn. What he can learn is how to read his parent’s face. So he studies that face, and he studies it hard.

    Consistency is usually explained as holding a line. That is true, but it is not the whole story. What matters even more is that it lets a child see what is coming.

    In the child’s mind it goes like this: “If I do this, Mum reacts like that. So I know what to do.”

    When a child can predict how you will respond, he can prepare for it. When the same thing is allowed one day and punished the next, he cannot. So he watches instead — your face, your tone, your mood — for signs of trouble. With no way to prepare, he becomes anxious, and what looks like clinging or defiance is often that anxiety.

    A limit is what makes a thing bearable

    We tend to think that a limit hems a person in and makes things harder to put up with. In practice it often does the opposite: it makes things easier to bear.

    Picture yourself in a lecture without knowing when it will end. A slightly dull stretch comes along, and suddenly it is close to unbearable — far worse than it really is — because you have no idea how much more is left.

    Now suppose you have been told it finishes at nine. The same dull stretch comes along, and you sit through it. It ends at nine, you tell yourself, and you pull yourself together.

    Nothing about the lecture changed. What changed is that you knew when it would end, so you could tell how much more there was to get through. A clear limit does the same for a child. Say the rule is one hour of video games today, and you calmly stick to it. He may be angry when the hour is up, but he knew from the start where it would end, and that makes the ending easier to bear.

    Here is what parents find hardest to believe: a child who finds he can always make his parents give in does not become free. He becomes anxious, because nothing is holding him steady. In fact, part of him is hoping his parents will hold firm.

    Holding the line brings conflict. That is normal

    Saying yes to everything will not settle a child. There are moments when a parent has to hold firm, and holding firm has a cost.

    Hold firm, and the conflict comes right on cue: anger, tears, accusations that you are being unfair. This is where most parents give in — not out of weakness, but out of a real fear that the conflict itself will hurt the child.

    I see it the other way round. The conflict is not what hurts the child; it is where he learns.

    Living through that conflict, the child learns two things. First, wanting something badly does not make reality change. Second, anger and disagreement do not end the relationship: you keep the limit, and afterwards you are still there and still close. Each time he goes through this, the limit you held becomes a little more his own: he finds that he can be told no, bear the feeling, and settle down again.

    A childhood engineered to be free of conflict does not produce an adult who is at peace. It produces an adult who cannot be in a room where someone disagrees with him.

    Warmth in front, firmness standing behind it

    If you keep one image from this, keep this one.

    Warmth is in front. It is the face the child meets, and it means taking his feelings seriously — really seriously, not as a trick to get him to obey faster. And behind it — not instead of it — stands firmness.

    Firmness is not raising your voice. It is almost the opposite. It is calmly making two things clear: this is not allowed in our house, and on this I will not back down. You say it once, you mean it, and when the child tests it, it is still there.

    Warmth without firmness makes the child keep testing because every protest may change the answer. Firmness without warmth teaches him that saying what he feels or wants will cost him your closeness, so he stops saying it. The child needs both: “I understand that you are angry” and “the answer is still no.”

    Donald Winnicott, a paediatrician who went on to become a psychoanalyst, said that what a child needs in order to grow is not a faultless parent but an environment that holds him. In everyday terms, that means adults who accept his feelings while taking responsibility for the limits on what he does. The word “hold” has two meanings, and a child needs both. To hold a child is to cradle him gently. It is also to hold firm and not give way.

    Protesting is allowed. Hitting you is not

    One distinction should stay sharp, because parents who are working hard to be gentle sometimes blur it.

    A child is allowed to be angry with you. He can argue, demand to know why, and tell you loudly that your decision is unfair. That is him expressing himself, and that is fine.

    Hitting a parent is a different matter. That is not expression; it is crossing a line that must not be crossed. And this is where inconsistency does the most damage: if how you respond depends on the kind of day you are having, the child never finds out where the line is, and not knowing is worse for him than a firm answer would have been. What he needs to hear, every time, is something like: “I understand that you’re angry, but I won’t let you hit me.”

    What comes first, second and third

    First, consistency. The same answer today as yesterday. This one comes before anything else on the list, including the ones that sound more loving.

    Second, understanding what he is actually feeling — the warmth in front. You will hear this everywhere, and it still cannot be skipped.

    Third, firmness standing behind that warmth: the strength to hold your ground, even while he protests, on the things that really cannot be allowed.

    If you and your child keep clashing, do not start by asking whether to become stricter or more lenient. Pick one argument that keeps coming back, look back over the past week, and compare how you answered it each time. If your answer changed with how tired you were, how guilty you felt or how your child reacted, then your child cannot tell what is coming and is always on guard. As long as your answer keeps shifting, he will stay anxious whether you are strict or soft.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — cited here for “holding”.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

    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

  • Everything Checks Out and You Still Feel Nothing

    The introduction went well enough. Steady work, decent to their mother, no obvious wreckage in the history. Your friends have run out of objections on your behalf. And you feel nothing — not aversion, which would at least be information, but a flat and slightly embarrassing nothing.

    Then there is the other case. Everyone can see where that one ends. You can see where it ends. And in that person’s company something in you unclenches.

    It is worth asking what is actually doing the choosing, because it is not the part of you that reads the résumé.

