Inner Work Notes

Tag: addiction

  • 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

  • You Gave Past Your Limit. That’s Why You Resent Them.

    She goes to her mother’s every day. She listens, she pays for what her mother needs out of her own pocket, and she never once says it is too much for her. Everyone around her says she is a saint. Then she gets in the car. On the drive home a thought comes that she would never say out loud to anyone — something like: that woman is never going to die. It shocks her. On the outside she is the good daughter. So where does such a hateful thought come from?

    The thought that arrives on the drive home

    Being kind to people is a good thing. The trouble starts when kindness turns into a rule you have to obey: “I have to be a good person.” “I have to be the kind one.” Once you live by that rule, you stop asking how much you can actually do. You do what the rule demands — and it demands more than you can give.

    Say the person you look after is your own father — though it could just as well be your husband’s mother, or the neighbor nobody else checks on. You could simply do what you are really able to do. Instead you do more, because you can already hear what people would say if you did less. Doing more than you can is where the resentment starts. From the outside, you are wonderful to him. Inside, a thought forms: he’s past eighty, and he still won’t die.

    That thought does not mean you are a bad person. It means you have been giving more time, money, and attention than you can sustain, with no end in sight. You keep asking yourself how much longer you will be paying for this, and how much longer you will have to go over there every day. You don’t allow yourself to do less, and you can’t say that it is too much. So the tiredness turns into resentment, and the resentment lands on the person you are caring for. That person starts to look like the cause of your exhaustion. The resentment keeps growing until you say, “I can do this much, and no more.”

    Being called selfish hurts less than hating the person you care for

    Now imagine it the other way: you do only as much as you are really able to, and then you step back. People will talk. Some of it will get back to you, and it stings.

    But you are far less likely to end up resenting the person you care for, because you did what you could and stopped at your limit. Other people’s criticism may hurt for a while. Giving more than you can, day after day, does lasting damage: it can turn your affection into hatred, until you can hardly stand to be near the person you set out to care for.

    Who handed you the word “should”?

    “You should do this.” “You should never do that.” Rules like these came from outside you — from your family, the people around you, the times you grew up in. You do need some of them. A life with no rules at all would not work.

    But a rule is not an absolute truth. Keeping one does not make you good, and breaking one does not make you bad. We forget that constantly, because rules look exactly like the truth.

    The yardstick keeps changing

    You can tell these rules are not the truth, because they change. A whole society lives by them, and the ones it holds on to hardest shift over time. In Korea, where I work, there was a time when a person without a university degree was hardly treated as a person. Wedding plans could be going well until somebody found out the groom had no degree. From that moment he was seen as a lesser kind of person, though nothing about him had changed.

    Degrees still matter there, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But there are more ways to succeed now, and parents are less fixed on a degree than they used to be. This is what happens as a society matures: the things you can see — money, the name of your university, your job title — lose some of their hold. What starts to count for more is what you can’t see: whether people’s rights are respected, what a person’s character is like, whether they care about anyone besides themselves.

    What happens to the people who lose the fight for power and money

    The less mature a society is, the harder it clings to power and money. In a society like that, people without power or money get treated badly, so everyone rushes to get them. People fight each other bitterly for them. And whoever loses that fight is no longer treated as a person at all.

    A man who loses that fight is left feeling robbed. He carries despair, frustration, and anger at the society that did this to him. He can’t make a decent living the ordinary way. So one day he thinks: to hell with it — one big score and I’ll finally have some money. That is how he falls into gambling.

    The arithmetic that keeps him going back

    Why can’t he stop once he has started? There are deeper psychological reasons as well, and I will come to one of them. But the reason he is aware of is simple arithmetic. By now he is deep in debt, and gambling looks like the only way he could ever pay it off.

    Say he does hard physical labor — hauling, lifting, whatever job pays that week. He works every day for a whole month, and it earns him one paycheck. His debt is hundreds of times the size of that paycheck. He could never pay it off with honest wages, and he knows it.

    So one thought takes hold and won’t let go: if I play it right — just once, if I play it right — I can pay off the whole debt. To him that is not a fantasy. It is the only calculation he has that ends with him out of debt. So he keeps going back.

    The deeper reason lies in the part of his mind he isn’t aware of. There, the aim is not to pay off the debt at all. The aim is to destroy himself, and you can see it in what he does. There are nights when he is ahead. He could stand up and walk out with money in his pocket, and he doesn’t. He is not trying to get out of gambling and failing. Deep down, part of him does not want to get out. It wants to ruin him.

    Addiction starts with refusing to admit your limits

    Every road into addiction has one thing in common: the person refuses to admit the limits of what he can actually do.

    The twelve-step program — the recovery program used by Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups — begins with exactly what the addicted person refuses to do: admitting a limit. Its first step asks you to admit that you are powerless: that you cannot control the drinking, the gambling, or whatever it is by willpower alone.

