Inner Work Notes

Tag: psychoanalysis

  • Why the Loudest Person in the Room Feels Empty at Home

    You were the loudest one at the table — the biggest laugh, the widest eyes, the gasp that turned heads two tables over. And you meant every bit of it, which is the part that confuses you later.

    Then you got home. Keys in the bowl, coat still on, and somewhere between the car and the kitchen the whole thing drained out of you. The quiet had a sound to it.

    Not sad. Not upset. Flat — as if somebody had reached behind you and pulled the plug out of the wall.

    If you know that drop, this is about the drop, and about what it might be trying to tell you.

    Does a big personality mean a big inner life?

    Some people run at a higher volume than the rest of us. Wide gestures. A voice that swings from a whisper to a shout inside one story. Reactions a size or two bigger than the moment called for. It shows up in men and women alike, and not only in how they talk — the whole body goes up a size with it.

    We keep a kind phrase on hand for them. We say they feel things deeply, and most of the time we mean it warmly.

    Maybe they do. But there is a second question. Is the big expression coming from a feeling that is already there? Or is the person using a louder voice, bigger gestures and other people’s reactions to stir up a feeling they cannot hold on to by themselves? From the next chair you cannot tell the two apart. The difference shows up afterward: one person stays emotionally steady, while the other goes numb as soon as the talk, the laughter and the attention stop.

    What could all that brightness be covering?

    Psychoanalysis explains this kind of liveliness in a way that surprises most people the first time they hear it. When liveliness runs this high, it is best understood as the person stirring themselves up to cancel out a feeling of deadness underneath. Deadness here means a numbness inside: the sense of not being alive, of not quite existing.

    In everyday life it looks like this. The person talks faster, laughs harder, tells one more story and watches the room respond, because each time the room reacts, they feel something again, if only for a moment.

    Read that again, and this time picture yourself as that person, not someone else. The claim isn’t that the liveliness is fake. It’s that the liveliness has a job to do, and the job is to keep you from noticing the numbness underneath.

    Why would anyone need to shake themselves awake?

    Think about a leg that has gone to sleep under you. You press it, knock it against the chair, stamp it on the floor until the pins and needles arrive — and pins and needles hurt, and you want them anyway, because numb is worse than pain. Numb makes the leg feel like it belongs to somebody else.

    Some people live with emotional numbness. Ordinary pleasure barely registers, so they increase the intensity: a bigger laugh, a more dramatic story, a stronger display of delight. The stimulation and the attention from others create a temporary sense of being alive.

    If this is you, it all looks like joy from the outside, and people tell you what good company you are. On the inside, it is closer to asking one question, over and over: Am I still here?

    That is why coming home can feel like a sudden drop. While you were out, you were kept stirred up by the talk, the laughter and other people’s attention. At home all of that stops, and you feel the numbness again, because the laughter never made it go away. The next time, it takes a louder laugh and more attention to get the same sense of being alive. Each time the stirring has to be stronger, and nothing underneath changes.

    This feeling is almost impossible to explain to someone who has never had it. Say you feel dead inside and most people hear sadness. It isn’t sadness. Sadness at least moves, like weather: it comes in, it presses on you, it lifts again. Feeling dead inside doesn’t move. Nothing comes in and nothing lifts. As a therapist, I see it far more often than you would guess, usually in someone who has suffered from it in silence for years without finding the words for it.

    Does too much of something always hide its opposite?

    Here is one rule that will change how people look to you. Wherever there is too much of something, its opposite is usually sitting right underneath it.

    A mood kept unusually high can hide a low one. As long as the music, the talk and the excitement keep going, there is never a quiet moment long enough to feel the low mood underneath. Acting loudly superior can protect a private belief that you are inferior. And someone who keeps announcing how strong they are is often afraid that others will notice how weak and helpless they feel.

