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  • “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack

    The day is done and you go back over it. The meeting. The message you sent too fast. The thing you meant to say and didn’t. By the end of it you are smaller than when you started. Somewhere in the middle a sentence arrived on its own: “Of course I got it wrong. That’s just me.” It arrived so smoothly it sounded like the truth. You would call all of that looking at yourself honestly. But when you look at yourself honestly, you don’t usually come away bruised.

    There is no reason to dislike yourself this much

    Is there really a reason to dislike yourself that much? There isn’t.

    You keep running yourself down anyway. The criticism doesn’t ask your permission, and it doesn’t stop just because you decided there was no reason for it. It is still going when you turn off the light.

    So the first step is to notice it while it is happening. Catch the moment when looking back at what you did turns into an attack on who you are: “I sent the message too quickly” becomes “I ruin everything, because this is just who I am.” Once you can say to yourself, “I am attacking myself right now,” you can say the next thing too: “There is no reason for this.”

    That is what it really means to tell yourself “it’s okay.” It does not mean you did nothing wrong. It keeps what you did separate from who you are. One careless remark may call for an apology, but the world doesn’t end because you said it, and saying it doesn’t make you a careless or worthless person. That is true, and that is why you can say “it’s okay” and mean it.

    Looking back is only looking back

    Reflection sounds like a big, serious word. It means one simple thing: you look back.

    Most of the day runs without much thinking. Then you stop for a minute and look into your own mind. “Why did I cut in like that at the meeting?” Sometimes an answer comes up on its own: “Oh — I wanted them to notice my idea first.”

    That’s it. That is all reflection is. You wanted something, or you didn’t want to do something, and now you see it. The answer ends there.

    Look at what an answer like that leaves out. It doesn’t grade you. It doesn’t say what kind of person you are. You wanted something, you can see that you wanted it, and seeing it is the result.

    Transactional analysis, one school of psychology, has a name for the part of you that looks back like this: the Adult. The Adult simply notes what happened, what you wanted and what followed. It says, “I avoided calling her because I didn’t want an argument,” and does not add, “Therefore I am a coward.”

    The Adult works like this all day long. The milk is finished. The train is late. You didn’t enjoy that dinner as much as you expected to. You handle facts like these without adding anything to them.

    Then a second voice says, “Right, you’re so greedy”

    Now take the same small want: “Oh — I wanted them to notice my idea first.” Sometimes, before you have even finished looking, a different line gets there first: “Right, you’re so greedy.”

    That is not reflection. It is what transactional analysis calls the Parent: the part of you that repeats judgments you heard over and over as a child, from your parents or teachers. Nobody has to say them to you anymore; you say them to yourself. And because the criticism now comes in your own voice, it sounds like the truth about you rather than an old judgment.

    But look at what that voice is reacting to. Wanting something is not greed. Wanting is a plain, innocent thing. You wanted them to notice your idea first. You wanted one evening with nothing owed to anyone. You didn’t want to call her and have an argument. Those sentences say what you wanted, and nothing more.

    Then a line gets stapled on the end: “You only ever think about yourself. You’re so selfish.” You call the whole thing self-reflection and go to bed.

    A moral word turns looking into scoring

    What gets stapled on the end is a verdict on what kind of person you are: greedy, selfish. These are moral words — they rate you as a good or bad person. The moment one of them attaches itself, the Parent has taken over.

    “You didn’t want to do it.” That is still looking back. “You didn’t want to do it, so you’re selfish” is something else entirely. The first sentence only watches. The second puts a score on you.

    Observing and judging can feel alike, because both involve thinking about yourself. The difference shows in what you are left with. Observing gives you something specific you can use: “I agreed because I was afraid of disappointing her.” Judging gives you a verdict on your whole self: “I am weak.” Once you have that verdict, there is nothing left to look into.

    So check what you are left with afterward. If you understand why you did it, and you can see what you might do differently next time, you were reflecting. If you only feel smaller and more hopeless, the reflection turned into punishment.

    “I really am selfish” isn’t always a judgment

    Sometimes “I really am selfish” sounds like a judgment and isn’t one. It isn’t reflection either, because it is not about one thing you wanted; it is about who you are. It is a third thing: a realization.

    But isn’t that the same kind of verdict as “You’re so selfish”? The word is the same. What is different is what it is for. A realization isn’t there to blame you or punish you. You simply see a fact — “I really am selfish” — and instead of arguing with it, you accept it.

    Picture a mother or father who has told their children for years, “Everything I did, I did for you.” Then one day they realize what was really going on: “I used them. I used my children for my own sake. I really did live a selfish life.”

    What happens next shows that this was a realization and not an attack. They go to their children and apologize: “I never thought about what was going on inside you. I only thought about myself.” The realization hurts, but it doesn’t end with them beating themselves up. They start listening to their children and treating them differently.

    So the same words, “I really am selfish,” can do two different jobs. Said as an attack, they end in pain, and nothing changes. Said as a realization, they lead you to take responsibility and do something concrete: apologize, or respond differently next time.

    “It’s okay” only works in the right order

    If you learn to say “it’s okay” before you can notice the attack while it is happening, you will slap it on everything. It’s okay, it’s okay — like a bandage you keep in your pocket for every scratch. Underneath, nothing changes, because you never saw the attack in the first place.

    Knowing something in your head and experiencing it yourself are two different things. You could read about “it’s okay” many times, in many places, and it would still only get you as far as “Ah, I see.” That is getting to know the idea. It has not yet become yours.

    It becomes yours on the day you go through the steps yourself, with nobody pushing you: you catch the attack mid-swing, you see there is no reason for it, and “it’s okay” comes out of that — in that order. An “it’s okay” that comes this way carries weight. You can hear the difference in your own voice when you say it.

    Cross out the moral word and read what’s left

    Find one moral word you used against yourself today, one that left you feeling smaller. Greedy. Selfish. Lazy. Then write down the whole sentence it came in.

    Now cross that word out, ask yourself what you actually wanted right then, and write the answer in its place. What you wanted is what is left once the moral word is gone. “I was so greedy today” becomes “I wanted them to notice my idea first.” “I’m so lazy” becomes “I wanted to rest.” “Why am I this selfish?” might become “I wanted someone to look after me a little today.”

    Read the new sentence out loud, once. Then check one thing and nothing else. Is it less savage toward you than the first version was? That is all tonight asks of you. You are not deciding whether it is true, and you are not deciding what to do about it.

    That new sentence is the Adult talking. It tells you what you wanted, and then it stops. Nothing in it is asking you to be sorry.

    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 Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me

    Something goes wrong and the heat climbs — past annoyed, past angry, all the way to the top. For one second you want the whole world in pieces on the floor. And if you made a list of everything you want to smash, you would find yourself somewhere on it. Then, before you even notice, the rage can start to turn into a different feeling: that someone is out to hurt you.

    What you actually want to break

    Real rage is not tidy. It feels like your body might come apart at the seams. You want to take the room, the day, the person in front of you, and break all of it into small pieces. And you want to break yourself into pieces along with it.

    Most people carry that quietly, because it sounds like something only a cruel person would feel. So you say nothing and wait for it to pass.

    But it is not something only cruel people have. Every one of us is born with this destructiveness, you included.

    What makes rage like this so frightening is what you find inside yourself. If that much destructiveness is really in you, it might not stop at breaking the room. It might break you too, until nothing of you is left. So what you fear most is not the damage around you. It is being wiped out yourself.