    The addicted mind is grandiose. Deep inside it sits a conviction: I am somebody special. I can go past any limit. Whatever wall other people hit, I can step over it. Psychology calls this feeling omnipotence — the private sense that nothing is beyond your reach.

    The woman who drives to her mother’s every day and the man who keeps gambling look as if they have nothing in common. But neither will admit a limit. She acts as though her time, money, and patience can never run out. He believes that one good night — “just once, if I play it right” — can pay off a debt that honest work never could. And because neither admits the limit, neither stops at it: she keeps giving until she hates the person she is caring for, and he keeps betting while his losses grow.

    Cut back to what you can actually give

    Pick one thing you are doing right now that is more than you can really manage. Just one, not everything. Choose the one you keep doing because doing less of it feels like it would be a disaster.

    I’m not telling you to stop doing it. Do as much of it as you can really manage, and then step back. Somebody will notice. What comes up in you then is the fear of being called selfish. That discomfort is expected. Stay with it for a week, without going back to doing more just to make the feeling stop.

    Then notice what goes through your head on the way home. Is that hateful thought quieter? If it is, the person you care for has not changed. What changed is how much you chose to give. Once the driving, the paying, and the listening have a clear limit, you can keep helping without feeling that the other person will take and take without end.

    One exception. This exercise is for people who are giving more care than they can. If you or someone in your home is already gambling, an exercise like this is not enough. Find a clinician who treats addiction, and start there.

    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

  • Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller

    It’s a Tuesday evening and nothing has happened. The dishes are done, nobody in the family is angry with you, and tomorrow is just another day at work. And still there’s something running underneath it all — a restlessness that follows you from room to room, and you couldn’t say what it’s about.

    Then there’s the other thing, the one you don’t mention to anybody. You told yourself one drink, or one episode of a show, or ten minutes on the phone — and then you reached the limit you’d set and went straight past it, and afterwards you couldn’t explain why, even to yourself.

    These look like two separate problems. They may be the same one: never having learned where to stop.

    Why do you feel anxious when nothing is wrong?

    The psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg described a pattern he called borderline personality organization. “Organization” here simply means the way a person is put together inside: the ways of coping they fall back on, again and again, whenever something goes wrong. The first mark Kernberg listed for this pattern is anxiety — a low, steady unease that never quite lifts. Feeling this way does not, by itself, mean you have this pattern. The same unease can also come from too little sleep, physical illness, or depression.

    The anxiety Kernberg described is not fear of something in particular. It is fear with nothing to attach itself to — it simply floats — which is why it is called free-floating anxiety. It turns up on quiet evenings and in the middle of an ordinary week, and when you ask yourself what exactly you are afraid of, you can’t find an answer.

    There is a reason for it, though. This kind of anxiety grows when your limits are unclear — when it is hard to say what you want, how far you will let yourself go, or when you will stop. Then, whenever you start something, whether a drink, a show or your phone, you don’t know how much is enough, and part of your attention has to keep checking whether you have already gone too far. And because nothing inside you holds your limits in place, they shift from one day to the next. You can never quite relax, even on an evening when nothing is happening.

    Picture an evening with nothing planned in it at all: nothing you have to do, all of it yours. That sounds like rest, and often it isn’t. What wears you down is not the freedom. It is that nothing tells you when to stop: when to put the phone down, when to switch off the show, when to go to bed.

    Is a limit a cage or a railing?

    Most people notice that a limit removes options, but a limit also removes uncertainty. If you decide before dinner that you will have one drink, the decision has already told you where the drinking ends. Without that limit, each empty glass means deciding all over again whether to have another.

    Stand on a balcony with a solid railing and you’ll lean out over it to look at the view below. Take the railing away and you’ll press yourself back against the wall instead. The railing never gave you the view. It gave you the nerve to go and look. A clear limit works the same way: because you know where it is, you can relax and choose freely inside it.

    The same thing happens with sleep, money, exercise, work, and phone use. A fixed bedtime removes the option of scrolling a little longer, but it also ends the argument you have with yourself every night about when to stop. A rule that part of every paycheck goes into savings limits what you can spend, but it also keeps that money safe from whatever you feel like buying on a given day.

    Why won’t a therapy session run late to make up for lost time?

    A therapy session runs fifty minutes. Say you arrive half an hour late — the trains were cancelled, a crash had the highway at a standstill, every word of your explanation is true and none of it is your fault. The session still ends at the moment it was always going to end. A minute or two over, sometimes. Never thirty.

    Nearly everyone hates this at first. It feels cold, and it feels like the one person who’s supposed to be looking after you is sitting there quietly watching the clock.

