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  • Why That One Person Gets Under Your Skin

    There’s one person you can’t let slide. Everybody else in the room lets it go — they roll their eyes, they move on, they’ve forgotten about it by the time they get to the parking lot. You haven’t. Something about the way that person takes credit, or opens a sentence with “no offense, but,” goes into you like a splinter and stays there. Their name comes up in conversation and your voice changes, and the strange part is you can hear it changing while it happens. Then you’re driving home and the question arrives: why did I go that hard? Nobody else did.

    That difference between your reaction and everyone else’s matters. The person may really be irritating. But when you react far harder than anyone else, it can be a sign that their behavior has touched something in you — a desire or anger of your own that you find hard to admit. So to understand why you stay angry for hours while everyone else moves on, you have to ask not only what they did, but why it hits you so hard.

    Where does your mind put a feeling it can’t stand?

    Some feelings belong to you and you still won’t look at them straight on. The small ugly jealousy when a friend gets the news you wanted for yourself. The mean, calculating thought you’d never say out loud to anybody. Anger that arrives at a size the situation obviously doesn’t deserve.

    When a feeling is too uncomfortable to admit as your own, the mind may hand it to someone else — and then find it in them. It’s a bit like tossing your own garbage over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, then looking over the next morning and complaining about how filthy their yard is. You feel competitive but accuse a colleague of turning everything into a contest. You want attention but become preoccupied with how desperately someone else seeks it. You haven’t stopped seeing the competitiveness or the hunger for attention. You just see it in them, and only in them.

    This is called projection. Your judgment of the other person feels completely true, partly because it may be true: they may really be competitive, or really hungry for attention. Projection doesn’t need you to make up something that isn’t there. It makes you stare at that trait in them, and keeps you from seeing the same thing in yourself.

    I call this an uncomfortable truth. It isn’t pleasant to hear, and there’s no gentle way to say it. But you can’t see yourself without bearing that discomfort. You can recognize the feelings you’ve been handing to other people only as far as you can stand to know they’re yours. Not an inch past that.

    What did Melanie Klein see in the first months of life?

    The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described in close detail what goes on in the mind of a very young baby. In her account, the first thing in that mind is terror.

    Not fear of something in particular — not dogs or strangers or the dark. A baby has no strength, no words, and no way of making anything at all happen. What it has instead is the raw sense that it could simply stop existing. Blink out, gone, nothing left where it used to be. Klein called this annihilation anxiety. It isn’t a fear of dying the way you or I think about dying, as something that will happen someday. A baby has no sense of “later,” so hunger doesn’t feel like a delay it can wait out. It feels like the end of everything.

    Terror like that is more than a baby can bear, and the baby’s mind finds a way to make it smaller.

    To see how, you need one more piece: there’s also destructiveness inside the baby, and it isn’t mild — hot, wrecking, wanting to smash whatever is nearest. Klein never believed infants were sweet blank pages waiting to be written on. But the baby can’t accept that this fury is its own, any more than it can bear the terror. So the fury gets thrown out, away, into the first outside thing the baby has ever met: its mother’s breast, the one that feeds it. Psychoanalysts call that first outside thing the object — their word for whoever or whatever our feelings are aimed at.

    This is how the terror gets smaller. The fury no longer seems to be inside the baby; now it seems to come at the baby from out there, from the breast. It’s a terrible bargain — the very breast that feeds it now feels threatening — but it is still easier to bear than the alternative. A baby is far too small and too new to hold the thought “this savagery is mine.”

    Why does the fault always seem to be in someone else?

    The habit of throwing out what we can’t bear stays with us into adulthood. In an adult, though, it doesn’t look like throwing anything. It looks like a confident judgment about someone, backed by a list of examples. And because you can list everything that person did, you never ask why this one fault takes up so much of your mind.

    Here’s something that sounds backwards until you check it against your own life: the more badness you find in other people, the more of it may be quietly sitting in you.

    Say “they’re all selfish” often enough, with enough conviction, and you make a rule without noticing you made it: selfishness is a thing other people have. So the next time you take the last of something without asking, the thought can’t arrive as “that was selfish of me.” It has to arrive as “I was in a hurry,” or “they didn’t really want it.” Once selfishness belongs only to other people, your own selfishness has no place to show openly, so you hide it more deeply — even from yourself. The more you hide it, the less of yourself you get to see.

    That’s the real cost of saying “they’re all selfish.” The cost isn’t that you’re being unfair to them. You may be entirely right about them — plenty of people really are selfish, and saying so isn’t a crime. The cost is that you become harder to see. To yourself.

    So who is the mature one here? Not the person with no dark side. Nobody is free of one, and anybody claiming otherwise is bluffing. The mature one is whoever can say, quietly and without making a show of it, “yeah, some of that is in me too.”

    The sentence doesn’t feel good, and saying it fixes nothing on its own — it certainly won’t make you nicer by Tuesday. Saying it takes strength, though. You have to be able to think “some of that is in me” without it flattening you for the rest of the night — and then get up and finish the dishes. When you don’t have that strength yet, the mind falls back on what the baby did: throw it out, find it in someone else, feel better for an hour or so.

    Why does a fight make you more certain instead of less?

    Projection is also why fights break out in close relationships. Two people can do this to each other at the same time: each one places their own unwanted feelings on the other, and then finds them there. Each now sees the badness in the other person, so a clash is hard to avoid.

    Now think of a fight of your own, and watch what happens to both of you as it heats up. You’d expect an argument to introduce a little doubt — more information, more of the other person’s side, more room to wonder. It does the opposite. The louder it gets, the more badly you need to prove the fault is theirs: “That’s not mine. You did this.” Every time you say it, you believe it a little more.

    That’s why an argument about something small, like the dishes, so quickly stops being about the dishes. It turns into a contest over who the bad one is, and neither of you can afford to lose it.

    By this point, each of you is treating a picture in your own head as the complete truth. Psychoanalysis calls this kind of picture a fantasy. In this sense a fantasy is not a lie you’ve made up. To you, the picture feels like plain fact, and that is what makes it so hard to shift. Your mind has arranged what happened so that the other person carries all the badness and you carry none of it. That is why nothing new gets through. Accepting even part of the other person’s side would mean admitting that some of the badness is yours, and that is exactly what the picture protects you from.

    And the firmer that picture becomes, the less you can see of what’s inside you. So the next time you’re absolutely sure about somebody, the certainty itself is worth a second look.

    Were you ever really alone, even as a newborn?

    Here’s the heart of Klein’s idea, and it starts with something almost too obvious to notice.

    Projection needs an object — someone or something to place the feeling in. You can’t throw something at someone who isn’t there. So if a newborn is already throwing its fury into the breast, then someone else is already in the baby’s world from the first weeks of life. The baby’s mind is turned toward its mother from the very beginning, long before it can recognize that the breast it knows belongs to a whole, separate person.

    Klein followed this simple point all the way through, and it led her to disagree with Freud.

