Inner Work Notes

Tag: Fairbairn

  • Stay Until I Fall Asleep: The Fear That Never Grew Up

    “Stay with me until I fall asleep. That’s all.” I hear some version of that constantly from people who keep falling in love too hard, too fast. It sounds like a small ask, and on the surface it is. A few minutes. A warm body in the room. Nothing promised, nothing signed.

    Then the light goes off. You lie down and, for no reason you can name, something behind your ribs turns cold. It feels as if you would be all right if only someone were with you, so you reach for the phone and scroll for anyone still awake. You stop on the name of a person you know abuses you. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Tonight none of that matters. If that person will only come and be with you, the night becomes bearable.

    This isn’t poor judgment. It isn’t judgment at all. What is making the choice is a fear from infancy, from long before you could judge anyone.

    Grown on the outside, unfinished on the inside

    Here is how I understand falling in love too hard, too fast, over and over. Psychologically, someone who loves like this has not yet been fully born as a person. Their body was born, but inside they never finished separating from their mother (or whoever first cared for them) and standing on their own as a separate self.

    After physical birth, a child gradually learns, “I am a separate person, and I remain myself even when my caregiver is not beside me.” This is not one event. It grows out of an experience repeated many times: the child moves a little away, gets upset, comes back to the caregiver, and finds that nothing has been lost. The caregiver is still there, and the child is still the same child.

    When that process is left unfinished, the body still grows up and the person learns to do adult things, but being apart from someone can still feel like a danger to life itself. When a partner is away, it doesn’t feel like ordinary distance. It brings back the old terror of a small child left without the one person who keeps them alive.

    I kept wondering what that would feel like from the inside. What is it actually like in the mind of an adult who was never fully born as a self?

    Fairbairn, a psychoanalyst who laid the groundwork for object relations theory (the study of how our earliest relationships go on shaping the way we relate to people), described how the self splits when a child’s early needs keep going unmet. One part functions: it goes to work, keeps appointments, and talks normally at lunch. Another part is still waiting for what it needed as a child and never got. Split like this, the self never comes together as one whole “me.” That is why a capable adult can still feel unsure who they are and live in constant fear of being left.

    If you never developed a stable inner sense of being held and protected, you have no memory of safety to draw on when someone leaves. You may know in your head that you can cope, but your body has never learned, through experience, that people who go away come back.

    And life does what life does: it doesn’t go your way, and it doesn’t tell you what’s coming. You have to live in it day after day, not knowing who you are, empty inside, afraid underneath, with nothing solid at your back.

    Everyone fears being left. This is not that.

    A bit of worry about being dropped is normal, and everyone has some. Do they actually like me, or are they just being polite? Nobody gets through a month without a version of that thought, and it means nothing.

    What I’m describing is a different animal. Anxiety is far too small a word for it. This is closer to terror, and at some moments it becomes panic, a state you simply cannot get through on your own.

    That terror is what sits under the late-night call to the person who hurts you.

    Letting go costs more than staying

    When being apart from someone sets off terror, stopping the terror becomes more urgent than judging the other person’s character. That is why you may call someone who has abused you even while knowing exactly what they will do.

    So it stops mattering to you that this person abuses you, or that they have no love to give you. If they will be there beside you, that is enough. Who they are, and how they treat you, stops being the question. The people who love you look on and cannot understand why you stay. But you are not holding on because the person is good. You are holding on because the moment you let go, the full terror comes down on you at once.

    Out of sight, gone

    A second problem is tangled up with this fear of being left.

    Somewhere in a decent childhood, a child builds a quiet certainty that the people they love do not stop existing when they leave the room: “Mom is in the kitchen. I can’t see her, but she’s still there.” Psychoanalysts call this object constancy; in their language, an “object” is a person we are attached to. Once you have it, you never notice you have it.

    Without object constancy, a person who is out of sight feels gone. Your adult mind may know that they still exist and may come back tomorrow, but your feelings react as though the relationship has ended for good. That is why facts like “they’ll be back tomorrow” often do nothing to calm the body.

    Because what you can’t see feels gone, the request I began with comes out so specific, and so small. While someone is in the room, you can see that they are still there. Just stay until I fall asleep — that’s the whole thing. Not forever, not a promise, not a ring. Stay in the room until my eyes close.

    The dark is not the problem

    I hear this one constantly, too: “I can’t sleep by myself. Lying there alone is unbearable.”

    Ask who that fear belongs to. It belongs to a baby alone in a dark room, when the one person keeping it alive is not there. It is not the dark that frightens the baby; it is being alone in it. For something that small, that is the end of the world — and there’s nothing irrational about it. A baby has no reasoning to fall back on, only the bare fact of being alone.

    Some adults still feel exactly this fear, at full strength, in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. Picture a woman in her forties lying alone in the dark and feeling what that baby feels. The fear never grew up with the rest of her.

    So the people around her are baffled. “Just go to sleep,” they say, not unkindly. But for her, those hours alone in the dark come close to panic. What she wants isn’t complicated: somebody warm, with their arms around her.

