Inner Work Notes

Tag: boundaries

  • Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries

    The bedroom door opens without a knock. She asked him not to do that — more than once. He walks in the way he always does, carrying a question that apparently cannot wait. By dinner he is warm and funny, as if the man who pushed in that morning had been someone else.

    Everyone notices the moods first

    When I work with someone who never developed a clear inner line — a sense of where they stop and the next person starts — the moods are the first thing I notice. Feelings swing hard and fast. Warm at nine, flat at noon, cold by three. The person laughing over breakfast can look like a stranger by lunch.

    So the people around them — maybe you are one of them — reach for easy words. He’s moody. She runs hot. He’s just an intense guy. Those words explain nothing, and they leave you waiting for better weather that never quite comes.

    The swings are not simply temperament. When a person can’t clearly tell their own feelings apart from yours, what you feel doesn’t stay on your side of the line. If your mood turns bad, theirs turns bad too, before they have even heard what is wrong. So every small shift between you shakes them. To them, your silence feels like rejection, your need for privacy feels like abandonment, and an ordinary disagreement feels as if the whole relationship has changed.

    Why someone with no line of their own crosses yours

    Someone with no firm line inside is often the one who crosses yours. Think of the markers a surveyor puts in the ground between two yards: your grass ends here, mine starts there. Because of those markers, each neighbor knows how far their own yard goes. People carry a line like that in the mind, too: up to here is me, past here is you. When that line is blurred inside a person, they can’t see yours either. They just walk in.

    They open your door without knocking. They read your phone while you’re washing the dishes. They go through a wallet that isn’t theirs and see nothing odd about it. Ask them about it later and they’re honestly puzzled: “What’s the big deal? We’re close.”

    These are the small things we file under privacy. Not secrets — just the ordinary corners a person keeps to themselves. A closed drawer. A phone lying face down. A door that takes one knock before it opens. They don’t see any of these as yours to keep.

    They open conversations you closed, too. You said you’d rather not get into it. Later that night it starts again: “Why won’t you tell me? What are you keeping from me? Why do you shut me out?”

    Everyone needs a certain distance to feel safe, even with the people closest to them, and hopes those people will respect it. But to them, being close means keeping nothing from each other, so your closed door or face-down phone looks like a secret, or like being pushed away. They don’t see it as distance you have every right to keep. So they open the door, ask the question again, or check the phone, trying to win back a closeness they feel is being taken from them.

    When an argument sweeps you both away

    An argument with them rarely stays on the subject. They feel criticized, raise their voice, and insist that you are attacking them. You become defensive and raise your voice in return. Within seconds, each person is reacting to the other person’s reaction rather than to the issue that began the conversation.

    It isn’t only your room and your wallet they get into. Feelings cross the line too. When you get angry, they are angry at once. In the heat of it, neither of you has a moment to sort out, “This is my fear, and that is your anger,” so the feelings run together. Their anxiety sets off yours. When you pull back, they get more anxious, and each round is worse than the last. By the end, both of you feel invaded: their feelings have poured into you, and yours into them.

    That’s what makes these fights so hard to resolve. You can’t sort out a feeling you never had a chance to look at. By the time you’re calm enough to ask yourself what you actually think, the evening is gone.

    Help that lands like a shove

    They cross your line not only when they are suspicious or angry, but just as much when they are trying hard to be good to you.

    They help, and the help goes too far. They answer a question that was put to you. They rearrange your kitchen while you’re out. They tell a friend what you’re going through, because they want the friend to understand and go easier on you.

    The intention may be genuinely warm. But when they answer for you, rearrange your belongings, or tell your story without asking, they make choices that were yours to make. That is why their help can feel like being pushed. The problem is not the wish to help. It is that they have no clear sense of where helping ends and pushing in begins.

    You keep redrawing a line that won’t stay drawn

    So far this has been about what they do. Now look at what it does to you, the one whose line keeps being crossed.

    Living with them, you spend your week putting a line back where it was. You ask them to knock, and the door opens anyway. You say you don’t want to talk about something, and the question comes back. You explain calmly. Then you explain with an edge in your voice. The calm version and the sharp version get the same result.

    It’s the same small fight on a loop. The line is clear to you, but not to them, so nothing stays settled. You are always on edge, and whatever peace of mind you had is gone.

    What wears you out is not one big intrusion. It is having to say the same thing again and again, because the last conversation didn’t stick. Each time looks small. But you spend the day watching for the next open door, the next question, the next intrusion, so your body stays braced for a fight from morning to night. That is why you get tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch.