    You will recognize the shape once you have the rule. The friend who tells you, unprompted and often, that she is completely over him. The colleague who turns every serious conversation into a joke inside thirty seconds. The uncle who explains at each family gathering how little he cares what anybody thinks of him. None of it is exactly a lie. Each sentence is doing a job: keeping its opposite out of sight.

    So being too much is not a character flaw to be embarrassed about. It’s information — often the best signpost you’ll get to what is hidden underneath. Once you know the rule you can hear it in your own sentences too: not just what you said, but what saying it was supposed to cover.

    Why does saying “I’m weak here” take strength?

    “I’m not good at that part.” “That one still gets to me.” The people who can say sentences like these out loud without flinching are, almost always, the strong ones.

    It sounds backward until you look at what the sentence costs. To name a weakness out loud, you first have to be able to hold it: to let the thought sit in you for a while without setting off an alarm. The words only come after that, never before. It also takes a belief that the people around you will not pull away once they have seen that weak spot.

    If you can’t hold it, or can’t count on them staying, you don’t say it. You go the other direction instead, and you go fast — louder laugh, harder argument, brighter performance, one more story where you come out of it well. How hard you run is usually a fair measure of how big the thing is that you are running from.

    If you have ever watched someone say a thing like that out loud in front of you, you know the strange relief it brings. The room loosens. Nobody has to keep pretending they haven’t noticed the weak spot, and for the rest of that conversation people say slightly truer things than they had planned to.

    Does this mean cheerful people are all faking it?

    No. And please don’t take this to the next party and start reading the guests.

    Plenty of people are simply lively. Some grew up in a loud, warm house and never had any reason to turn the volume down. Being big and expressive is very often just who a person is, all the way down, and the world is better for having them in it.

    The difference doesn’t show up in the volume anyway. It shows up afterward. This idea earns its keep in one narrow place: when an extreme keeps repeating itself and a strange blank follows it every single time. You laugh hardest at the table, then feel hollow in the car. You keep insisting, in a firm voice, that you’re fine, and feel small the moment the door shuts behind you.

    The height is not the signal. The drop is.

    And you weren’t lying at that table, by the way. The laugh was real while it was happening. The question isn’t whether you meant it. It’s what the laugh was keeping you from feeling.

    Use this idea to look at your own week. Don’t use it to read anybody else’s.

    Write down the loudest minute of your week

    This exercise is small and takes no more than a minute. Pick one moment from the past week when you were too much: the hardest you laughed, the loudest you argued, the most eagerly you put yourself forward. Write it down as one plain line.

    Then, beside it, write the opposite of what you were showing in that moment. If you were being strong, write weak. If you were lit up, write flat. If you were overflowing, write empty.

    Don’t fix it, don’t explain it, and don’t soften it into something you’d rather read back later. Give the opposite its name and close the notebook.

    Name the thing underneath and the extreme loses some of its size.

    One more thing before I let you go. This exercise is reflective writing, not treatment, and it is small — but the flat feeling it can bring to the surface is not small at all. Over time that feeling tends to weigh on you more and more while you notice it less and less, until you barely register it as a problem. If it has been sitting in you for months, or if the noise you make is mostly there to keep you a step ahead of it, don’t leave it in a notebook. Say it out loud to a therapist who knows the difference between flat and sad. Writing the word down was the first move. Make a second one.

    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 Oedipus Complex Explained: Why Your Partner Isn’t the Problem

    Think back to the last time you were properly angry. Not irritated. Angry — ears hot, hands not quite steady, the same three sentences going round and round in your head.

    You probably knew whose fault it was before the feeling had finished arriving. He said that thing again. She rolled her eyes at exactly the wrong moment. Or you turned the whole thing inward, the way people do at two in the morning, and decided you were too sensitive, too needy, too much. Hold that scene a second, because here comes the uncomfortable part. None of those was the real cause.

    If it isn’t the other person, and it isn’t you, then what is it?