    Freud had pictured the newborn as a sealed little world, wrapped up in itself, only bumping into other people later on. Klein said no. We don’t start out alone and then pick up relationships as a skill, the way we eventually pick up walking. We start out already in a relationship. The very first thing a baby ever does with its mind, it does toward somebody.

    That’s where the term object relations comes from. It names this way of understanding people: a person begins life not alone, but in a relationship with an object — someone to aim feelings at. You were never a closed room that later grew a door.

    Who got to you today?

    You know exactly who. Bring that person to mind.

    Name what you couldn’t stand about them, and keep it to a single word, because one word is more than enough. Selfish. Cold. Fake. Careless.

    Then take the word — just the word, not the person, not the history, not the list of everything they’ve done — and ask yourself one question about it: Is any of this in me?

    Now don’t try to answer it — I mean that seriously. If something surfaces on its own, fine, but don’t go hunting for it. Finding an answer matters less than the turn itself: the finger you’ve been pointing at them swings back toward you for one second. For that one second, the picture in your head — all the badness is theirs, none of it is mine — starts to crack. One crack is plenty for tonight.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.

    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 Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow: Carl Jung on the Part You Won’t Look At

    You know someone who has never once been wrong — not in their own account of it, anyway. The argument was the other person’s fault, the job went bad because the manager had it in for them, and the friendship ended because the friend was the one who changed.

    You nod along, mostly, because arguing with a story like that costs more than it’s worth. Then one evening you catch yourself telling a story of your own the same way — every piece accounted for, every motive explained, except your own part in the thing.

    That blank spot, where your own part should be, is what this article is about.

    Why does insisting you are right leave you in the dark about yourself?

    We prefer to remember the moments when we were capable, generous, and reasonable. But refusing to recognize anything else in ourselves does not make our envy, selfishness, and cruelty disappear. We simply stop seeing them in ourselves and start noticing them mainly in other people. When we see them in someone else, they can make us far angrier than the situation calls for. Over time, the story becomes simple: I am the reasonable one, and everyone else is the problem.

    Jung called the rejected side of the personality the shadow. It contains whatever does not fit the good image you want to maintain: envy when a friend succeeds, the wish to humiliate someone who embarrassed you, or pleasure at the failure of a rival. The more firmly you insist that you are only kind and fair, the less able you become to recognize these reactions as your own.

    This leads somewhere uncomfortable. When sunlight falls on something, the stronger the light, the darker the shadow behind it. It works the same way in us: the harder you insist on seeing only your good side, the darker your shadow grows. So the people most certain of their own decency often have the darkest shadow of all, and they are the ones who do not see it.

    Does having a shadow make you ill?

    Here’s where people get it backwards. Having a dark side is not what makes a person ill — Jung was plain about that. What makes a person ill is refusing to look at it.

    A feeling you keep denying does not go away. It starts steering what you do without your noticing. Envy may show up as relentless criticism of a successful colleague. Anger may come out as sarcasm toward a family member who did nothing to cause it. Jung’s point was that once you name the feeling and admit it is yours, it can no longer steer you from behind — and you get to choose whether to act on it.

    That sounds easy written down. It isn’t. Something in us resists looking, and not out of laziness. Seeing our own envy or cruelty would break the good picture we hold of ourselves, so part of us would rather not look at all.

    Where do you look for the part you can’t see?

    If you are hiding this part from yourself, and the people around you can see it plainly, where do you even begin to look?

    Jung’s first answer was dreams.

    Jung’s school of psychology is called analytical psychology, and it puts so much weight on dreams that it could fairly be called a psychology of dreams. Many popular books about dreams have been shaped by it. For Jung, dreams were a way to find the part of yourself you have not been looking at.

    There’s a reason he started there: you do not get to choose what you dream. A dream takes no interest in which picture of yourself you would rather keep, so it can show you what you have pushed out of your waking mind, in the form of people and scenes. Unlike the stories you tell about yourself when you are awake, it doesn’t take your side.

    Do all dreams come from the same depth?

    No. Some float near the surface — you ate too late or had a difficult meeting, and your brain shuffles the day’s events and plays them back to you. Underneath those are dreams that come from your own unconscious, the part of your mind that holds what you are not aware of. These dreams draw on your own life: your history, the people in it, the business you never got to finish.

    And beneath that personal layer there is a deeper one. Jung called it the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind that does not come from your own experience. In his view we are born with it, it is older than any single life, and we share it with people we will never meet.

    Dreams from this layer carry what Jung called archetypes: images that turn up again and again across many different lives and cultures. In a dream like this, a flood, a threatening animal, a ruler, or a figure waiting at a gate can feel larger than anything that has happened to you lately. You may wake with intense fear or awe and keep thinking about the image all day. For Jung, that emotional force is the sign that the dream comes from somewhere deeper than your memories of yesterday.

    Why can images from this deep layer be frightening?

    Because they carry real force. “Frightening” here doesn’t mean spooky, or even unpleasant. It means they are strong enough to swallow up the waking mind.

    The ego is the part of your mind that holds on to who you are, keeps track of what is real, and keeps what is happening inside you separate from what is happening in the world. If images and feelings from the unconscious grow stronger than the ego can handle, a person can lose their footing. At worst, they lose touch with reality and can no longer tell a dream image from what is actually happening in their life.

    The unconscious is also much larger than we usually picture. Waking awareness has limits: it can take in only what your own senses bring to it. In Jung’s view, the unconscious is not bound by that limit.

    People sometimes say they knew someone far away had died before anybody called to tell them. In his memoir, Jung wrote that before the First World War broke out, he had visions of terrible destruction. Stories like these, Jung’s included, are personal reports. They are not scientific proof that anyone can see the future, and reading them that way misses the point. The point is simpler: what lies in the unconscious is not small, and it is not tame.

    What did Jung do with these experiences, and what did he refuse to do?

    Jung never went around announcing what he saw, the way a fortune-teller might. No stage, no readings, no room full of paying strangers waiting to hear what was coming. Instead he turned inward, into what he called his confrontation with the unconscious: he watched what rose up in him and wrote it down in his own hand.

    Jung did not simply receive this way of working with the unconscious. He built it himself, slowly, and kept at it. But this kind of work has a condition: if the ego is not healthy, what rises up from the unconscious can swallow the ego whole.

    Is your ego healthy enough to hold what comes up from the unconscious?

    If you forget everything else here, keep this part.

    Here is one way to tell. If a single difficult conversation leaves you unable to work, sleep, or feel like yourself again for several days, your ego may not yet be steady enough for dream work. An ego that one hard conversation can knock over is in no shape to meet images far stronger than that. At that point, diving into your dreams is more likely to leave you confused and shaken than to help you understand yourself.