    Auditioning people to fill a hole

    One person to be there with you. That is the entire requirement, so you go looking, and you will use whatever works.

    You fish for attention in places you don’t even want it. You post something you know will get a reply. You answer the message from someone you’d already written off. You leave a door open to a person you would never pick in daylight. If someone seems likely to accept you and stay by your side, who they are stops mattering.

    It shapes the big decisions too. Most people choosing a partner to build a life with ask about the life they would share. What do we both want? Could I stand to grow old next to this person? When this fear is in charge, those questions never get asked. Only one question counts: can this person take away the empty, low feeling of being alone? Somebody can fail every other test and still pass that one.

    The child on the station floor

    There is also a flat, emptied-out feeling that comes over you when you are alone. It comes from the same place as the terror: the separation from your first caregiver that was never finished. Your sense of who you are never came together as one whole. Without a stable sense that you are still yourself when nobody else is there, being alone can feel like losing yourself. Having someone beside you can make a night of terror bearable, but it does not make this feeling go away, because what is missing is inside you.

    Here’s the picture I keep coming back to. A packed station at rush hour. A very small child has lost the adult they came in with. They’re sitting on the floor screaming while strangers step around them.

    The child can’t reason it out. All the child knows is that the one person who keeps them alive is not here. From down there on the floor, the world has ended, and it stays ended.

    That child’s despair and fear are what fill these nights. The station scene is more than a comparison. The same despair and fear are carried whole into a grown body that gets up and goes to work in the morning.

    The fear belongs to a baby, not to the adult you are now

    Tonight the light will go off and the cold feeling in your chest will arrive on schedule. Before your hand finds the phone, stay where you are for a moment and ask what is really frightening you. It is not that there is no one to hold on to. It is that a small child who was once left alone is still sitting inside you.

    This fear comes from a very early stage of life, so adult reasoning does not reach it. Telling yourself, “This is ridiculous; I should be able to sleep alone,” only adds shame; it does not make you any safer. Instead, respond the way you would to a frightened child. Put into words what is happening. Notice the fear in your body and let it be there, without running from it. And do not put your safety in the hands of whoever answers the phone first.

    If these nights have started to bring thoughts of hurting yourself, tell a doctor instead of carrying that alone.

    The station is still loud, the child is still down on the floor, and strangers keep stepping around them. That child is the one sitting inside you. Instead of going out to find just anyone, sit down on the floor beside that child.

    References

    • Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock. — the central ego (the part of the self that goes on functioning) and the splitting of the self.
    • Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books. — separation from the first caregiver, and object constancy.
    • Masterson, J. F. (1976). Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult. New York: Brunner/Mazel. — abandonment depression: the flat, emptied-out feeling that comes when you are alone.

    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 Someone Warm to Everyone Turns Cold With You

    Everyone describes him as warm and easy to talk to. His coworkers say he listens, laughs, and helps without being asked. But at dinner with you, he answers in four words, looks at his phone, and shows no interest in what you are saying. The difference leaves you wondering which version of him is real.

    You ask what he’s thinking about and he says nothing. Later you lie in the dark and do what you always do, which is look for the fault in yourself first. Maybe you need too much. Maybe you heard a tone that was never in the room. Maybe you’re just too sensitive.

    Hold on to that last one for a minute, because there’s an explanation that goes back to the 1940s, and it doesn’t start with you.

    Ronald Fairbairn, a Scottish psychoanalyst, had a name for people who keep others at a distance even while they seem warm. He called the pattern schizoid. The word comes from the Greek for “split.” It can sound like the name of a severe mental illness, but Fairbairn also used it for something he saw in ordinary people: a mind divided in two to keep itself safe. In the man who is warm at work and cold at dinner, his coworkers meet one half, and no one is allowed near the other.

    Fairbairn said this split shows up in three ways. Read them slowly, because each one probably explains an evening you have already lived through. I’ll write “he” throughout; swap it for “she” if that fits your life better.

    Why does nothing you say ever get through to him?

    The first is a quiet, unshakable sense of being right. Fairbairn’s word for it was omnipotence, which literally means being all-powerful, the way God is. The man at your table would never say it out loud, but inside he feels as if he were God, so to him, whatever he knows and believes simply cannot be wrong.

    For a man like this, what he believes does not feel like an opinion. It feels like reality itself. So when you remember something differently, or tell him it felt different to you, he doesn’t hear one more way of looking at it. He hears an attack, as if you had called him a liar, and he defends himself instead of thinking about what you said.

    You already know how that feels from the inside. You went in to talk something through and somehow ended up in a courtroom, where you explained and he defended, you softened and he defended again. You tried explaining it more clearly, and then tried again. But the problem was never how well you explained. He cannot bear the idea that there could be another way of seeing it.

    So why would anybody need to be that right? Fairbairn’s answer is strange, and it’s worth sitting with. In his view, being divided in two and feeling that the world is not quite real are the same condition. People and events never feel fully solid to a man like this. When nothing out there feels solid, the one thing that still does is what goes on in his own head. That is where the feeling of being God comes in: his own thoughts become the one thing he can be sure of. The less real the world feels to him, the harder he has to be right about it.

