You can be told that this is a room where anything may be said and still find that nothing comes out. The block is not shyness. Somewhere early, you decided that a decent person must never feel hatred, imagine violence, or want revenge. Those experiences were denied words, but they did not disappear. They remained inside you without a form you could examine.
And the unworded thing is the one that eventually comes out as behaviour.
Someone once told me they wanted to take a saw to people
Someone once told me, when the room had finally become safe enough for it, that they wanted to take a saw to certain people. They said it plainly.
And while they were saying it, the thing nobody expects happened. They got calmer. Sentence by sentence, they came back to their senses. I asked who it was they wanted to cut. In that moment a man from their childhood arrived — that man, and that man’s hands. It had been held down the whole time.
Say it and you do not do it
Most people have the order backwards: they assume that putting such a thing into words brings it nearer to happening, so they keep the lid weighted. The opposite is the case. Say a thing like that and you do not do it. Leave it sitting inside with nothing done about it, and that is when it gets done.
Where it gets said is part of what happened, not a detail you can drop. This was a room built for it: anything could be said, and someone in it received the words instead of flinching.
Once the fantasy became words in a safe room, the person could observe it instead of being driven by it. Speaking also revealed its source: the man from childhood and what his hands had done. How the unnamed keeps its grip is the subject of As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad. Here, the important point is that a feeling you can name becomes something you can think about; a feeling you cannot name is more likely to find its way into behaviour.
Sadness as sadness, gladness as gladness
This — the wording of it, and the looking at what got worded — is what loving yourself consists of. You look carefully at what is in you, you care for it, you grant that it is there. Sadness as sadness, gladness as gladness, lowness as lowness. Permitting it and taking it in — that is the process, and the process is what loving yourself means.
Taking sadness as sadness means declining to give it a second name. You are sad and you do not say this is fine. You are sad and you do not say this is weakness.
Bring all of it home, and forgive it first
You may feel lacking, weak, or unable to do what others seem able to do. To bring all of it home means admitting that this is how you experience yourself right now, instead of covering it with praise you do not believe. Then you forgive the self who carries that experience.
When the feeling that you are bad keeps arriving, stop laying good words on top of it. Say instead: yes, I am bad — granted — and I forgive the bad me. An admission with forgiveness attached to it.
It feels like being born was my fault. The more injury there is, the more reliably this shows up. Being born a daughter was my fault. If saying no, it wasn’t has not moved it the first time, there is no use in repeating the correction. Just bring it home. Bring it in and say: being born a daughter is my fault. And then forgive that fault. Only what you own outright is in your hands, and forgiveness needs something in your hands. Left standing outside, it cannot be forgiven at all.
One thing before we go on. What refuses to come off will not come off by your pulling at it alone. This is where a professional psychological approach is needed, and it is hard for someone outside the field to get it off alone. If you read this today and nothing shifts, that is not another item for the list of things wrong with you.
But it wasn’t my fault, so why forgive it?
The objection comes fast. That was not my fault, so why am I forgiving it? Forgiving what you did not do sounds like agreeing to carry a charge that belongs to someone else.
Look at what is actually happening, though. You are pushing — no, not my fault — and underneath the pushing the feeling goes on reporting that it is yours. The pushing away is the refusal to grant it. The feeling holds its position with exactly the force you use against it.
Psychic reality is stronger than external reality
Knowing in your head that it was not your fault while everything inside you insists that it truly was — that is psychic reality. And psychic reality is stronger than external reality. What is felt inside moves you more, and more often, than what actually took place outside.
So the work here is not correcting the record. Confirm a hundred times that being born was not your decision, and the confirmation stays outside while the feeling stays inside, and the two never touch. The feeling has to be set down as something really there, and then granted rather than denied. Granting is what puts it in your hands, and forgiveness needs it there.
Granting it, or passing sentence on yourself
If bring even the bad me home reads as punish yourself, it runs backwards and does damage. Two different operations. Setting moral judgement aside — that is what “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack asks of you. Bringing I am bad home — that is what this asks. They part company at whatever follows the sentence.
After yes, I am bad, if what comes next is so this is the kind of creature I am, so I deserve what I get, that is self-punishment: one feeling was admitted and a whole person got convicted. If what comes next is and I forgive that bad me, that is granting. The sentence ends at there is this in me right now, and what is in you gets acknowledged. The thing to drop is the verdict. The thing to bring home is the feeling.
Your body, your feelings, your thoughts — and your fantasies
However small a thing you take yourself to be, granting your existence exactly as it stands is the process that amounts to loving yourself. So: your body. Your feelings. Your thoughts. And your fantasies. Most people stop at the fantasies. Fantasy is grotesque, all of it, so it does not get spoken and gets denied instead. No — and the lid goes back on.
Guard against one misunderstanding here. This is not an instruction to go and think such things on purpose. When a picture of putting a knife into a stranger has passed through you, the move is not to judge it as evil but to take it lightly: I am very angry right now — that much is enough to receive. Receiving it does not mean drawing the picture out further. It means letting what passed through stay passed.
Covering it instead — that I could do something so wicked — makes the problem larger. Any human being can have a thought like that. So the process runs the other way: not calling it bad, and loving those fantasies too. Love yourself.
Related
- There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
- I Had to Be a Good Person, So I Never Expressed a Feeling
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