Inner Work Notes

Tag: self-blame

  • What Did I Do to Deserve This? Punishments End. This Doesn’t.

    There is a sentence that climbs up your throat on the bad days. What did I do to deserve this. Some people finish it out loud — to deserve these parents, to deserve this life with this person, to deserve waking up in this exact room again. You can carry that question a long time. It rarely hands anything back.

    If this were punishment, it would have a size

    Think about how punishment actually works. A fine prints an amount and a date. A sentence comes with a length — this many months, and then the door opens and you walk out. Someone set the price. You pay the price. The account closes.

    Even the worst of them has an edge on it. You can stand at the front of it and point at the place where it stops.

    That closing is the whole point. Without it, the word means nothing. A penalty nobody can total up, with no last payment on it, is not a penalty at all.

    You have paid it more than once, and it is still open

    Now hold your own life next to that. Nobody named a figure. Nobody set a release date. There is no office you can walk into and ask how much is left to pay.

    You have taken more than you ever thought you could take. You have said to yourself, more than once, that you have served whatever this is. You kept a private count. You decided that after this much, surely, the thing would be settled.

    Then a season goes by, and there you are in the same kitchen, in the same argument, saying what you already said the last time.

    Nothing closed. Nothing got crossed off. Whatever you keep paying and never finish paying is not a punishment — that shape does not exist inside punishment. And once the punishment goes, the crime behind it goes with it. There is no ledger. Nobody wrote your name at the top of a page and started adding.

    A hard life is heavy, and it is still not payment for anything. None of it is here because of something you did wrong. It looks like somebody’s fault. It is nobody’s fault.

    Nobody asks what a rich man did to deserve it

    You never hear the other version. Nobody looks at a man with money and asks what he did to deserve that. You only reach for crime and payment when something hurts. Which means those words are not describing your life. They are describing how much your life stings right now.

    The word hiding inside why me

    That question is not asking about the pain. It is hunting for a name — who did this, who let it happen, who has to answer for it.

    So you go looking for a place to set the blame down. Outside first — your parents, the person you live with. You build a case against one of them, and it does not hold. So you turn it inward. What did I do wrong. What is wrong with me.

    Pick a name and watch what happens next

    Once you settle on an answer, there is no next step.

    Land on your parents and you are left holding resentment. Land on yourself and you are left holding self-blame. One burns and one freezes, and both of them are heavy, and neither one moves you a single inch. Tomorrow morning arrives exactly the same either way. The name changed. Nothing else did.

    That is the clue that Who is to blame? is not producing the answer you need. Blaming your parents may explain where the pain began, and blaming yourself may create the illusion of control, but neither tells you what you need now or what you can do next. The question keeps you searching for a guilty person when your life requires a response.

    Living beside someone impossible, or coming into money

    We learn who we are by living through very different things. Some people learn it beside someone impossible. Some learn it by getting rich. Nobody would call the second one a punishment.

    So here is how I read it. Joy, pain, and a problem that refuses to resolve each reveal different parts of you. Pressure shows what makes you go silent, what makes you attack, what you can endure, and where you abandon yourself to keep a relationship. The circumstances differ, but each one brings your habitual way of meeting life into view.

    Your particular life is therefore where you encounter yourself. Not because the suffering was assigned as punishment, but because your responses become visible only in the situations you actually have to live through.

    Knowing yourself probably means nothing to you right now

    If I told you to go find out who you are, you would have no idea what to do with Monday. I know. But you are already in the middle of finding out. That is what these years are.

    So watch yourself in the middle of them. What makes you go silent. What makes you say the thing you will regret before midnight. Whose one sentence still takes your legs out years later. What you can carry far longer than you expected to. Where you fold on the first push.

    You are not a fact filed away somewhere, waiting to be looked up. You are what shows up in how you meet what is in front of you. It comes out in pieces, mostly under pressure.

    When it climbs up your throat again

    I am not asking you to stop saying it. Say it. Say the whole thing, out loud if you are alone in the car. What did I do to deserve these parents. What did I do to deserve this life with this person. Do not cut it short and do not be polite with it.

    Then, when the question has run all the way out, add another one: What does this situation show me about what I fear, what I keep repeating, and what I need to do differently now?

    The circumstances may not change immediately. But the second question gives you somewhere to move. The first searches for someone to charge; the second helps you recognise your pattern and choose your next response.

    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