Inner Work Notes

English

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 being married to this person, to deserve waking up in this exact room again. You can carry that question a long time. It rarely gives you an answer.

    If this were a punishment, it would have a set price

    Think about how punishment actually works. A fine comes with an amount and a due date. A prison 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 harshest punishment is decided in advance. On the day it is handed down, you already know what it is and how long it will last.

    That is what makes a punishment a punishment. A penalty with no set amount and no last payment is not a penalty at all.

    You have paid more than once, and the account 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 your time for 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. Something you keep paying and never finish paying is not a punishment — no punishment works that way. And if it is not a punishment, then there is no crime you are paying for either. There is no ledger. Nobody wrote your name at the top of a page and started adding up what you owe.

    A hard life is heavy, and it is still not payment for anything. You are not going through all this because of something you did wrong. That does not mean nobody has hurt you. A parent or partner who was violent, or who failed to look after you, is responsible for what they did. But being treated unfairly does not mean you deserved it.

    Nobody asks what a rich man did to deserve it

    You never hear the question asked the other way round. Nobody looks at a man with money and asks what he did to deserve that. You only ask what you did to deserve something when it hurts. So the question does not show that your life is a punishment. It only shows how much your life hurts right now.

    What the question is really asking

    “What did I do to deserve this?” comes out of pain, but it is not asking how to ease the pain. It is asking who is to blame — who did this, who let it happen, who has to answer for it.

    So you look for somewhere to put the blame. Sometimes you put it on your parents, or on your husband or wife. Sometimes you turn it on yourself. What did I do wrong. What is wrong with me.

    Pick someone to blame and see what happens next

    Once you decide who is to blame, there is no next step.

    Decide it was your parents, and you are left with resentment. Decide it was you, and you are left with self-blame. Both are heavy, and neither one moves you a single inch. Tomorrow morning arrives exactly the same either way. You changed who you blame. Nothing else changed.

    This is how you can tell that the question Who is to blame? will not give you the answer you need. Blaming your parents may explain where the pain began. Blaming yourself may feel easier than living with pain that has no reason at all. If it is your fault, at least there is a reason, and the world feels predictable again, as if you were in control. That control is not real. Neither kind of blame tells you what you need now or what you can do next. The question keeps you looking for a guilty person, when what you actually need is to decide how you will respond.

    Living with someone impossible, or getting rich: both show you who you are

    We learn who we are by living through very different things. Some people learn it by living with someone impossible. Some learn it by getting rich. Nobody would call getting rich a punishment. Living with someone impossible is not a punishment either. It is another way of finding out who you are.

    Joy, pain, and a problem that will not go away each show you something different about yourself. Hard times especially show what makes you go silent, what makes you attack, what you can endure, and where you give up your own needs just to keep a relationship. However different the situations are, each one lets you see how you tend to respond to what life puts in front of you.

    Your own life, exactly as it is, is where you meet yourself. That is not because the suffering was handed to you as a punishment. It is because you can only see how you respond in the situations you actually have to live through.

    You may have no idea what “knowing yourself” even means

    If I told you to go and find out who you are, you would probably have no idea where to start. I know. But you are already in the middle of finding out. That is what you have been doing all these hard years.

    So watch yourself as you live through them. What makes you go silent. What makes you say something you will regret the same night. Whose single remark still knocks you flat years later. What you can carry far longer than you expected to. Where you give in at the first push.

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

    When the question comes back

    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 being married to this person. Do not cut it short and do not be polite with it.

    Then, when you have said all of it, add another question: What does this situation show me about how I respond, what I keep repeating, and what I need to do differently now?

    The circumstances may not change right away. But the second question gives you somewhere to go. The first question looks for someone to blame. 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