    This matters when the dream belongs to someone else, too. Dreams are fun, and that is exactly the trouble with them. A friend tells you her dream over coffee, and you have an interpretation ready before the cup goes back down. Usually it’s harmless. But if she is already close to falling apart, one confident sentence from somebody she trusts can push her over the edge. So when you hear yourself begin, “Your father in that dream stands for…”, stop there. Not at a café table, not as a remark tossed off in passing, and not from you. You are her friend, not her therapist.

    So there’s an order to this, and the order is not a formality. Steady the ego first: keep up your sleep, meals, work and relationships, and stay grounded in everyday reality. Go deep afterward. Skipping that order is how people get hurt, and the person who pushed too fast, into their own dreams or into a friend’s, almost always meant well.

    If your life is steady right now, here’s the smallest possible way into your dreams, and it’s small on purpose. Tomorrow morning, before your feet hit the floor, write down a single image from the night. Two or three lines, no more than that. Not what it meant. Only what you saw: the corridor, the water, the person who had no business standing in that room.

    No interpreting. That sounds easy and it isn’t, because your mind will hand you a meaning before the pen is back down. Let the meaning come if it wants to, but write down only the image.

    Give it a week and something odd starts happening. The same door keeps showing up. The same stranger, the same weather, the same locked car you can never get into. You’ll begin to notice the repeats — and the repeats are already saying something, long before anyone tries to interpret them.

    One more thing before you go and try it. Sometimes a week of two-line entries turns up an image that is too much for a notebook to handle: one of those archetypal images I described earlier, the kind you wake from in fear or awe and then keep thinking about all day. If a morning comes when what you have written frightens you, that is the morning to stop writing and call a therapist. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. A therapist can answer you back. A notebook can’t, and neither can I — I’m on the other side of this page, with no idea what you are facing. The order I described, steady the ego first and go deep afterward, isn’t me being careful with you. It’s the order the work runs in.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books. — the premonition of the First World War is Jung’s own account in this autobiography.
    • Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1.
    • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Why the Fear of Making Mistakes Is Really Fear of Being Seen

    You reread the email ten times before you send it. Someone offers you a project you could probably handle, and you find yourself taking a small step back. From the outside this looks like caution, or maybe modesty. But sit with it honestly for a moment and you may find that the fear of making mistakes isn’t really about the mistake at all. What frightens you is what comes after — the pause, the shift in someone’s face, the moment people see that you got it wrong. Being afraid of the mistake itself and being afraid of being seen can sound like almost the same thing. But the difference explains where the fear comes from, why hiding your mistakes makes it stronger, and what can loosen it.

    Why is the person in your head so much more capable than the person who has to do the work?

    Most of us carry two selves at once: an ideal self, the one we picture in our heads, and an actual self, the one who is really here today. The ideal one is impressive. When you describe your plans out loud, they sound convincing, and you can see clearly how everything will turn out. In your mind the work is already finished — the article written, the difficult conversation handled with grace. The actual self is the one who has to sit down on a Tuesday afternoon, with limited energy and no clear next step, and it can’t yet do everything the ideal self has already done in your imagination.

    So you hesitate before beginning. It can look like laziness, but something else is going on: the moment you start, the distance between the finished person in your mind and the learner you are today becomes visible. If you do not write the first page, nobody can see that it is awkward. If you decline the project, nobody can discover what you do not yet know. Putting things off protects that ideal self, because as long as you never start, reality never gets to test it. The cost is that each time you put it off, you also lose a chance to get better.

    Were you ever allowed to get something wrong and find out you were still all right?

    What helps a person mature is usually not success. It’s mistakes. When we get something wrong and come through it, we learn what reality is actually like: what a mistake really costs, and how much smaller that cost turns out to be than we had imagined.

    In the first months of life, a baby does need care that is close to perfect: for a while, food and comfort really do need to come the moment they are needed. But only at first. Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, said a caregiver does not need to be perfect, only good enough: closely in tune with the baby at the start, and then, little by little, slightly late or slightly off. These small lapses, coming gradually as the baby grows, are not a flaw in the care. They are how a child finds out that the bottle does not always arrive the instant the crying starts, and that it still arrives.

    After infancy, a child grows partly through disappointments small enough to live through: a trip is cancelled, the answer tonight is no, a parent is busy until seven but comes back as promised. Each time, the child finds out that something can go wrong, the feeling can be borne, and life goes on. A child who does not get enough of these experiences can grow into an adult who has never learned from experience that the bad feeling after a failure passes. Then one mistake does not feel like something to fix. It feels as if the whole person they were trying to be is collapsing.

    Can care that blocks every fall become its own kind of harm?

    Some parents always get there first: they clear the obstacle before the child reaches it and fix the mess before the child has even felt it as a mess. The intention is almost always love. But protection that never eases off as the child grows can work against the child: it takes away the very experiences in which a child learns that a bad thing can happen and then be over.

    Stepping in completely is exactly right at the beginning; a newborn can do nothing for themselves. What matters is what comes after: a slow handing-over, in which the parent steps back a little each year and the child carries a slightly larger share of the consequences. When that handover is skipped, the child never gets the practice of getting something wrong and recovering, so a mistake keeps feeling like a disaster. The child grows up still believing in the impressive self in their head, because reality has never been allowed to test it. For someone who was never allowed to trip, a small stone in the path can feel like the edge of a cliff.

    Was it a failure you could bear, or one you couldn’t?

    Two questions are worth taking slowly:

    • Were you allowed to experiment, and to get things wrong, often enough?
    • Were those failures kept to a size you could actually carry?

    Picture a child who makes a mistake while someone is nearby. That person helps put things right, shields the child from the worst of it, and then says something like it’s all right, here’s what we do next. The mistake shrinks to a size the child can bear. It becomes information: this went wrong, and here is what to do. The mistake is followed by repair, and the child learns that getting something wrong does not cost them the person who looks after them.

    Now picture the same mistake with no one there, or with someone who points out the failure but never shows a way forward. The event is the same, but it lands very differently. The child is left alone with more feeling than they can handle, and the mistake stops being something that happened and becomes a verdict on who they are: “I’m someone who can’t even get this right.” This may be part of why one person treats an error as useful information and is done with it by lunch, while another is still awake at three in the morning going over it. It isn’t that the one lying awake cares more about getting things right. One of them may simply have been helped, early on, to keep failure at a size they could survive.

    A mistake becomes bearable when someone stays and points to the next step. Left alone with it, you are likely to take the same mistake as proof that something is wrong with you.

    Is perfectionism about doing well — or about not being found out?

    Now suppose that happened to you again and again as a child: no one was there, or someone only pointed out what went wrong. Then having a mistake noticed can come to feel like being attacked. As an adult, the moment an error comes to light, it can seem as if the whole room has turned toward you. Your body reacts before you have time to think: heat in the face, a drop in the stomach, an urgent wish that it weren’t true. In that state, only one option seems to be left: hide it.

