Inner Work Notes

Tag: object relations

  • I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me

    Something goes wrong and the heat climbs — past annoyed, past angry, all the way to the top. For one second you want the whole world in pieces on the floor. And if you made a list of everything you want to smash, you would find yourself somewhere on it. Then, before you even notice, the rage can start to turn into a different feeling: that someone is out to hurt you.

    What you actually want to break

    Real rage is not tidy. It feels like your body might come apart at the seams. You want to take the room, the day, the person in front of you, and break all of it into small pieces. And you want to break yourself into pieces along with it.

    Most people carry that quietly, because it sounds like something only a cruel person would feel. So you say nothing and wait for it to pass.

    But it is not something only cruel people have. Every one of us is born with this destructiveness, you included.

    What makes rage like this so frightening is what you find inside yourself. If that much destructiveness is really in you, it might not stop at breaking the room. It might break you too, until nothing of you is left. So what you fear most is not the damage around you. It is being wiped out yourself.

    Because the rage feels dangerous inside you, you quickly start seeing the danger in somebody else. You hear contempt in your partner’s tired tone; you hear an attack in a colleague’s disagreement. Once the threat seems to be coming from them, your own urge to destroy feels like self-defence. This shift — from something dangerous is happening in me to you are dangerous to me — is not a lie you tell on purpose. It happens before you have even noticed your own feeling. Psychoanalysts call it projection: a feeling you cannot bear to accept as yours is felt as if it came from someone else.

    The first thing a baby ever meets

    A baby does not meet a whole person first. He meets the breast — one part of his mother, not the whole of her. Psychoanalysts call it a part-object. An “object”, in their language, is whatever our love and anger are aimed at — usually a person, and here only one part of a person. At the start the breast is simply good. It keeps him alive, keeps him warm and comforts him.

    But the breast is not always there the moment he wants it. When he is left waiting, his hunger and frustration can become too much. He is flooded with his own rage, and that rage is too frightening to keep inside. So it is projected onto the breast, and now the breast itself seems to be attacking him. The breast that felt entirely good while it fed him now feels like a monster that could destroy him. He may turn away from the very breast he wanted a moment earlier, because to him the source of comfort has become the source of danger. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein saw this as one of the most basic ways the human mind works: the rage is pushed outside, and then it seems to come back as an attack. Adults still fall into it under pressure.

    What Klein meant by the paranoid-schizoid position

    Klein gave this state of mind a name: the paranoid-schizoid position. The words sound clinical, but what they describe is simple.

    The “schizoid” part means split: the mind keeps good and bad strictly apart, and nothing is allowed to be both at once. For the baby, the breast is all good while it feeds him and all bad while he is left waiting. In adults, this splitting shows up as seeing someone as either an angel or an enemy. Then comes the “paranoid” part: all of the badness is out there, and I am the one being attacked.

    Notice the word “position”. It is not a place you leave behind for good when you grow up. It is a place where anyone can be standing: a baby before he has any words for it, or you, this afternoon, in a meeting.

    Listen to who your sentences are about

    Here is what it looks like in adult life. You are already in a bad mood, and the person nearest to you gets the brunt of it. Think back to what actually comes out of your mouth on days like that.

    “You’ve got no sense at all.” “Why can’t you ever see how people feel?” “Why can’t you think any further than that?” “You’re so selfish.”

    Every sentence is about the other person, but the bad mood was already in you before they spoke. Some ordinary mistake of theirs gives the mood an explanation: I feel this bad because you are selfish, insensitive, or dismissive. Once the bad feeling has been pinned on them, you no longer have to notice what you brought into the room.

    So when you are in the middle of blaming somebody, you are standing exactly where the baby stood when he turned away from the breast. It is the same paranoid-schizoid position, only now it has adult words: all the badness is over there, and I am the one under attack.

    When someone brushes you off, where is the brush-off, exactly?

    Let me ask you a single question, and I would like you to answer it slowly.

    When you say “she brushed me off”, where is the brush-off? Point to it. Is it stuck to her face, or sitting somewhere in her tone of voice?

    I think much of it is already in you. If you walked into the room already afraid of being overlooked, a distracted glance can feel like proof that you do not matter. You read the brush-off into her face, then react to her as though she put it there on purpose. What began as a fear inside you now feels like an attack from outside.

    Admitting that is uncomfortable. That is why most of us would rather leave the brush-off where we see it: on her face. And as long as we leave it there, we spend one more day standing in the paranoid-schizoid position.

    The other place you can stand

    Some people do something different with the bad feeling. They do not push all of it onto the other person; they let part of it stay theirs. Klein called the place where they stand the depressive position.

    The name does not mean clinical depression. In the depressive position you see that some of the badness is on your side too: you can be angry even with someone you love, and you have harmful sides as well as good ones. Facing that brings sadness and guilt, and that is where the word “depressive” comes from. It feels heavier than blaming someone else. Still, it is a more grown-up place to stand.

    The difference between the two positions comes down to two sentences. One says: the badness is entirely theirs. The other says: some of it came from me. The person who can say the second sentence can bear knowing this about themselves.

    Owning your part is not the same as attacking yourself

    I want to be careful here, because this gets misread constantly. Remember the list at the start — everything you wanted to smash, with you somewhere on it. It is easy to hear “some of it is mine” and turn that into one more reason to attack yourself.

    That is not what it means. It does not mean hating yourself for having the rage in the first place. It means you stop insisting that every bad thing lives out there, without piling every bad thing onto yourself instead. You apologise for the hurtful thing you said, and you set a boundary where the other person overstepped.