    Because the rage feels dangerous inside you, you quickly start seeing the danger in somebody else. You hear contempt in your partner’s tired tone; you hear an attack in a colleague’s disagreement. Once the threat seems to be coming from them, your own urge to destroy feels like self-defence. This shift — from something dangerous is happening in me to you are dangerous to me — is not a lie you tell on purpose. It happens before you have even noticed your own feeling. Psychoanalysts call it projection: a feeling you cannot bear to accept as yours is felt as if it came from someone else.

    The first thing a baby ever meets

    A baby does not meet a whole person first. He meets the breast — one part of his mother, not the whole of her. Psychoanalysts call it a part-object. An “object”, in their language, is whatever our love and anger are aimed at — usually a person, and here only one part of a person. At the start the breast is simply good. It keeps him alive, keeps him warm and comforts him.

    But the breast is not always there the moment he wants it. When he is left waiting, his hunger and frustration can become too much. He is flooded with his own rage, and that rage is too frightening to keep inside. So it is projected onto the breast, and now the breast itself seems to be attacking him. The breast that felt entirely good while it fed him now feels like a monster that could destroy him. He may turn away from the very breast he wanted a moment earlier, because to him the source of comfort has become the source of danger. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein saw this as one of the most basic ways the human mind works: the rage is pushed outside, and then it seems to come back as an attack. Adults still fall into it under pressure.

    What Klein meant by the paranoid-schizoid position

    Klein gave this state of mind a name: the paranoid-schizoid position. The words sound clinical, but what they describe is simple.

    The “schizoid” part means split: the mind keeps good and bad strictly apart, and nothing is allowed to be both at once. For the baby, the breast is all good while it feeds him and all bad while he is left waiting. In adults, this splitting shows up as seeing someone as either an angel or an enemy. Then comes the “paranoid” part: all of the badness is out there, and I am the one being attacked.

    Notice the word “position”. It is not a place you leave behind for good when you grow up. It is a place where anyone can be standing: a baby before he has any words for it, or you, this afternoon, in a meeting.

    Listen to who your sentences are about

    Here is what it looks like in adult life. You are already in a bad mood, and the person nearest to you gets the brunt of it. Think back to what actually comes out of your mouth on days like that.

    “You’ve got no sense at all.” “Why can’t you ever see how people feel?” “Why can’t you think any further than that?” “You’re so selfish.”

    Every sentence is about the other person, but the bad mood was already in you before they spoke. Some ordinary mistake of theirs gives the mood an explanation: I feel this bad because you are selfish, insensitive, or dismissive. Once the bad feeling has been pinned on them, you no longer have to notice what you brought into the room.

    So when you are in the middle of blaming somebody, you are standing exactly where the baby stood when he turned away from the breast. It is the same paranoid-schizoid position, only now it has adult words: all the badness is over there, and I am the one under attack.

    When someone brushes you off, where is the brush-off, exactly?

    Let me ask you a single question, and I would like you to answer it slowly.

    When you say “she brushed me off”, where is the brush-off? Point to it. Is it stuck to her face, or sitting somewhere in her tone of voice?

    I think much of it is already in you. If you walked into the room already afraid of being overlooked, a distracted glance can feel like proof that you do not matter. You read the brush-off into her face, then react to her as though she put it there on purpose. What began as a fear inside you now feels like an attack from outside.

    Admitting that is uncomfortable. That is why most of us would rather leave the brush-off where we see it: on her face. And as long as we leave it there, we spend one more day standing in the paranoid-schizoid position.

    The other place you can stand

    Some people do something different with the bad feeling. They do not push all of it onto the other person; they let part of it stay theirs. Klein called the place where they stand the depressive position.

    The name does not mean clinical depression. In the depressive position you see that some of the badness is on your side too: you can be angry even with someone you love, and you have harmful sides as well as good ones. Facing that brings sadness and guilt, and that is where the word “depressive” comes from. It feels heavier than blaming someone else. Still, it is a more grown-up place to stand.

    The difference between the two positions comes down to two sentences. One says: the badness is entirely theirs. The other says: some of it came from me. The person who can say the second sentence can bear knowing this about themselves.

    Owning your part is not the same as attacking yourself

    I want to be careful here, because this gets misread constantly. Remember the list at the start — everything you wanted to smash, with you somewhere on it. It is easy to hear “some of it is mine” and turn that into one more reason to attack yourself.

    That is not what it means. It does not mean hating yourself for having the rage in the first place. It means you stop insisting that every bad thing lives out there, without piling every bad thing onto yourself instead. You apologise for the hurtful thing you said, and you set a boundary where the other person overstepped.

    Try it on something small. A colleague answers you in a flat voice, and the heat starts. In the paranoid-schizoid position, you have decided before you say a word: she brushed me off, and that is simply what happened. In the depressive position, there is a pause first, and in that pause you can tell yourself: “Some of this is hers. Some of it is what I walked in carrying.”

    Owning your part feels heavier because you can no longer solve the problem simply by proving the other person wrong. Yet it also gives you back some control. If all the danger belongs to them, you must keep watching and defending yourself. If part of the reaction came from what you carried in, you can soothe that part, check what actually happened, and respond to the person in front of you rather than only to the fear you brought in.

    Before you argue, check which position you are in

    The heat will come back — maybe tomorrow, maybe later this week. It will arrive with the same flat certainty: she brushed me off.

    When it does, take your eyes off her face for a moment. Before you work out what to say to her, work out which position you are standing in.

    There are two: the one where all the badness is hers, and the one where some of it is yours. Which one are you standing in right now?

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — the paranoid-schizoid position.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — the depressive position.

    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

  • Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries

    The bedroom door opens without a knock. She asked him not to do that — more than once. He walks in the way he always does, carrying a question that apparently cannot wait. By dinner he is warm and funny, as if the man who pushed in that morning had been someone else.

    Everyone notices the moods first

    When I work with someone who never developed a clear inner line — a sense of where they stop and the next person starts — the moods are the first thing I notice. Feelings swing hard and fast. Warm at nine, flat at noon, cold by three. The person laughing over breakfast can look like a stranger by lunch.

    So the people around them — maybe you are one of them — reach for easy words. He’s moody. She runs hot. He’s just an intense guy. Those words explain nothing, and they leave you waiting for better weather that never quite comes.

    The swings are not simply temperament. When a person can’t clearly tell their own feelings apart from yours, what you feel doesn’t stay on your side of the line. If your mood turns bad, theirs turns bad too, before they have even heard what is wrong. So every small shift between you shakes them. To them, your silence feels like rejection, your need for privacy feels like abandonment, and an ordinary disagreement feels as if the whole relationship has changed.

    Why someone with no line of their own crosses yours

    Someone with no firm line inside is often the one who crosses yours. Think of the markers a surveyor puts in the ground between two yards: your grass ends here, mine starts there. Because of those markers, each neighbor knows how far their own yard goes. People carry a line like that in the mind, too: up to here is me, past here is you. When that line is blurred inside a person, they can’t see yours either. They just walk in.

    They open your door without knocking. They read your phone while you’re washing the dishes. They go through a wallet that isn’t theirs and see nothing odd about it. Ask them about it later and they’re honestly puzzled: “What’s the big deal? We’re close.”

    These are the small things we file under privacy. Not secrets — just the ordinary corners a person keeps to themselves. A closed drawer. A phone lying face down. A door that takes one knock before it opens. They don’t see any of these as yours to keep.

    They open conversations you closed, too. You said you’d rather not get into it. Later that night it starts again: “Why won’t you tell me? What are you keeping from me? Why do you shut me out?”