    The shortlist was drawn up a long time ago

    Who you are drawn to has a great deal to do with what happened around you before you could describe any of it.

    Take a boy raised largely by his grandmother. She wore the baggy elastic-waisted work trousers every grandmother of that generation wore, and nothing on her face. Twenty-five years later, which women does he find himself turning toward? Overwhelmingly, the frumpy ones — the ones nobody would call stylish.

    He will describe this as personal taste: natural-looking people make him comfortable, while glamour feels tense or artificial. But the preference translates an early association. His grandmother’s appearance became linked with safety, so a similar appearance later produces ease before he knows anything about the woman herself. Because he does not remember learning the association, it feels entirely spontaneous.

    Reverse the household and the result reverses with it. A mother who was stylish, who liked a short skirt and liked being looked at in it, tends to produce a son who goes for the sexy ones.

    Or take a daughter of a father who said very little. She meets a man who is quick and funny and generous with his attention — by every account a gift. She finds it faintly unbearable. Everyone else at the table is delighted. She cannot say why she is not, and she has no argument to offer, only the fact.

    You were never choosing the better person

    This is the part that tends to land badly, so I will put it plainly. The sorting is not running on quality.

    We assume attraction begins by appraising character: Is this person kind, reliable, and capable of intimacy? But an internal working model formed in early relationships responds first. Familiar cues — distance, warmth, volatility, appearance, or tone — produce attraction or aversion before conscious evaluation begins.

    It is not deliberation. It does not take a second.

    And when the template is matched, what you feel is ease. The room is one you have been in. A stranger somehow does not require any adjustment from you.

    We have a word for that ease. We call it attraction.

    Why the sensible choice tends not to hold

    The practical consequence shows up in a particular kind of decision: the one made on the specification, with no pull underneath it.

    The work has to be secure. The income has to clear a line. The families have to be able to sit in a room together. You draw the list, you check the boxes, everything checks, and you decide.

    Those arrangements struggle, and not because anyone in them behaved badly. A specification is a thing that can be satisfied.

    Once the practical conditions are met, they cannot create emotional attachment if no attachment was present. You may value the person’s stability yet continue searching for the sense of familiarity, aliveness, or emotional recognition the checklist did not supply. That is why attention from someone else can remain in your mind long after the encounter.

    The problem is not that practical judgment is wrong. It is that practical compatibility and attachment answer different questions. A relationship chosen only by criteria may be sensible without becoming emotionally binding.

    The same mechanism keeps people beside the ones who hurt them

    Here the idea stops being interesting and starts being expensive.

    Some of you grew up in a house organised around a father’s drinking, or a mother’s gambling, or something else that everyone worked around and nobody named. You learned the reading of a face from across a room. You learned the timing of a request. You learned to absorb and to smooth and to wait, and you learned all of it early, in the years when learning is not yet optional.

    Later, someone with the same instability enters your life and feels immediately understandable. You know how to monitor the face, time the request, absorb the disappointment, and restore calm. The relationship may hurt you, but it gives you a familiar role and therefore feels easier to navigate than a stable relationship in which you do not know who to be.

    John Bowlby, who assembled attachment theory out of exactly this kind of observation, held that the earliest relationship becomes the working model for the ones that follow. Not the best relationship available. The first one.

    So is the template fixed?

    The template does not go away. I would not promise you otherwise, and I would not build a plan on trying.

    What is available is knowing what the template is doing to you at the moment it does it — noticing, as you sit across from someone, that the ease arrived before you knew a single thing about them. The difference between knowing and not knowing is larger than it sounds.

    Not knowing, you call it taste. This is simply the kind of person I like — and there the conversation ends, every time, for thirty years.

    Knowing, you get one distinction back. Two questions instead of one.

    Is this person easy for me. Is this person good for me.

    Those are not the same question. Familiarity creates ease, but ease does not prove that the person is safe or good for you. Unfamiliarity creates discomfort, but discomfort does not prove that the person is wrong. A stable person may feel emotionally flat simply because stability does not match the relationship pattern your body learned first.

    Bring to mind whoever you are currently drawn to, or whoever you cannot make yourself want. Then sit with the awkward question of where that feeling is actually coming from — from them, in front of you now, or from somewhere considerably older. The answer may not arrive. It does not need to. Having asked is already a small loosening of a thing that has been running without being asked anything at all.

    References

    • Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books. — the internal working model.
    • Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory. London: Routledge.

    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

  • Crying at the Television

    Some people cry at small things. They cry at somebody else’s sadness. They cry watching TV, and once they start, the tears keep coming. This happens a lot to people who cannot accept their own feelings — people who hold back what they feel about their own lives.

    Crying like that means a great deal of sadness has built up inside. That sadness comes from a loss in their own life that was never mourned. To mourn a loss is to weep over it until you can accept it and let it go. Because that never happened, the loss is still unresolved, and the sadness from it is still there.

    Why the tears come out in front of a TV drama

    When you cry like that in front of the TV, the tears are not really about the drama. You are crying about your own life.

    When thinking about your own life is too painful or too shameful, you hold the feeling back. In front of a drama, though, you can cry. The sadness moves onto the story on the screen, and you end up watching your own life in it. You cry for the character, but the force of the tears comes from your own loss, which the scene has stirred up. If that loss had been mourned, the sadness would not have to come out through a drama.