    So you may organise your life not around avoiding mistakes, which is impossible, but around making sure no one sees them. You rewrite the email ten times, cover up an oversight, or turn down work that would make you visible. This is also why perfectionism, the need to get everything exactly right, is so hard to loosen. Each time you hide a mistake successfully, you feel relief, and the relief strengthens the belief that being found out would have been a disaster. And because the mistake stays hidden, you never get the experience that could change that belief: someone sees the mistake, you fix it, and afterwards the relationship is still there and you are worth no less than before. So the real aim of all that effort to be perfect may not be to do well. It may be not to be found out.

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called the face we show the world the persona: the public self that lets us play our part at work and among other people. He didn’t treat it as a fault; everyone needs a persona. The trouble starts when a person takes that face to be all they are. Then there is nothing behind it to fall back on, and the polished self they show others is no longer one part of their life but the whole of it. Any crack in that face, even one small mistake that someone else can see, then feels like an emergency, because the face is the only thing holding them together.

    When did you start reading everyone else’s signals instead of your own?

    An infant signals constantly: hunger, discomfort, the need to be picked up, or left alone. When those signals are read reasonably well, the child learns that what they feel and want matters and is worth showing. If the signals mostly go unnoticed, the direction turns around: instead of the adult reading the child, the child starts reading the adult — tracking their mood, anticipating their irritation, adjusting to whatever the room seems to require.

    Once this becomes a habit, it carries on into adult life. You notice a manager’s irritation before you notice your own exhaustion, agree before asking yourself whether you want to, and provide what others need before they ask. You may become very good at reading the room while losing track of what you yourself want. Winnicott called this the false self: a self you build to keep your relationships going by fitting in with what other people want. The attention that could have gone to your own feelings goes, all the time, to watching other people and keeping them satisfied.

    This habit of fitting yourself to what others want, often called people-pleasing, is also what makes a small mistake feel so dangerous. If you’ve never lived by a standard of your own, someone else’s standard is the only ground you have to stand on. Falling short of it doesn’t feel like “we just see this differently.” It feels like losing the only place you had to stand. No wonder a small mistake can feel like a threat to your very existence rather than one ordinary thing that went wrong this week.

    What is one small thing you could try today?

    Pick one minor mistake — genuinely minor. Something you’d normally play down, make excuses for in advance, or quietly fix before anyone notices. This time, say it plainly to the person it affects, in a single sentence: I missed this; here’s how I’ll correct it. No preamble. No self-criticism attached, no string of apologies.

    Then add one more line, this time silently to yourself: It’s all right. Here’s what we do next. These are the same words spoken by the person who stayed with the child in the scene above: the sentence that shrinks a mistake back to a size a person can carry. It may be the one nobody said to you when you were a child. It can still be said now. It counts even when you’re the one saying it. Little by little, each time you admit a small mistake like this and it passes, you learn from experience that being seen is not the disaster you expected.

    None of this replaces help from another person. If the pattern runs deep, or if being seen at all has started to feel unsafe, it’s worth exploring in therapy, with a professional who can stay beside you while you practise. But loosening this fear can begin here, with one small mistake you did not hide, said out loud.

    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 Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting

    Have you ever rewritten a simple request four or five times before sending it? You soften the wording, add an apology, remove it, and then add it again. While editing the message, you are no longer thinking only about what you need. You are trying to prevent the other person from becoming uncomfortable, disappointed, or angry. Sometimes you never send the request at all. And oddly, the more carefully you ask, the more likely you are to be turned down. Why does that happen? This article starts there and works toward a bigger question: what makes a parent good? D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst best known for the phrase the good enough mother, helps answer both.

    Why do the requests you agonize over get refused?

    Winnicott used the term true self for the real you — not dressed up, not performed, not edited for someone else’s comfort. He didn’t think this part of a person develops on its own. It grows out of a belief a child takes in long before they have words for it: what I show and ask for will be accepted.

    When that belief holds, asking for something feels light. You say what you need and you expect, without really thinking about it, that the other person will say yes. That isn’t confidence in the motivational-poster sense. It’s closer to ease: the anxiety simply isn’t there.

    When you expect a yes, you state the request directly and leave the other person free to answer. When you expect a no, you may apologize repeatedly, overexplain, or make the request so vague that the other person cannot tell what you want. Your fear changes your tone and wording before they respond. So the request carries two messages at once: what you need, and your expectation that it will not be welcome. People respond to the feeling underneath the words before they respond to the words themselves. The other person picks up that second message, your expectation of a no, and reacts to it more than to what you actually asked. That is why a no becomes more likely. The reverse is also true: when you ask expecting a yes, it is easier for them to give one.

    There’s a second thing worth noticing. People who can ask easily also tend to ask realistically. They have a feel for what the other person can actually spare, so they rarely ask for something that would cost too much, and they don’t pressure the other person into saying yes. A request sized to what someone can give leaves both people comfortable — the one who asked and the one who said yes. The ease and the realism come from the same place. If you aren’t braced for a no, your attention is free to go to the other person instead of to your own worry — so you can see what they actually have to spare, and you size the request to fit.

    Now to parents, and a harder question. If the true self grows out of being accepted, what happens when a parent tries to give a child everything and never lets them down?

    What does a child lose when a parent is too good?

    No child can be protected from every disappointment, and in Winnicott’s view complete protection would not be good for the child anyway: it would keep them from growing. A child needs manageable experiences of waiting, hearing no, becoming angry, and discovering that the frustration passes and the relationship survives.

    Winnicott made a claim that can sound almost scandalous the first time you hear it: parents have to make mistakes. Not disastrous or cruel ones, but real, ordinary ones, often enough for the child to notice. A parent’s mistake gives the child something to be angry at, and Winnicott thought a child badly needs somewhere to put anger.

    When a parent gets something wrong and the child pushes back, Winnicott called that push aggression. He did not mean violence, and he meant more than anger. He meant a child’s own will going out into the world: the force behind reaching, grabbing, refusing, insisting, behind “No!” and “I want to do it my way!” In his account the child needs to try that force out on their mother — to shout that they hate her, refuse to come to the table, slam a door — and then find her still there at bedtime, neither wrecked by it nor getting even. What the child learns in that moment is that their own strong wants and feelings are not dangerous: wanting something badly, pushing hard, and being furious do not have the power to destroy the people they depend on.

    When a parent seems flawless — endlessly patient, never getting anything wrong — the child still gets angry and disappointed at times, since no child can be spared every frustration. But the child cannot connect those feelings to anything the parent did. The child then concludes, If my parent has done nothing wrong, my anger must mean that something is wrong with me. The child hides the reactions that seem unacceptable and shows only the ones the parent seems able to accept. This is one way a false self begins. “False self” is Winnicott’s term for the opposite of the true self: a way of living in which you watch what others expect and fit yourself to it, while your real feelings stay out of sight.

    How is “good enough” different from perfect?

    The idea that parents have to make mistakes lies behind Winnicott’s most quoted phrase: the good enough mother. Not the perfect mother. Not the excellent one. The one who is enough: she slips up, some days she doesn’t respond well to what her child needs, and that is all right.

