Inner Work Notes

Tag: accepting reality

  • The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head

    Someone sends you a short message. Before long you have decided what it meant, what they think of you, what they would say if you brought it up, and how you would feel afterward. In your head the whole conversation has already happened, and all of it is settled. None of it has been checked with the person.

    Then you do not bring it up. Weeks go by, and you are just as sure as you were at the start. The only thing that changes is that the story in your head gets more detailed every week.

    You cannot find out who you are on your own

    You learn what you are like, and what other people make of you, from how they actually respond when you speak to them. On your own, your guess about what they would say never meets anything that pushes back against it, corrects it, or surprises you. And with nothing new coming in, you cannot tell the difference between what the other person really thinks and what you fear, or hope, they think.

    People often tell a story to make this point: a child raised by wolves. When he is found, he walks on all fours. He is clearly a human being, yet he takes himself for a wolf, because wolves are the ones he grew up among. Real cases like this are few and most are disputed, so take the story as an illustration, not as evidence. But you can see the point in any family: we learn what we are from how the people around us respond to us.

    When you never actually talk to the other person, your mind still supplies their answer. But it builds that answer out of what you already expected, so the answer can only confirm the fear, or the hope, you started with.

    Guessing comes easier than talking things over

    Left alone with a question about someone, a person does not stay undecided. They become more certain.

    “She likes me; that is why she said that.” “That tone was on purpose.” “They are talking about me right now.” The people involved may simply have been saying what they wanted to say and getting on with their day; it may have had nothing to do with you. Still, the guessing runs on and always reaches a verdict, because the one making the guess is also the one judging it.

    We are more practiced at imagining than at talking, because imagining came first: it is with us from the very beginning of life, while talking things over with another person is something we learn later. So when a conversation feels risky, the mind falls back on the older, easier habit. It plays both parts itself, so you never have to let the other person see what you feel, and you never hear an answer you did not make up yourself.

    Notice how comfortable this is. In your head, the other person says only the lines you give them, when you expect them to. Nothing catches you off guard. Nobody asks you a question you were not ready for. You guess, you have your feelings about it, and it ends there.

    The sentence that has to be said out loud

    Say you are fairly sure someone likes you, and you like them too. There is exactly one thing to do with that: go and tell them, in words. “I like you. Do you like me?”

    But you would probably rather not say it. You are afraid that if you do, the other person will run away.

    They might, if they do not feel the same way, and that hurts. But now you know something you could not have known before you asked. Asking out loud matters because it lets the other person give their own answer, which may not be the one you predicted. Until you ask, every new detail comes from you, and the relationship you imagine keeps growing with nothing real to correct it.

    The frustration you were avoiding is the one you needed

    When you finally speak, you may get an answer you did not want, and think, “I thought they liked me. They don’t.” That letdown is what psychologists call frustration: the disappointment of not getting what you hoped for.

    In that disappointment you feel, and not just know, that there is a real world outside your head. The other person turns out to have wishes and feelings of their own that do not follow the script you wrote for them. Frustration that is too great, or that humiliates you, can do real harm. But a disappointment you can bear teaches you two things: that you can survive an answer you did not want, and that the answer tells you something you can use. Meeting reality this way, again and again, is how you learn to live in it.

    D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about the “good-enough mother.” She is not a perfect mother. At first she meets her baby’s needs almost completely. Then, as the baby becomes able to cope, she meets them a little less completely and a little later. Through those small gaps, the child faces the world a little at a time, in amounts it can manage. Heinz Kohut, another psychoanalyst, called frustration of this bearable size optimal frustration. Too much frustration makes it harder for a child to accept reality; the right amount helps the child accept it bit by bit. Neither of them saw this as a parenting failure to be apologized for. A child who is looked after perfectly, one hundred percent of the time, does not mature.

    Adults need this kind of bearable frustration too, and the way to get it is to ask. If you never ask, the guessing simply goes on, and nothing in the guessing itself will ever bring it to a stop.

    Not asking has another cost that is easy to miss. Every conversation you rehearse in your head and never actually have leaves you a little more convinced that you already know what people are like. That makes you a little less likely to try the next real conversation. So, quietly, you grow less practiced at talking with people while you grow more certain about them.

