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.
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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