    Try it on something small. A colleague answers you in a flat voice, and the heat starts. In the paranoid-schizoid position, you have decided before you say a word: she brushed me off, and that is simply what happened. In the depressive position, there is a pause first, and in that pause you can tell yourself: “Some of this is hers. Some of it is what I walked in carrying.”

    Owning your part feels heavier because you can no longer solve the problem simply by proving the other person wrong. Yet it also gives you back some control. If all the danger belongs to them, you must keep watching and defending yourself. If part of the reaction came from what you carried in, you can soothe that part, check what actually happened, and respond to the person in front of you rather than only to the fear you brought in.

    Before you argue, check which position you are in

    The heat will come back — maybe tomorrow, maybe later this week. It will arrive with the same flat certainty: she brushed me off.

    When it does, take your eyes off her face for a moment. Before you work out what to say to her, work out which position you are standing in.

    There are two: the one where all the badness is hers, and the one where some of it is yours. Which one are you standing in right now?

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — the paranoid-schizoid position.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — the depressive position.

    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

  • 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

  • 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

  • You Got Everything You Needed. So Why Does the Inside Dry Out?

    There is food in the fridge and the rent went through on time. You answered everything that needed answering. You finished the week, and anybody watching you would have said you were doing fine.

    Then you sit down at the end of it and notice that you feel almost nothing. Good news does not lift you, rest does not restore you, and the people you love feel farther away than they did before.

    It is not exactly sadness. Sadness is usually about something: a loss, a disappointment, a person you miss. This feeling is harder to name because nothing has visibly gone wrong. Your practical needs were met, but you went too long without warm attention, touch, or the feeling that another person was genuinely glad you were there. Many years ago, a doctor visiting hospital wards saw the same gap in babies, in a much starker form: they were fed, but nobody held them.

    What if you don’t already know what you’ll find?

    One thing before the doctor’s story, because it changes how you will read it.

    When you look at yourself, or at anybody else, there are two ways to go about it. You can go in already sure of what you’re going to find, or you can go in assuming there’s something there you haven’t seen yet.

    The first way is faster and almost entirely blind. You end up seeing only what you walked in believing, and quietly bending everything else until it fits the shape you brought with you. The second way is slower, and it’s the only one that ever turns up anything worth having. You go in admitting you don’t know, and so you come out with something you didn’t have before.

    So when you look at yourself or anyone else, the most important work isn’t collecting new ideas. It’s setting aside the ones you already have. Read the rest of this without deciding in advance what you will find.

    Why were well-fed babies wasting away?

    The doctor was René Spitz. He ran a children’s ward himself, and he went from one hospital or children’s home to another, watching infants. In some of those places he kept seeing something that made no medical sense at all.

    The babies were being fed properly, on schedule, as much as they needed. Breast milk, formula, whatever was on hand. And they were fading anyway.

    No illness explained it, and nothing was missing from their diet. Their bodies simply withered: they got thinner and smaller and quieter, week after week, and some of them died. On paper these babies were well cared for, yet they were dying in clean rooms with full bottles beside them.

    Nobody could give a reason for it. The cause was real, and it was right there in the room, but nobody had seen it. Spitz found it by going from place to place and watching the babies.

    This wasting came to be known as hospitalism, because it kept turning up in hospitals and children’s homes.

    Same formula — so why were babies in other wards plump?

    Here’s the observation that cracked it open. In some places nearly every baby wilted, while in others the babies were round and loud and thriving. Same formula, out of the same tins.

    Spitz compared the two kinds of places. They differed in a good many ways, and one of those differences mattered more than all the rest.

    In the wards where the babies faded, the bottle was propped up in the crib and the baby drank alone. In the wards where the babies thrived, a nurse lifted the baby out and held it while it ate.

    The nutrition going in was identical. The difference was a pair of arms.

    Why does being held count for so much?

    A baby can’t understand the idea of being loved; it has no words yet. What it has is skin, and love reaches it first as touch: being picked up, being stroked, being fussed over by someone whose attention, for that moment, is all on the baby. Through that touch the baby’s body takes in a message: something warm is holding me, something keeps coming back for me, so I must be worth coming back for.

    Repeated care gives a baby its first sense of self. Before the child can think “I matter,” the body learns it through being picked up, soothed, fed, and answered when it cries. Psychologists call this first, bodily sense of self the physical self. Whatever you later come to believe about your own worth is built on top of it.

    When no one holds the baby or answers its cries, food alone cannot give it that experience. An adult who goes without warmth still has ways to react: turning bitter, demanding, or withdrawn, or going numb. A baby has none of these yet. All it can take in is that it is in distress and no one comes, and so the lack shows up in its body. That is the wasting Spitz saw: babies who were fed but not held grew thinner and quieter, and some of them died.

    If babies waste away without warmth, why are you still standing?

    Because you are not a baby in a crib any more. Your first sense of self was built in childhood. It may have been built unevenly in places, but it is there, and being left alone all day no longer kills you. Nobody has to notice you or love you today for your heart to keep beating, and an adult can go a remarkably long time with no warmth at all and stay medically fine.

    What changes instead is your capacity to feel connected and alive.

    You still go to work, answer emails, and say the right thing at dinner. But your feelings are slow to come, pleasure fades quickly, and other people begin to feel distant. In a baby, deprivation can show up in the body. In an adult, the daily routine may continue while interest, warmth, and emotional responsiveness gradually weaken.

    You notice it in small ways, if you notice it at all. Weeks blur together. Nothing quite lands. Good news arrives and you register it the way you’d register a fact about somebody else. You can’t remember the last time anything reached you.

