She goes to her mother’s every day. She listens, she pays for what her mother needs out of her own pocket, and she never once says it is too much for her. Everyone around her says she is a saint. Then she gets in the car. On the drive home a thought comes that she would never say out loud to anyone — something like: that woman is never going to die. It shocks her. On the outside she is the good daughter. So where does such a hateful thought come from?
The thought that arrives on the drive home
Being kind to people is a good thing. The trouble starts when kindness turns into a rule you have to obey: “I have to be a good person.” “I have to be the kind one.” Once you live by that rule, you stop asking how much you can actually do. You do what the rule demands — and it demands more than you can give.
Say the person you look after is your own father — though it could just as well be your husband’s mother, or the neighbor nobody else checks on. You could simply do what you are really able to do. Instead you do more, because you can already hear what people would say if you did less. Doing more than you can is where the resentment starts. From the outside, you are wonderful to him. Inside, a thought forms: he’s past eighty, and he still won’t die.
That thought does not mean you are a bad person. It means you have been giving more time, money, and attention than you can sustain, with no end in sight. You keep asking yourself how much longer you will be paying for this, and how much longer you will have to go over there every day. You don’t allow yourself to do less, and you can’t say that it is too much. So the tiredness turns into resentment, and the resentment lands on the person you are caring for. That person starts to look like the cause of your exhaustion. The resentment keeps growing until you say, “I can do this much, and no more.”
Being called selfish hurts less than hating the person you care for
Now imagine it the other way: you do only as much as you are really able to, and then you step back. People will talk. Some of it will get back to you, and it stings.
But you are far less likely to end up resenting the person you care for, because you did what you could and stopped at your limit. Other people’s criticism may hurt for a while. Giving more than you can, day after day, does lasting damage: it can turn your affection into hatred, until you can hardly stand to be near the person you set out to care for.
Who handed you the word “should”?
“You should do this.” “You should never do that.” Rules like these came from outside you — from your family, the people around you, the times you grew up in. You do need some of them. A life with no rules at all would not work.
But a rule is not an absolute truth. Keeping one does not make you good, and breaking one does not make you bad. We forget that constantly, because rules look exactly like the truth.
The yardstick keeps changing
You can tell these rules are not the truth, because they change. A whole society lives by them, and the ones it holds on to hardest shift over time. In Korea, where I work, there was a time when a person without a university degree was hardly treated as a person. Wedding plans could be going well until somebody found out the groom had no degree. From that moment he was seen as a lesser kind of person, though nothing about him had changed.
Degrees still matter there, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But there are more ways to succeed now, and parents are less fixed on a degree than they used to be. This is what happens as a society matures: the things you can see — money, the name of your university, your job title — lose some of their hold. What starts to count for more is what you can’t see: whether people’s rights are respected, what a person’s character is like, whether they care about anyone besides themselves.
What happens to the people who lose the fight for power and money
The less mature a society is, the harder it clings to power and money. In a society like that, people without power or money get treated badly, so everyone rushes to get them. People fight each other bitterly for them. And whoever loses that fight is no longer treated as a person at all.
A man who loses that fight is left feeling robbed. He carries despair, frustration, and anger at the society that did this to him. He can’t make a decent living the ordinary way. So one day he thinks: to hell with it — one big score and I’ll finally have some money. That is how he falls into gambling.
The arithmetic that keeps him going back
Why can’t he stop once he has started? There are deeper psychological reasons as well, and I will come to one of them. But the reason he is aware of is simple arithmetic. By now he is deep in debt, and gambling looks like the only way he could ever pay it off.
Say he does hard physical labor — hauling, lifting, whatever job pays that week. He works every day for a whole month, and it earns him one paycheck. His debt is hundreds of times the size of that paycheck. He could never pay it off with honest wages, and he knows it.
So one thought takes hold and won’t let go: if I play it right — just once, if I play it right — I can pay off the whole debt. To him that is not a fantasy. It is the only calculation he has that ends with him out of debt. So he keeps going back.
The deeper reason lies in the part of his mind he isn’t aware of. There, the aim is not to pay off the debt at all. The aim is to destroy himself, and you can see it in what he does. There are nights when he is ahead. He could stand up and walk out with money in his pocket, and he doesn’t. He is not trying to get out of gambling and failing. Deep down, part of him does not want to get out. It wants to ruin him.
Addiction starts with refusing to admit your limits
Every road into addiction has one thing in common: the person refuses to admit the limits of what he can actually do.
The twelve-step program — the recovery program used by Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups — begins with exactly what the addicted person refuses to do: admitting a limit. Its first step asks you to admit that you are powerless: that you cannot control the drinking, the gambling, or whatever it is by willpower alone.
The addicted mind is grandiose. Deep inside it sits a conviction: I am somebody special. I can go past any limit. Whatever wall other people hit, I can step over it. Psychology calls this feeling omnipotence — the private sense that nothing is beyond your reach.
The woman who drives to her mother’s every day and the man who keeps gambling look as if they have nothing in common. But neither will admit a limit. She acts as though her time, money, and patience can never run out. He believes that one good night — “just once, if I play it right” — can pay off a debt that honest work never could. And because neither admits the limit, neither stops at it: she keeps giving until she hates the person she is caring for, and he keeps betting while his losses grow.
Cut back to what you can actually give
Pick one thing you are doing right now that is more than you can really manage. Just one, not everything. Choose the one you keep doing because doing less of it feels like it would be a disaster.
I’m not telling you to stop doing it. Do as much of it as you can really manage, and then step back. Somebody will notice. What comes up in you then is the fear of being called selfish. That discomfort is expected. Stay with it for a week, without going back to doing more just to make the feeling stop.
Then notice what goes through your head on the way home. Is that hateful thought quieter? If it is, the person you care for has not changed. What changed is how much you chose to give. Once the driving, the paying, and the listening have a clear limit, you can keep helping without feeling that the other person will take and take without end.
One exception. This exercise is for people who are giving more care than they can. If you or someone in your home is already gambling, an exercise like this is not enough. Find a clinician who treats addiction, and start there.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board