Inner Work Notes

Tag: anger

  • Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From

    Some of the people who come to see me for therapy lie down and, before long, fall asleep. I don’t wake them. I don’t clear my throat to move things along. I let them sleep a long while, and when the time is up I say one thing: “Time’s up.”

    Nothing got produced in that hour, and the hour was not wasted. If you learned that your worth depends on what you get done, resting without getting anything done will feel wrong, even when your body needs the rest.

    Rest also gives something back. While you rest somewhere safe, your body lets go of tension and you start to feel like yourself again. Sometimes a person needs that first, before they can use their own drive: the force to say no, to choose, to start something, and to keep at it. Push someone who hasn’t had enough rest to keep going, and what they do no longer comes from that drive. It becomes one more duty, done to meet someone else’s demands.

    Anger may seem to have nothing to do with rest, but it is part of that same force. So when you press anger down the moment it rises, you weaken your drive along with it.

    Resting where nobody can poke you

    No part of me is thinking we ought to be getting somewhere. The person lying there is doing something that matters. They’re resting in a spot where nobody is going to reach over and poke them.

    They are not working on themselves. They are experiencing a relationship in which they can stop performing and still be welcome. In a sense, the room is a mother’s arms. A small child in its mother’s arms doesn’t have to do anything to stay there, and the room holds the person lying there in the same way, without asking them to produce anything.

    Being comes before doing

    Therapy is not an hour you have to fill. We talk, of course. But the bigger thing on offer is simpler than talking. In the therapy room you get to stop. You get to simply be there without having to justify it to anyone.

    The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it plainly: being comes before doing. Being able simply to exist, without having to get anything done, is the ground a person grows from. Doing is built on top of it.

    That may sound strange, because most of your week runs the other way. You earn your place by getting things done — inbox cleared, everyone fed, a weekend that somehow arrives with its own to-do list. When there is nothing to get done, something in you starts to fidget. That restlessness is worth noticing. It comes from the belief that you are worth only what you get done.

    The silence I leave alone

    So when a client goes quiet, I don’t fill the silence. This is not a technique. The quiet itself is that experience of simply being, without having to do anything. Whatever is going on inside the person during it does not need my voice to make it better.

    Sitting in silence with another person is harder than it sounds. Think of the last time a conversation went quiet on you, and how fast you reached for your phone or a joke or the weather. That reflex is so quick it passes for good manners.

    Two silences I do step into. One is the silence of digging in: “I don’t want to say it, so I won’t.” The other belongs to someone who wants to speak and can’t get the words out. I work with both of those. The rest I leave alone.

    What’s left is two people sitting together, doing nothing for each other. No performance, no service, no progress report. Winnicott had a name for this experience when nothing interrupts it: the continuity of being. You simply go on existing, without having to react to anyone’s demands. He stressed it above everything else, because a person needs it first in order to grow into a whole person. When it is interrupted too often, that growth gets hard. Instead you become whoever the person in front of you needs you to be — quick with an answer for anyone who asks, and blank when somebody asks what you want for dinner.

    Why does the whole world look like it’s coming at you?

    Besides this experience of simply being, Winnicott insisted on a second thing, and it is harder to hear. You have to recognize the aggression in yourself: your anger, and your own wishes to attack, humiliate, or destroy. He was firm that denying these feelings does not get rid of them. If you learned that getting angry ruins relationships, you may not admit, even to yourself, that you are angry. Then you start seeing that anger in other people instead.

    The neighbor’s tone. The email with no greeting. The driver who didn’t wave a thank-you. All of it starts reading as aimed at you, and your week fills up with the work of deciding what people meant. You catch yourself thinking, “He looked at me a certain way,” or “She left me out on purpose,” and you get defensive or back off first. When you are that busy finding hostility in other people, some of the hostility you find is your own.

    Then one day you admit to yourself: “I have wanted to break something. I have wanted someone to get hurt.” Once you can recognize those wishes as your own, you no longer have to see all the hostility as coming from neighbors, coworkers, or strangers. The world stops looking threatening everywhere you turn, even though nobody out there has changed.

    Admitting your own anger does not mean the person who upset you did nothing wrong. Once you can say “I was angry too,” you can look at two things separately: how much of a threat that person really is, and how strong your own feeling is. Then there is room to show your anger by saying no or keeping your distance, instead of through insults or violence.

    A lion runs down a lamb. Where is the evil in it?