    In the first weeks after birth, Winnicott thought, a mother is almost completely absorbed in her baby and meets the baby’s needs nearly the moment they arise. Then, little by little, she starts to fall short. She doesn’t do it on purpose: she’s tired, she doesn’t come right away, she misreads what the crying means. Winnicott’s point was that this gradual falling short is not an unfortunate side effect of good care. It is how good care works. Each small failure hands the child one true piece of how things are — you have to wait, the milk does not come the second you cry for it, the person you need is sometimes busy — in a size they can survive.

    So a good-enough parent isn’t one who anticipates every need and takes care of everything perfectly. In fact, the wish to do everything perfectly takes something from the child. A parent driven by it tries to clear away, ahead of time, every moment in which the child might bump into a limit, be disappointed by it, get angry about it, and discover that the relationship holds anyway.

    If you’re a parent reading this and feeling something tighten: the point isn’t to start failing more deliberately. You will fail without any help from me. The point is what you do with the failures you already have — whether you read them as evidence of your inadequacy, or as the ordinary texture of a real relationship.

    Where does the drive to be perfect come from?

    Most people repeat parts of the parenting they received, even when they consciously disagree with them. Under stress, you fall back on the way you yourself were raised before you have time to think of another way. A parent may hear themselves using the same critical sentence they once hated hearing from their own parent.

    But perfectionist parenting usually has a more specific origin than habit. The constant push to get everything flawless — the checking, the anticipating, the inability to let a small thing stay small — has a compulsive quality: you cannot relax until everything is right. That kind of compulsion is rarely just a personality trait. More often it’s a scar.

    A person who cannot tolerate mistakes has often spent years, starting in childhood, learning that being unsure, messy, or ordinary brought criticism or made people pull away. Perfection then becomes a way to prevent rejection. If every detail is correct, nobody can expose the uncertain part of you or use a mistake against you.

    Winnicott would call this the false self at work. You answer an email at eleven at night, check every detail twice, and show other people only the capable version of yourself. “False” here does not mean fake or dishonest. The false self is a form of protection: it keeps the unsure part of you from being criticized or rejected. Because it works, you may not notice what it costs until your child makes a mistake and you find yourself holding them to the same standard that has been controlling you.

    The harsh words you say to your child — who heard them first?

    Parents experience their children as extensions of themselves — less like a separate person, more like part of their own body. So when your child falls short, what decides how you respond is rarely parenting technique. It is how far you can accept your own shortcomings. You can usually put up with about as much weakness in your child as you can put up with in yourself. Rarely more.

    The less you can accept in yourself, the harder you come down on your child. Words like You can’t even manage this? start coming out. Corrections come faster and land harder, and they land on whatever in your child resembles the part of yourself you have never forgiven.

    The voice behind those words is often not new. It was running long before you had a child to aim it at. It was aimed at you, inside your own head — sometimes in your own words, sometimes in the voice of the person who first said it to you. Having a child doesn’t invent the voice. It gives the voice a new target.

    So being able to love your child, flaws and all, isn’t really a skill you apply to them. It depends on something closer to home: whether you can love yourself, go easy on yourself, and let your own shortcomings simply exist without putting them on trial.

    Could you try changing one sentence today?

    Here’s something small to try.

    Think of one correction you made today — to your child, or to a partner, a colleague, anyone close. Recall the exact words. Then change the subject of the sentence to I — “You can’t even manage this?” becomes “I can’t even manage this?” — and read it silently to yourself.

    Notice how it feels. If it doesn’t feel strange at all — if it slides on like a coat you’ve worn for years — you may have just found who heard that sentence first: you did. It is not something new you came up with for your child. You have been saying it to yourself for a long time.

    You don’t have to fix it today. You don’t have to say anything to anyone, or resolve to do better tomorrow. Noticing the sentence is enough.

    Written as educational reflection, not as parenting advice or clinical guidance, and not tailored to any particular family. If reading this has stirred up something about your own childhood, or about how you are parenting now, that is worth taking to a qualified professional where you live rather than carrying alone.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Why Do We Dream? A Jungian Reading of the Night

    Some mornings a dream follows you through the entire day: a hallway that should not be there, someone you have not thought about in years, or a feeling you cannot name. The story makes little sense, yet one image returns in the shower, on the train, and during a meeting. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose way of reading dreams this article follows, would say it matters that the image keeps coming back. Often the dream is carrying something you have not fully felt or thought about while awake: the hurt of an insult you brushed off as nothing, say, or the sadness of a breakup you told yourself you were over.

    Why don’t the feelings you already know about show up in dreams?

    In the psychoanalytic tradition, a feeling or a memory rarely comes up in a dream unless it was first pushed out of your awareness or kept apart from the rest of what you feel. Repression is the pushing out: a feeling or a memory becomes uncomfortable enough that your attention stops going near it. Splitting is the keeping apart. The feeling stays in you, but because it clashes with another feeling you hold, it gets filed under not mine, as though it belonged to someone else. If you cannot bear the thought that you might also hate someone you love, you may admit only the love during the day, and at night dream that you are attacking that person.

    So a dream, simply by arriving, is already telling you something. It suggests there is a piece of your life you’ve pushed out of view, or quietly disowned. What you already know about yourself and accept has no need to come to you in a dream. You can just think about it. What appears at night is more often the part you don’t know — or the part you know and are pretending not to.

    That is why waking with the thought I have no idea what that was about does not make the dream useless. It may feel foreign precisely because it comes from the part of you that you do not know. Instead of forcing an immediate interpretation, you can ask which feeling or image seems least like the person you believe yourself to be.

    What is a dream trying to do when it comes?

    Jung saw a dream as a message. It comes from the unconscious, the part of your mind you are not aware of, and it is addressed to your waking self. Not an instruction. Not a prophecy. Closer to a report that says: this is how you are actually living, and this is what that way of living is leaving out.

    And the message pushes toward balance. Spend a whole day being patient — swallowing what you wanted to say, keeping your voice level, being the reasonable one — and that night you may dream that you are shouting in a supermarket and cannot stop. Jung called this the compensatory function of dreams. To compensate is to make up for something, and here the dream makes up for the side of you that you have been leaving out during the day. This idea of compensation is central to how he read dreams. The picture you have of yourself while awake is always partial. It has to be. You can only pay attention to so much, and each of us builds a workable story about who we are, a story that is bound to leave things out. At night, dreams bring back some of what that story left out.

    Seen this way, an unsettling dream reads differently. The one where you behave badly. The one where you feel something you would rather not feel, or find yourself somewhere you’d never choose to be. It may not be a verdict on your character at all. It may be showing you what your daytime picture of yourself leaves out: a feeling that is really there, but that you have not been able to accept while awake.

    What changes if you treat a dream as a signpost?

    It helps to treat a dream as a signpost rather than as an order. A signpost does not make you do anything. It gives you information, and it can show you that you have drifted off the road you thought you were on. A dream in which you shout does not instruct you to shout at anyone. It may show that behind the patience you keep up during the day there is anger you have not yet admitted to yourself.