    Therapy helps a person accept what they could not bear

    Mourning, then, is about accepting: letting a painful fact in. That is also what therapy does. The tears come from a loss that was never accepted, so therapy helps the person let in the painful fact they have been keeping out.

    People often think therapy works by breaking down a person’s defenses. A defense is the way a person wraps themselves up tight so they do not have to feel something. But the wrapping is there for a reason: at the time, some fact or feeling was more than they could bear. Therapy does not try to strip the wrapping away. Instead, it helps the person accept the very thing the wrapping was keeping out.

    It sounds like a paradox, but that is what heals: accepting the very thing the person could least bear to accept.

    The same scene, every time

    Some scenes are sad for everybody. A child longs to see a parent and cannot. Anyone watching would be moved by that. That kind of crying is ordinary; everybody shares it.

    The crying I am talking about is different. The tears keep coming in one particular kind of situation. Whenever that situation turns up, or anything like it, the tears come again.

    When the tears keep returning to the same kind of scene like that, they are coming from a wound in the person’s own past.

    Knowing a painful fact is not the same as accepting it

    To mourn a loss is to accept that it happened — and you get to that acceptance by weeping over it.

    Say someone did not get their mother’s love. Something that should have come to them never came, and that is a loss. So what they have to accept is this: “I did not get my mother’s love.”

    But that fact will not sink in. In their head, they may know their mother never gave them that love. In their heart, it still does not feel final, because they keep hoping that one day she will change and notice their pain. So each time she lets them down, it does not feel like “that is just how she is.” It feels like being rejected all over again. That is why they keep ending up frustrated and hurt.

    Here is how that looks. A woman said to her mother, “My arm hurts.” Her mother said, “Go to the doctor.” The daughter was upset by that, and the two of them ended up arguing.

    Why did “go to the doctor” upset her so much? Because she was not only reporting a pain. She was asking her mother to care. This mother had never paid her much attention, and the daughter was still hoping for the attention she had missed as a child. So a sensible, practical answer felt like one more refusal. The argument was not really about the arm. Underneath it was an old request that had never been met: “Notice me. Care that I am hurting.”

    The daughter knows her mother is not going to change. She will say so herself, and say she has stopped trying. But in the way she actually lives, she is still clinging to that hope, still asking to be loved. When the love she hopes for doesn’t come, she is hurt, and the asking gets louder. That is how “My arm hurts” turned into an argument.

    Never having had something is a loss too

    People usually distinguish between two things. Deprivation is when something you needed was never there and was never given to you. Loss is when you had something and then it was gone. I count both as loss. An example will make this easier to see.

    Picture a child who has had no mother from the day he was born. There was never a mother in his life. He is raised somehow, and he grows up. Is that child hurt by having had no mother, or not?

    He is. He carries it with him all his life. The absence of a mother is itself the wound. A growing child needs a mother, and for this child she never came.

    The same goes for babies adopted right after birth, too young to know anything about it. Even for them, the fact that they were adopted will not sink in. Adoptive parents are advised to tell the child early anyway, because children do find out, and finding out later makes it worse.

    An adopted child at least has adoptive parents. A child left without parents at birth and raised by substitute caregivers instead never knows what it is to have a mother in those early years. He never had a mother to lose. Even so, I count that absence as a loss.

    And this kind of loss does not happen only to children with no mother at all. It also happens to a child whose mother was in the kitchen every day and never once looked at him. A child whose mother died can point at the empty chair. This child has nothing to point at — and the hole is the same size.

    So this is a loss too: “I wanted to be loved, and the love never came.”

    This loss has to be wept over

    You have to weep over it — really weep.

    The weeping is about particular moments: “Where were my parents when I needed them? When I was in pain, where were they?” You weep over those moments until you can accept them as they were. Then, little by little, you stop clinging — you stop going back to the same parent again and again for the care they were never able to give.

    If you keep clinging instead, this is what happens. First comes anger at the world, and behind it the thought: “My parents never looked after me.” Then, as that anger keeps coming back, people go different ways. Some sink into frustration. Others hold on even tighter, like the woman with the sore arm, and go on asking to be loved.

    A therapist’s job is to help a person accept that the love they needed never came. But accepting it takes strength. Think what it costs to say out loud that your mother never loved you, and not take it back an hour later — to sit still with it, not phone her, not decide it wasn’t that bad after all. You need to be standing firm inside before you can take in something that heavy. So therapy builds that inner strength first. The weeping comes after.

    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

  • All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode

    I get home and the TV is on before I have put anything down. I could not tell you what is playing. What is playing was never the point. I have lived like this for most of my life.

    It runs while I eat. It runs while I shower. It is still on when I fall asleep.

    What happens if you turn it off?

    Try it tonight. You won’t last long.

    The moment it goes quiet, something starts coming up in you. A feeling, a thought, something from years ago that never got settled. Facing it is painful, and tonight you would rather not.

    So you reach for something to fill the quiet instead. I call this a self-prescription: a remedy you give yourself, with no doctor involved, so that you do not have to feel what would otherwise come up. There are many of these, and the television is the easiest to reach: nowhere to go, nothing to get ready, nobody to call. You press one button, and it keeps going on its own long after you have stopped paying attention.