    This is where the word aggression misleads. When Winnicott talks about aggression, he does not mean only what you’re picturing — the fist, the shouting, the wreckage afterward. He means energy: the force that moves you toward what you want, pushes obstacles out of the way, and protects you. The wish to hurt someone is one form that energy can take, but only one.

    Picture a lion running flat out and taking down a lamb in front of the lamb’s own mother. Ask yourself honestly: is the lion evil? The body driving forward, the claws, the teeth, the whole act — every part of that is aggression.

    And nobody watching calls the lion bad. We say it’s nature, and we mean it. We know what we are looking at: not evil, but the force of a living thing.

    But when the same force rises in you, you don’t see it that way. You call it a bad feeling and press it down the moment it appears. Same force, worse name, harsher judgment.

    Creativity is aggression that found somewhere to go

    When you accept aggression as part of yourself, you can steer its energy instead of blowing up or pressing it down. Love is what gives the force a direction. You can be angry with someone close to you and still love them. When you can feel both at once, you don’t have to attack the whole person with “I hate you.” You can say, “Stop doing that.” Held together with love like this, the force no longer has to attack anyone. You can use it to take on a problem, protect a boundary, or keep working until something is made.

    Creativity comes out of aggression.

    You probably don’t believe that yet, so stay with it a minute before you argue back. Think of the things we value most: wisdom, insight, recovery, love, gratitude, happiness, plain enjoyment. Every one of them grows out of this same force. None of them shows up in a person who has no force left.

    Think of something you finished that mattered. If there was a stretch in the middle where you were half furious — at the problem, at yourself, at how slowly it moved — that heat was doing work. Take the heat out and you’re left with a nice idea that never got built.

    Winnicott kept coming back to zest. The buzz. The fun of a thing. It’s what has you starting a project on a Saturday morning for no good reason, and it runs on the same force.

    If aggression looks only destructive, what you are seeing is the force without love or responsibility. When the same force is joined to love, it appears as protection, persistence, creativity, and the determination to recover.

    Getting better takes force too

    Think about what getting better actually takes. There is nothing soft about it.

    “I’m going to get through this.” “I’m going to live differently.” “I’m having this treated, whatever it takes out of me.” When a thought like that rises in you, that is force — aggression working on your side.

    And right behind it comes a second voice: “Don’t bother.” “Stay put.” “Who do you think you are?” The push back against that voice is force as well, and so is the whole struggle between the two.

    You can see what happens when this force runs short in people who have spent years swallowing their anger to keep things pleasant at work or at home. They never snap, never argue, never make anyone uncomfortable — and they also can’t get a single day started. Almost nobody, including them, sees that the two are connected: the force they press down to keep the peace is the same force they would need to get going.

    This force is what keeps a life moving. Without it, a life comes to a stop. Nothing appeals. Nothing pulls at you. Nothing gets going in the first place.

    Feeling aggression and attacking someone are not the same act. The feeling is energy inside you, and it carries information: it tells you where your limits are. Turning it on another person is an action, and whether you take that action is your choice. Being angry does not give you the right to hurt anyone. Violence and threats have to stop, and if it is hard to keep yourself under control, step away and get help.

    Before you press your anger back down

    Something will flare up in you today: irritation, the sting of being treated unfairly, an “Oh, come on” that lands in your chest.

    You already know your reflex: press it down, smile, move along. Give it three seconds first. While the feeling is still warm in your chest, ask it: What is this protecting? What does it want to get done?

    You may not get an answer. Ask anyway and let the day go on. Looking at your anger even once, instead of pressing it down, makes more of a difference than you might think. A person with no anger left is not calm. That person has run out of force, and nothing gets started anymore.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock. — being and doing.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958).

    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

  • Why Taking Orders Feels Like an Insult

    Your manager stops at your desk and says, “Do this one differently next time.” That’s the whole event. No raised voice, no audience, nothing unfair in the words. But your jaw sets before she’s finished the sentence, and before you’ve even weighed what she said, a thought is already there: Who does she think she is?

    The work isn’t what’s hard. Being told is.

    You’ve probably noticed this in yourself before. When something is your own idea, you do it gladly. When the very same thing comes to you as an instruction, something in you locks up. The work hasn’t changed. The only difference is that someone told you to do it.

    When a child first speaks up for herself, she says “no”

    Babies don’t arrive as separate people. For a long stretch, as far as the baby is concerned, she and her mother are not yet two people. The psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler called this stage symbiosis: mother and baby live as if they were one, with no line yet between where one ends and the other begins.

    Then the child starts to pull away from that oneness, and that is when she begins to push back against her mother. Look at the first words she uses to make her own wishes known.