    Everyone needs a certain distance to feel safe, even with the people closest to them, and hopes those people will respect it. But to them, being close means keeping nothing from each other, so your closed door or face-down phone looks like a secret, or like being pushed away. They don’t see it as distance you have every right to keep. So they open the door, ask the question again, or check the phone, trying to win back a closeness they feel is being taken from them.

    When an argument sweeps you both away

    An argument with them rarely stays on the subject. They feel criticized, raise their voice, and insist that you are attacking them. You become defensive and raise your voice in return. Within seconds, each person is reacting to the other person’s reaction rather than to the issue that began the conversation.

    It isn’t only your room and your wallet they get into. Feelings cross the line too. When you get angry, they are angry at once. In the heat of it, neither of you has a moment to sort out, “This is my fear, and that is your anger,” so the feelings run together. Their anxiety sets off yours. When you pull back, they get more anxious, and each round is worse than the last. By the end, both of you feel invaded: their feelings have poured into you, and yours into them.

    That’s what makes these fights so hard to resolve. You can’t sort out a feeling you never had a chance to look at. By the time you’re calm enough to ask yourself what you actually think, the evening is gone.

    Help that lands like a shove

    They cross your line not only when they are suspicious or angry, but just as much when they are trying hard to be good to you.

    They help, and the help goes too far. They answer a question that was put to you. They rearrange your kitchen while you’re out. They tell a friend what you’re going through, because they want the friend to understand and go easier on you.

    The intention may be genuinely warm. But when they answer for you, rearrange your belongings, or tell your story without asking, they make choices that were yours to make. That is why their help can feel like being pushed. The problem is not the wish to help. It is that they have no clear sense of where helping ends and pushing in begins.

    You keep redrawing a line that won’t stay drawn

    So far this has been about what they do. Now look at what it does to you, the one whose line keeps being crossed.

    Living with them, you spend your week putting a line back where it was. You ask them to knock, and the door opens anyway. You say you don’t want to talk about something, and the question comes back. You explain calmly. Then you explain with an edge in your voice. The calm version and the sharp version get the same result.

    It’s the same small fight on a loop. The line is clear to you, but not to them, so nothing stays settled. You are always on edge, and whatever peace of mind you had is gone.

    What wears you out is not one big intrusion. It is having to say the same thing again and again, because the last conversation didn’t stick. Each time looks small. But you spend the day watching for the next open door, the next question, the next intrusion, so your body stays braced for a fight from morning to night. That is why you get tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch.

    What worked yesterday doesn’t work today

    Now go back to the moods we started with. The moods and the way they cross your line come from the same place: the line inside them was never firmly drawn. A line like that gives a person something fixed to go by. Without one, they change with whatever is happening at the moment: one way, then the other, then back again.

    So you adapt. You learn what they are fine with and what upsets them, and you get good at it. Then it all shifts. What worked yesterday lands wrong today, and you start to feel you can’t get anything right in your own home. It isn’t you. There’s nothing steady there to learn.

    To say it plainly: they don’t cross your line or change from day to day to wear you down, and it isn’t meanness. They have no fixed line inside to go by, and so you have nothing steady to go by either.

    Make your own line firm in one place, while the house is calm

    You can’t draw the missing line inside someone else. You can keep your own, though, and you can start by making it firm in just one place.

    Work out how much distance you need in order to feel safe. Then mark it clearly in just one place. Not ten. One. It might sound like this: “This drawer stays shut.” “I’m not ready to talk about this yet.” “The first hour after work is mine, before it belongs to anyone else.” Decide it on a day when nothing is happening. The line isn’t there to change them. It’s there so you still have a place to stand beside someone who changes from one day to the next. Somewhere in the house, one thing stays where you put it.

    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

  • Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From

    Some of the people who come to see me for therapy lie down and, before long, fall asleep. I don’t wake them. I don’t clear my throat to move things along. I let them sleep a long while, and when the time is up I say one thing: “Time’s up.”

    Nothing got produced in that hour, and the hour was not wasted. If you learned that your worth depends on what you get done, resting without getting anything done will feel wrong, even when your body needs the rest.

    Rest also gives something back. While you rest somewhere safe, your body lets go of tension and you start to feel like yourself again. Sometimes a person needs that first, before they can use their own drive: the force to say no, to choose, to start something, and to keep at it. Push someone who hasn’t had enough rest to keep going, and what they do no longer comes from that drive. It becomes one more duty, done to meet someone else’s demands.

    Anger may seem to have nothing to do with rest, but it is part of that same force. So when you press anger down the moment it rises, you weaken your drive along with it.

    Resting where nobody can poke you

    No part of me is thinking we ought to be getting somewhere. The person lying there is doing something that matters. They’re resting in a spot where nobody is going to reach over and poke them.

    They are not working on themselves. They are experiencing a relationship in which they can stop performing and still be welcome. In a sense, the room is a mother’s arms. A small child in its mother’s arms doesn’t have to do anything to stay there, and the room holds the person lying there in the same way, without asking them to produce anything.

    Being comes before doing

    Therapy is not an hour you have to fill. We talk, of course. But the bigger thing on offer is simpler than talking. In the therapy room you get to stop. You get to simply be there without having to justify it to anyone.

    The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it plainly: being comes before doing. Being able simply to exist, without having to get anything done, is the ground a person grows from. Doing is built on top of it.

    That may sound strange, because most of your week runs the other way. You earn your place by getting things done — inbox cleared, everyone fed, a weekend that somehow arrives with its own to-do list. When there is nothing to get done, something in you starts to fidget. That restlessness is worth noticing. It comes from the belief that you are worth only what you get done.

    The silence I leave alone

    So when a client goes quiet, I don’t fill the silence. This is not a technique. The quiet itself is that experience of simply being, without having to do anything. Whatever is going on inside the person during it does not need my voice to make it better.

    Sitting in silence with another person is harder than it sounds. Think of the last time a conversation went quiet on you, and how fast you reached for your phone or a joke or the weather. That reflex is so quick it passes for good manners.

    Two silences I do step into. One is the silence of digging in: “I don’t want to say it, so I won’t.” The other belongs to someone who wants to speak and can’t get the words out. I work with both of those. The rest I leave alone.

    What’s left is two people sitting together, doing nothing for each other. No performance, no service, no progress report. Winnicott had a name for this experience when nothing interrupts it: the continuity of being. You simply go on existing, without having to react to anyone’s demands. He stressed it above everything else, because a person needs it first in order to grow into a whole person. When it is interrupted too often, that growth gets hard. Instead you become whoever the person in front of you needs you to be — quick with an answer for anyone who asks, and blank when somebody asks what you want for dinner.

    Why does the whole world look like it’s coming at you?

    Besides this experience of simply being, Winnicott insisted on a second thing, and it is harder to hear. You have to recognize the aggression in yourself: your anger, and your own wishes to attack, humiliate, or destroy. He was firm that denying these feelings does not get rid of them. If you learned that getting angry ruins relationships, you may not admit, even to yourself, that you are angry. Then you start seeing that anger in other people instead.

    The neighbor’s tone. The email with no greeting. The driver who didn’t wave a thank-you. All of it starts reading as aimed at you, and your week fills up with the work of deciding what people meant. You catch yourself thinking, “He looked at me a certain way,” or “She left me out on purpose,” and you get defensive or back off first. When you are that busy finding hostility in other people, some of the hostility you find is your own.