    If you had it on for the show, you would switch it off when the show ended. So the telling thing is not that you turn the TV on. It is that you keep it on — through meals, through the shower, into sleep — so the house is never quiet long enough for you to feel lonely or afraid, or for an old memory to surface.

    What is the TV holding off?

    The first thing is loneliness.

    Look at older people who live by themselves. Their TV runs all day. Anyone who has visited a grandmother living alone knows what this is like: nobody is watching, and the sound never stops. It runs while she does the dishes. It runs while she is on the phone to someone else. When you arrive, she doesn’t turn it off; she turns it down. And when the talk goes quiet for a moment, the volume is back up before either of you has noticed.

    If you ever ask her why it is always on, she says she gets bored.

    But being bored means having nothing to do, and she keeps the TV on while she is doing the dishes and while she is talking on the phone. The sound is not there to fill empty time. It is there so the house sounds as if someone else is in it. When she says she is bored, she means she is lonely.

    How I lived as a boy

    I went to school and came home, and once I was home I did nothing but watch television. It was my only window on the world.

    I had no friends. At school, the only conversation I could manage with the other kids was retelling whatever had been on TV the night before. For a while that worked: talking about last night’s episode was enough to keep me part of a group. That lasted only as long as the talk stayed on television. The moment it moved on to something else, I had nothing to say. I always saw my silence coming about four seconds before anyone else noticed it. So I kept steering the talk back to television, and I got good at it. But steering a conversation is not the same as taking part in it, and the others could tell the difference.

    That may sound sociable, but it was a way of making sure the talk never turned to me. As long as we were discussing a TV show, I could stay in the group without anyone finding out what I felt, what I wanted, or what I was afraid of.

    So loneliness, for me, had little to do with there being nobody around. There were people around — a whole school full of them. What I lacked was any idea how to turn one of them into a friend. That is something you learn while you are growing up, by getting it wrong many times in front of other people. I spent those years indoors with the TV on.

    In front of the TV, nobody can hurt you

    That is the second thing the TV holds off: fear.

    Get close to a person, and sooner or later you will get hurt. Someone you like may not like you. You may be turned down, or merely tolerated, which is worse. So you go around holding your breath, checking faces, reading meaning into a silence that probably meant nothing.

    And there is the effort. You buy the coffee. You remember what they told you last time and ask about it — which means that back then you were really listening, even though there was nothing in it for you. When somebody takes an interest in you, you return it, even on a day when you have nothing left to give. Relationships run on energy, and you are the one who has to keep supplying it.

    A television asks for none of this. It entertains you without your doing anything, it never turns you down, and it does not leave until you switch it off. While it is on, you do not have to feel how lonely you are, or how afraid. You get something that feels a little like company, without ever having to show anything of yourself, sit through an awkward moment, or find out whether anyone actually wants to be close to you.

    Think of the small lift you get when somebody looks up as you come in, or says your name, or laughs along with you half a second after you start. It tells you that someone has noticed you. A television never gives you that. Nobody on the screen knows there is anyone in the room. The sound fills the silence, but not your need for another person. That is why four hours of it leaves you exactly as lonely as when you started, and four hours older.

    And then it gets worse

    Spend long enough with a television for company, and problems start to show up in your relationships with real people.

    Of course they do. Being with people is learned by doing, and you weren’t doing it. So conversations start going wrong in small ways — a pause you don’t know how to fill, a joke that lands oddly and sits there, an invitation you answer half a beat too slowly so that it sounds like a no.

    You would never mention any of this to anyone. You would just rather not go through an evening like that again for a while. Then the while gets longer.

    An evening at home feels safer, because nothing can go wrong in it. But every evening you stay away is practice you miss, and practice is what makes talking to people easier. So the next invitation feels a little harder, staying home looks a little better, and around it goes.

    The TV itself is not what harms you. The trouble is that it is very good at keeping you from feeling lonely or afraid. The alternative to the TV, being with real people, is hard, and for a long time it gives little back before it gets easier.

    The TV still goes on when I come in

    It does. That hasn’t changed much.

    What has changed is that some nights I turn it off and just sit there. When the sound stops, the feelings I spent all those years avoiding are right where they were: the loneliness, the fear of people. Decades later, neither has gone anywhere.

    Usually I end up turning it back on. The difference is that now, before I do, I stop for a moment and notice that they are still there. I never used to do even that.

    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

  • You Won the Argument and You’re No Happier for It

    Three days on, you are still going over the argument in your head, even though you won it. That is the confusing part.

    It started over the route. Not even the route — over whether the road you took was actually faster, which neither of you could have proved sitting in that car. Somewhere in the third exchange it stopped being about the road. You could hear it stop. Your voice changed before your argument did, and so did theirs, and then it was ten minutes of two people who were no longer discussing traffic.

    In the end, they backed down. Fine, they said. You were right. You won — and days later you are not a bit happier for it.

    You weren’t having a conversation. You were settling who ranks higher.

    The reason winning doesn’t make you any happier is simple enough. It wasn’t a conversation.