    And nothing shows. That’s the part that makes it dangerous. A broken arm gets a cast and a fever gets a thermometer, but there is nothing here to point at, so nobody thinks to ask — including you.

    Why won’t the zombie films stop coming?

    Imagine someone who has died inside, and ask what they would look like to anyone watching. You already have the picture. You’ve seen it hundreds of times. It walks around. It eats. There’s nobody home behind the eyes.

    Zombie films never go away. A series gets a fourth film and a fifth, and then a brand-new one comes out. People keep making them because people keep turning up to watch, and a story only gets that big when it shows us something about ourselves that we can’t say out loud.

    The audience isn’t there for the makeup. Something in them recognizes that figure: a body that keeps going with nobody inside. If there weren’t so many people going hollow inside perfectly ordinary lives, that whole genre would have burned out long ago. Your own inner deadness ends up on a screen where you can look straight at it for two hours and never once realize what you’re looking at. What people can’t say about themselves, they will pay to sit and watch.

    How much attention does a person actually need?

    Transactional analysis, a school of psychotherapy, has a name for any small sign from another person that says, “I see you, and you matter to me.” It calls such a sign a stroke, in the sense of stroking a baby, not the medical kind. A hand on the shoulder counts, and so does your name said by somebody who meant it. People need a steady supply of these, roughly the way we need meals.

    The amount matters too: neither too little nor too much.

    Too little attention leaves you feeling unnoticed and emotionally depleted. Too much attention — constant questions, monitoring, touching, or demands for a response — removes privacy and puts the body on alert. Your jaw tightens, your thoughts narrow, and ordinary contact begins to feel intrusive.

    When that tension has nowhere to go, you may snap at the nearest person even when they did not cause it. The need is not for the most attention possible. It is for steady contact that lets you feel noticed without making you feel watched or controlled.

    Small signs like these are harder to come by now than they used to be, too. Notice how much of an ordinary day can pass without a single one. Coffee ordered through an app, groceries through self-checkout, work conducted in a chat window with people you have never stood next to. You can get from Monday to Friday without one person saying your name out loud, and none of it feels like a loss while it’s happening. It feels like convenience.

    So exchange one stroke with someone today. Only one, and it doesn’t have to be a big one.

    Say somebody’s name and add a sentence that’s genuinely about them — the barista, a coworker, your sister. Not a compliment you’d hand to anybody, but something you noticed about that particular person. If there’s honestly nobody within reach today, put your hand on your own arm and run it slowly down once. It will feel ridiculous, and you should do it anyway. The babies who thrived on those wards weren’t given a treatment. They were held.

    References

    • Spitz, R. A. (1945). Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.
    • Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books.

    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

  • Regression Isn’t a Breakdown. Your Mind Is Just Going Home.

    The alarm goes off and you turn the phone face down. Nothing bad has happened. Nobody shouted at you, nothing broke, and the day in front of you is perfectly ordinary. Still, the only thing you really want is to stay under the covers and be nobody for a while.

    The voices in the next room sound far away, as if they were coming through glass. Your list of things to do is sitting right there on the kitchen table, and somehow it feels like somebody else’s. So you ask yourself what you always ask. What’s wrong with me? Am I just lazy?

    Before you call yourself lazy, ask why your mind responds to the ordinary demands of the day, like that list on the table, by withdrawing, putting off decisions, and wanting someone else to take over. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory suggests that this is not random. Under pressure, the mind goes back to a way of coping from much earlier in life, when pulling back made you feel less afraid and someone else carried the responsibility for you.

    Which came first — the world, or your picture of it?

    Most of us assume a baby first gets to know the world as it really is, and only later, with more words and more years behind it, starts to imagine.

    Klein turned that around.

    Long before a baby can speak, she said, its mind is already full of pictures of what the world is like, built from what its body feels. She called these pictures unconscious fantasy, but she did not mean daydreaming or making things up. Fantasy, for her, is how a mind that has no words yet first makes sense of the world. When the baby is hungry, it feels as if no one will ever come. When it is held and fed, the whole world feels safe.

    For the infant, these unconscious fantasies are not occasional thoughts. They shape the baby’s whole experience of hunger and fullness, danger and safety, long before it has words or can check what it feels against what is really there.

    In Klein’s view, then, you did not begin with an accurate understanding of reality and add imagination later. You began with unconscious fantasy and gradually corrected it through experience. Each time someone close to you turned out differently from what the picture inside you expected, and your bond with them survived the surprise, that picture moved a little closer to the world as it really is.

    What does a good home actually give a child?

    If life begins in fantasy, that changes what we mean by a good home. We usually think of how much love a child was given, or whether there was enough money in the house. But part of what makes a home good is how much of the real world it lets a child take in — how often, and how safely, the child can check the picture inside against what is really happening.

    Put plainly: the worse the home, the less of the real world a child can afford to let in.

    That may sound backwards, but the reasoning behind it is simple. Children learn to swim in water they can stand up in. A steady home hands a child small, survivable disappointments — the promise kept a day late, the answer that turns out to be no — and every one of them is a chance to check the picture in their head against what actually happened and find out it was slightly off. Nothing collapses when that happens. The child learns that a disappointment is not the end of the world, corrects that part of the picture, and goes back to playing.

    When home is too painful — when the adults are unpredictable or frightening — a child has no room to calmly check the picture against what is real. Every look on an adult’s face can read as a sign of danger. So the child retreats into the world inside, which at least feels like something they can control. And the more time the child spends in that inner world, the less often the picture inside gets tested against someone safe, and so the less it gets corrected.