    But alongside the hurt, the fixed ending gives you something. If you arrive late, the lost time is gone; if you arrive on time, you get the full fifty minutes. After months of sessions that start and end the same way, you no longer wonder whether a crisis, an apology or an important story might buy you extra time. You know exactly what to expect, and that is part of what makes therapy feel steady and safe.

    Why does saying no settle a child down?

    Telling a child they can’t have what they want is hard, because you’re the one who has to stand there and watch the small face crumple. So you give in, and that’s easier on everybody for about four minutes.

    But a child who never gets stopped grows more anxious, not less. Being told no is a surprisingly large part of what makes a child feel safe.

    When you tell a child you’re not buying any more candy, the child may whine, become furious, or lie on the supermarket floor. That reaction means the child has run into a limit, and what you do next is what counts. If you let the child be upset but keep the same answer, and stay loving while you do, the child learns two things: being angry with you does not end the relationship, and not getting what they want right away is something they can live through.

    If you give in because the crying is too hard to bear, the child learns something else: the harder they push, the more the line moves. Instead of learning to stop, the child learns to demand more loudly.

    Is the drink the problem, or the line you crossed?

    Look closely at what addiction actually means, and it turns out to be less about what a person uses than about going past a limit.

    Are drugs bad? Some of the same drugs people get addicted to are part of ordinary medicine. If you’ve given birth with an epidural, it very likely contained an opioid, and some cough and cold medicines contain opioids too. Is alcohol bad? Not by itself — whole countries drink at dinner and then stop when dinner is over. Some substances do carry far more risk than others, especially illegal drugs and misused prescription drugs, but the substance is not what defines an addiction.

    What defines an addiction is going past the point where you meant to stop, again and again. One drink becomes several, ten minutes on the phone becomes three hours, and you keep going even when your health, your work, your finances or your relationships are suffering. You can name the limit before you start. What you can’t do is stop when you reach it.

    Can something healthy turn into a way to hurt yourself?

    Exercise makes this plain. A sensible amount of it does you good, which is why nobody thinks of it as a risk. Now watch somebody who has gone past the line. Their knees and shoulders are ruined, and they keep training anyway, straight through the damage. That isn’t health any more — something else has taken the wheel.

    There’s a name for that something: the superego, the part of you that watches and scolds and keeps score. It doesn’t tell you when enough is enough. It sets a standard, and when you fall short of it, it punishes you. Once it has taken the wheel, you aren’t training to look after your body any more. You’re training to wreck it, and the damage is the punishment.

    So you can’t tell whether something is an addiction by looking at what a person is doing, because the activity on its own tells you almost nothing. Even something good can wreck you once you go past the line, and for some people, wrecking themselves is the point.

    What happens when nobody ever says stop?

    I work as a therapist, and not long ago an elderly couple came to see me about their son. He’s thirty-six, still caught in his addiction, and still coming home some nights and not others.

    In all the years they were raising him, his parents never actually stepped in. When he stole money, nothing whatsoever happened. There were words, plenty of words — don’t do that, do this — and the words were all there ever was. No consequence ever followed them. Plenty of telling. Never any stopping. The line got talked about for years and never once got drawn.

    Where does that lead? A person who is never stopped keeps going, further and further out, until he hits a wall. Sooner or later he always does. The last line left is the law, the edge of what society will accept. He crosses it, and once he has, society can no longer put up with him. So he gets locked up. That is the wall.

    Why would a locked door feel like relief?

    Being locked up is hard, and people hate it, count the days, can’t stand another minute of it. And alongside all of that, something in them quietly settles, because somebody finally drew the line.

    Some of the people who end up in prison know something the rest of us find hard to believe: being inside is easier than being outside. Not better. Not kinder. Easier. Outside, there were no limits anywhere, and for years nothing stopped them. Inside, there are far fewer choices to make, and what happens next has already been decided.

    Under that strange pairing — unbearable and a relief at the same time — there may be a wish they have never put into words: Someone, please, tell me where this ends.

    So who is going to draw your line?

    A locked door can stop a person, but it cannot teach him to stop himself. Nobody drew the line for the son while he was growing up, and nobody is going to draw yours for you either. That is less bleak than it sounds, because it means you get to say where it goes. Draw one tonight, something small: the phone, the run, the work you’d otherwise carry past midnight. Decide where it ends before you start, and then actually stop there when you reach it. If it’s drinking, and you already know that once you start you can’t stop, your line may need to come before the first drink: don’t start at all, and get help, from a professional if you need it.

    The hard part comes after you stop. You may feel empty, deprived, restless, or angry that your own rule has taken away something you could have had. If you go straight back to it, the discomfort disappears and the old habit gets stronger. If you let the feeling stay without crossing the line, you learn that you can want more and still not act on it. Repeat that, and you begin to build the limit of your own that was missing — one that lets you stop yourself before a wall outside has to do it for you.

    References

    • Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson.

    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