    Not “I like this,” and not “I want that one.” It’s “no,” and “don’t.” She starts with refusals.

    That isn’t a small child misbehaving. It’s a step she has to take. When a toddler plants her feet and says no to the person she loves most, she is doing something enormous. For the first time, she is someone who is not her mother.

    Each “no” shows her, in action, that her mother wants one thing and she wants another. That is how a child first finds out that she has a will of her own, separate from her mother’s.

    We go through this separation twice, and the second time is louder

    Mahler had a name for this whole process: separation-individuation. You separate from that sense of being one with your mother, and you become an individual, someone who can say “I’m here, I’m me.” It doesn’t happen once and then finish. We go through it twice: once as toddlers, and again in adolescence. Another psychoanalyst, Peter Blos, called the teenage round “the second individuation.”

    The toddler version is small enough to be funny. She marches off across the park as if she’s leaving for good, until her mother catches her by the arm and pulls her back. She looks her mother in the eye and takes one more bite of the very thing she was told not to eat.

    Adolescence is the full-strength version. Now the pushing back comes with real opinions, and with a bigger body and a louder voice. It’s the same job the toddler was doing, on a far bigger scale.

    Why good advice sends a teenager the other way

    A teenager is trying to show that he exists as his own person: that his opinions and choices are his, not his parents’. Going against them is the quickest way to show it.

    That is why even sensible advice can send him in the opposite direction. If he simply does what his parents say, it feels as if he has no mind of his own, as if the choice were theirs and not his. So he goes against it.

    Parents feel wronged by this, and honestly, fair enough. The more they point him toward the good road, the more likely he is to head down the bad one. But he isn’t arguing about the road. He’s arguing about who gave the directions.

    The passcode on the phone

    Adolescence seems to start earlier these days, around fourth grade, at nine or ten. That is when many children begin openly defying their parents. A passcode goes on the phone, and the bedroom door shuts a little harder than it strictly needs to. Both say the same thing: stay out.

    Parents feel their stomach drop, but this is not a disaster. A child has to rebel in some form or other. The toddler’s “no” was small, and in the years since, she has mostly lived by fitting in with what her parents want. Rebelling now is how she breaks out of that and starts living as herself. The passcode isn’t really about the phone. It is a child finding out that there is something she alone gets to decide. Going through this rebellion is what a healthy adolescence looks like.

    So does being a grown-up mean swallowing your feelings and doing as you’re told?

    This is the part that matters. Once the rebellion has done its job and you know you exist as your own person, you become an adult. And an adult can do something a teenager can’t.

    Someone with authority tells you to do a thing, and part of you hears it as an insult. You can do it anyway — not because you caved, but because you know that doing as you’re told won’t make you stop being your own person. That’s an adult.

    Notice that nothing gets swallowed here. You still feel the sting, you still do the task, and one doesn’t cancel the other. The sting is a feeling passing through, not proof that you’ve been crushed.

    But if the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, being told what to do becomes unbearable. Before you’ve even taken in what an instruction says, it feels like an attack on your right to run your own life. Your body braces, the thought “Who does she think she is?” arrives, and you resist even when you agree with the task. Your manager ends up receiving resistance that was first meant for a parent, years ago.

    Why the trouble is always with whoever is above you

    This reaction is strongest in people whose relationship with their father went badly, especially a father who gave orders and allowed no questions. A manager, a senior colleague, anyone above them: there’s always friction, always some version of the same fight, and it doesn’t go away. And the odd part is how specific it is: they bristle only at people above them.

    If your father used his authority to control, humiliate, or overpower you, that wound stays with you. Years later, anyone with authority over you can feel like the same threat. Your manager is not your father. But she stands where he stood, as someone who can tell you what to do. That alone is enough to make your body brace and your jaw set, as it once did with him, before you’ve looked at what is actually happening.

    So on an ordinary afternoon you are angry at your manager, but the strength of that anger comes partly from much earlier, from a time when being told what to do meant being humiliated or losing control over your own life. The anger you couldn’t voice in front of your father comes up along with it.

    When the people and rules above you are wrong

    Growing up comes down to something plain in the end: you accept that the world has an order, that some people and some rules have authority over you. At work, that means a manager. Beyond work, it means laws and government policies. That is reality, whether you like it or not.

    And that order is not always right. A law, a policy, the person above you: any of them can be wrong, and sometimes badly. When that happens, you should be able to see it and say so out loud: “This isn’t right.”