    Then one day you admit to yourself: “I have wanted to break something. I have wanted someone to get hurt.” Once you can recognize those wishes as your own, you no longer have to see all the hostility as coming from neighbors, coworkers, or strangers. The world stops looking threatening everywhere you turn, even though nobody out there has changed.

    Admitting your own anger does not mean the person who upset you did nothing wrong. Once you can say “I was angry too,” you can look at two things separately: how much of a threat that person really is, and how strong your own feeling is. Then there is room to show your anger by saying no or keeping your distance, instead of through insults or violence.

    A lion runs down a lamb. Where is the evil in it?

    This is where the word aggression misleads. When Winnicott talks about aggression, he does not mean only what you’re picturing — the fist, the shouting, the wreckage afterward. He means energy: the force that moves you toward what you want, pushes obstacles out of the way, and protects you. The wish to hurt someone is one form that energy can take, but only one.

    Picture a lion running flat out and taking down a lamb in front of the lamb’s own mother. Ask yourself honestly: is the lion evil? The body driving forward, the claws, the teeth, the whole act — every part of that is aggression.

    And nobody watching calls the lion bad. We say it’s nature, and we mean it. We know what we are looking at: not evil, but the force of a living thing.

    But when the same force rises in you, you don’t see it that way. You call it a bad feeling and press it down the moment it appears. Same force, worse name, harsher judgment.

    Creativity is aggression that found somewhere to go

    When you accept aggression as part of yourself, you can steer its energy instead of blowing up or pressing it down. Love is what gives the force a direction. You can be angry with someone close to you and still love them. When you can feel both at once, you don’t have to attack the whole person with “I hate you.” You can say, “Stop doing that.” Held together with love like this, the force no longer has to attack anyone. You can use it to take on a problem, protect a boundary, or keep working until something is made.

    Creativity comes out of aggression.

    You probably don’t believe that yet, so stay with it a minute before you argue back. Think of the things we value most: wisdom, insight, recovery, love, gratitude, happiness, plain enjoyment. Every one of them grows out of this same force. None of them shows up in a person who has no force left.

    Think of something you finished that mattered. If there was a stretch in the middle where you were half furious — at the problem, at yourself, at how slowly it moved — that heat was doing work. Take the heat out and you’re left with a nice idea that never got built.

    Winnicott kept coming back to zest. The buzz. The fun of a thing. It’s what has you starting a project on a Saturday morning for no good reason, and it runs on the same force.

    If aggression looks only destructive, what you are seeing is the force without love or responsibility. When the same force is joined to love, it appears as protection, persistence, creativity, and the determination to recover.

    Getting better takes force too

    Think about what getting better actually takes. There is nothing soft about it.

    “I’m going to get through this.” “I’m going to live differently.” “I’m having this treated, whatever it takes out of me.” When a thought like that rises in you, that is force — aggression working on your side.

    And right behind it comes a second voice: “Don’t bother.” “Stay put.” “Who do you think you are?” The push back against that voice is force as well, and so is the whole struggle between the two.

    You can see what happens when this force runs short in people who have spent years swallowing their anger to keep things pleasant at work or at home. They never snap, never argue, never make anyone uncomfortable — and they also can’t get a single day started. Almost nobody, including them, sees that the two are connected: the force they press down to keep the peace is the same force they would need to get going.

    This force is what keeps a life moving. Without it, a life comes to a stop. Nothing appeals. Nothing pulls at you. Nothing gets going in the first place.

    Feeling aggression and attacking someone are not the same act. The feeling is energy inside you, and it carries information: it tells you where your limits are. Turning it on another person is an action, and whether you take that action is your choice. Being angry does not give you the right to hurt anyone. Violence and threats have to stop, and if it is hard to keep yourself under control, step away and get help.

    Before you press your anger back down

    Something will flare up in you today: irritation, the sting of being treated unfairly, an “Oh, come on” that lands in your chest.

    You already know your reflex: press it down, smile, move along. Give it three seconds first. While the feeling is still warm in your chest, ask it: What is this protecting? What does it want to get done?

    You may not get an answer. Ask anyway and let the day go on. Looking at your anger even once, instead of pressing it down, makes more of a difference than you might think. A person with no anger left is not calm. That person has run out of force, and nothing gets started anymore.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock. — being and doing.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958).

    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 Safe You Don’t Know You Own

    You’re rinsing a plate, or waiting at a red light, and it starts again. That conversation from years back. You know your lines, you know theirs, and you still lose the argument every time you replay it.

    Then comes the second thought, the heavy one. If I had handled that differently, everything since would look different now.

    Most of us carry two or three scenes like this. The sentence you said at the worst possible moment, to the person who deserved it least. The rest of that year has gone soft and grey, but that one scene stays sharp, right down to where your hands were.

    Everything you lived through taught you something

    Here’s how I see it. Whatever life you’ve lived, you learned something in it — and not only in the good years.

    The good years are the easy case. Ask what one of them gave you and the answer comes straight out. No digging required.

    But there is also the stretch you would never choose again — the one you skip past when somebody asks how you ended up here. Nobody signs up for a year like that. You learned something there anyway.

    If you slow down for a second, you can usually feel that you took something away from that year.

    So no life is a mistake. Nothing you lived through was wasted, because every stretch of it taught you something. That is why I say there is no reason to regret any of it.

    So why won’t the regret leave?

    If regret keeps circling the same event, here is what I think is happening. You did learn something from it. You just haven’t noticed what it was. And instead of noticing it, you keep blaming yourself: “You should have known better.”

    Listen to what regret actually tells you. You were stupid. You should have seen it coming. If you had done one thing differently, none of this would have happened.

    Read those back slowly and you’ll notice that not one of them tells you anything you can use: which warning sign you missed, what fear kept you from saying no, what to check next time. All you are doing is grabbing yourself by the collar. You can punish yourself for the past that way, but it will not change what you do next.

    There’s a safe behind your books

    Picture this. On the shelf in your living room, behind the row of paperbacks nobody has moved in years, there is a small safe. Inside it is a thick stack of cash — enough to change your year.

    You don’t know it’s there, because nobody ever mentioned it. You walk past that shelf every day without a thought.

    So here is the question. Are you a person who has that money, or a person who doesn’t?

    The money is there, and that part is settled whatever you happen to believe about it. Meanwhile you go on living as a person without it.

    Owning the money is one thing. Living as someone who has it is another.

    What you have lived through works the same way. Maybe a painful year taught you to spot manipulation, to say no sooner, or to notice when you are ignoring your own judgment. Whatever it taught you is really there, like the money in the safe. But because you are not aware of it, you conclude, “I learned nothing from that.” And then all that is left is blaming yourself: How could you be so stupid? Why did you make the same choice all over again?

    What changes on the day you find the safe

    Imagine the books coming off that shelf one Saturday, and there it is.

    Nothing new arrived that morning. Not a cent. The only thing that changed is that you know.

    And that changes everything after it, because nobody leaves money sitting in a box once they know it’s there. It gets spent. Plans you put off for years are back on the table, because the reason you put them off has quietly stopped being true.

    Learning works the same way: once you know it is there, you use it. Say you can put what a painful relationship taught you into one sentence: “I now notice when I start making excuses for someone who treats me with contempt.” Then you can act on it in the very next conversation. The past does not change, but the way you use it can.

    Why the same thing keeps happening

    You promise yourself you’ll speak up sooner. Then the next time comes, and you go quiet again. And out comes the usual verdict: I never learn.