    Why does he move away as you move closer?

    The second is distance, and underneath it sits fear. Getting close to another person genuinely frightens him. Without realizing it, he expects anyone who gets close either to leave him or to take control of him. Here’s the part that makes it almost impossible to discuss — he doesn’t know he’s frightened at all. Ask him, and he may tell you he has just never needed people much. The fear never looks like fear. Instead he wraps himself in mystery and becomes hard to read.

    You can’t tell what kind of day he’s had, and a real question gets you back a shrug, a joke, or an answer to some other question. Step toward him and he is already a step further back.

    Early in the relationship, the fact that he said so little about himself may have looked like depth. You imagined a rich inner life in him, waiting to be shared, and thought that one day, as you grew closer, he would let you in. Fairbairn saw the mystery as armor. Because he never shows what he feels or why he does what he does, no one can get close enough to hurt him.

    Months later you finally work out what the mystery actually was: a line drawn without a single word. Come this close. No closer.

    The distance also feeds the first feature, the need to be right. Because he never lets anyone all the way in, nothing anybody says really reaches him — not the praise, not the warning, not the apology. With nothing from other people to steady him, all he has left to lean on is being right. The less he takes in from other people, the harder he leans on it, and the longer this goes on, the more certain he becomes.

    Why can a quiet man nod along and still change nothing?

    The third is living entirely inside his own head: his own thoughts and his own view of things count for more than anything anyone says to him. This one surprises people. You would expect it mostly in loud, self-centered types, but quiet, inward people often have more of it.

    The loud version is easy enough to spot. He takes up all the air, fishes for compliments, and wants the whole day arranged around him. Ten minutes in, you have him figured out: he thinks he’s the only person in the room who matters.

    The quiet version is much harder to spot. He does not raise his voice or ask for praise. He listens, nods, and lets you finish. But after an hour of talking, nothing has changed: not what he thinks, not what he does. He never tells you what is on his mind, either, so you walk away not knowing whether he agreed to anything at all. He looked open the whole time, and none of your words got through.

    That’s a different order of stubbornness. It doesn’t need to win the argument. It simply never has the argument.

    Why is the quiet one’s stubbornness so hard to see, even for him?

    Because the loud one keeps running into things. He charges at the world and the world pushes back — a job ends, a friend stops calling, somebody finally tells him to his face what he’s like. None of that is pleasant, but all of it is a mirror, and one day he might actually look into it.

    The quiet one collides with nothing. He stays polite, stays useful, stays well liked, so nobody ever has a reason to push back. No crash means no mirror. The pattern isn’t any smaller inside him; it has simply never been seen, not even by him, and it lasts longer for exactly that reason.

    Why does it only happen with you?

    This is the part I would underline twice. None of the three has to show up in everyday life, and Fairbairn was careful to say so. A man can know he carries them or have no idea at all. He can seem fine most of the time and then, in one area of his life only, the whole thing switches on.

    Sometimes that area is power. Watch how he handles a boss, or somebody who works under him, and there it is, sitting inside a life that looks fine everywhere else.

    Most often, though, the area is love.

    This is why a man can be generous with strangers, patient with coworkers, and emotionally cold with the person who loves him. Casual relationships do not require him to reveal himself or depend deeply on another person. Intimate love does. So the fear that stays quiet with strangers and coworkers comes up with you, because you are the one who is close.

    That’s why the man his coworkers describe and the man across the dinner table from you will never add up to one person. Neither description is a lie. They see him from a distance, and you see him up close.

    So are you the sensitive one?

    Not necessarily. Other people speaking well of him does not make the coldness you have felt any less real.

    Look at what you’ve been quietly doing each time he goes cold. You count it against yourself — too needy, too watchful, too much. Notice that habit, because the cause you keep looking for in yourself lies somewhere else.

    The trigger is intimacy. He goes cold with you not because you matter less than his coworkers, but because you are close enough that he would have to show his feelings and lean on you. His coldness protects him from that closeness. It is not a measure of your worth.

    But isn’t a bit of this in everyone?

    Yes. And that’s the part to keep.

    These three aren’t a checklist for labeling somebody so you can be finished with him. Being sure you’re right, keeping your distance, living inside your own head — everyone carries some of each, in different amounts, and usually in one particular area of life. If you read this only as an article about him, the same problems will keep coming back between the two of you.

    So go back over today and find one moment when you nodded along while, inside, you were quietly saying no. Just one. Don’t work out who was right; that’s a different job for a different evening.

    Then write it down, one line, in whatever words turn up: “I nodded along about the weekend plans, and inside I was saying no.”

    It’s small enough to feel pointless. It isn’t. Think back to the quiet man. What he carries inside never runs into anything, so it is never seen, not even by him. A no you say only inside your head is the same. Nobody sees it, and even you barely notice it. Once you write it down, it is on the page, where you can see it. That one line is a first step out of your own head.

    References

    • Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1940). Schizoid Factors in the Personality. In Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952). London: Tavistock.

    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