In “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack I worked with the idea that there is more than one of you in there. This is the same frame, one step further in. Being divided is not the thing that is wrong with you. What goes wrong sits somewhere else, and it is worth knowing exactly where.
The sentence that needs two of you
When you are frightened you say something to yourself. I’m frightened. You’re frightened right now, aren’t you. It’s alright. The same when sadness arrives. I’m sad. Sad? Very sad, yes.
Stop on the grammar of that, because by rights it should not work. Someone is speaking and someone is listening, and both of them are you. You can speak to yourself because the speaker and the listener are the same person — because you are split. One part says it is sad. Another part answers the sadness. Nothing has gone wrong in that exchange. It happens because a mind comes in pieces, and that is the ordinary condition.
Three of them, before anything has gone wrong
How many of you are in there to start with? Three. In broad outline a person is divided into three, and those three divide again, so the working number runs higher than three.
You have heard of multiple personality. That is what this looks like when it turns into an illness, and it is the same material. And a perfectly healthy person is divided all the same. So the line between health and illness does not run between divided and undivided. It runs somewhere else entirely.
Which changes what knowing yourself would have to mean. You would need to know the state each of those parts is in. Otherwise you cannot hear more than one voice from inside your own mind. Not several voices filed down into one. Several, with some sense of how each one is doing. The work is not to reduce yourself to a single voice and call the rest noise. It is to find out how many there are and what state they are in.
Divided, and still connected
The parts sit separately and they are joined to one another. Connection. That is why being in pieces does not become a real problem.
The frightened part can say, I cannot do this, and another part can answer, You are frightened, but I will stay with you while we decide. The fear has not vanished, yet it no longer acts alone. While that exchange remains possible, you can contain several feelings and still act as one person. A healthy interior is not silent; its parts remain in contact.
When the parts stop reaching each other
Here is where the trouble starts. The distance between the parts opens too wide, and what one of them is living through, the other no longer knows anything about. Inside a single person, an experience belongs to one part and is unavailable to the rest (the clinical term is dissociation). Multiple personality is that, carried the whole way.
When the connection goes, you get pulled toward believing things that are not true. Fantasy takes over. This is where the odd remarks come from, the talk that arrives out of nowhere and keeps arriving. Parts that cannot reach each other cannot correct each other. Nothing is holding it, so it runs.
In Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land and I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First I went into what it takes to bring the divided parts back together. This is the other level of the same subject: you can stay divided, as long as the line between the parts is live.
You only ever watch how other people treat you
There is a way you treat yourself. Hardly anyone looks at it. What gets looked at is the other direction — how is that person treating me. Putting it like that, is he looking down on me? He is. Why would he say that to me? And you stay there, on him, going around the same lap.
What is actually snagging you is the way you treat yourself.
Because you are the one dismissing you
If you tell yourself all day that you are incompetent, an ambiguous remark from a colleague is likely to sound like proof that they also look down on you. The outside remark catches because it matches the treatment already happening inside. When you hold yourself as worth something, you can evaluate the same remark instead of automatically turning it into a verdict.
So the state your mind is in comes down almost entirely to this: how you treat yourself. Not what was done to you.
Attention has to land before you can see it
The you that is doing the treating does to you what your parents did to you. The very thing you could not stand. That is present when you are worn out and lonely and in pain.
The method your parent used on you is the one you are running on yourself now. That is the thing that has to be found and recognised. But recognition does not come first. Attention does. Attention is love. Your attention has to go to your own mind first, to whatever is going on inside it — recognition comes after that. Not: see it, then take an interest. Take an interest, and then you see.
This is the thing my parent hurt me with, and here I am doing it to myself. Once you can see it that far down, the direction can change. Right. I will love myself instead. What that turns into in practice I have set out in “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack.
Why am I running myself down like this? Why do I keep telling myself I cannot do it? The criticising stops there. What starts in its place is a different way of dealing with yourself, and it sounds like this.
What one part says to the other
You don’t have to be good at it. A mistake that size is allowed. It does not kill you, and it does not make you worthless to anyone else.
If one part of you can say that to another part, you can be divided into as many as you like. The connection holds.
Related
- “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
- Stay Until I Fall Asleep: The Fear That Never Grew Up
- There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
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