    The verdict is the loudest part of that loop — promise, silence, verdict, and round again. Every time the loop comes round, the verdict says the same thing: I never learn. I’m just someone who never changes. But look at what that verdict rests on: the times you went quiet before. You have only ever used those memories one way, as proof that you failed.

    Here is what keeps the loop going. Those times did teach you something, but you never put what they taught you into words. And what you have never put into words, you cannot reach for when you need it. So when the next time comes, you walk in with the same old habits and go quiet again.

    You are not short on experience. The same thing keeps happening not because you learned nothing, but because what you learned is still sitting in the safe, unused.

    Write one line about the regret that comes back most

    Pick the regret that visits you more than the rest — the one you could describe in your sleep. That memory is like the safe in the picture. You go back to it again and again, but you have never once looked inside to see what it holds. Write a single line about it, by hand if you can: “What I know now, because of that, is ___.”

    You will probably get stuck at the blank. That is to be expected. Until now you have used this memory only as proof that you are no good, never as something to learn from. So it may take a while before anything other than “I was stupid” comes to mind.

    If you get even one line down, you have found one thing you thought you never had, and it was there the whole time. And if the line stays empty for now, that is not proof that you never learn. It means your hand is finally on the handle of the safe, even though the door has not opened yet.

    That memory was never evidence against you. It was the safe, and what you learned has been inside it all along.

    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

  • Daydreaming for Hours: In My Head, I Was King

    You sat down to handle one small thing — a form with a deadline on it, a load of laundry, an email that needed four lines. You are still sitting there. Your computer screen has gone dark while you weren’t looking, and somehow it is already late afternoon.

    Your hands never moved the whole time. But you weren’t doing nothing. In your head you were somewhere else, somewhere better, where you were stronger and quicker and everything went the way you decided.

    A hurt child has three ways to go

    When a child is hurt badly at a young age — abused, or scolded and brushed aside every time they try to speak up — the child has to react somehow. The reaction usually takes one of three forms.

    The first is the good child. To make their mother happy, this child does whatever she asks, and does it well. Keeping her pleased becomes the child’s whole job.

    The second is the angry child. This child doesn’t keep the anger inside. It comes straight out, and the child turns defiant and aggressive.

    The third child neither tries to please the adults nor openly fights them. This child shuts the door on the outside world, stops expecting comfort from people, and retreats into an inner world of their own, where the child is in control.

    Why the third child ends up daydreaming

    It is the third child who drifts into daydreams. Not the good one. Not the angry one. The one who went quiet and stayed that way.

    The reason is simple. When being with people keeps ending in scolding, shame, or a fight, the child learns it is safer to look for comfort inside their own head. In real life, the child cannot change so much as the look on a parent’s face. In their head, the child decides what happens, gets the praise real life doesn’t give, and is stronger than anyone. A child who does this for hours at a time, again and again, ends up with a habit: whenever something hurts, the mind slips into a daydream on its own.

    I was the third child

    I was the third one.

    My mother and I could never really talk to each other, and I was scolded and punished constantly. I’d like to tell you that was unfair, but I know how it started. Doing what she told me felt like losing to her, as if I were handing her the win myself.

    So I refused, every time. Refusing got me punished more. The more I was punished, the more everything between us felt like a contest, so I refused even harder. In the end, pulling away from people felt easier than being with them.

    I didn’t become the good child, and I didn’t become the angry one either. I closed myself off and stayed inside my own world.

    My daydream never changed

    I had one daydream. Just the one. The details moved around, but the story underneath never changed.

    In it, I was powerful and capable, and I controlled everything: nothing happened unless I had already decided it would. I had a castle of my own, and in that castle I was king. I was the strongest one in every room I walked into. I knew everything before anyone told me. Whatever I wanted done got done, and it got done immediately.

    In real life, I was the exact opposite of all that. I had no power and nothing of my own, and I was always in trouble with my mother.

    In that daydream I gave myself the comfort I couldn’t get from people. I won’t pretend that comfort was nothing. The daydream was the one place I got to rest, so I kept going back and staying there.

    In the castle, I lost track of time

    The trouble was that once I was inside the castle, I stayed for hours. One thought led to the next, and that one led to another, and nothing in the story ever told me to stop. I had no idea how much time had gone by.

    Meanwhile I sat perfectly still in a real chair, in a real room, with real work to do.

    The page I never turned

    There was schoolwork waiting for me. There was cleaning waiting. My body stayed exactly where it was.

    In those hours I could have turned one page of the book lying open in front of me. Just one page. I could have put a load of laundry on. I could have washed the dishes already sitting in the sink — not every dish in the house, only those.

    I did none of it. Not one page. Not one load. Not one plate.

    The same thing happens at any age. A daydream makes the feeling of helplessness go away at once, so you keep going back to it. But while you feel strong and comforted in your head, the form, the email and the laundry stay untouched. By the end of the day the task is still there, and now you are also ashamed of yourself for not doing it. So you go back into the daydream, where you are strong again, and the cycle starts over.

    You probably have a castle too

    Your daydream probably doesn’t have an actual castle in it. Mine did, because the castle gave me power, and power was exactly what I didn’t have in real life.

    Whatever happens in your daydream, notice what it gives you. That is usually what you are missing in real life. If you are always being praised there, ask yourself whether you feel that nobody around you ever gives you credit. If you keep picturing yourself making someone give in, ask yourself whether there is anger you have never said out loud to the people in your life, or a line you have never told them not to cross.

    Outside the walls, the day went on without me

    I won’t tell you the daydream was my enemy. It gave me the comfort I wasn’t getting from people. I rested there, and I kept going back.

    Inside the castle I was king. Everything answered to me and nothing could reach me.

    Outside the castle, the day went on. The daydream protected me from feeling powerless, but it also kept me from doing small things, like turning one page or putting on one load of laundry. Real power comes from finishing small things like these. Each one you finish shows you that you can actually make something happen in the real world.

    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

  • Chiron’s Wound: When the Lid Stops Holding

    Burying it was never a character flaw. I want that settled before anything else, because people skip past it and then carry a low hum of shame through everything that follows.

    For a long stretch you had a method, and it worked. Something hurt, so you didn’t look at it. You set it in the back somewhere and got on with the morning.

    Then the method begins to fail. Memories return without warning, small events produce reactions that feel too large, and the feelings you once postponed begin interrupting ordinary days.

    What a week actually held back then

    You buried it because burying it was how you kept going. You have to get through the day. Somebody was waiting on you — a shift that started early, a kid who needed picking up, a parent who expected the Sunday call, a bill with a date printed on it. You couldn’t stop and sit with an old injury and still be out the door on time.

    Look honestly at what a week contained back then. There was no afternoon in it for this. There was no one in it who could have covered for you while you sat down with the worst thing that ever happened to you. So the wound got a lid, and the lid held, and the week got done.

    You covered the sore place and looked away from it. That wasn’t weakness. That was an adaptation — the right move for the conditions you were living in. It kept you upright. It deserves some credit, not an apology.

    Somewhere around forty, the method quits

    Then it stops working. In my experience that’s usually somewhere around forty, give or take a few years.

    Something begins in people around then. You start, slowly and without deciding to, to live as yourself — rather than as the person you put together just to get through it. Jung had a word for that: individuation. Heavy word, plain meaning. You become the particular person you are, instead of the useful version of you that the years required.

    Here’s the catch. You cannot become more fully yourself while continuing to organize your life around never feeling what happened.

    The avoided experience has to be recognized as an injury rather than treated as evidence of weakness. That recognition connects present reactions to their cause. Without it, you may remain highly functional while continuing to avoid relationships, situations, and feelings that remind you of the wound.