    What the avoidance costs later

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung summed up what avoiding pain costs in a sentence worth keeping: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Legitimate suffering is the pain a person simply has to go through in the course of living. Neurosis, meaning lasting anxiety and other symptoms, is what grows in its place when that pain is avoided.

    Addiction works the same way. There is a specific pain — a conversation you dread, a loss, a refusal, a limit you have to accept — and instead of going through it, you reach for something that stops the feeling for a while, the way a painkiller does. That original pain had a cause, and it could have come to an end. But each time you avoid it, new problems pile up on top of it: you come to depend on what you reach for, you start keeping secrets, and all of this causes trouble of its own. So the suffering that comes later is larger than the pain you put off.

    What you use does not have to be alcohol or a drug. The phone does it. Work does it. So does a relationship that exists only inside your own head, where the other person always behaves, is always available, and has never once said anything you did not write for them.

    Asking takes about four seconds

    There is nothing wrong with a mind that runs ahead. It is a good mind and a quick one. The only trouble is that no one ever contradicts it, and ideas that are never contradicted drift further and further from what is really happening.

    So the fix is not more rehearsal. If the other person is not someone who insults or threatens you, go to them and say one sentence, a question that leaves room for their answer, and wait to hear it: “When you said that, I thought you meant ___. Did you?” They may say yes, or they may say no. Either way, you hear something you did not write yourself, and the imagined conversation becomes a real one.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. Collected Works, Vol. 11, para. 129. — “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — the graduated failure of adaptation.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — optimal frustration.

    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

  • Regression Isn’t a Breakdown. Your Mind Is Just Going Home.

    The alarm goes off and you turn the phone face down. Nothing bad has happened. Nobody shouted at you, nothing broke, and the day in front of you is perfectly ordinary. Still, the only thing you really want is to stay under the covers and be nobody for a while.

    The voices in the next room sound far away, as if they were coming through glass. Your list of things to do is sitting right there on the kitchen table, and somehow it feels like somebody else’s. So you ask yourself what you always ask. What’s wrong with me? Am I just lazy?

    Before you call yourself lazy, ask why your mind responds to the ordinary demands of the day, like that list on the table, by withdrawing, putting off decisions, and wanting someone else to take over. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory suggests that this is not random. Under pressure, the mind goes back to a way of coping from much earlier in life, when pulling back made you feel less afraid and someone else carried the responsibility for you.

    Which came first — the world, or your picture of it?

    Most of us assume a baby first gets to know the world as it really is, and only later, with more words and more years behind it, starts to imagine.

    Klein turned that around.

    Long before a baby can speak, she said, its mind is already full of pictures of what the world is like, built from what its body feels. She called these pictures unconscious fantasy, but she did not mean daydreaming or making things up. Fantasy, for her, is how a mind that has no words yet first makes sense of the world. When the baby is hungry, it feels as if no one will ever come. When it is held and fed, the whole world feels safe.

    For the infant, these unconscious fantasies are not occasional thoughts. They shape the baby’s whole experience of hunger and fullness, danger and safety, long before it has words or can check what it feels against what is really there.

    In Klein’s view, then, you did not begin with an accurate understanding of reality and add imagination later. You began with unconscious fantasy and gradually corrected it through experience. Each time someone close to you turned out differently from what the picture inside you expected, and your bond with them survived the surprise, that picture moved a little closer to the world as it really is.

    What does a good home actually give a child?

    If life begins in fantasy, that changes what we mean by a good home. We usually think of how much love a child was given, or whether there was enough money in the house. But part of what makes a home good is how much of the real world it lets a child take in — how often, and how safely, the child can check the picture inside against what is really happening.

    Put plainly: the worse the home, the less of the real world a child can afford to let in.

    That may sound backwards, but the reasoning behind it is simple. Children learn to swim in water they can stand up in. A steady home hands a child small, survivable disappointments — the promise kept a day late, the answer that turns out to be no — and every one of them is a chance to check the picture in their head against what actually happened and find out it was slightly off. Nothing collapses when that happens. The child learns that a disappointment is not the end of the world, corrects that part of the picture, and goes back to playing.