    In an argument like that, the same few questions are always being asked, though nobody says them out loud. Are you stronger than me? Are you better than me?

    The words on the surface are about the route. Underneath, each person is trying to establish who is more competent and whose judgment should dominate. So even when the argument is over, nothing has really been gained. The only thing it decided was who came out on top.

    This is also why winning brings no lasting relief. If your sense of your own worth depends on being above the other person, one win cannot settle it. The next disagreement puts your place above them at risk again, so the same contest comes back over some other topic. The argument about the road ended. Your doubt about your own worth did not.

    What it costs, day to day

    Once ranking yourself against others becomes a habit, you meet people first as rivals to compete with, not as people to be considerate of. Two things then get difficult, and they are the two things relationships are actually made of.

    The first is respect. Someone sits down across from you and, before either of you has said a word, you have already sized him up. Is he above me or below me? Does he know more? Has he done more? You do not decide to do this. It happens on its own, the way a first impression does, and it shapes how you hear everything he says after. If he comes out above you, you find yourself disagreeing with him before you have even worked out whether you do. If he comes out below you, you expect him to keep quiet and listen to you. Either way, you are no longer listening to what he actually says.

    The second is consideration. Consideration means stepping for a moment into the other person’s position and seeing things from there. If you are always measuring who is above whom, you never have that moment to spare: every exchange is already being used to settle it one more time. A colleague mentions she is struggling with something, and what comes up in you first is not that sounds hard. It is a small relief you would rather not feel: she admitted to struggling and you did not, so for now you are the one above.

    If someone described all this to you out loud, you would not defend it. That is not the same as being able to stop it.

    Where do you learn it?

    Not in any lesson. Nobody teaches it; you pick it up by having it done to you.

    As a child, you said no, and an adult overrode you anyway, with a louder voice and the authority to make it stick. Not by persuasion — you were not persuaded, and you did not come around. You were simply the smaller party. That is not being treated as a person. That is being overpowered.

    When this happens not once or twice but all through childhood, the child comes to a conclusion about what relationships are: a way of deciding who is on top. Every disagreement ended with the stronger person winning, and the child never saw one settled any other way. Children cannot invent a way they have never seen.

    Later, when that child has power of their own, they reach for the same method: press harder, speak louder, or refuse to stop until the other person gives in. They do not need to be out for revenge to do this. It is simply the only way they were ever shown.

    The parent on the receiving end of a child’s no

    When a small child first starts to show who they are, the word they reach for first is no. Saying no is how a child begins to become a person separate from their parents. It is healthy, not disrespectful. What I want to look at here is the parent who hears it.

    Some parents cannot take it. As I see it, a parent like that is weak on the inside: weak enough that a small child’s no feels like an attack.

    Look at the difference between what the word means and how it is heard. The child says no, and what that means is that she is finding out she can want something you do not want and still be your child. That is not remotely how it sounds to you, the parent. It sounds like defiance. It sounds like being talked down to by someone who comes up to your hip and who would not survive a week without you. And on a bad evening, it arrives as the fourth thing that has gone against you since six o’clock.

    The child’s refusal stings the parent’s pride. A parent who hears disagreement as a blow to their authority or their worth cannot simply let the sting pass. So the parent overpowers the child to feel strong again, and wins, because the parent controls the rules, the resources and the consequences.

    But I have never once seen a parent who pushes a child down like that end up happy.

    Some children grow up the opposite way

    Not every child whose no was overridden grows up to push others. Some go quiet instead, and stop speaking up for themselves.

    They are not people who never learned to draw a line. They did draw one, by saying no, and were punished for it.

    What goes wrong for them is small and very specific. Someone like this knows exactly what she does not want, immediately and without any doubt. The trouble is saying it. The sentence is ready; it gets as far as the back of her teeth and does not come out. Afterward she can tell you word for word what she meant to say. She has been saying it over to herself ever since.

    Shut a child’s no down enough times and the humiliation of it hardens and settles in. Shame, we call it. And shame comes down in the end to a single sentence.

    There is nothing in me worth anything.

    When saying no brings ridicule, punishment or withdrawal of love again and again, the child comes to feel that showing what she wants means being humiliated. Later she may know exactly what she wants and still say nothing, because the moment a disagreement begins, her body expects what used to happen next.

    Both began with a child’s no that was overridden

    The person who has to win, and the person who can’t get the sentence out. They look like they have nothing to do with each other.

    In both cases, a child said no and was overpowered. One took on the stronger person’s way of doing things and, once grown, overpowers others in arguments too. The other learned that speaking up is dangerous and keeps the argument inside her own head. They behave in opposite ways as adults, but they started in the same place: a no that was not accepted.

    What to do when a child refuses everything, constantly, is a separate question, and I am not answering it here. Only this: when a parent pushes a child down because their pride is hurt, that is not treating the child as a person. It is simply overpowering her, and what she learns from it is that the stronger one wins. Taking a child’s no seriously does not mean she always gets her way. A parent can say, “You don’t have to like it, but you do need a bath tonight.” The feeling is accepted, and the limit still holds. A child whose no was taken seriously like this does not grow up needing to win every conversation, because for her a conversation was never where it got decided who is on top.