    Which is why, right around then, the mind starts bringing things back out. What you set in the back somewhere won’t stay where you put it. You cry at something small and feel ridiculous about it. A certain tone of voice from a coworker drops you into a room you haven’t thought about in a very long time. It can look like falling apart. It isn’t only that.

    A mind doesn’t get wider for free

    Think about what it takes to build a body. You pay for it in the body. The strain, the shaking on the last rep, the ache the next morning that tells you exactly which muscle you used.

    Psychological growth also requires strain. When you begin facing what you avoided, you may cry more easily, feel tired, remember forgotten details, or become angry about things you once minimized. Those reactions are the immediate cost of allowing previously excluded experience back into awareness.

    The centaur who couldn’t die

    There’s an old story I keep returning to here. It’s about Chiron.

    He was one of the centaurs — part man, part horse. His father was a god, and that was why his body couldn’t die. Then a poisoned arrow found him.

    Anybody else would have died from that poison. That’s what such a poison is for. Chiron couldn’t. And in his case, being unable to die was not a gift. It meant feeling what the poison did to him, with no end to it. Pain with no far edge.

    Most people recognize that shape without needing the myth explained. Something got in a long time ago. It didn’t kill you. It also never finished.

    He went down, not around

    The pain grew so large that Chiron went down — to Hades, the world below.

    He had no death of his own to die. Prometheus was chained to a rock under a punishment that would not end. So Chiron gave up the deathlessness — handed it over, so that Prometheus could be let off the rock — and took a death he could finally die.

    He didn’t come back up. He was already the physician before any of this, the one Asclepius learned medicine from. What the wound changed was the kind of physician he was: patient, merciful, grown.

    Notice what the story says about pain. Chiron did not escape it by distraction or by waiting for it to disappear. He faced it directly and accepted that his old form of life could not continue. In psychological terms, change begins when avoidance stops and the injury is allowed to become conscious.

    The other road was open the whole time

    This is the part I find most useful, and it’s the easiest one to miss.

    Chiron had another option. There are ways to arrange a life so that pain stops reaching you. Keep the calendar full. Never be alone in a quiet house. Stay busy enough that nothing ever catches up with you. He could have done all of that, and he would have lived. People live that way for a long time.

    But avoiding pain this way has a cost. You may keep answering messages and meeting obligations while losing interest, emotional range, and closeness with other people. The life remains functional, but less and less of you is emotionally present in it.

    He didn’t take that road. He faced it straight on, body and spirit together, all the way down — and that is the only reason he was any good afterward.

    Watch a child after a hard stretch

    Anyone who has raised one knows this. A child goes through something genuinely difficult, and afterward the child is bigger. Not taller. Steadier. Handling things nobody taught them in the meantime. You catch yourself thinking, when did that happen?

    None of it is pleasant while it runs. The child doesn’t enjoy it, and neither does anybody standing nearby, watching and unable to fix it. The growth shows up later, and only to people who kept looking.

    Pain does the same thing to grown people. It takes longer, and it’s uglier while it runs. When you’re hurting, you look at everything again. Things you thought were fixed turn out to be things somebody decided. Things you never once noticed become the only things in the room. Who actually calls. What you keep apologizing for. Which rooms you go quiet in.

    It’s an awful way to learn anything, and I wouldn’t wish the tuition on anyone. But people who go through it without running usually build something steadier on the other side than what they had before.

    A name said once, inside your own head

    I’m not going to tell you to open anything today. Opening takes preparation, and preparation isn’t something a page can hand you.

    There’s a smaller thing, though. One item has probably been surfacing lately — most likely the one that showed up while you were reading this. Don’t write it down. Name it silently, in your head, in about three words. “That thing she said.” “The one nobody ever asked about.” That short.

    No explaining. No working out what it means. All it does is admit there is something under the lid, and admitting is where this starts.

    Chiron carried the poison all the way down with him, and he is remembered as a physician.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1928). The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 7. — individuation.
    • Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Aldus Books.

    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 Gave Past Your Limit. That’s Why You Resent Them.

    She goes to her mother’s every day. She listens, she pays for what her mother needs out of her own pocket, and she never once says it is too much for her. Everyone around her says she is a saint. Then she gets in the car. On the drive home a thought comes that she would never say out loud to anyone — something like: that woman is never going to die. It shocks her. On the outside she is the good daughter. So where does such a hateful thought come from?

    The thought that arrives on the drive home

    Being kind to people is a good thing. The trouble starts when kindness turns into a rule you have to obey: “I have to be a good person.” “I have to be the kind one.” Once you live by that rule, you stop asking how much you can actually do. You do what the rule demands — and it demands more than you can give.

    Say the person you look after is your own father — though it could just as well be your husband’s mother, or the neighbor nobody else checks on. You could simply do what you are really able to do. Instead you do more, because you can already hear what people would say if you did less. Doing more than you can is where the resentment starts. From the outside, you are wonderful to him. Inside, a thought forms: he’s past eighty, and he still won’t die.

    That thought does not mean you are a bad person. It means you have been giving more time, money, and attention than you can sustain, with no end in sight. You keep asking yourself how much longer you will be paying for this, and how much longer you will have to go over there every day. You don’t allow yourself to do less, and you can’t say that it is too much. So the tiredness turns into resentment, and the resentment lands on the person you are caring for. That person starts to look like the cause of your exhaustion. The resentment keeps growing until you say, “I can do this much, and no more.”

    Being called selfish hurts less than hating the person you care for

    Now imagine it the other way: you do only as much as you are really able to, and then you step back. People will talk. Some of it will get back to you, and it stings.

    But you are far less likely to end up resenting the person you care for, because you did what you could and stopped at your limit. Other people’s criticism may hurt for a while. Giving more than you can, day after day, does lasting damage: it can turn your affection into hatred, until you can hardly stand to be near the person you set out to care for.

    Who handed you the word “should”?

    “You should do this.” “You should never do that.” Rules like these came from outside you — from your family, the people around you, the times you grew up in. You do need some of them. A life with no rules at all would not work.

    But a rule is not an absolute truth. Keeping one does not make you good, and breaking one does not make you bad. We forget that constantly, because rules look exactly like the truth.

    The yardstick keeps changing

    You can tell these rules are not the truth, because they change. A whole society lives by them, and the ones it holds on to hardest shift over time. In Korea, where I work, there was a time when a person without a university degree was hardly treated as a person. Wedding plans could be going well until somebody found out the groom had no degree. From that moment he was seen as a lesser kind of person, though nothing about him had changed.

    Degrees still matter there, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But there are more ways to succeed now, and parents are less fixed on a degree than they used to be. This is what happens as a society matures: the things you can see — money, the name of your university, your job title — lose some of their hold. What starts to count for more is what you can’t see: whether people’s rights are respected, what a person’s character is like, whether they care about anyone besides themselves.

    What happens to the people who lose the fight for power and money

    The less mature a society is, the harder it clings to power and money. In a society like that, people without power or money get treated badly, so everyone rushes to get them. People fight each other bitterly for them. And whoever loses that fight is no longer treated as a person at all.

    A man who loses that fight is left feeling robbed. He carries despair, frustration, and anger at the society that did this to him. He can’t make a decent living the ordinary way. So one day he thinks: to hell with it — one big score and I’ll finally have some money. That is how he falls into gambling.

    The arithmetic that keeps him going back

    Why can’t he stop once he has started? There are deeper psychological reasons as well, and I will come to one of them. But the reason he is aware of is simple arithmetic. By now he is deep in debt, and gambling looks like the only way he could ever pay it off.

