Inner Work Notes

Tag: self-awareness

  • Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak

    There is probably a pen within reach of you. Pick it up, or just look at it.

    You know what it is immediately. That’s worth pausing on, because that knowledge didn’t come from the pen. It came from you. Every scrap of information that let you land on pen was gathered before this moment — years before, most of it. If you’d never seen one, you’d be holding an object you couldn’t name.

    So even when you look at a piece of plastic on a desk, you are seeing it through your past. Before you have had a single thought about it, earlier experience has already told you what kind of thing it is, what it’s called and what it’s for.

    What would it take to see the pen as it is?

    Suppose you could set all of that down — everything you already know about pens. No memory telling you what it is, no name arriving ahead of the object. Just the thing, right now. What would you feel?

    Wonder. You’d be looking at something for the first time in your life.

    But nobody feels wonder looking at a pen. You think pen, register the color, and move on. In that half-second the past has already arrived and done the work for you.

    And notice you can’t catch it happening. There’s no moment where you hold an unnamed object and then supply the name. The name is there the instant you see the object. Whatever the mind is doing, it has finished before you notice anything happening.

    I’m not saying it’s impossible to see a thing as it is. I’m saying it’s very, very hard, and that in ordinary life we almost never do it.

    Why do we judge people so quickly?

    Now put a person where the pen was — someone you have only just met.

    You haven’t even learned their name. A few sentences have gone back and forth, most of them about nothing. And somewhere in there you’ve already made up your mind: this person is fine, or this person is not. If someone asked what this person had done to earn that, you couldn’t say. There’s only the verdict, already in.

    And it isn’t just a yes or no, either. Before the conversation has really started, you have a whole small story about them — what they’re probably like, how the rest of this conversation is going to go, whether you’ll want to be near them again. None of that came from those few sentences. There wasn’t enough in them to build it from.

    That verdict forms the same way the word pen came to you: instantly, and from the past. Something in this person’s face, tone of voice or posture resembles someone you knew before, and your mind reacts to them as if they were that earlier person — before you know enough about the one actually in front of you.

    That is why the judgment arrives quickly and feels certain. You experience it as seeing the new person clearly, not as remembering how an earlier person made you feel.

    Who gathered the information you judge people by?

    The important question is who first decided what people are like. You did, as a child. A child who knows only a few adults may conclude, “Quiet people are angry” or “Confident people will humiliate me,” and carry that conclusion into later encounters.

    Because the conclusion becomes part of how you see people, it never shows up as a belief you could check and correct. It simply looks like the way people are. You notice what fits it and overlook what doesn’t, so the old conclusion keeps feeling accurate.

    The conclusions came in small pieces. So that’s what the world is like. So people don’t like me. Thousands of those, collected quietly, until they settled into one steady view of how things are — a whole private philosophy, put together by you as a child, when you had met perhaps four adults and had no idea that was a small sample. Most of it was in place by the time you were six or seven.

    Why doesn’t that childhood view ever get corrected?

    Because as soon as it was finished, you started looking at the people you met through it — and what you saw seemed to be about them, not something you brought with you.

    That’s the part worth sitting with. The conclusions a child reached weren’t kept as guesses, to be checked later against better evidence. They were kept as settled — as how things are. And a settled view doesn’t wait to be tested. It goes out ahead of you and shapes what you find.

    That settled view works as an expectation, and the expectation shapes what you notice and how you act. If you expect rejection, you notice a delayed reply, miss signs of warmth, and speak more cautiously. The other person responds to that caution, and their response becomes new evidence that people do not want you. Each time this happens, the childhood conclusion feels less like a conclusion and more like simply seeing what is there.

    When someone rubs you the wrong way, you may well be seeing them through that old view.

    Can you stop judging people this fast?

    No. I don’t think you can, and I wouldn’t put effort into trying.

    The judgment isn’t a decision, so you can’t simply decide differently. It arrives finished, the instant you see their face. There’s no moment in between where you could step in.

    Why, then, do I keep saying that what you see is the past? Because something starts to change when a person can admit, plainly and without softening it, that what they’re seeing may not be true. Not that it’s false — you have no way of knowing that for sure. Just that it may not be true. That admission is small, and it isn’t comfortable, but it’s the only place I’ve seen anything actually shift. The first impression still comes. What changes is what the person does with it.

    So let the first verdict come, but don’t take it as the final word on the other person. Take it as information about you: who this person reminds you of, what you expect next, and when you first learned to expect it.

    The next time someone puts you off in the first ten seconds, you don’t have to argue yourself out of the feeling or feel guilty for having it. Just notice that it came too fast to have been about them. Knowing that your picture of them comes from your past won’t change the picture. What it does is make you less likely to decide who they are on the strength of something you concluded as a child. That is most of what you can do.