    Children are not the only ones who retreat into that inner world. Most of us go there for a while and then find our way back out. At the extreme are people who cannot find their way back out at all. That is the territory of psychosis: in schizophrenia, for example, a person stays shut inside their own private world. This does not mean that a painful home is the single cause of any particular illness. But it can shape how a person handles stress later in life.

    Why is the pull to retreat strongest at certain times in life?

    There are three times in life when people are most likely to feel they are coming apart: the teenage years; the early twenties, when many people leave home; and the years after marriage, or after setting up a household with someone.

    Why those three? Because that is when the demands of real life arrive all at once, from every direction. Your body changes, or your address does. The people around you change, and so does what they expect from you. You’re handed a role that nobody bothers to explain. There are more decisions to make, and more of the blame falls on you when one goes wrong. Worst of all, the way you’ve always coped stops working — quietly, and completely.

    At times like these, there is more to carry than you can manage all at once, and carrying it simply hurts too much. So the mind slides backward, into that inner world of early pictures. Every human mind begins there, which makes it the mind’s first home — a home inside you, not the house you grew up in. When you retreat like this, in a sense your mind is simply going home.

    If this is the year you feel like you’re coming apart, look at where you are in life before you go looking at your character. Check whether this moment falls on one of those three times, or on another big change in your life, such as starting a job, having a baby, or going through a divorce. You may not have gotten weaker at all. Reality may have just started asking for far more than it used to.

    So what is this pull backward, exactly?

    You live out in the real world for a while, it hurts, and something in you wants to be a small child again. No decisions. No judgment calls. Somebody else handling the difficult parts, the way somebody once did.

    The name for this return is regression. The mind is not inventing a new response. It is returning to an earlier state in which withdrawing, becoming passive, or waiting for someone else to act once provided relief.

    Why is it so hard to come back out?

    Regression feels familiar because you learned this way of coping early and used it many times. Avoiding a message, staying in bed, or waiting for someone to tell you what to do takes the pressure off right away. That relief makes the old way hard to leave, even while the unanswered messages and postponed tasks pile up and the anxiety grows with them. The safer it feels under the covers, the harder it becomes to come out.

    It shows up in ordinary ways, too. The afternoon that disappears into your phone. The message you could answer in four lines and somehow cannot. The steady, quiet wish that somebody would arrive and simply tell you what to do next. None of those look like much from the outside, and every one of them is the same short walk back to the mind’s first home. The pull is never loud when it arrives, and it usually comes dressed as tiredness, or as a small and very reasonable decision to deal with the whole thing tomorrow.

    When ordinary tasks feel far away and you want to pull back from every demand, you may be falling back on an old way of protecting yourself, not showing some permanent flaw in your character. Once you see it as regression, you can ask a more useful question: what is pressing on me right now that set this off?

    Does that mean you should get rid of the old picture inside you?

    No, and you couldn’t manage it even if you tried. The picture isn’t a part you can unbolt and throw away — it’s the place you started from. Adult life is the slow work of checking it against whatever is really in front of you and correcting it a little at a time.

    Stop revising the picture, and your trips back into that inner world get longer and longer. Keep revising it, and your time out in the real world gets longer instead. That is the choice, and the work is never quite finished.

    So pick one scene from the past week that felt heavier than it had any business being. A message that has been sitting there unanswered. A room that went quiet the moment you walked into it.

    Then write down, in a single line, what you were quietly expecting. “He should know without me having to say it.” “After everything I did, somebody should have noticed.” One sentence is plenty. Don’t tidy it up, and don’t argue with it. If the line makes you wince a little, you’ve probably written the real one down instead of the polite version.

    Once it’s sitting there on paper, you can slowly begin to see where it came from — the situation you were actually in, or a much older picture you’ve been carrying since before you had words for anything. Some of those lines will turn out to be fair. Others were formed a long time ago, to fit a house you no longer live in.

    That’s where the revising starts. One line at a time.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174.

    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 That One Person Gets Under Your Skin

    There’s one person you can’t let slide. Everybody else in the room lets it go — they roll their eyes, they move on, they’ve forgotten about it by the time they get to the parking lot. You haven’t. Something about the way that person takes credit, or opens a sentence with “no offense, but,” goes into you like a splinter and stays there. Their name comes up in conversation and your voice changes, and the strange part is you can hear it changing while it happens. Then you’re driving home and the question arrives: why did I go that hard? Nobody else did.

    That difference between your reaction and everyone else’s matters. The person may really be irritating. But when you react far harder than anyone else, it can be a sign that their behavior has touched something in you — a desire or anger of your own that you find hard to admit. So to understand why you stay angry for hours while everyone else moves on, you have to ask not only what they did, but why it hits you so hard.

    Where does your mind put a feeling it can’t stand?

    Some feelings belong to you and you still won’t look at them straight on. The small ugly jealousy when a friend gets the news you wanted for yourself. The mean, calculating thought you’d never say out loud to anybody. Anger that arrives at a size the situation obviously doesn’t deserve.

    When a feeling is too uncomfortable to admit as your own, the mind may hand it to someone else — and then find it in them. It’s a bit like tossing your own garbage over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, then looking over the next morning and complaining about how filthy their yard is. You feel competitive but accuse a colleague of turning everything into a contest. You want attention but become preoccupied with how desperately someone else seeks it. You haven’t stopped seeing the competitiveness or the hunger for attention. You just see it in them, and only in them.

    This is called projection. Your judgment of the other person feels completely true, partly because it may be true: they may really be competitive, or really hungry for attention. Projection doesn’t need you to make up something that isn’t there. It makes you stare at that trait in them, and keeps you from seeing the same thing in yourself.