    Where people part ways is in how they respond to something wrong. The mature route uses the proper channels to change it. At work, that means checking the rules and gathering the facts before you raise the problem. With a law or a policy, it means finding the others who see the problem too, researching it, and campaigning for change. Either way, you keep making your case with reasons, and that route asks you to stay with it for a long time.

    The other route wants it settled this afternoon. When the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, or the old wound from your father is still open, you go after the person instead of the problem: “Who do you think you are?” You blame, and you try to win by force rather than by reasons.

    What was said, or the fact of being told

    So the next time your jaw sets, don’t answer right away. Ask yourself one question first.

    Is this about what she said, or about the fact that she’s the one who gets to say it?

    If it’s the content that bothers you, you may have a real point, and a real point can be raised. Don’t stop at “this feels bad.” Work out what the rules say, what the facts are, and what harm the instruction could do, and take that to her. That is the mature route.

    If the content was honestly fine, it’s worth asking whether the person you’re fighting is really the person in front of you. Would you react the same way if a coworker at your own level had said exactly the same words? If not, the reaction may go back to your father, and your manager has simply stepped into the place he once stood.

    References

    • Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books.
    • Blos, P. (1967). The Second Individuation Process of Adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 22, 162–186. — the second individuation in adolescence is Blos’s formulation, not Mahler’s.

    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

  • Why Not Understanding Someone Makes You Angry

    Someone is explaining something to you, and the words keep arriving, but nothing is landing. You ask them to go through it once more, and they do, patiently — and you still have nothing.

    Then you notice the heat coming up in your chest.

    Which is strange, when you think about it. Not following someone costs you nothing at all, and nobody gets hurt. You could say “I’m not getting this” and the afternoon would carry on exactly as before. But your jaw sets, your voice comes out with an edge you never planned, and something in you has clearly taken offense.

    That heat is worth a closer look, because what drives it began long before this conversation, when you were a baby.

    Why do grown adults still throw tantrums?

    In the first months of life, a baby’s mind works very differently from an adult’s.

    A baby experiences hunger, cries, and is fed. Because the baby cannot yet understand that a separate caregiver heard the cry and chose to respond, the hunger and the feeding feel like one continuous event. At this stage, the baby cannot yet tell where he ends and the world begins.

    Psychoanalysis calls this early state infantile narcissism. The baby is the center of his own world, and as far as he can tell, things happen the way he wants them to. It is a normal stage, not a fault.

    As a child grows, that self-centered state has to change, slowly, until he can want something badly and still notice that the person fetching it is tired. The trouble starts when that change never happens. Then the baby’s expectation that things will go the way he wants is still at work at ten, at twenty, at fifty. You can see it at an airport gate when a flight is cancelled: a man at the counter, his voice climbing, talks to the agent as though she had grounded the plane herself. Some part of him still expects the world to rearrange itself the moment he asks.

    For some people, this expectation is not just one part of them; it shapes their whole personality. Then it does not stay quietly in the background. It is strong, and it allows no exceptions: things have to go their way, every time. A no does not merely disappoint someone like that. It shakes them.

    What does a baby learn when crying brings milk?

    That early stage comes with a feeling of enormous power. It is not power over other people; the baby does not yet know other people are there. It is simpler and wider than that: I can do anything. Psychoanalysis calls it omnipotence, and the baby feels certain the power belongs to him.

    He feels this because he cannot yet imagine that anything is coming to him from outside. There is hunger, there is crying, and then there is warmth and milk and fullness. From where the baby lies, that sequence can mean only one thing: I made that happen. I produced it myself.

    The illusion holds because the milk arrives soon after the hunger — soon enough that the baby can feel he created it himself.

    Meanwhile someone is awake at three in the morning, and someone’s back hurts, and the baby knows nothing about it — and at that age he shouldn’t have to.

    He needs that illusion for a while because it creates the first sense that his actions affect the world. Gradually, small delays teach him that another person exists separately and that satisfaction does not always arrive on command. As he learns to bear those waits, the feeling that he can do anything slowly turns into a more realistic confidence. When that learning remains incomplete, the old expectation — whatever I need will come the moment I need it — carries on into adult life. And for an adult, what is needed is often not milk but an answer: “If I need an answer, an answer must exist, and I should be able to get it now.”

    Where does “I have to know everything” come from?

    When we picture that feeling of power, we usually think of the doing side of it: I can handle anything, I can fix anything, just hand it to me.

