Your manager stops at your desk and says, “Do this one differently next time.” That’s the whole event. No raised voice, no audience, nothing unfair in the words. But your jaw sets before she’s finished the sentence, and before you’ve even weighed what she said, a thought is already there: Who does she think she is?
The work isn’t what’s hard. Being told is.
You’ve probably noticed this in yourself before. When something is your own idea, you do it gladly. When the very same thing comes to you as an instruction, something in you locks up. The work hasn’t changed. The only difference is that someone told you to do it.
When a child first speaks up for herself, she says “no”
Babies don’t arrive as separate people. For a long stretch, as far as the baby is concerned, she and her mother are not yet two people. The psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler called this stage symbiosis: mother and baby live as if they were one, with no line yet between where one ends and the other begins.
Then the child starts to pull away from that oneness, and that is when she begins to push back against her mother. Look at the first words she uses to make her own wishes known.
Not “I like this,” and not “I want that one.” It’s “no,” and “don’t.” She starts with refusals.
That isn’t a small child misbehaving. It’s a step she has to take. When a toddler plants her feet and says no to the person she loves most, she is doing something enormous. For the first time, she is someone who is not her mother.
Each “no” shows her, in action, that her mother wants one thing and she wants another. That is how a child first finds out that she has a will of her own, separate from her mother’s.
We go through this separation twice, and the second time is louder
Mahler had a name for this whole process: separation-individuation. You separate from that sense of being one with your mother, and you become an individual, someone who can say “I’m here, I’m me.” It doesn’t happen once and then finish. We go through it twice: once as toddlers, and again in adolescence. Another psychoanalyst, Peter Blos, called the teenage round “the second individuation.”
The toddler version is small enough to be funny. She marches off across the park as if she’s leaving for good, until her mother catches her by the arm and pulls her back. She looks her mother in the eye and takes one more bite of the very thing she was told not to eat.
Adolescence is the full-strength version. Now the pushing back comes with real opinions, and with a bigger body and a louder voice. It’s the same job the toddler was doing, on a far bigger scale.
Why good advice sends a teenager the other way
A teenager is trying to show that he exists as his own person: that his opinions and choices are his, not his parents’. Going against them is the quickest way to show it.
That is why even sensible advice can send him in the opposite direction. If he simply does what his parents say, it feels as if he has no mind of his own, as if the choice were theirs and not his. So he goes against it.
Parents feel wronged by this, and honestly, fair enough. The more they point him toward the good road, the more likely he is to head down the bad one. But he isn’t arguing about the road. He’s arguing about who gave the directions.
The passcode on the phone
Adolescence seems to start earlier these days, around fourth grade, at nine or ten. That is when many children begin openly defying their parents. A passcode goes on the phone, and the bedroom door shuts a little harder than it strictly needs to. Both say the same thing: stay out.
Parents feel their stomach drop, but this is not a disaster. A child has to rebel in some form or other. The toddler’s “no” was small, and in the years since, she has mostly lived by fitting in with what her parents want. Rebelling now is how she breaks out of that and starts living as herself. The passcode isn’t really about the phone. It is a child finding out that there is something she alone gets to decide. Going through this rebellion is what a healthy adolescence looks like.
So does being a grown-up mean swallowing your feelings and doing as you’re told?
This is the part that matters. Once the rebellion has done its job and you know you exist as your own person, you become an adult. And an adult can do something a teenager can’t.
Someone with authority tells you to do a thing, and part of you hears it as an insult. You can do it anyway — not because you caved, but because you know that doing as you’re told won’t make you stop being your own person. That’s an adult.
Notice that nothing gets swallowed here. You still feel the sting, you still do the task, and one doesn’t cancel the other. The sting is a feeling passing through, not proof that you’ve been crushed.
But if the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, being told what to do becomes unbearable. Before you’ve even taken in what an instruction says, it feels like an attack on your right to run your own life. Your body braces, the thought “Who does she think she is?” arrives, and you resist even when you agree with the task. Your manager ends up receiving resistance that was first meant for a parent, years ago.
Why the trouble is always with whoever is above you
This reaction is strongest in people whose relationship with their father went badly, especially a father who gave orders and allowed no questions. A manager, a senior colleague, anyone above them: there’s always friction, always some version of the same fight, and it doesn’t go away. And the odd part is how specific it is: they bristle only at people above them.
If your father used his authority to control, humiliate, or overpower you, that wound stays with you. Years later, anyone with authority over you can feel like the same threat. Your manager is not your father. But she stands where he stood, as someone who can tell you what to do. That alone is enough to make your body brace and your jaw set, as it once did with him, before you’ve looked at what is actually happening.
So on an ordinary afternoon you are angry at your manager, but the strength of that anger comes partly from much earlier, from a time when being told what to do meant being humiliated or losing control over your own life. The anger you couldn’t voice in front of your father comes up along with it.
When the people and rules above you are wrong
Growing up comes down to something plain in the end: you accept that the world has an order, that some people and some rules have authority over you. At work, that means a manager. Beyond work, it means laws and government policies. That is reality, whether you like it or not.
And that order is not always right. A law, a policy, the person above you: any of them can be wrong, and sometimes badly. When that happens, you should be able to see it and say so out loud: “This isn’t right.”
Where people part ways is in how they respond to something wrong. The mature route uses the proper channels to change it. At work, that means checking the rules and gathering the facts before you raise the problem. With a law or a policy, it means finding the others who see the problem too, researching it, and campaigning for change. Either way, you keep making your case with reasons, and that route asks you to stay with it for a long time.
The other route wants it settled this afternoon. When the teenage work of becoming your own person was never finished, or the old wound from your father is still open, you go after the person instead of the problem: “Who do you think you are?” You blame, and you try to win by force rather than by reasons.
What was said, or the fact of being told
So the next time your jaw sets, don’t answer right away. Ask yourself one question first.
Is this about what she said, or about the fact that she’s the one who gets to say it?
If it’s the content that bothers you, you may have a real point, and a real point can be raised. Don’t stop at “this feels bad.” Work out what the rules say, what the facts are, and what harm the instruction could do, and take that to her. That is the mature route.
If the content was honestly fine, it’s worth asking whether the person you’re fighting is really the person in front of you. Would you react the same way if a coworker at your own level had said exactly the same words? If not, the reaction may go back to your father, and your manager has simply stepped into the place he once stood.
References
- Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books.
- Blos, P. (1967). The Second Individuation Process of Adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 22, 162–186. — the second individuation in adolescence is Blos’s formulation, not Mahler’s.
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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