    I call this an uncomfortable truth. It isn’t pleasant to hear, and there’s no gentle way to say it. But you can’t see yourself without bearing that discomfort. You can recognize the feelings you’ve been handing to other people only as far as you can stand to know they’re yours. Not an inch past that.

    What did Melanie Klein see in the first months of life?

    The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described in close detail what goes on in the mind of a very young baby. In her account, the first thing in that mind is terror.

    Not fear of something in particular — not dogs or strangers or the dark. A baby has no strength, no words, and no way of making anything at all happen. What it has instead is the raw sense that it could simply stop existing. Blink out, gone, nothing left where it used to be. Klein called this annihilation anxiety. It isn’t a fear of dying the way you or I think about dying, as something that will happen someday. A baby has no sense of “later,” so hunger doesn’t feel like a delay it can wait out. It feels like the end of everything.

    Terror like that is more than a baby can bear, and the baby’s mind finds a way to make it smaller.

    To see how, you need one more piece: there’s also destructiveness inside the baby, and it isn’t mild — hot, wrecking, wanting to smash whatever is nearest. Klein never believed infants were sweet blank pages waiting to be written on. But the baby can’t accept that this fury is its own, any more than it can bear the terror. So the fury gets thrown out, away, into the first outside thing the baby has ever met: its mother’s breast, the one that feeds it. Psychoanalysts call that first outside thing the object — their word for whoever or whatever our feelings are aimed at.

    This is how the terror gets smaller. The fury no longer seems to be inside the baby; now it seems to come at the baby from out there, from the breast. It’s a terrible bargain — the very breast that feeds it now feels threatening — but it is still easier to bear than the alternative. A baby is far too small and too new to hold the thought “this savagery is mine.”

    Why does the fault always seem to be in someone else?

    The habit of throwing out what we can’t bear stays with us into adulthood. In an adult, though, it doesn’t look like throwing anything. It looks like a confident judgment about someone, backed by a list of examples. And because you can list everything that person did, you never ask why this one fault takes up so much of your mind.

    Here’s something that sounds backwards until you check it against your own life: the more badness you find in other people, the more of it may be quietly sitting in you.

    Say “they’re all selfish” often enough, with enough conviction, and you make a rule without noticing you made it: selfishness is a thing other people have. So the next time you take the last of something without asking, the thought can’t arrive as “that was selfish of me.” It has to arrive as “I was in a hurry,” or “they didn’t really want it.” Once selfishness belongs only to other people, your own selfishness has no place to show openly, so you hide it more deeply — even from yourself. The more you hide it, the less of yourself you get to see.

    That’s the real cost of saying “they’re all selfish.” The cost isn’t that you’re being unfair to them. You may be entirely right about them — plenty of people really are selfish, and saying so isn’t a crime. The cost is that you become harder to see. To yourself.

    So who is the mature one here? Not the person with no dark side. Nobody is free of one, and anybody claiming otherwise is bluffing. The mature one is whoever can say, quietly and without making a show of it, “yeah, some of that is in me too.”

    The sentence doesn’t feel good, and saying it fixes nothing on its own — it certainly won’t make you nicer by Tuesday. Saying it takes strength, though. You have to be able to think “some of that is in me” without it flattening you for the rest of the night — and then get up and finish the dishes. When you don’t have that strength yet, the mind falls back on what the baby did: throw it out, find it in someone else, feel better for an hour or so.

    Why does a fight make you more certain instead of less?

    Projection is also why fights break out in close relationships. Two people can do this to each other at the same time: each one places their own unwanted feelings on the other, and then finds them there. Each now sees the badness in the other person, so a clash is hard to avoid.

    Now think of a fight of your own, and watch what happens to both of you as it heats up. You’d expect an argument to introduce a little doubt — more information, more of the other person’s side, more room to wonder. It does the opposite. The louder it gets, the more badly you need to prove the fault is theirs: “That’s not mine. You did this.” Every time you say it, you believe it a little more.

    That’s why an argument about something small, like the dishes, so quickly stops being about the dishes. It turns into a contest over who the bad one is, and neither of you can afford to lose it.

    By this point, each of you is treating a picture in your own head as the complete truth. Psychoanalysis calls this kind of picture a fantasy. In this sense a fantasy is not a lie you’ve made up. To you, the picture feels like plain fact, and that is what makes it so hard to shift. Your mind has arranged what happened so that the other person carries all the badness and you carry none of it. That is why nothing new gets through. Accepting even part of the other person’s side would mean admitting that some of the badness is yours, and that is exactly what the picture protects you from.

    And the firmer that picture becomes, the less you can see of what’s inside you. So the next time you’re absolutely sure about somebody, the certainty itself is worth a second look.

    Were you ever really alone, even as a newborn?

    Here’s the heart of Klein’s idea, and it starts with something almost too obvious to notice.

    Projection needs an object — someone or something to place the feeling in. You can’t throw something at someone who isn’t there. So if a newborn is already throwing its fury into the breast, then someone else is already in the baby’s world from the first weeks of life. The baby’s mind is turned toward its mother from the very beginning, long before it can recognize that the breast it knows belongs to a whole, separate person.

    Klein followed this simple point all the way through, and it led her to disagree with Freud.

    Freud had pictured the newborn as a sealed little world, wrapped up in itself, only bumping into other people later on. Klein said no. We don’t start out alone and then pick up relationships as a skill, the way we eventually pick up walking. We start out already in a relationship. The very first thing a baby ever does with its mind, it does toward somebody.

