Someone said the thing you had wanted to hear. You heard it. You said thank you and meant it. Ten minutes later nothing of it is left: your mood has not lifted, and there is nothing to go back to and feel again.
Meanwhile a careless put-down someone made three weeks ago is still with you, down to the tone of voice.
This usually gets filed under low self-esteem. But that is not an explanation. It only gives what just happened another name. Telling a person with a temperature that they have a fever says nothing about why the fever is there.
There is an actual reason praise does not stay. Once you can see it, you will also see why years of encouragement have never once worked on you.
At first, good and bad are kept apart
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described a baby’s mind in its first months like this: the baby does not take in experience as one whole. From the start, experience comes in split into two parts, and the parts are stored separately. A baby does not have one mother. He has two — the one who feeds him and the one who leaves him hungry — and he keeps them in separate places and never puts them together. He does the same to himself: there is a good me and a bad me, and those are kept apart too.
Later the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg laid this out as two pairs: the mother who feeds him is paired with a good me, and the mother who leaves him hungry is paired with a bad me. It is one baby and one mother, but each is stored in two separate places.
Klein did not see this as the baby getting things wrong. He is simply not yet strong enough to bear knowing that the mother who feeds him and the mother who leaves him hungry are the same person. So he keeps them apart. Psychoanalysts call this splitting. Keeping them apart protects the good: his anger at the mother who leaves him hungry cannot reach the mother who feeds him and destroy her.
So splitting is not a mistake. It is a solution: dividing the mother into a good one and a bad one is how the baby keeps from losing the good one.
A drop of ink in a glass
Why can’t the good and the bad simply be put together? It is easiest to see with water.
Here is a glass of clear water and here is a bottle of ink. One drop goes in and the glass is ruined. There is no clear water left anywhere in it, not even a mouthful; it has all turned grey. Nothing in that glass survives the mixing.
So if this one glass is all the clear water you have, you will not let the ink in. You will guard the glass. Keeping the ink out is not stubbornness. It is the only way to keep any clear water at all.
Now pour the same bottle into a river. The river takes it and stays a river. You would have trouble finding where it went.
It depends on how much good there is, not on how hard you try
This is the heart of it. Whether a person can hold the good and the bad in one place and bear it is not a matter of insight or willpower alone. It depends on how much good the person has known, in themselves and in other people. There has to be enough of it that one bad experience does not wipe it all out.
When there is plenty of this good, the bad goes in the way the ink goes into the river: it mixes in, and the good is still there. Psychoanalysts call this integration. Put into words, it sounds like this: I am a person with faults. My mother loved me and also let me down. My friend is decent and occasionally careless.
But where there is only about as much good as bad, the person has a glass, not a river. Then the two cannot be put together, because putting them together would spoil all of the good. So they stay split. That is not a symptom to argue someone out of. It is what is holding that person together right now.
This is why being told you should try to see the good in yourself can feel like an insult rather than a comfort. The advice asks a person to put the good and the bad in themselves together, in one place. If they have only one glass of clear water, that means pouring ink into it.
Where a compliment gets stopped
The split into a good me and a bad me does not end with infancy.
Someone who grew up hearing mostly about what they had done wrong comes into adult life with a picture of themselves as someone who falls short. They also bring a habit of mind that expects criticism and goes looking for it. So when another person says something to them, they are already listening for the criticism in it before they have even weighed whether it is true. This happens the moment the words reach them.
Picture five people at a table. Four say your presentation went well; one says the middle section was confusing. For the rest of the evening, all you can think about is the middle section. That is not because that person put it harshly, and not because you are unusually thin-skinned. It is because theirs was the only remark that had a place already waiting for it inside you.
Praise, on the other hand, has to get past that habit of mind first. On the way in, you answer it in your head: “They are just being polite. They want something. They have not seen the real me.” Long before the praise can reach you, it has been written off.
Criticism does not have to get past anything, because it fits what you already believe: “Something is wrong with me.” So it goes straight in and is remembered in detail.
So the problem is not simply a poor memory that lets only the good things slip away. There is a place ready for the bad words, and none for the good ones.
Maturity does not come with age alone
Here, maturity means one specific ability: taking in what is actually in front of you as it is, instead of through the habits of mind formed when you were small, like the one that expects criticism. The more mature a person is, the more they can take in this way.
This ability does not come automatically with age. A person of sixty or seventy who has not grown up on the inside still sees the people around them the way they learned to see people in the family home they left fifty years ago. If they were criticized in that home, they feel criticized by the people around them now. A colleague’s compliment does not come through as a compliment; the old habit of mind gets to it first and colors it on the way in.
There is a simple way to tell how much of this ability you have, and it is not whether you believe the good thing someone said. It is whether you can let it stand for one day, just as it was said, without adding your own “yes, but.”
Where the water comes from
If the problem is how much good there is next to the bad, then the answer is not to attack the ink. Most people have already spent years trying to argue their bad picture of themselves down to size, and it has not shrunk. The work is adding water.
The water comes from real relationships, not only from encouraging things you tell yourself. One compliment is easily brushed off. What makes the difference is hundreds of ordinary hours with people in which nothing bad happens: you make a mistake and no one humiliates you; you turn down a request and the relationship does not end. Slowly those hours add up to evidence against the old picture you have of yourself. As that evidence builds, a criticism can be heard as a comment on one thing you did, not as proof that you are bad through and through.
So the next time something kind is said and slides straight off, you have not failed at receiving it, and there was no technique you were meant to apply. Your glass is just small for now. More clear water comes from outside, slowly — mostly from staying a little longer with people when you would rather get up and leave.
References
- Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — splitting, and what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position: the baby’s earliest state of mind, in which good and bad are kept apart.
- Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — what Klein called the depressive position (not depression in the everyday sense): the later state of mind in which good and bad can be held together in one person.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson. — the inner pictures of a good and a bad self and of good and bad others (self and object representations).
Related
- Why That One Person Gets Under Your Skin
- Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak
- “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
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