    What worked yesterday doesn’t work today

    Now go back to the moods we started with. The moods and the way they cross your line come from the same place: the line inside them was never firmly drawn. A line like that gives a person something fixed to go by. Without one, they change with whatever is happening at the moment: one way, then the other, then back again.

    So you adapt. You learn what they are fine with and what upsets them, and you get good at it. Then it all shifts. What worked yesterday lands wrong today, and you start to feel you can’t get anything right in your own home. It isn’t you. There’s nothing steady there to learn.

    To say it plainly: they don’t cross your line or change from day to day to wear you down, and it isn’t meanness. They have no fixed line inside to go by, and so you have nothing steady to go by either.

    Make your own line firm in one place, while the house is calm

    You can’t draw the missing line inside someone else. You can keep your own, though, and you can start by making it firm in just one place.

    Work out how much distance you need in order to feel safe. Then mark it clearly in just one place. Not ten. One. It might sound like this: “This drawer stays shut.” “I’m not ready to talk about this yet.” “The first hour after work is mine, before it belongs to anyone else.” Decide it on a day when nothing is happening. The line isn’t there to change them. It’s there so you still have a place to stand beside someone who changes from one day to the next. Somewhere in the house, one thing stays where you put it.

    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

  • 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

  • Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts

    You already know the relationship is hurting you. You know how tired you are and how often you have been disappointed. You may even have packed a bag or promised yourself that the next incident would be the last.

    But when you imagine leaving, another thought appears: He would fall apart without me. She would not manage. Everything would collapse because I stopped holding it together.

    If you have wondered why you cannot leave a relationship that keeps hurting you, love may not be the only reason you stay. Codependency may also be holding you there: you have become responsible for keeping the other person stable, and you believe that if you sacrifice enough, your care will eventually change them.

    Have you ever thought, “They would not make it without me”?

    Codependency is a way of relating in which another person’s problems become your responsibility. When they drink, you call their employer and say they are sick. When they forget a bill, you pay it before the service is disconnected. When they become angry, you change your words and behavior to calm them. Once you have done this again and again, caring for them is no longer just one part of your life. It becomes your role, and you start to feel that you matter only as long as you are solving their problems.

    From the outside, this looks like devotion. The devotion is real. People in this position often give more than anyone around them and continue giving after they are exhausted. But underneath the giving, there is often an unspoken condition: If I sacrifice enough, this person will change.

    You may never say this condition aloud. It may feel like commitment rather than a bargain. But the expectation still shapes what you do. You give up sleep, money, friendships, and plans of your own because you believe each sacrifice brings the other person closer to becoming responsible, sober, affectionate, or stable.

    People rarely change because someone else has sacrificed for them. Change must begin inside the person who needs to change. When that change does not happen, however, you often reach the wrong conclusion. Instead of thinking, They are not choosing to change, you think, I have not loved them well enough yet.

    That conclusion creates a repeating cycle. They create another problem. You step in and repair the damage. They avoid the consequences of what they did. Because the crisis has passed, you feel briefly relieved. Then the same problem returns, and you try even harder. You give more and more, but they take no more responsibility for their own behavior. You believe you are helping. But because you keep taking the consequences onto yourself, they never have to face them, and so they have no reason to change.

    Why were they so good to you at the beginning?

    People with an addiction, or with some other trouble they have never dealt with, are often unusually attentive at the beginning of a relationship. They listen closely, respond quickly, and adjust themselves to what you need. Their warmth may be sincere. At the same time, the part of them that desperately needs the relationship is working hard to make sure you do not leave.

    Later, when they feel certain that the relationship will continue, that effort may disappear. The person who once called every night stops answering. The person who noticed every change in your mood now dismisses your pain. Because you experienced their warmth at the beginning, you remember that warm person as who they really are. The way they treat you now seems like a temporary change, not the whole relationship.

    This is why you keep thinking, He was a good man when we met. She used to understand me. If I respond correctly, we can return to that time. Each brief return of affection strengthens that expectation. A kind weekend after weeks of conflict can convince you that the person you first met is coming back. You stay not only because of what the relationship is now, but because you are still waiting for it to become what it was at the beginning.

    The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to leave. You have already put in years, money, and patience, and given up many plans of your own. Leaving now can feel as though you are admitting that none of those sacrifices produced the change you expected. To avoid that conclusion, you make one more effort. The more the relationship costs you, the more determined you become to make the cost mean something.

    Did you really choose this person?

    As a therapist, when I look at a relationship, I pay attention to how each person was already handling fear, loneliness, and responsibility before the two of them met. Give two people the same difficult month and they may respond in completely different ways. One asks three friends for help within two days. The other becomes silent, hides the problem, and waits for someone to notice. Each person brings a way of coping like this into a relationship.