    That’s where the term object relations comes from. It names this way of understanding people: a person begins life not alone, but in a relationship with an object — someone to aim feelings at. You were never a closed room that later grew a door.

    Who got to you today?

    You know exactly who. Bring that person to mind.

    Name what you couldn’t stand about them, and keep it to a single word, because one word is more than enough. Selfish. Cold. Fake. Careless.

    Then take the word — just the word, not the person, not the history, not the list of everything they’ve done — and ask yourself one question about it: Is any of this in me?

    Now don’t try to answer it — I mean that seriously. If something surfaces on its own, fine, but don’t go hunting for it. Finding an answer matters less than the turn itself: the finger you’ve been pointing at them swings back toward you for one second. For that one second, the picture in your head — all the badness is theirs, none of it is mine — starts to crack. One crack is plenty for tonight.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.

    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

  • The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting

    Have you ever rewritten a simple request four or five times before sending it? You soften the wording, add an apology, remove it, and then add it again. While editing the message, you are no longer thinking only about what you need. You are trying to prevent the other person from becoming uncomfortable, disappointed, or angry. Sometimes you never send the request at all. And oddly, the more carefully you ask, the more likely you are to be turned down. Why does that happen? This article starts there and works toward a bigger question: what makes a parent good? D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst best known for the phrase the good enough mother, helps answer both.

    Why do the requests you agonize over get refused?

    Winnicott used the term true self for the real you — not dressed up, not performed, not edited for someone else’s comfort. He didn’t think this part of a person develops on its own. It grows out of a belief a child takes in long before they have words for it: what I show and ask for will be accepted.

    When that belief holds, asking for something feels light. You say what you need and you expect, without really thinking about it, that the other person will say yes. That isn’t confidence in the motivational-poster sense. It’s closer to ease: the anxiety simply isn’t there.

    When you expect a yes, you state the request directly and leave the other person free to answer. When you expect a no, you may apologize repeatedly, overexplain, or make the request so vague that the other person cannot tell what you want. Your fear changes your tone and wording before they respond. So the request carries two messages at once: what you need, and your expectation that it will not be welcome. People respond to the feeling underneath the words before they respond to the words themselves. The other person picks up that second message, your expectation of a no, and reacts to it more than to what you actually asked. That is why a no becomes more likely. The reverse is also true: when you ask expecting a yes, it is easier for them to give one.

    There’s a second thing worth noticing. People who can ask easily also tend to ask realistically. They have a feel for what the other person can actually spare, so they rarely ask for something that would cost too much, and they don’t pressure the other person into saying yes. A request sized to what someone can give leaves both people comfortable — the one who asked and the one who said yes. The ease and the realism come from the same place. If you aren’t braced for a no, your attention is free to go to the other person instead of to your own worry — so you can see what they actually have to spare, and you size the request to fit.

    Now to parents, and a harder question. If the true self grows out of being accepted, what happens when a parent tries to give a child everything and never lets them down?

    What does a child lose when a parent is too good?

    No child can be protected from every disappointment, and in Winnicott’s view complete protection would not be good for the child anyway: it would keep them from growing. A child needs manageable experiences of waiting, hearing no, becoming angry, and discovering that the frustration passes and the relationship survives.

    Winnicott made a claim that can sound almost scandalous the first time you hear it: parents have to make mistakes. Not disastrous or cruel ones, but real, ordinary ones, often enough for the child to notice. A parent’s mistake gives the child something to be angry at, and Winnicott thought a child badly needs somewhere to put anger.

    When a parent gets something wrong and the child pushes back, Winnicott called that push aggression. He did not mean violence, and he meant more than anger. He meant a child’s own will going out into the world: the force behind reaching, grabbing, refusing, insisting, behind “No!” and “I want to do it my way!” In his account the child needs to try that force out on their mother — to shout that they hate her, refuse to come to the table, slam a door — and then find her still there at bedtime, neither wrecked by it nor getting even. What the child learns in that moment is that their own strong wants and feelings are not dangerous: wanting something badly, pushing hard, and being furious do not have the power to destroy the people they depend on.

    When a parent seems flawless — endlessly patient, never getting anything wrong — the child still gets angry and disappointed at times, since no child can be spared every frustration. But the child cannot connect those feelings to anything the parent did. The child then concludes, If my parent has done nothing wrong, my anger must mean that something is wrong with me. The child hides the reactions that seem unacceptable and shows only the ones the parent seems able to accept. This is one way a false self begins. “False self” is Winnicott’s term for the opposite of the true self: a way of living in which you watch what others expect and fit yourself to it, while your real feelings stay out of sight.

    How is “good enough” different from perfect?

    The idea that parents have to make mistakes lies behind Winnicott’s most quoted phrase: the good enough mother. Not the perfect mother. Not the excellent one. The one who is enough: she slips up, some days she doesn’t respond well to what her child needs, and that is all right.

    In the first weeks after birth, Winnicott thought, a mother is almost completely absorbed in her baby and meets the baby’s needs nearly the moment they arise. Then, little by little, she starts to fall short. She doesn’t do it on purpose: she’s tired, she doesn’t come right away, she misreads what the crying means. Winnicott’s point was that this gradual falling short is not an unfortunate side effect of good care. It is how good care works. Each small failure hands the child one true piece of how things are — you have to wait, the milk does not come the second you cry for it, the person you need is sometimes busy — in a size they can survive.

    So a good-enough parent isn’t one who anticipates every need and takes care of everything perfectly. In fact, the wish to do everything perfectly takes something from the child. A parent driven by it tries to clear away, ahead of time, every moment in which the child might bump into a limit, be disappointed by it, get angry about it, and discover that the relationship holds anyway.