    When home is too painful — when the adults are unpredictable or frightening — a child has no room to calmly check the picture against what is real. Every look on an adult’s face can read as a sign of danger. So the child retreats into the world inside, which at least feels like something they can control. And the more time the child spends in that inner world, the less often the picture inside gets tested against someone safe, and so the less it gets corrected.

    Children are not the only ones who retreat into that inner world. Most of us go there for a while and then find our way back out. At the extreme are people who cannot find their way back out at all. That is the territory of psychosis: in schizophrenia, for example, a person stays shut inside their own private world. This does not mean that a painful home is the single cause of any particular illness. But it can shape how a person handles stress later in life.

    Why is the pull to retreat strongest at certain times in life?

    There are three times in life when people are most likely to feel they are coming apart: the teenage years; the early twenties, when many people leave home; and the years after marriage, or after setting up a household with someone.

    Why those three? Because that is when the demands of real life arrive all at once, from every direction. Your body changes, or your address does. The people around you change, and so does what they expect from you. You’re handed a role that nobody bothers to explain. There are more decisions to make, and more of the blame falls on you when one goes wrong. Worst of all, the way you’ve always coped stops working — quietly, and completely.

    At times like these, there is more to carry than you can manage all at once, and carrying it simply hurts too much. So the mind slides backward, into that inner world of early pictures. Every human mind begins there, which makes it the mind’s first home — a home inside you, not the house you grew up in. When you retreat like this, in a sense your mind is simply going home.

    If this is the year you feel like you’re coming apart, look at where you are in life before you go looking at your character. Check whether this moment falls on one of those three times, or on another big change in your life, such as starting a job, having a baby, or going through a divorce. You may not have gotten weaker at all. Reality may have just started asking for far more than it used to.

    So what is this pull backward, exactly?

    You live out in the real world for a while, it hurts, and something in you wants to be a small child again. No decisions. No judgment calls. Somebody else handling the difficult parts, the way somebody once did.

    The name for this return is regression. The mind is not inventing a new response. It is returning to an earlier state in which withdrawing, becoming passive, or waiting for someone else to act once provided relief.

    Why is it so hard to come back out?

    Regression feels familiar because you learned this way of coping early and used it many times. Avoiding a message, staying in bed, or waiting for someone to tell you what to do takes the pressure off right away. That relief makes the old way hard to leave, even while the unanswered messages and postponed tasks pile up and the anxiety grows with them. The safer it feels under the covers, the harder it becomes to come out.

    It shows up in ordinary ways, too. The afternoon that disappears into your phone. The message you could answer in four lines and somehow cannot. The steady, quiet wish that somebody would arrive and simply tell you what to do next. None of those look like much from the outside, and every one of them is the same short walk back to the mind’s first home. The pull is never loud when it arrives, and it usually comes dressed as tiredness, or as a small and very reasonable decision to deal with the whole thing tomorrow.

    When ordinary tasks feel far away and you want to pull back from every demand, you may be falling back on an old way of protecting yourself, not showing some permanent flaw in your character. Once you see it as regression, you can ask a more useful question: what is pressing on me right now that set this off?

    Does that mean you should get rid of the old picture inside you?

    No, and you couldn’t manage it even if you tried. The picture isn’t a part you can unbolt and throw away — it’s the place you started from. Adult life is the slow work of checking it against whatever is really in front of you and correcting it a little at a time.

    Stop revising the picture, and your trips back into that inner world get longer and longer. Keep revising it, and your time out in the real world gets longer instead. That is the choice, and the work is never quite finished.

    So pick one scene from the past week that felt heavier than it had any business being. A message that has been sitting there unanswered. A room that went quiet the moment you walked into it.

    Then write down, in a single line, what you were quietly expecting. “He should know without me having to say it.” “After everything I did, somebody should have noticed.” One sentence is plenty. Don’t tidy it up, and don’t argue with it. If the line makes you wince a little, you’ve probably written the real one down instead of the polite version.

    Once it’s sitting there on paper, you can slowly begin to see where it came from — the situation you were actually in, or a much older picture you’ve been carrying since before you had words for anything. Some of those lines will turn out to be fair. Others were formed a long time ago, to fit a house you no longer live in.

    That’s where the revising starts. One line at a time.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174.

    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