    You also came into your relationship with patterns of your own. You may be drawn to people who need rescuing because being useful makes you feel secure. You may trust an emotionally distant person quickly, because that distance feels familiar. You may work harder for affection if, as a child, love was something you had to earn. These patterns usually shape your choice of partner long before you can put them into words.

    This is why the faces can change while the shape of your relationships stays the same. One partner drinks and another withdraws, but you become the responsible one in both relationships. You make excuses for them, wait, repair the damage, and give another chance. The details change, but your role and the ending remain familiar.

    In these relationships, choice is shaped by familiarity. You can mistake what feels familiar for what is right for you. You do not consciously decide to repeat the same pain. You recognize the familiar feel of the relationship long before you see what it will cost you.

    Why do their words sound like something you have heard before?

    Suppose your partner swears at you, and as you hear it, you remember your father swearing at you in almost the same words decades earlier. The current scene hurts, but it is not unfamiliar. You already learned what to do in this kind of relationship: become quiet, watch the other person’s mood, wait for the anger to pass, and try not to make the situation worse.

    Because of that history, familiar pain can feel safer than a calm you are not used to. Your body already knows the sequence. Their voice changes, your muscles tighten, you stop saying what you think, and your attention moves from your own feelings to the other person’s reaction. In a calm relationship, nobody needs to be rescued or watched. Because you have not practiced living that way, calm can feel empty or uncertain rather than safe.

    Psychoanalysis calls this pull toward familiar pain the repetition compulsion: without realizing it, you keep going back to the kind of emotional situation you first lived through as a child. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called a knot of early feelings and memories a complex. A complex does not remain in the past. It influences which people attract your attention, what behavior you excuse, and which role you automatically take when conflict begins.

    This is why your partner’s words can sound like your father’s. The present relationship puts you back in the place you held with your father as a child. You again become the person who absorbs the anger, keeps everything from falling apart, and waits for warmth to return. Part of you is also trying to do this time what you could not do back then: finally fix the relationship with your father. That old wish is part of why you try so hard to change your partner. Willpower alone rarely breaks the pattern, because to you this is simply how a relationship works.

    Where does devotion end and codependency begin?

    Devotion and codependency can look almost identical from the outside. In both cases, you may cook, pay bills, attend appointments, and stay close during a crisis. The difference becomes clearer when you look at what happens to your own life while you are helping.

    Here is the first question to ask yourself: If this person never gets better, do I still have a life of my own?

    If you continue sleeping, working, seeing friends, making decisions, and knowing what matters to you, your care is closer to devotion. If their condition determines your mood, your schedule, your self-worth, and whether you are allowed to have a life of your own, then this is codependency.

    The second question is harder: If this person became completely well tomorrow, what would happen to me?

    Imagine that they manage their own money, make their own appointments, regulate their own emotions, and no longer call you to solve each crisis. If you feel relief, then what you wanted all along was to share a life with them, not to carry their life for them. If you feel empty or anxious, being needed may have become the main source of your identity.

    Feeling empty or anxious is not a moral failure, and it does not mean you consciously wanted them to remain unwell. It means the role has been giving you something important: the sense that you matter. When you are the person who notices the unpaid bill, makes the phone call, prepares the meal, and prevents the next disaster, you always know what to do and why you matter.

    If the other person begins doing those things without you, your role disappears. Then another question appears: If nobody needs rescuing today, what do I want to do with my own life? That question can feel frightening when you have put your own wishes, friendships, work, and rest on hold for years.

    If their recovery makes you feel empty instead of relieved, being needed has probably been giving you a reason to remain in the relationship.

    If they were completely well tomorrow, what would you want to do?

    Try writing something today, but not about them. Do not write about what they did last week, why they behaved that way, or what you should have done differently. Instead, write your answer to one question:

    If this person were completely well tomorrow, what would I want to do?

    You may not have an answer. That blank space tells you something important. Your days may have been organized around another person for so long that you have stopped asking what you enjoy, whom you want to see, and where you want your own life to go.

    You do not have to make a final decision about the relationship tonight. Begin with one concrete answer about the life that would still belong to you if the other person were no longer at the center of every day. Write down one place you would visit, one person you would call, or one activity you stopped doing when managing the relationship took over your time.

    What you write down is not yet a plan to leave or stay. It shows that you have needs, wishes, or a direction of your own that do not depend on holding another person together.

    This is educational writing, not treatment. If you are afraid for your safety in this relationship, getting safe and getting outside help come first, before any effort to persuade or change the other person.

    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