    If you’re a parent reading this and feeling something tighten: the point isn’t to start failing more deliberately. You will fail without any help from me. The point is what you do with the failures you already have — whether you read them as evidence of your inadequacy, or as the ordinary texture of a real relationship.

    Where does the drive to be perfect come from?

    Most people repeat parts of the parenting they received, even when they consciously disagree with them. Under stress, you fall back on the way you yourself were raised before you have time to think of another way. A parent may hear themselves using the same critical sentence they once hated hearing from their own parent.

    But perfectionist parenting usually has a more specific origin than habit. The constant push to get everything flawless — the checking, the anticipating, the inability to let a small thing stay small — has a compulsive quality: you cannot relax until everything is right. That kind of compulsion is rarely just a personality trait. More often it’s a scar.

    A person who cannot tolerate mistakes has often spent years, starting in childhood, learning that being unsure, messy, or ordinary brought criticism or made people pull away. Perfection then becomes a way to prevent rejection. If every detail is correct, nobody can expose the uncertain part of you or use a mistake against you.

    Winnicott would call this the false self at work. You answer an email at eleven at night, check every detail twice, and show other people only the capable version of yourself. “False” here does not mean fake or dishonest. The false self is a form of protection: it keeps the unsure part of you from being criticized or rejected. Because it works, you may not notice what it costs until your child makes a mistake and you find yourself holding them to the same standard that has been controlling you.

    The harsh words you say to your child — who heard them first?

    Parents experience their children as extensions of themselves — less like a separate person, more like part of their own body. So when your child falls short, what decides how you respond is rarely parenting technique. It is how far you can accept your own shortcomings. You can usually put up with about as much weakness in your child as you can put up with in yourself. Rarely more.

    The less you can accept in yourself, the harder you come down on your child. Words like You can’t even manage this? start coming out. Corrections come faster and land harder, and they land on whatever in your child resembles the part of yourself you have never forgiven.

    The voice behind those words is often not new. It was running long before you had a child to aim it at. It was aimed at you, inside your own head — sometimes in your own words, sometimes in the voice of the person who first said it to you. Having a child doesn’t invent the voice. It gives the voice a new target.

    So being able to love your child, flaws and all, isn’t really a skill you apply to them. It depends on something closer to home: whether you can love yourself, go easy on yourself, and let your own shortcomings simply exist without putting them on trial.

    Could you try changing one sentence today?

    Here’s something small to try.

    Think of one correction you made today — to your child, or to a partner, a colleague, anyone close. Recall the exact words. Then change the subject of the sentence to I — “You can’t even manage this?” becomes “I can’t even manage this?” — and read it silently to yourself.

    Notice how it feels. If it doesn’t feel strange at all — if it slides on like a coat you’ve worn for years — you may have just found who heard that sentence first: you did. It is not something new you came up with for your child. You have been saying it to yourself for a long time.

    You don’t have to fix it today. You don’t have to say anything to anyone, or resolve to do better tomorrow. Noticing the sentence is enough.

    Written as educational reflection, not as parenting advice or clinical guidance, and not tailored to any particular family. If reading this has stirred up something about your own childhood, or about how you are parenting now, that is worth taking to a qualified professional where you live rather than carrying alone.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press.

    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 Setting Boundaries Causes Conflict Almost Every Time

    Have you ever wanted to say no, heard yourself agree instead, and then spent the evening replaying the conversation? You knew you didn’t want to do what was being asked of you, but the other person’s disappointment felt more urgent than your own answer. By the time you noticed what you wanted, you had already promised to help.

    This is not mainly a problem of finding the right words. The trouble starts earlier, with whether you can tell your own feeling apart from the other person’s. A boundary is what lets you say to yourself: their disappointment belongs to them; my decision belongs to me. When that distinction is unclear, saying no feels less like making a choice and more like harming someone. So you keep handing over your time and energy to protect their mood.

    What do psychological boundaries actually mean?

    In psychoanalytic thinking, a boundary isn’t a matter of manners. It isn’t the polite distance you keep at a dinner party, and it isn’t the same thing as being assertive. It is the line in your mind that says: up to here is me, and beyond here is not me. When that line blurs, what you feel inside starts to pass for what is actually happening outside. So a boundary is less about politeness than about keeping hold of what is real.

    In everyday life, the line comes down to a simple distinction: this feeling is mine, and that reaction belongs to the other person. With that distinction, you can see that someone is upset and still ask, as a separate question, whether you actually did anything wrong. Without it, you start treating feelings as facts. If you feel guilty, you assume you must have done something wrong. If someone becomes quiet, you assume they are angry with you. If you feel anxious about saying no, you conclude that saying no is dangerous.

    That’s why boundaries matter so much for emotional health. Without a clear boundary, you start to lose track of what is real, including what is going on inside you. People who can’t say no often say they are unsure what they want and what they think, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re feeling until someone else names it for them.

    Why does a self need an outline?

    Think of a country on a map. You recognize it by its outline. Without the border line there would be no shape to recognize, only blank paper. A person is the same. Only when a line is drawn around you does the shape of who you are appear, so that you can say, “This is the kind of person I am.” In daily life, you draw that line through small distinctions like these: I like this and dislike that. I can help with this but cannot take responsibility for that. I understand why you are upset, but I do not agree with your conclusion. Each one marks something as yours — your taste, your limit, your view — and so shows where you end and another person begins.