    Say he does hard physical labor — hauling, lifting, whatever job pays that week. He works every day for a whole month, and it earns him one paycheck. His debt is hundreds of times the size of that paycheck. He could never pay it off with honest wages, and he knows it.

    So one thought takes hold and won’t let go: if I play it right — just once, if I play it right — I can pay off the whole debt. To him that is not a fantasy. It is the only calculation he has that ends with him out of debt. So he keeps going back.

    The deeper reason lies in the part of his mind he isn’t aware of. There, the aim is not to pay off the debt at all. The aim is to destroy himself, and you can see it in what he does. There are nights when he is ahead. He could stand up and walk out with money in his pocket, and he doesn’t. He is not trying to get out of gambling and failing. Deep down, part of him does not want to get out. It wants to ruin him.

    Addiction starts with refusing to admit your limits

    Every road into addiction has one thing in common: the person refuses to admit the limits of what he can actually do.

    The twelve-step program — the recovery program used by Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups — begins with exactly what the addicted person refuses to do: admitting a limit. Its first step asks you to admit that you are powerless: that you cannot control the drinking, the gambling, or whatever it is by willpower alone.

    The addicted mind is grandiose. Deep inside it sits a conviction: I am somebody special. I can go past any limit. Whatever wall other people hit, I can step over it. Psychology calls this feeling omnipotence — the private sense that nothing is beyond your reach.

    The woman who drives to her mother’s every day and the man who keeps gambling look as if they have nothing in common. But neither will admit a limit. She acts as though her time, money, and patience can never run out. He believes that one good night — “just once, if I play it right” — can pay off a debt that honest work never could. And because neither admits the limit, neither stops at it: she keeps giving until she hates the person she is caring for, and he keeps betting while his losses grow.

    Cut back to what you can actually give

    Pick one thing you are doing right now that is more than you can really manage. Just one, not everything. Choose the one you keep doing because doing less of it feels like it would be a disaster.

    I’m not telling you to stop doing it. Do as much of it as you can really manage, and then step back. Somebody will notice. What comes up in you then is the fear of being called selfish. That discomfort is expected. Stay with it for a week, without going back to doing more just to make the feeling stop.

    Then notice what goes through your head on the way home. Is that hateful thought quieter? If it is, the person you care for has not changed. What changed is how much you chose to give. Once the driving, the paying, and the listening have a clear limit, you can keep helping without feeling that the other person will take and take without end.

    One exception. This exercise is for people who are giving more care than they can. If you or someone in your home is already gambling, an exercise like this is not enough. Find a clinician who treats addiction, and start there.

    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 Taking Orders Feels Like an Insult

    Your manager stops at your desk and says, “Do this one differently next time.” That’s the whole event. No raised voice, no audience, nothing unfair in the words. But your jaw sets before she’s finished the sentence, and before you’ve even weighed what she said, a thought is already there: Who does she think she is?

    The work isn’t what’s hard. Being told is.

    You’ve probably noticed this in yourself before. When something is your own idea, you do it gladly. When the very same thing comes to you as an instruction, something in you locks up. The work hasn’t changed. The only difference is that someone told you to do it.

    When a child first speaks up for herself, she says “no”

    Babies don’t arrive as separate people. For a long stretch, as far as the baby is concerned, she and her mother are not yet two people. The psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler called this stage symbiosis: mother and baby live as if they were one, with no line yet between where one ends and the other begins.

    Then the child starts to pull away from that oneness, and that is when she begins to push back against her mother. Look at the first words she uses to make her own wishes known.

    Not “I like this,” and not “I want that one.” It’s “no,” and “don’t.” She starts with refusals.

    That isn’t a small child misbehaving. It’s a step she has to take. When a toddler plants her feet and says no to the person she loves most, she is doing something enormous. For the first time, she is someone who is not her mother.

    Each “no” shows her, in action, that her mother wants one thing and she wants another. That is how a child first finds out that she has a will of her own, separate from her mother’s.

    We go through this separation twice, and the second time is louder

    Mahler had a name for this whole process: separation-individuation. You separate from that sense of being one with your mother, and you become an individual, someone who can say “I’m here, I’m me.” It doesn’t happen once and then finish. We go through it twice: once as toddlers, and again in adolescence. Another psychoanalyst, Peter Blos, called the teenage round “the second individuation.”

    The toddler version is small enough to be funny. She marches off across the park as if she’s leaving for good, until her mother catches her by the arm and pulls her back. She looks her mother in the eye and takes one more bite of the very thing she was told not to eat.

    Adolescence is the full-strength version. Now the pushing back comes with real opinions, and with a bigger body and a louder voice. It’s the same job the toddler was doing, on a far bigger scale.

    Why good advice sends a teenager the other way

    A teenager is trying to show that he exists as his own person: that his opinions and choices are his, not his parents’. Going against them is the quickest way to show it.

    That is why even sensible advice can send him in the opposite direction. If he simply does what his parents say, it feels as if he has no mind of his own, as if the choice were theirs and not his. So he goes against it.

    Parents feel wronged by this, and honestly, fair enough. The more they point him toward the good road, the more likely he is to head down the bad one. But he isn’t arguing about the road. He’s arguing about who gave the directions.

    The passcode on the phone

    Adolescence seems to start earlier these days, around fourth grade, at nine or ten. That is when many children begin openly defying their parents. A passcode goes on the phone, and the bedroom door shuts a little harder than it strictly needs to. Both say the same thing: stay out.

    Parents feel their stomach drop, but this is not a disaster. A child has to rebel in some form or other. The toddler’s “no” was small, and in the years since, she has mostly lived by fitting in with what her parents want. Rebelling now is how she breaks out of that and starts living as herself. The passcode isn’t really about the phone. It is a child finding out that there is something she alone gets to decide. Going through this rebellion is what a healthy adolescence looks like.

    So does being a grown-up mean swallowing your feelings and doing as you’re told?

    This is the part that matters. Once the rebellion has done its job and you know you exist as your own person, you become an adult. And an adult can do something a teenager can’t.

    Someone with authority tells you to do a thing, and part of you hears it as an insult. You can do it anyway — not because you caved, but because you know that doing as you’re told won’t make you stop being your own person. That’s an adult.

    Notice that nothing gets swallowed here. You still feel the sting, you still do the task, and one doesn’t cancel the other. The sting is a feeling passing through, not proof that you’ve been crushed.

    But if the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, being told what to do becomes unbearable. Before you’ve even taken in what an instruction says, it feels like an attack on your right to run your own life. Your body braces, the thought “Who does she think she is?” arrives, and you resist even when you agree with the task. Your manager ends up receiving resistance that was first meant for a parent, years ago.

    Why the trouble is always with whoever is above you

    This reaction is strongest in people whose relationship with their father went badly, especially a father who gave orders and allowed no questions. A manager, a senior colleague, anyone above them: there’s always friction, always some version of the same fight, and it doesn’t go away. And the odd part is how specific it is: they bristle only at people above them.

    If your father used his authority to control, humiliate, or overpower you, that wound stays with you. Years later, anyone with authority over you can feel like the same threat. Your manager is not your father. But she stands where he stood, as someone who can tell you what to do. That alone is enough to make your body brace and your jaw set, as it once did with him, before you’ve looked at what is actually happening.

    So on an ordinary afternoon you are angry at your manager, but the strength of that anger comes partly from much earlier, from a time when being told what to do meant being humiliated or losing control over your own life. The anger you couldn’t voice in front of your father comes up along with it.