    When people approach dreams the way they’d approach a fortune-teller, they get stuck on a single question: so what am I supposed to do? Dreams don’t answer that question, so the whole exercise starts to feel useless, or people are tempted to make up an answer. Read the dream as a signpost instead, and you ask a different question, one you can actually work with: Where’s the gap between the road I believe I’m on and the direction the dream seems to be pointing? In the shouting dream, it is the gap between the patient person you believe you are and the anger the dream shows you. That gap is what you work with. You don’t have to close it tonight. You only have to notice that it’s there.

    Dream dictionaries tend to disappoint because they give each symbol one fixed meaning, and a dream is about your own particular life. A snake, a house, a dog — none of these means the same thing to everyone. A dog may bring to mind a protector for one person and, for another, the fear left over from being bitten as a child. What matters far more is what the image is connected to in your own life right now, and how it felt while you were inside the dream.

    Have you been dreaming much more than usual lately?

    The more you are keeping out of your awareness, the more frequent or vivid your dreams may become. You may be functioning normally during the day while repeatedly avoiding grief, anger, or a decision that feels too costly. At night, when you are no longer steering your own attention, what you have been avoiding comes back as images.

    It’s worth being precise about what this avoiding looks like, because repression, the pushing out described earlier, gets imagined as something far more dramatic than it is. It isn’t a decision. Nobody sits down and resolves to bury a feeling. Something simply needed to be felt and lived through, and it hurt, and your attention turned away. That’s the whole mechanism: a turning away, repeated so often that you no longer notice it happening.

    But what you turned away from doesn’t disappear. It waits. And at night, when the daytime habit of turning away loosens its grip, it comes up.

    If your dreams have become more frequent or more vivid lately, that may deserve a gentle question rather than alarm: What have I been busy not looking at?

    Why does living against your own nature bring suffering?

    Jung held a plain view: when we live at odds with our own nature, we run into suffering.

    Don’t hear this as moral advice. He isn’t describing a code of conduct, and none of it is about being good. Living by your own nature means something far more ordinary: feeling what you actually feel and going through it, instead of looking away because it hurts. Being sad when you are sad. Recognizing anger as anger instead of relabeling it as tiredness, or maturity, or being reasonable. Admitting that fear is fear.

    A good deal of psychological pain has this shape: the original feeling is avoided, but the effort of avoiding it creates another layer of suffering. Anger relabeled as tiredness may come out as irritation with people who did not cause it. Grief that is never acknowledged may show up as sleeplessness or emotional flatness. The dream is one more place where the avoided feeling can return.

    What about the dreams that feel ancient and strange?

    Sometimes a dream doesn’t feel personal at all. Something in it seems older than your own life: a ritual, ancient symbols, a gloomy, primitive scene unlike anything you have lived through. People often hesitate to mention dreams like this, because they seem to reveal something disturbing about the dreamer.

    Jung believed that if you go on not looking at what is inside you, it gains more and more influence over you, until your dreams are no longer limited to your own life. Besides the people you know and the rooms you have stood in, they start showing you scenes you have never been anywhere near. These scenes come from what Jung called the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind that belongs to human beings as a whole rather than to your own life. It holds images that seem to come with being human: a flood, a chase, a giant, a figure waiting at a gate. Nobody taught them to you, and someone born on the other side of the world dreams them too. Not all of this shared layer is gentle. Cruelty and a raw, primitive side are part of that human inheritance too, which is one reason such dreams can feel both foreign and dark.

    When an image like that comes up, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It does not tell you what kind of person you are. The same flood, the same figure at the gate, turn up in the sleep of people who have nothing in common with you, or with each other. It may mean that something you have not been looking at has been building up for a while, and that what is rising now reaches past your own history into that layer shared by all human beings.

    What could you try tonight?

    Put a sheet of paper and a pen where you can reach them from bed. Not your phone: the screen pulls you fully awake, and the dream stays within reach only while you are still half asleep.

    When you wake, don’t try to interpret anything yet, or to piece the whole story together. That can come later. Write down one image you remember, in a single line. Then one word beside it for how it felt. Hallway. Ashamed. That’s enough. It should take under a minute.

    Do this for a week or so, then read the page back. Don’t try to squeeze a meaning out of it. Look for repetition instead: the image that keeps returning, the feeling word you’ve now written four times. What keeps coming back often points to what you have been turning away from during the day. Then ask where in your waking life the same feeling comes up: around a decision at work you keep putting off, say, or something you wanted to say to someone in your family and swallowed. You don’t have to do anything about it yet. Noticing where the dream keeps pointing is already a start.

    This article is educational and reflective in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individual assessment or treatment. If your dreams come with persistent distress, disrupted sleep, or intrusive memories that are hard to manage, it is safer to look at them with a qualified mental health professional in your area than on your own.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Aldus Books.
    • Jung, C. G. (1934). The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis. Collected Works, Vol. 16.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Why Setting Boundaries Causes Conflict Almost Every Time

    Have you ever wanted to say no, heard yourself agree instead, and then spent the evening replaying the conversation? You knew you didn’t want to do what was being asked of you, but the other person’s disappointment felt more urgent than your own answer. By the time you noticed what you wanted, you had already promised to help.

    This is not mainly a problem of finding the right words. The trouble starts earlier, with whether you can tell your own feeling apart from the other person’s. A boundary is what lets you say to yourself: their disappointment belongs to them; my decision belongs to me. When that distinction is unclear, saying no feels less like making a choice and more like harming someone. So you keep handing over your time and energy to protect their mood.

    What do psychological boundaries actually mean?

    In psychoanalytic thinking, a boundary isn’t a matter of manners. It isn’t the polite distance you keep at a dinner party, and it isn’t the same thing as being assertive. It is the line in your mind that says: up to here is me, and beyond here is not me. When that line blurs, what you feel inside starts to pass for what is actually happening outside. So a boundary is less about politeness than about keeping hold of what is real.

    In everyday life, the line comes down to a simple distinction: this feeling is mine, and that reaction belongs to the other person. With that distinction, you can see that someone is upset and still ask, as a separate question, whether you actually did anything wrong. Without it, you start treating feelings as facts. If you feel guilty, you assume you must have done something wrong. If someone becomes quiet, you assume they are angry with you. If you feel anxious about saying no, you conclude that saying no is dangerous.

    That’s why boundaries matter so much for emotional health. Without a clear boundary, you start to lose track of what is real, including what is going on inside you. People who can’t say no often say they are unsure what they want and what they think, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re feeling until someone else names it for them.

    Why does a self need an outline?

    Think of a country on a map. You recognize it by its outline. Without the border line there would be no shape to recognize, only blank paper. A person is the same. Only when a line is drawn around you does the shape of who you are appear, so that you can say, “This is the kind of person I am.” In daily life, you draw that line through small distinctions like these: I like this and dislike that. I can help with this but cannot take responsibility for that. I understand why you are upset, but I do not agree with your conclusion. Each one marks something as yours — your taste, your limit, your view — and so shows where you end and another person begins.