    Psychoanalysis says something that sounds almost rude the first time you hear it. The pain you feel in moments like that doesn’t come from your husband, or your wife, or your children. And it doesn’t come from you being too sensitive, too needy or too much, either. It comes from a fantasy that’s been running inside you the whole time, one you never chose and mostly can’t see.

    Not fantasy in the pleasant sense. Not the daydream you pick up on the train and put down again at your stop. In psychoanalysis, a fantasy is something older: the wishes and fears of early childhood, still at work in the way you read the people closest to you. It works away below your awareness, quietly and steadily, and it has already moved your mood before you notice anything at all.

    The fantasy decides what something means before you have looked at what actually happened. Your partner goes quiet, and you immediately read the silence as rejection. That interpretation produces anger, withdrawal, or desperate attempts to hold on. Because the interpretation feels like a fact, you react to it without checking whether your partner’s silence had another cause.

    You know the sequence even if you have never named it. Somebody says a few words, you add “I don’t matter to them,” and your whole day collapses. The words triggered the reaction, but the meaning you added determined its size.

    Why can’t you tell when you’re caught up in a fantasy?

    As an adult, you can think things through, which sounds like an advantage. You can explain yourself, point to evidence, walk anybody through exactly how you reached your conclusion. That is precisely where the trap is set. Being able to explain it all makes you certain you’re looking at plain facts, so it never occurs to you that you might be looking at a meaning you added yourself.

    The difficulty is that an unconscious fantasy does not feel like an interpretation. It feels like simply seeing clearly. You do not think, “I’m adding an old story to this moment.” You think, “Now I finally see what this person really feels about me.” So feeling certain proves nothing about whether you have read the moment correctly.

    The fantasy also started earlier than you’d think. When you were only one or two, before you had words for any of it, your mind was already staging wild, violent scenes between you and the people around you: grabbing and shoving away, swallowing and being swallowed, smashing to pieces. It sounds bizarre, but psychoanalysis says every human being starts out with fantasies like these. They don’t stop when you grow up. You are still strongly influenced by them; you just don’t know it. You may even have caught a trace of them yourself: a flash of wanting to shove somebody out of the way at a dinner table, gone before you’d registered it.

    What happens in the Oedipus story?

    Psychoanalysis has one idea that makes these hidden fantasies much easier to see: the Oedipus complex, named after an old Greek myth. While Oedipus is still a baby, too young to have done anything at all, his father is warned by a prophecy that this son will one day kill him and marry his own mother. The father panics and has the baby left outside to die, but somebody finds him, and he grows up in another household, never knowing who his real parents are.

    Years later he’s out on the road, and at a crossroads he falls into a stupid quarrel with an old man in a carriage. He kills him. He travels on to a city that has just lost its king, answers a riddle nobody else has been able to answer, and the city hands him the empty throne — and, with it, the widowed queen as his wife.

    Then the truth comes out. The old man he killed at the crossroads was that city’s king, and his own father. The woman lying beside him is his mother. Tormented by guilt, he puts out his own eyes.

    The details shift depending on who tells it — who picked the baby up, how he ended up in that particular city, how much anybody knew. The versions disagree, and none of that’s the point. The real question is why a story this ugly refused to die.

    Why do these old stories keep coming back?

    Think of a myth as a picture of the part of your mind you never get to look at directly. Psychoanalysis calls that part the unconscious: the part that had already decided whose fault it was before you had even finished getting angry. A myth is not a lesson or a warning. It is a picture of how that hidden part works. The Oedipus myth is only one such picture. The Greek myths about Zeus, Athena and Poseidon work the same way, and so do the old stories of every other culture that lasted long enough to reach us. These stories survived because they picture something that really goes on inside us, and people kept recognizing it even when they couldn’t possibly have said what it was.

    Line up the stories people never stop retelling and they start to look strangely alike. Many follow the same basic outline as the story of Oedipus. A baby is sent away. A child grows up with the wrong parents, in the wrong house. The truth about where he came from comes out only much later. Think of Moses in the basket, Superman in the rocket, Harry Potter in the cupboard under the stairs, and Luke Skywalker, told his father was dead.