    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 Child Who Was No Trouble at All

    She waits until the adults have finished before she asks for anything. She takes her plate to the sink without it being mentioned. She has never once had to be told twice, and she does not cut into a conversation, and when the visitors are here she sits where she is put and stays there.

    Nobody in the house finds this strange. She is the one person there who never makes any extra work.

    What state are we in when we are born?

    We are born in pieces.

    What is in pieces is the self. By ‘self’ I don’t mean a name or an age or a list of things you’re good at. I mean the bare sense that you are here at all. And that sense does not come pre-assembled.

    A newborn has sensations and states — hunger, warmth, fear, relief — but does not yet experience them as parts of one continuous self. The sense of “I am the same person across all these moments” develops later.

    At first, the person caring for the baby holds the pieces together for her. When the baby cries, that person finds out why; when she is startled, that person calms her down. Because this happens in the same way, time after time, the baby gets from hunger to being fed, or from a fright to calm, without the hunger or the fright ever becoming more than she can bear.

    We usually picture a baby as a complete person who only needs to grow bigger. The body is complete. The sense of being one person is not. At birth, that sense is like a pot whose pieces have been set in place but not yet glued. A loud noise or a sudden jolt, and the pieces come apart. What glues them, little by little, is care repeated day after day.

    What joins the pieces?

    The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a name for what the caregiver does here: holding. The caregiver shields the baby from what is too much for someone so small — the loud noise, the sudden jolt — and responds reliably enough that separate moments of hunger, distress and comfort start to join up into the experience of being one person.

    Holding has two sides. One is physical: the baby is picked up and carried, and while she is very small, that side matters more. But the emotional side is there from the start too, and that is the side I want to look at here.

    Holding a child emotionally means welcoming her: accepting her as she is, paying attention to her, and letting her see that you are amazed by her.

    Consider the fuss a parent can make over a full diaper. An adult who is otherwise a serious person will pitch her voice up half an octave and announce that this is the most remarkable thing she has seen: “Look at that! Would you look at what you did!” Somebody else is called in to look.

    Now measure the reaction against the event. The baby has not achieved anything. She has not tried. She could not have done otherwise, and she has no idea what the fuss is about. The reaction is wildly, comically out of proportion to what happened — and the very size of the reaction is the message. What it says is not well done. What it says is: what comes out of you is welcome here, and you did not have to earn that.

    And then it happens again, the next day and the day after that, and in between there are a thousand smaller versions of it — the face that lights up when she wakes, the voice that changes register the moment she is picked up. To the adults, these are small, everyday things. Nobody in the house would remember any of them afterward.

    No single moment builds the self. What glues the pieces, one at a time, is the repetition: the baby shows a need, someone notices, and nobody pulls away. Over time, she learns that she can let out what is inside her and still keep the people she depends on.

    The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called the result a cohesive self: a self whose pieces have joined and now hold together.

    None of this means giving a baby everything she wants. It means staying close, in ways she can predict, until whatever she is feeling has come out and she has settled again.

    Growing up in pieces

    Now picture the same scene with a parent who is irritated from the start. The full diaper gets a scolding instead: “You wouldn’t go when I told you to, and now you go in your diaper?”

    Not a cruel parent. An impatient one. The necessary things get done — she is fed, she is changed — but with an air of getting it over with. Later, once she can talk, this parent is already answering before she has finished her sentence, and meets her second question by asking why she is still asking. She is looked after, but never once welcomed.

    In a house like that, the glue never sets. The pieces stay pieces.

    A child whose pieces never joined has to spend her attention holding herself together. Anything new that is asked of her, any strong feeling, even someone coming close, can be too much, so she pushes people away before they can knock the pieces loose. From outside this looks cold or difficult. From inside it is protection against falling apart.

    Where does your attention go when your hand is cut?

    Cut your hand and every bit of your attention goes to that hand. You will find yourself carrying it slightly raised. Walking down an ordinary street you curl it in, in case somebody knocks it. Somebody comes toward you and your whole body turns a few degrees to put the hand on the far side.

    Nobody has touched your hand. You’ve flinched in advance, repeatedly, at nothing.

    You are also, for the duration, extremely poor company. Someone is telling you about their week and you are tracking a stranger’s shoulder at the edge of your vision. You are not being self-absorbed. You are guarding something, and guarding takes everything.

    To anyone else in the room, though, it just looks as if you only care about yourself. A self that is still in pieces is like that hand: guarding it takes all the attention a person has. So when someone seems to think only of themselves, it may be that they are hurting.

    The child who watches the adults

    A small child is entitled to think only of herself. At that age, every child’s self is still fragile, like that cut hand, so all her attention goes to herself. Where would she find any left over for anybody else?

    So when a small child starts paying attention to the grown-ups instead of to herself, something has gone the wrong way round. It can happen, for example, when a parent often blows up or is often depressed. Then the child has to manage the mood of the house, because she is only safe when the parent is calm. Here is what she does.

    She knows which evenings not to ask for anything. She can tell from the sound of the front door how the next hour is going to go, and she adjusts before anyone has spoken. When someone asks one of the adults an awkward question, she answers it before they have to. She never lets other people see her wanting anything.

    Adults are delighted by her. “She’s so grown up,” they say.