    When the people and rules above you are wrong

    Growing up comes down to something plain in the end: you accept that the world has an order, that some people and some rules have authority over you. At work, that means a manager. Beyond work, it means laws and government policies. That is reality, whether you like it or not.

    And that order is not always right. A law, a policy, the person above you: any of them can be wrong, and sometimes badly. When that happens, you should be able to see it and say so out loud: “This isn’t right.”

    Where people part ways is in how they respond to something wrong. The mature route uses the proper channels to change it. At work, that means checking the rules and gathering the facts before you raise the problem. With a law or a policy, it means finding the others who see the problem too, researching it, and campaigning for change. Either way, you keep making your case with reasons, and that route asks you to stay with it for a long time.

    The other route wants it settled this afternoon. When the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, or the old wound from your father is still open, you go after the person instead of the problem: “Who do you think you are?” You blame, and you try to win by force rather than by reasons.

    What was said, or the fact of being told

    So the next time your jaw sets, don’t answer right away. Ask yourself one question first.

    Is this about what she said, or about the fact that she’s the one who gets to say it?

    If it’s the content that bothers you, you may have a real point, and a real point can be raised. Don’t stop at “this feels bad.” Work out what the rules say, what the facts are, and what harm the instruction could do, and take that to her. That is the mature route.

    If the content was honestly fine, it’s worth asking whether the person you’re fighting is really the person in front of you. Would you react the same way if a coworker at your own level had said exactly the same words? If not, the reaction may go back to your father, and your manager has simply stepped into the place he once stood.

    References

    • Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books.
    • Blos, P. (1967). The Second Individuation Process of Adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 22, 162–186. — the second individuation in adolescence is Blos’s formulation, not Mahler’s.

    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 Self-Prescription: What You’ve Been Taking Every Day

    Nothing happened this month. No crisis, no bad news, nothing you could point at. So why does every day feel so heavy?

    Someone asks about a hard time you went through a while back, and you hear yourself say it’s fine. The strange part is that you mean it. When you actually think back on it, you feel almost nothing. Yet you can’t get moving. Coffee doesn’t help. A weekend of rest doesn’t bring your energy back. And none of this seems to have anything to do with what happened back then, which you barely think about anymore.

    Forgetting what happened pushes down the feeling too

    Something hard happens, and a feeling comes with it. The feeling hurts more than you can hold right then. So you try to forget the event itself. You steer your mind elsewhere every time it drifts back. The subject comes up and you change it, and you get good at changing it. Someone brings it up at dinner and you reach for the bread and ask about their kids. Time passes, the trick keeps working, and after a while the event hardly crosses your mind.

    Forgetting does more than make the memory fade. It also pushes down the feeling you had at the time. Each time the subject comes up and you change it, busy yourself, or go numb, you also cut off the sadness, fear, or anger before you can really feel it. So the event gets harder to remember, but the feeling never gets to run its course. It is still there, and it goes on affecting your energy, your attention, and the way you react.

    No feeling is a bad feeling

    I don’t think any emotion is bad on its own. Sadness, joy, fear — each one is part of the energy that makes a person feel alive instead of merely awake.

    Even the feelings you’d happily do without have a job. Fear and worry are your gut telling you: protect yourself. Some feelings have to be felt, or you’d walk straight into the thing that hurts you.

    We sort them into good ones and bad ones anyway. That’s where the trouble starts. You end up with a list of feelings you are not allowed to have. Then, whenever one of them shows up, it becomes a problem you have to get rid of.

    The prescription you write for yourself

    The painful feelings really do hurt, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. So you do something about it. You wipe the event from your mind, or you clamp down hard on whatever starts rising inside. For a while it goes quiet again. You’re reaching for a little peace with the only tools in your hand.

    Handling pain your own way like this is what I call a self-prescription. Nobody taught it to you. No doctor signed it, and no pharmacy filled it. You worked out the dose on your own: stay busy, laugh it off, keep the conversation moving, be the one who’s doing fine. It was the only medicine in the cabinet then. You took it the way anyone takes the only thing they have.

    And it works. Not a little, either — in the moment you honestly do not hurt. So you take another dose when the subject comes up in a meeting. You take one more at the family gathering, when someone asks, as someone always does, how you’re holding up. The refill is automatic by now.

    Why keeping a feeling down wears you out

    The trouble comes later. A feeling you push down doesn’t leave, and keeping it down takes work, over and over: steering around certain memories, watching where conversations are heading, staying busy, and shutting down any reaction that starts to rise.

    Over time, that work uses up the energy you need for ordinary life. You tire early, put off simple tasks, lose interest in things you used to enjoy, and cannot explain why. You may not feel sad at all. You may simply be awake and getting through the day without feeling fully alive.

    Not knowing why is its own small misery. As far as you can tell, nothing is wrong, so there’s nothing to fix. But something is happening inside you, quietly.

    Feelings don’t disappear. They come out somewhere else.

    A feeling you refuse to feel doesn’t quietly go away. It changes shape and comes out somewhere else, usually in a moment that seems to have nothing to do with what caused it.

    You snap at a coworker over a jammed printer. You go cold on a friend who did nothing at all. Your eyes sting at a commercial about a dog, in a room full of people, with no warning. Afterward you think: no idea where that came from. None of it is about the printer, the friend, or the dog.

    The original feeling never went away. You didn’t let yourself feel it when it first came, so it comes out later, when something smaller and safer gives it an opening. The printer, the friend, or the commercial sets it off, but the size of your reaction comes from the older feeling, one you have never put a name to. So you end up going through the pain you tried to avoid anyway — only later, and worse.

    Going back to the feeling you pushed down

    The way through is exactly what the prescription was meant to stop you from doing: going back and feeling what you pushed down. Nothing in you wants to do that, and that reluctance is the prescription doing its job. You return to what you have been stepping around, and you let the feeling be there. It is the least comfortable thing this piece asks of you.

    Letting the feeling be there means saying plainly what it was: “That hurt me.” “I was frightened.” “I was furious, and I never said a word about it.” No editing. No ranking it against what other people have survived. No hurrying to the part where you’re over it.

    Be clear about what’s being asked, too. You don’t have to dig the whole thing up. You don’t have to replay the worst day at full volume. You only have to stop arguing with yourself about it. You’ve been building a case against yourself: you shouldn’t have felt that, it wasn’t that bad, other people had it worse. Drop the case.

    As long as you hold a feeling down, you can’t deal with it. It becomes easier to handle once you stop spending energy denying that it exists. Naming it — “I was frightened,” “I was furious” — connects the feeling to what caused it. Once you can see what you felt and why, the feeling no longer hangs over you as a heaviness you can’t explain, or spills out at people and moments that had nothing to do with it. You can grieve what happened and let it go, instead of fighting yourself for reacting to it.

    The prescription you wrote yourself today

    You wrote yourself a prescription today. Everybody does. It might read like one of these: “Kept busy all day.” “Said I was fine and changed the subject.” “It came up and I laughed and asked about the weather.” “Left the TV on until it was late enough to fall asleep without thinking.” Small doses, taken on schedule, so routine that you barely notice them.

    A pharmacist reads the label out before handing over the bottle. What’s in it. How much of it. What it does to you if you keep taking it. Nobody has ever done that for the prescription you give yourself every day.

    So write down one line: what you gave yourself today, and nothing more. That one line is the whole label. You don’t have to change the prescription; so far, it has been the best way you knew to get by. Just read the line out loud.

    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