    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 Safe You Don’t Know You Own

    You’re rinsing a plate, or waiting at a red light, and it starts again. That conversation from years back. You know your lines, you know theirs, and you still lose the argument every time you replay it.

    Then comes the second thought, the heavy one. If I had handled that differently, everything since would look different now.

    Most of us carry two or three scenes like this. The sentence you said at the worst possible moment, to the person who deserved it least. The rest of that year has gone soft and grey, but that one scene stays sharp, right down to where your hands were.

    Everything you lived through taught you something

    Here’s how I see it. Whatever life you’ve lived, you learned something in it — and not only in the good years.

    The good years are the easy case. Ask what one of them gave you and the answer comes straight out. No digging required.

    But there is also the stretch you would never choose again — the one you skip past when somebody asks how you ended up here. Nobody signs up for a year like that. You learned something there anyway.

    If you slow down for a second, you can usually feel that you took something away from that year.

    So no life is a mistake. Nothing you lived through was wasted, because every stretch of it taught you something. That is why I say there is no reason to regret any of it.

    So why won’t the regret leave?

    If regret keeps circling the same event, here is what I think is happening. You did learn something from it. You just haven’t noticed what it was. And instead of noticing it, you keep blaming yourself: “You should have known better.”

    Listen to what regret actually tells you. You were stupid. You should have seen it coming. If you had done one thing differently, none of this would have happened.

    Read those back slowly and you’ll notice that not one of them tells you anything you can use: which warning sign you missed, what fear kept you from saying no, what to check next time. All you are doing is grabbing yourself by the collar. You can punish yourself for the past that way, but it will not change what you do next.

    There’s a safe behind your books

    Picture this. On the shelf in your living room, behind the row of paperbacks nobody has moved in years, there is a small safe. Inside it is a thick stack of cash — enough to change your year.

    You don’t know it’s there, because nobody ever mentioned it. You walk past that shelf every day without a thought.

    So here is the question. Are you a person who has that money, or a person who doesn’t?

    The money is there, and that part is settled whatever you happen to believe about it. Meanwhile you go on living as a person without it.

    Owning the money is one thing. Living as someone who has it is another.

    What you have lived through works the same way. Maybe a painful year taught you to spot manipulation, to say no sooner, or to notice when you are ignoring your own judgment. Whatever it taught you is really there, like the money in the safe. But because you are not aware of it, you conclude, “I learned nothing from that.” And then all that is left is blaming yourself: How could you be so stupid? Why did you make the same choice all over again?

    What changes on the day you find the safe

    Imagine the books coming off that shelf one Saturday, and there it is.

    Nothing new arrived that morning. Not a cent. The only thing that changed is that you know.

    And that changes everything after it, because nobody leaves money sitting in a box once they know it’s there. It gets spent. Plans you put off for years are back on the table, because the reason you put them off has quietly stopped being true.

    Learning works the same way: once you know it is there, you use it. Say you can put what a painful relationship taught you into one sentence: “I now notice when I start making excuses for someone who treats me with contempt.” Then you can act on it in the very next conversation. The past does not change, but the way you use it can.

    Why the same thing keeps happening

    You promise yourself you’ll speak up sooner. Then the next time comes, and you go quiet again. And out comes the usual verdict: I never learn.

    The verdict is the loudest part of that loop — promise, silence, verdict, and round again. Every time the loop comes round, the verdict says the same thing: I never learn. I’m just someone who never changes. But look at what that verdict rests on: the times you went quiet before. You have only ever used those memories one way, as proof that you failed.

    Here is what keeps the loop going. Those times did teach you something, but you never put what they taught you into words. And what you have never put into words, you cannot reach for when you need it. So when the next time comes, you walk in with the same old habits and go quiet again.

    You are not short on experience. The same thing keeps happening not because you learned nothing, but because what you learned is still sitting in the safe, unused.

    Write one line about the regret that comes back most

    Pick the regret that visits you more than the rest — the one you could describe in your sleep. That memory is like the safe in the picture. You go back to it again and again, but you have never once looked inside to see what it holds. Write a single line about it, by hand if you can: “What I know now, because of that, is ___.”

    You will probably get stuck at the blank. That is to be expected. Until now you have used this memory only as proof that you are no good, never as something to learn from. So it may take a while before anything other than “I was stupid” comes to mind.

    If you get even one line down, you have found one thing you thought you never had, and it was there the whole time. And if the line stays empty for now, that is not proof that you never learn. It means your hand is finally on the handle of the safe, even though the door has not opened yet.

    That memory was never evidence against you. It was the safe, and what you learned has been inside it all along.

    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