    It isn’t that writers copied one another. The outline matches the way the unconscious works in all of us, so it catches hold and gets told again and again. That is why it keeps turning up in myths, in fairy tales, and in films people watch over and over without quite knowing why.

    Notice which stories catch hold of you like that. If one book or one film gets under your skin far more than it seems it should, it’s worth asking what in you it touched.

    What happens inside a three-year-old?

    At first, your world had room for only two people: your mother and you, a small closed circle. Then you began to notice a third person who belonged in that circle too, usually your father. Mother, father, child — three corners now, and one of them was you.

    From then on, the child feels several things at once, and none of them fit together: love, rivalry, and a quiet wish for somebody to disappear. Freud called this three-cornered tangle the Oedipus complex, after the son in the myth who, without knowing it, kills his father and marries his mother. It usually begins around the age of three or four, a little after the wild, violent scenes of the first two years.

    According to psychoanalysis, a child this age feels a sexual desire toward one parent that is as strong as an adult’s, even though the child’s body is far too young to hold any of it. That is what the term incestuous desire refers to. At its heart is a simple wish: that parent should be mine and nobody else’s, and the other parent, standing in the way, should go. Shame and guilt haven’t developed yet, so nothing tones the feeling down. The child feels it at full strength, draws the desired parent into its fantasies, and enjoys them.

    The words psychoanalysis uses for this stage sound brutal: killing the rival, possessing the parent, incestuous desire. That isn’t an accident. Nobody is trying to shock you. The words are harsh because the child’s feelings are that intense, and softer words would be describing something else altogether.

    And still, nothing happened. Not one of those scenes took place. Hold on to that, because everything else depends on it. All of it runs inside the child’s mind — no event, no moment anybody else could have walked in on. It’s fantasy from the first frame to the last.

    This is where most of us go wrong. We hear that something was only imagined and quietly file the whole business under harmless. For a small child, that’s not remotely how it works. The fantasy is not just a thought; it is something the child actually lives through.

    Why does something imagined leave a real mark?

    Dreams make this easy to see. Nothing in a dream is really happening. Now take the plainest example there is: a man has a sexual dream and he actually ejaculates. Crude, perhaps — and that is exactly why it works. His body never stopped to check whether any of it was true. It just reacted.

    Or take the milder version: you dream you’re arguing with somebody, and the bad mood trails you around all morning, long after you’ve remembered there was never any argument.

    A small child’s fantasies work the same way, only they run all day, for years. What the child only imagined still produces real fear, real pleasure, real jealousy and real tension in the body. That experience doesn’t simply disappear as the child grows up. Years later, in your mind, your partner can come to stand where the parent you wanted all to yourself once stood. So when your partner goes silent at the table, you may read the silence through the old triangle — “I’m being replaced” or “someone else matters more” — before you’ve even considered what is happening now.

    Is “he ignored me” something he did, or something you added?

    Separating what is happening now from the meaning the old fantasy adds to it changes what you can do. If the entire cause seems to be your partner, your only options are to change, punish, or leave them. Once you can see what you added, you have another option: examine the interpretation before acting on it.

    So here’s one thing to try, starting today. The next time a strong feeling rushes up and grips your whole chest, take a sheet of paper as soon as you can and fold it down the middle. Fill in both sides. On the left, write what the other person actually said or did — the words, the action, nothing else. No tone, no expression, no guess at what they meant by it. On the right, write the meaning you added.

    “He looked at his phone while I spoke” belongs on the left. “He ignored me because I don’t matter” belongs on the right. “She said she needed an evening alone” belongs on the left. “She’s getting ready to leave me” belongs on the right. You do not have to decide who was right. The point is to see the exact step where an event became a story and the story became a feeling.

    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