    Without those distinctions, you can feel many things without knowing which feeling should guide your decision. You notice the other person’s anger before your own exhaustion. You can explain what everyone else needs but cannot answer a simple question about what you want. A boundary is what lets you know which feelings and which choices are yours.

    When does the “I” first appear?

    You are not born with boundaries. They form slowly as you grow up, and they begin at the moment you realize that another person is truly separate from you. A small child first learns this from their caregiver, the person who looks after them. The child may be hungry while the caregiver wants to rest. The child may want something, and the caregiver may say no. A boundary develops as the child learns to bear this: the person they depend on is separate from them and has wants of their own.

    This realization comes through small discoveries about someone close to you. Their temperament isn’t yours. What makes them laugh isn’t what makes you laugh. They are someone other than you, and they will not become you. Noticing this is where the line begins.

    Notice the order, because it is the opposite of what we usually assume. We imagine that a fully formed “I” exists first and then learns to recognize other people. It actually works the other way around: only when you realize that someone over there is not you does the outline of your own “I” begin to appear.

    Saying no is often hardest with the people who matter most to you, because with them you most fear that their anger could end the relationship. When someone close to you is upset, you stop checking your own response and start arranging yourself around their reaction. So it is not only that you are afraid to speak. For the moment, you have lost track of what your own answer even is.

    What happens inside when the line goes blurry?

    When a boundary is weak, what is inside you and what is outside you get mixed up. A feeling that rose up in you feels as if it came at you from outside, from another person.

    Most of us know this in mild, everyday forms. You are actually unhappy with yourself, but it feels like this: “I feel bad because that person dislikes me.” Or a harsh thing you have been telling yourself for years suddenly seems to come from someone else: you catch it in their tone of voice, the look on their face, the wording of their text message. Psychoanalysis calls this projection: you feel as if a feeling came from someone else when it actually started in you.

    This is why checking with the other person may not bring relief. You ask, “Are you upset with me?” They say no, but twenty minutes later you want to ask again. Their answer cannot settle the fear, because the fear did not start with them. It started in you, in your own expectation of being rejected. Until you recognize the fear as yours, you will keep asking the other person to remove it.

    Why does setting boundaries cause conflict almost every time?

    Here’s the part almost nobody is warned about. When you start holding a boundary, conflict follows. Not occasionally. Close to always.

    Looked at plainly, this makes complete sense. The other person was used to getting a yes from you, and now they’ve met a “no.” Of course there’s friction. Say you have always done what someone asked, and one day you tell them for the first time, “I don’t think I can this time.” They may be more than disappointed: they may be caught off guard and ask why you have suddenly changed. The longer your yes had been taken for granted, the louder the reaction. A boundary changes the terms of a relationship, and terms don’t get renegotiated quietly.

    At that point most people back down. They take the conflict as proof: I’ve handled this badly. I’ve hurt them. I’ve broken something. So they quietly erase the line, the peace returns, and the old pattern stays in place, ready to repeat the next time.

    But there is another way to read the conflict. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described one of the ways we come to experience another person as truly separate from us, a person in their own right: they survive our anger or attack, neither striking back nor falling apart. Saying no for the first time can feel, to you, like exactly that kind of attack, as if you were hurting them. Surviving it does not mean the other person stays calm; they may well be upset. It means they do not insult you or threaten to end the relationship, and they do not collapse. Then you learn that your no did not destroy them, and that choosing differently from them does not make you a bad person. A relationship that can take a “no” and still stand has become a relationship between two separate people. If you have been keeping the peace in order to stay close, this is hard to accept, because it means the friction you have been avoiding may not be an obstacle on the road to closeness. It may be part of what closeness is built from.

    So the conflict that flares up may not mean the relationship is damaged. It may mean that a line now exists where there was never one before.

    None of this promises that every relationship will survive the change. Nor is it a reason to force a confrontation you aren’t ready for. It is an invitation to look carefully at the friction before you decide what it says about you.

    What if you keep erasing the line to keep the peace?

    So what happens if you don’t hold the line — if fear of conflict wins, as it understandably might for a while?

    The relationship becomes quiet, which is why giving in can feel like success. But every time you agree before checking what you want, you practice ignoring your own answer. Over time you get better at making other people comfortable and worse at knowing what you like, where your limits are, and what you yourself want to do.

    Winnicott used the term true self for your spontaneous reactions: what you feel and want before you adjust it to win someone’s approval. A genuine no comes from this part of you. But when agreeing has become automatic, “Sure, that works” comes out before you have checked whether it actually works for you. The problem is not only that you lacked courage. You agreed so quickly that you did not have time to hear your own answer.

    Growing as a person has an order, and the first step can’t be skipped. People often want to jump straight to the later steps: opening up to others, giving generously. But first there has to be a clear “I”, with its outline drawn. Opening up and giving come after that.

    So if you are uncomfortable right now because you are drawing a line you have never drawn before, that discomfort is not necessarily a step backward. It may be the step you have to take in order to move forward.

    One small thing to try today, if you’d like. Bring to mind the moment from the past day that bothered you most. Then ask yourself one question and write the answer on paper in a single line: Where did this feeling start? If it started in you, write that it’s yours. If it was really the other person’s feeling — their disappointment, their anger — write that it’s theirs. It’s fine if you can’t tell for sure. You’re not solving anything, and not deciding what to do about it. You’re stopping for a moment to tell your feeling apart from theirs and putting one mark on the paper — and that’s how an outline gets drawn.

    This is educational writing about a psychological idea, not guidance for your particular situation. Drawing a boundary is not equally safe in every relationship — if holding one in your own relationship could put you at risk, please talk it through with someone qualified who knows your circumstances before you act on anything here.

    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

  • Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts

    You already know the relationship is hurting you. You know how tired you are and how often you have been disappointed. You may even have packed a bag or promised yourself that the next incident would be the last.

    But when you imagine leaving, another thought appears: He would fall apart without me. She would not manage. Everything would collapse because I stopped holding it together.

    If you have wondered why you cannot leave a relationship that keeps hurting you, love may not be the only reason you stay. Codependency may also be holding you there: you have become responsible for keeping the other person stable, and you believe that if you sacrifice enough, your care will eventually change them.

    Have you ever thought, “They would not make it without me”?

    Codependency is a way of relating in which another person’s problems become your responsibility. When they drink, you call their employer and say they are sick. When they forget a bill, you pay it before the service is disconnected. When they become angry, you change your words and behavior to calm them. Once you have done this again and again, caring for them is no longer just one part of your life. It becomes your role, and you start to feel that you matter only as long as you are solving their problems.

    From the outside, this looks like devotion. The devotion is real. People in this position often give more than anyone around them and continue giving after they are exhausted. But underneath the giving, there is often an unspoken condition: If I sacrifice enough, this person will change.