    I do not see maturity here. I see a symptom: a sign that this child has been deeply hurt. She has learned that she is safe only if she keeps watch on the adults, so she reads their faces before she has even noticed what she herself needs. She makes sure she is no trouble, because asking, interrupting or wanting might irritate an adult, or cost her the care she depends on.

    The praise covered the wound

    A child who throws tantrums wears the adults out. She is inconvenient, and inconvenience gets investigated — somebody eventually sits down and asks what is going on with her.

    The child who is no trouble is never inconvenient, so nobody investigates. She gets compliments instead. People tell her parents they have done a lovely job. Teachers write that she is a pleasure to have in class. Relatives compare her, out loud and in front of her, to the cousin who is a handful.

    So nobody finds out that she is hurting, and she never gets the chance to find out either. There is praise lying over the sore place, and praise is not a thing anybody thinks to look underneath.

    Worse, the praise teaches her to go on being no trouble. Asking for nothing is what earns her warmth and approval, so, to keep them coming, she holds back more and more of what she needs. She comes to feel that the moment she says “this is hard,” she will let her parents down. And the better she gets at looking as if she needs no one, the less likely any adult is to notice that she is anxious, lonely, or afraid to need anyone.

    If you were a child like this, you may still be hearing the same praise today. That you’re no trouble. That you never need anything. That you always manage. That praise is no proof that you were safe. It is worth asking what you had to hold back to earn it.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — holding.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In Winnicott (1965), listed above. — the child who fits herself to what the adults need.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — the cohesive self.

    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

  • Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak

    There is probably a pen within reach of you. Pick it up, or just look at it.

    You know what it is immediately. That’s worth pausing on, because that knowledge didn’t come from the pen. It came from you. Every scrap of information that let you land on pen was gathered before this moment — years before, most of it. If you’d never seen one, you’d be holding an object you couldn’t name.

    So even when you look at a piece of plastic on a desk, you are seeing it through your past. Before you have had a single thought about it, earlier experience has already told you what kind of thing it is, what it’s called and what it’s for.

    What would it take to see the pen as it is?

    Suppose you could set all of that down — everything you already know about pens. No memory telling you what it is, no name arriving ahead of the object. Just the thing, right now. What would you feel?

    Wonder. You’d be looking at something for the first time in your life.

    But nobody feels wonder looking at a pen. You think pen, register the color, and move on. In that half-second the past has already arrived and done the work for you.

    And notice you can’t catch it happening. There’s no moment where you hold an unnamed object and then supply the name. The name is there the instant you see the object. Whatever the mind is doing, it has finished before you notice anything happening.

    I’m not saying it’s impossible to see a thing as it is. I’m saying it’s very, very hard, and that in ordinary life we almost never do it.

    Why do we judge people so quickly?

    Now put a person where the pen was — someone you have only just met.

    You haven’t even learned their name. A few sentences have gone back and forth, most of them about nothing. And somewhere in there you’ve already made up your mind: this person is fine, or this person is not. If someone asked what this person had done to earn that, you couldn’t say. There’s only the verdict, already in.

    And it isn’t just a yes or no, either. Before the conversation has really started, you have a whole small story about them — what they’re probably like, how the rest of this conversation is going to go, whether you’ll want to be near them again. None of that came from those few sentences. There wasn’t enough in them to build it from.

    That verdict forms the same way the word pen came to you: instantly, and from the past. Something in this person’s face, tone of voice or posture resembles someone you knew before, and your mind reacts to them as if they were that earlier person — before you know enough about the one actually in front of you.

    That is why the judgment arrives quickly and feels certain. You experience it as seeing the new person clearly, not as remembering how an earlier person made you feel.

    Who gathered the information you judge people by?

    The important question is who first decided what people are like. You did, as a child. A child who knows only a few adults may conclude, “Quiet people are angry” or “Confident people will humiliate me,” and carry that conclusion into later encounters.

    Because the conclusion becomes part of how you see people, it never shows up as a belief you could check and correct. It simply looks like the way people are. You notice what fits it and overlook what doesn’t, so the old conclusion keeps feeling accurate.

    The conclusions came in small pieces. So that’s what the world is like. So people don’t like me. Thousands of those, collected quietly, until they settled into one steady view of how things are — a whole private philosophy, put together by you as a child, when you had met perhaps four adults and had no idea that was a small sample. Most of it was in place by the time you were six or seven.

    Why doesn’t that childhood view ever get corrected?

    Because as soon as it was finished, you started looking at the people you met through it — and what you saw seemed to be about them, not something you brought with you.

    That’s the part worth sitting with. The conclusions a child reached weren’t kept as guesses, to be checked later against better evidence. They were kept as settled — as how things are. And a settled view doesn’t wait to be tested. It goes out ahead of you and shapes what you find.

    That settled view works as an expectation, and the expectation shapes what you notice and how you act. If you expect rejection, you notice a delayed reply, miss signs of warmth, and speak more cautiously. The other person responds to that caution, and their response becomes new evidence that people do not want you. Each time this happens, the childhood conclusion feels less like a conclusion and more like simply seeing what is there.

    When someone rubs you the wrong way, you may well be seeing them through that old view.

    Can you stop judging people this fast?

    No. I don’t think you can, and I wouldn’t put effort into trying.

