In a counselling session you can be told you may say anything, and still nothing comes out. It is not shyness that stops you. You have already decided that a decent person never feels hatred, imagines violence or wants revenge — so none of that is allowed to exist in you either. Deciding that does not make those thoughts go away. They stay inside you, never put into words, where you cannot look at them.
And the thoughts you never put into words are the ones that, one day, turn into action.
Someone once told me they wanted to take a saw to people
Someone I was working with in counselling once told me, when the room had finally come to feel safe enough, that they wanted to take a saw to certain people and cut them all up.
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. At that moment a memory came up in answer: a man from their childhood — that man, and what his hands had done. They had been pushing that memory down all those years.
Say it and you do not do it
Many people believe that saying something like that out loud makes it more likely to happen, so they keep it shut away inside. It is the other way round. Say a thing like that and you do not do it. Leave it inside, unspoken, and that is when you end up doing it.
But notice where this happened, because it matters. It was a room set up so that anything could be said, and the person listening heard the words out instead of flinching.
Once the saw fantasy had been put into words in that room, the person could look at it instead of being driven by it. Speaking also revealed its source: the man from their childhood and what his hands had done. What you put into words becomes something you can look at and think about. What you leave inside, unsaid, never becomes something you can look at, and over time that is what turns into action.
Letting sadness be sadness, and gladness be gladness
What happened in that room is exactly what loving yourself is about. Pressing a feeling down and refusing to admit it is there is a way of ignoring yourself. Loving yourself is the opposite: letting what is inside you come out in words, and then looking at what has come out. You look carefully at what is inside you, you look after it, and you acknowledge that it is there. You let sadness be sadness, gladness be gladness, and gloom be gloom. Allowing each of these and accepting it — that process is what loving yourself means.
Letting sadness be sadness means not calling it something else. You are sad, and you do not tell yourself this is fine. You are sad, and you do not tell yourself this is weakness.
Accept all of it as part of you, and start by forgiving yourself
You may feel that something is lacking in you, that you are weak, that you are simply no good at certain things. Rather than denying it, accept all of it as part of you. Admit that this is how you experience yourself right now, instead of covering it with praise you do not believe. Then, before anything else, forgive yourself for it.
When the feeling that you are bad keeps coming back, stop laying nice words on top of it. Admit it instead: “Yes, I am bad — and I forgive the bad me.” An admission with forgiveness attached to it.
Sometimes the feeling is this: It feels like being born was my fault. The more you have been hurt, the more likely this feeling is. For some women it takes this form: being born a daughter was my fault. If saying no, it wasn’t does not change the feeling the first time, there is no point in repeating it. Just accept it as yours. Say it: being born a daughter was my fault. And then forgive that fault. Only when you fully accept it as yours do you have something to forgive. As long as you keep pushing it away as not yours, you cannot forgive it at all.
One thing before we go on. Sometimes a feeling like this will not let go, and working at it alone, again and again, will not loosen it much. A feeling like that needs professional psychological help; loosening it on your own is hard. So if you try this after reading it 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? If you did nothing wrong, forgiving yourself sounds like agreeing to take the blame for a wrong that never happened.
But look at what is actually happening. You keep pushing the feeling away — no, not my fault — and all the while, underneath the pushing, it goes on feeling like your fault. Pushing the feeling away is itself a refusal to acknowledge it. The harder you push against it, the more firmly it stays where it is.
Psychological reality is stronger than external reality
You know in your head that it was not your fault, and yet inside you it feels as if it truly was. That feeling is what is called psychological reality — what is real for you on the inside. And psychological reality is stronger than external reality: what you feel inside moves you more than what actually took place outside.
So the work here is not to correct the facts, because the facts are not what needs fixing. Someone can assure you a hundred times that being born was not your choice, so it could not have been your fault. That reassurance comes from outside you, the feeling lives inside you, and the two never meet. You have to treat the feeling as something that is really there, and then acknowledge it rather than deny it. Only when you acknowledge it does it become yours, and only once it is yours can you forgive it.
Acknowledging the feeling, or punishing yourself
When you are told to admit even “I am bad”, it can sound as if you are being told to punish yourself. Heard that way, it takes you in the opposite direction: toward punishment instead of forgiveness. Admitting the feeling and punishing yourself are two different things. What tells them apart is what you say next, after “yes, I am bad”.
If what comes next is “so this is the kind of person I am, so I deserve to be punished”, that is self-punishment. Instead of acknowledging one feeling, you have passed a verdict on your whole self. If what comes next is “and I forgive that bad me”, that is acknowledgement. Then “I am bad” means only “this feeling is in me right now” and goes no further, and the feeling gets acknowledged. What you drop is the verdict on yourself. What you accept as yours is the feeling.
Your body, your feelings, your thoughts — and your fantasies
No matter how small you feel, accepting yourself exactly as you are is what truly loving yourself means. That includes your body, your feelings, your thoughts — and your fantasies. The fantasies are where most people hold back. Because fantasies tend to be so grotesque, people do not say them out loud; they try to deny them instead. No, they tell themselves, and cover them up again.
Guard against one misunderstanding here. This is not an instruction to go and think such things on purpose. Suppose a picture of putting a knife into a stranger passes through your mind. Do not judge it as evil. Just notice, calmly: I must be very angry right now. Accepting that much is enough. Accepting it does not mean adding more to the picture. It means letting what passed through your mind simply pass.
If instead you cover it up — how could I be capable of something so wicked? — the problem only gets bigger, because what you cover up stays inside, unsaid. Any human being can have a thought like that. So rather than calling it bad, go the other way: accept even these fantasies as part of you, and love them 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