    You may never say this condition aloud. It may feel like commitment rather than a bargain. But the expectation still shapes what you do. You give up sleep, money, friendships, and plans of your own because you believe each sacrifice brings the other person closer to becoming responsible, sober, affectionate, or stable.

    People rarely change because someone else has sacrificed for them. Change must begin inside the person who needs to change. When that change does not happen, however, you often reach the wrong conclusion. Instead of thinking, They are not choosing to change, you think, I have not loved them well enough yet.

    That conclusion creates a repeating cycle. They create another problem. You step in and repair the damage. They avoid the consequences of what they did. Because the crisis has passed, you feel briefly relieved. Then the same problem returns, and you try even harder. You give more and more, but they take no more responsibility for their own behavior. You believe you are helping. But because you keep taking the consequences onto yourself, they never have to face them, and so they have no reason to change.

    Why were they so good to you at the beginning?

    People with an addiction, or with some other trouble they have never dealt with, are often unusually attentive at the beginning of a relationship. They listen closely, respond quickly, and adjust themselves to what you need. Their warmth may be sincere. At the same time, the part of them that desperately needs the relationship is working hard to make sure you do not leave.

    Later, when they feel certain that the relationship will continue, that effort may disappear. The person who once called every night stops answering. The person who noticed every change in your mood now dismisses your pain. Because you experienced their warmth at the beginning, you remember that warm person as who they really are. The way they treat you now seems like a temporary change, not the whole relationship.

    This is why you keep thinking, He was a good man when we met. She used to understand me. If I respond correctly, we can return to that time. Each brief return of affection strengthens that expectation. A kind weekend after weeks of conflict can convince you that the person you first met is coming back. You stay not only because of what the relationship is now, but because you are still waiting for it to become what it was at the beginning.

    The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to leave. You have already put in years, money, and patience, and given up many plans of your own. Leaving now can feel as though you are admitting that none of those sacrifices produced the change you expected. To avoid that conclusion, you make one more effort. The more the relationship costs you, the more determined you become to make the cost mean something.

    Did you really choose this person?

    As a therapist, when I look at a relationship, I pay attention to how each person was already handling fear, loneliness, and responsibility before the two of them met. Give two people the same difficult month and they may respond in completely different ways. One asks three friends for help within two days. The other becomes silent, hides the problem, and waits for someone to notice. Each person brings a way of coping like this into a relationship.

    You also came into your relationship with patterns of your own. You may be drawn to people who need rescuing because being useful makes you feel secure. You may trust an emotionally distant person quickly, because that distance feels familiar. You may work harder for affection if, as a child, love was something you had to earn. These patterns usually shape your choice of partner long before you can put them into words.

    This is why the faces can change while the shape of your relationships stays the same. One partner drinks and another withdraws, but you become the responsible one in both relationships. You make excuses for them, wait, repair the damage, and give another chance. The details change, but your role and the ending remain familiar.

    In these relationships, choice is shaped by familiarity. You can mistake what feels familiar for what is right for you. You do not consciously decide to repeat the same pain. You recognize the familiar feel of the relationship long before you see what it will cost you.

    Why do their words sound like something you have heard before?

    Suppose your partner swears at you, and as you hear it, you remember your father swearing at you in almost the same words decades earlier. The current scene hurts, but it is not unfamiliar. You already learned what to do in this kind of relationship: become quiet, watch the other person’s mood, wait for the anger to pass, and try not to make the situation worse.

    Because of that history, familiar pain can feel safer than a calm you are not used to. Your body already knows the sequence. Their voice changes, your muscles tighten, you stop saying what you think, and your attention moves from your own feelings to the other person’s reaction. In a calm relationship, nobody needs to be rescued or watched. Because you have not practiced living that way, calm can feel empty or uncertain rather than safe.

    Psychoanalysis calls this pull toward familiar pain the repetition compulsion: without realizing it, you keep going back to the kind of emotional situation you first lived through as a child. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called a knot of early feelings and memories a complex. A complex does not remain in the past. It influences which people attract your attention, what behavior you excuse, and which role you automatically take when conflict begins.

    This is why your partner’s words can sound like your father’s. The present relationship puts you back in the place you held with your father as a child. You again become the person who absorbs the anger, keeps everything from falling apart, and waits for warmth to return. Part of you is also trying to do this time what you could not do back then: finally fix the relationship with your father. That old wish is part of why you try so hard to change your partner. Willpower alone rarely breaks the pattern, because to you this is simply how a relationship works.

    Where does devotion end and codependency begin?

    Devotion and codependency can look almost identical from the outside. In both cases, you may cook, pay bills, attend appointments, and stay close during a crisis. The difference becomes clearer when you look at what happens to your own life while you are helping.

    Here is the first question to ask yourself: If this person never gets better, do I still have a life of my own?

    If you continue sleeping, working, seeing friends, making decisions, and knowing what matters to you, your care is closer to devotion. If their condition determines your mood, your schedule, your self-worth, and whether you are allowed to have a life of your own, then this is codependency.

    The second question is harder: If this person became completely well tomorrow, what would happen to me?

    Imagine that they manage their own money, make their own appointments, regulate their own emotions, and no longer call you to solve each crisis. If you feel relief, then what you wanted all along was to share a life with them, not to carry their life for them. If you feel empty or anxious, being needed may have become the main source of your identity.

    Feeling empty or anxious is not a moral failure, and it does not mean you consciously wanted them to remain unwell. It means the role has been giving you something important: the sense that you matter. When you are the person who notices the unpaid bill, makes the phone call, prepares the meal, and prevents the next disaster, you always know what to do and why you matter.

    If the other person begins doing those things without you, your role disappears. Then another question appears: If nobody needs rescuing today, what do I want to do with my own life? That question can feel frightening when you have put your own wishes, friendships, work, and rest on hold for years.

    If their recovery makes you feel empty instead of relieved, being needed has probably been giving you a reason to remain in the relationship.

    If they were completely well tomorrow, what would you want to do?

    Try writing something today, but not about them. Do not write about what they did last week, why they behaved that way, or what you should have done differently. Instead, write your answer to one question:

    If this person were completely well tomorrow, what would I want to do?

    You may not have an answer. That blank space tells you something important. Your days may have been organized around another person for so long that you have stopped asking what you enjoy, whom you want to see, and where you want your own life to go.

    You do not have to make a final decision about the relationship tonight. Begin with one concrete answer about the life that would still belong to you if the other person were no longer at the center of every day. Write down one place you would visit, one person you would call, or one activity you stopped doing when managing the relationship took over your time.

    What you write down is not yet a plan to leave or stay. It shows that you have needs, wishes, or a direction of your own that do not depend on holding another person together.

    This is educational writing, not treatment. If you are afraid for your safety in this relationship, getting safe and getting outside help come first, before any effort to persuade or change the other person.

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    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board