    The judgment isn’t a decision, so you can’t simply decide differently. It arrives finished, the instant you see their face. There’s no moment in between where you could step in.

    Why, then, do I keep saying that what you see is the past? Because something starts to change when a person can admit, plainly and without softening it, that what they’re seeing may not be true. Not that it’s false — you have no way of knowing that for sure. Just that it may not be true. That admission is small, and it isn’t comfortable, but it’s the only place I’ve seen anything actually shift. The first impression still comes. What changes is what the person does with it.

    So let the first verdict come, but don’t take it as the final word on the other person. Take it as information about you: who this person reminds you of, what you expect next, and when you first learned to expect it.

    The next time someone puts you off in the first ten seconds, you don’t have to argue yourself out of the feeling or feel guilty for having it. Just notice that it came too fast to have been about them. Knowing that your picture of them comes from your past won’t change the picture. What it does is make you less likely to decide who they are on the strength of something you concluded as a child. That is most of what you can do.

    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

  • What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.

    There is a sentence that climbs up your throat on the bad days. What did I do to deserve this. Some people finish it out loud — to deserve these parents, to deserve this life with this person, to deserve waking up in this exact room again. You can carry that question a long time. It rarely hands anything back.

    If this were punishment, it would have a size

    Think about how punishment actually works. A fine prints an amount and a date. A sentence comes with a length — this many months, and then the door opens and you walk out. Someone set the price. You pay the price. The account closes.

    Even the worst of them has an edge on it. You can stand at the front of it and point at the place where it stops.

    That closing is the whole point. Without it, the word means nothing. A penalty nobody can total up, with no last payment on it, is not a penalty at all.

    You have paid it more than once, and it is still open

    Now hold your own life next to that. Nobody named a figure. Nobody set a release date. There is no office you can walk into and ask how much is left to pay.

    You have taken more than you ever thought you could take. You have said to yourself, more than once, that you have served whatever this is. You kept a private count. You decided that after this much, surely, the thing would be settled.

    Then a season goes by, and there you are in the same kitchen, in the same argument, saying what you already said the last time.

    Nothing closed. Nothing got crossed off. Whatever you keep paying and never finish paying is not a punishment — that shape does not exist inside punishment. And once the punishment goes, the crime behind it goes with it. There is no ledger. Nobody wrote your name at the top of a page and started adding.

    A hard life is heavy, and it is still not payment for anything. None of it is here because of something you did wrong. It looks like somebody’s fault. It is nobody’s fault.

    Nobody asks what a rich man did to deserve it

    You never hear the other version. Nobody looks at a man with money and asks what he did to deserve that. You only reach for crime and payment when something hurts. Which means those words are not describing your life. They are describing how much your life stings right now.

    The word hiding inside why me

    That question is not asking about the pain. It is hunting for a name — who did this, who let it happen, who has to answer for it.

    So you go looking for a place to set the blame down. Outside first — your parents, the person you live with. You build a case against one of them, and it does not hold. So you turn it inward. What did I do wrong. What is wrong with me.

    Pick a name and watch what happens next

    Once you settle on an answer, there is no next step.

    Land on your parents and you are left holding resentment. Land on yourself and you are left holding self-blame. One burns and one freezes, and both of them are heavy, and neither one moves you a single inch. Tomorrow morning arrives exactly the same either way. The name changed. Nothing else did.

    That is the clue that Who is to blame? is not producing the answer you need. Blaming your parents may explain where the pain began, and blaming yourself may create the illusion of control, but neither tells you what you need now or what you can do next. The question keeps you searching for a guilty person when your life requires a response.

    Living beside someone impossible, or coming into money

    We learn who we are by living through very different things. Some people learn it beside someone impossible. Some learn it by getting rich. Nobody would call the second one a punishment.

    So here is how I read it. Joy, pain, and a problem that refuses to resolve each reveal different parts of you. Pressure shows what makes you go silent, what makes you attack, what you can endure, and where you abandon yourself to keep a relationship. The circumstances differ, but each one brings your habitual way of meeting life into view.

    Your particular life is therefore where you encounter yourself. Not because the suffering was assigned as punishment, but because your responses become visible only in the situations you actually have to live through.

    Knowing yourself probably means nothing to you right now

    If I told you to go find out who you are, you would have no idea what to do with Monday. I know. But you are already in the middle of finding out. That is what these years are.

    So watch yourself in the middle of them. What makes you go silent. What makes you say the thing you will regret before midnight. Whose one sentence still takes your legs out years later. What you can carry far longer than you expected to. Where you fold on the first push.

    You are not a fact filed away somewhere, waiting to be looked up. You are what shows up in how you meet what is in front of you. It comes out in pieces, mostly under pressure.

    When it climbs up your throat again

    I am not asking you to stop saying it. Say it. Say the whole thing, out loud if you are alone in the car. What did I do to deserve these parents. What did I do to deserve this life with this person. Do not cut it short and do not be polite with it.

    Then, when the question has run all the way out, add another one: What does this situation show me about what I fear, what I keep repeating, and what I need to do differently now?

    The circumstances may not change immediately. But the second question gives you somewhere to move. The first searches for someone to charge; the second helps you recognise your pattern and choose your next response.

    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