    Without those distinctions, you can feel many things without knowing which feeling should guide your decision. You notice the other person’s anger before your own exhaustion. You can explain what everyone else needs but cannot answer a simple question about what you want. A boundary is what lets you know which feelings and which choices are yours.

    When does the “I” first appear?

    You are not born with boundaries. They form slowly as you grow up, and they begin at the moment you realize that another person is truly separate from you. A small child first learns this from their caregiver, the person who looks after them. The child may be hungry while the caregiver wants to rest. The child may want something, and the caregiver may say no. A boundary develops as the child learns to bear this: the person they depend on is separate from them and has wants of their own.

    This realization comes through small discoveries about someone close to you. Their temperament isn’t yours. What makes them laugh isn’t what makes you laugh. They are someone other than you, and they will not become you. Noticing this is where the line begins.

    Notice the order, because it is the opposite of what we usually assume. We imagine that a fully formed “I” exists first and then learns to recognize other people. It actually works the other way around: only when you realize that someone over there is not you does the outline of your own “I” begin to appear.

    Saying no is often hardest with the people who matter most to you, because with them you most fear that their anger could end the relationship. When someone close to you is upset, you stop checking your own response and start arranging yourself around their reaction. So it is not only that you are afraid to speak. For the moment, you have lost track of what your own answer even is.

    What happens inside when the line goes blurry?

    When a boundary is weak, what is inside you and what is outside you get mixed up. A feeling that rose up in you feels as if it came at you from outside, from another person.

    Most of us know this in mild, everyday forms. You are actually unhappy with yourself, but it feels like this: “I feel bad because that person dislikes me.” Or a harsh thing you have been telling yourself for years suddenly seems to come from someone else: you catch it in their tone of voice, the look on their face, the wording of their text message. Psychoanalysis calls this projection: you feel as if a feeling came from someone else when it actually started in you.

    This is why checking with the other person may not bring relief. You ask, “Are you upset with me?” They say no, but twenty minutes later you want to ask again. Their answer cannot settle the fear, because the fear did not start with them. It started in you, in your own expectation of being rejected. Until you recognize the fear as yours, you will keep asking the other person to remove it.

    Why does setting boundaries cause conflict almost every time?

    Here’s the part almost nobody is warned about. When you start holding a boundary, conflict follows. Not occasionally. Close to always.

    Looked at plainly, this makes complete sense. The other person was used to getting a yes from you, and now they’ve met a “no.” Of course there’s friction. Say you have always done what someone asked, and one day you tell them for the first time, “I don’t think I can this time.” They may be more than disappointed: they may be caught off guard and ask why you have suddenly changed. The longer your yes had been taken for granted, the louder the reaction. A boundary changes the terms of a relationship, and terms don’t get renegotiated quietly.

    At that point most people back down. They take the conflict as proof: I’ve handled this badly. I’ve hurt them. I’ve broken something. So they quietly erase the line, the peace returns, and the old pattern stays in place, ready to repeat the next time.

    But there is another way to read the conflict. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described one of the ways we come to experience another person as truly separate from us, a person in their own right: they survive our anger or attack, neither striking back nor falling apart. Saying no for the first time can feel, to you, like exactly that kind of attack, as if you were hurting them. Surviving it does not mean the other person stays calm; they may well be upset. It means they do not insult you or threaten to end the relationship, and they do not collapse. Then you learn that your no did not destroy them, and that choosing differently from them does not make you a bad person. A relationship that can take a “no” and still stand has become a relationship between two separate people. If you have been keeping the peace in order to stay close, this is hard to accept, because it means the friction you have been avoiding may not be an obstacle on the road to closeness. It may be part of what closeness is built from.

    So the conflict that flares up may not mean the relationship is damaged. It may mean that a line now exists where there was never one before.

    None of this promises that every relationship will survive the change. Nor is it a reason to force a confrontation you aren’t ready for. It is an invitation to look carefully at the friction before you decide what it says about you.

    What if you keep erasing the line to keep the peace?

    So what happens if you don’t hold the line — if fear of conflict wins, as it understandably might for a while?

    The relationship becomes quiet, which is why giving in can feel like success. But every time you agree before checking what you want, you practice ignoring your own answer. Over time you get better at making other people comfortable and worse at knowing what you like, where your limits are, and what you yourself want to do.

    Winnicott used the term true self for your spontaneous reactions: what you feel and want before you adjust it to win someone’s approval. A genuine no comes from this part of you. But when agreeing has become automatic, “Sure, that works” comes out before you have checked whether it actually works for you. The problem is not only that you lacked courage. You agreed so quickly that you did not have time to hear your own answer.

    Growing as a person has an order, and the first step can’t be skipped. People often want to jump straight to the later steps: opening up to others, giving generously. But first there has to be a clear “I”, with its outline drawn. Opening up and giving come after that.

    So if you are uncomfortable right now because you are drawing a line you have never drawn before, that discomfort is not necessarily a step backward. It may be the step you have to take in order to move forward.

    One small thing to try today, if you’d like. Bring to mind the moment from the past day that bothered you most. Then ask yourself one question and write the answer on paper in a single line: Where did this feeling start? If it started in you, write that it’s yours. If it was really the other person’s feeling — their disappointment, their anger — write that it’s theirs. It’s fine if you can’t tell for sure. You’re not solving anything, and not deciding what to do about it. You’re stopping for a moment to tell your feeling apart from theirs and putting one mark on the paper — and that’s how an outline gets drawn.

    This is educational writing about a psychological idea, not guidance for your particular situation. Drawing a boundary is not equally safe in every relationship — if holding one in your own relationship could put you at risk, please talk it through with someone qualified who knows your circumstances before you act on anything here.

    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