    But that feeling has a twin, growing from the same root: I can know everything. Psychoanalysis calls this second one omniscience. In adult life it usually sounds like this: I have to know everything.

    You will recognize it immediately if you carry it. Not being able to let a thing go until you work out why someone spoke to you in a certain tone. Reading every review on the internet before buying a kettle. Two in the morning, still searching your symptoms online. Sitting in a meeting where one word goes past you, and feeling something clench.

    Curiosity looks identical from the outside, but curiosity can be put down. You get interested, you get distracted, you are perfectly fine. The need to know everything cannot be put down — it has to be finished.

    And it can never be finished, because we are small and the world is not. Most of what happens near you will never be explained to your satisfaction. Why your neighbor moved. Why a friendship cooled. What your father was really thinking. A great deal will simply stay unexplained. Some people can’t accept that. The missing answer does no harm by itself; the harm comes from refusing to live without one. That refusal keeps them frustrated, and, as the next scene shows, the frustration turns into anger at other people.

    What happens to your voice when you don’t follow?

    Here is the scene where this belief shows itself. Two people are talking, and one of them is getting angry because he does not understand what the other is saying.

    Look at it plainly and it makes no sense at all. The one who didn’t understand is the one who is angry. If that is you, why should missing the point put heat in your chest? “I’m not following you” is a complete sentence, and you are allowed to leave it there and go get a coffee.

    Instead there is the sigh, the clipped tone, the “no, but what do you actually mean.” The temperature in the room climbs two degrees.

    Underneath the sigh sits a sentence nobody ever says out loud: I am supposed to know this. And when the explanation will not go in, the frustration does not stay inside this one conversation. It spreads: this person makes no sense, the news makes no sense, nothing about the way the world works makes sense. There is an easy way out of all of it, one simple thought: there is something here I don’t know yet. And that is precisely the thought that will not come.

    Why does the blame end up on the other person?

    When you do not understand something but believe you should, confusion quickly becomes shame: “If I cannot follow this, there must be something wrong with me.”

    Because that conclusion is painful, the mind looks for another explanation. Anger provides one: the problem is no longer that you do not understand; the problem is that the other person is explaining badly.

    Then that thought comes out as blame.

    Psychoanalysis calls this move projection. When you cannot bear to feel confused or inadequate, you experience your own shame and frustration as something the other person is doing to you. You may even feel they are making it difficult on purpose, or looking down on you. So instead of saying, “I do not understand,” you say, “You are not explaining this properly. You are not making any sense. Anyone would be lost.” The accusation protects you from the shame of not knowing. But from then on, the conversation is no longer about what they meant. It is about what they did wrong.

    Sometimes the complaint is fair. Some people genuinely do explain badly. So use the heat as a signal. When you hear yourself say, hotly, “You’re not making any sense,” stop before you argue any further and ask yourself: am I ashamed, right now, that I don’t know?

    Why is “I don’t know” so expensive to say?

    For most people, most of the time, it costs very little. You say the three words, someone explains, and the world carries on turning.

    But if your self-worth depends on being the person who understands, those three words feel like a threat to who you are. Admitting confusion makes you feel exposed or inferior. Anger feels safer: it lets you keep feeling like the person who understands, and it puts the failure on someone else.

    It all happens very quickly. You miss the meaning. You take that as proof that something is wrong with you. You push that shame away and get annoyed at the speaker instead. By the time you notice you are angry, the earlier steps are already over.

    Have you ever said “I don’t know” and left it there?

    Nobody has ever read a paragraph like this one and thought, right then, I’ll stop needing to know things. The belief does not give way to reasoning, because it formed in infancy, long before you could reason at all.

    It gives way instead to experience, gathered slowly. You didn’t understand, and you said so, and nothing fell apart. You sat with a question that stayed open, and an hour later you were still yourself. Enough of those and the old belief loosens its grip. It never gets defeated — it gets outgrown.

    That means the change comes in very small steps. So start with one small step.

    The next time somebody loses you completely, say it out loud — I don’t know what you mean — and then stop there. Don’t ask them to explain it again, and don’t tell them they’ve explained it badly. Don’t turn it into a joke, and don’t attach a reason about being tired or the room being loud. Just the sentence, and then quiet.

    Then watch what your body does with the quiet. Maybe nothing much. Maybe a small squirm, an urge to fill the silence, or to give the excuse you promised yourself you wouldn’t give. If discomfort turns up, don’t argue with it, because the discomfort is the useful part. It shows you that the oldest part of you, the part formed in infancy, is still at work, still expecting the world to explain itself to you.

    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