Inner Work Notes

Tag: self-criticism

  • Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land

    Someone said the thing you had wanted to hear. You heard it. You said thank you and meant it. Ten minutes later nothing of it is left: your mood has not lifted, and there is nothing to go back to and feel again.

    Meanwhile a careless put-down someone made three weeks ago is still with you, down to the tone of voice.

    This usually gets filed under low self-esteem. But that is not an explanation. It only gives what just happened another name. Telling a person with a temperature that they have a fever says nothing about why the fever is there.

    There is an actual reason praise does not stay. Once you can see it, you will also see why years of encouragement have never once worked on you.

    At first, good and bad are kept apart

    The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described a baby’s mind in its first months like this: the baby does not take in experience as one whole. From the start, experience comes in split into two parts, and the parts are stored separately. A baby does not have one mother. He has two — the one who feeds him and the one who leaves him hungry — and he keeps them in separate places and never puts them together. He does the same to himself: there is a good me and a bad me, and those are kept apart too.

    Later the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg laid this out as two pairs: the mother who feeds him is paired with a good me, and the mother who leaves him hungry is paired with a bad me. It is one baby and one mother, but each is stored in two separate places.

    Klein did not see this as the baby getting things wrong. He is simply not yet strong enough to bear knowing that the mother who feeds him and the mother who leaves him hungry are the same person. So he keeps them apart. Psychoanalysts call this splitting. Keeping them apart protects the good: his anger at the mother who leaves him hungry cannot reach the mother who feeds him and destroy her.

    So splitting is not a mistake. It is a solution: dividing the mother into a good one and a bad one is how the baby keeps from losing the good one.

    A drop of ink in a glass

    Why can’t the good and the bad simply be put together? It is easiest to see with water.

    Here is a glass of clear water and here is a bottle of ink. One drop goes in and the glass is ruined. There is no clear water left anywhere in it, not even a mouthful; it has all turned grey. Nothing in that glass survives the mixing.

    So if this one glass is all the clear water you have, you will not let the ink in. You will guard the glass. Keeping the ink out is not stubbornness. It is the only way to keep any clear water at all.

    Now pour the same bottle into a river. The river takes it and stays a river. You would have trouble finding where it went.

    It depends on how much good there is, not on how hard you try

    This is the heart of it. Whether a person can hold the good and the bad in one place and bear it is not a matter of insight or willpower alone. It depends on how much good the person has known, in themselves and in other people. There has to be enough of it that one bad experience does not wipe it all out.

    When there is plenty of this good, the bad goes in the way the ink goes into the river: it mixes in, and the good is still there. Psychoanalysts call this integration. Put into words, it sounds like this: I am a person with faults. My mother loved me and also let me down. My friend is decent and occasionally careless.

    But where there is only about as much good as bad, the person has a glass, not a river. Then the two cannot be put together, because putting them together would spoil all of the good. So they stay split. That is not a symptom to argue someone out of. It is what is holding that person together right now.

    This is why being told you should try to see the good in yourself can feel like an insult rather than a comfort. The advice asks a person to put the good and the bad in themselves together, in one place. If they have only one glass of clear water, that means pouring ink into it.

    Where a compliment gets stopped

    The split into a good me and a bad me does not end with infancy.

    Someone who grew up hearing mostly about what they had done wrong comes into adult life with a picture of themselves as someone who falls short. They also bring a habit of mind that expects criticism and goes looking for it. So when another person says something to them, they are already listening for the criticism in it before they have even weighed whether it is true. This happens the moment the words reach them.

    Picture five people at a table. Four say your presentation went well; one says the middle section was confusing. For the rest of the evening, all you can think about is the middle section. That is not because that person put it harshly, and not because you are unusually thin-skinned. It is because theirs was the only remark that had a place already waiting for it inside you.

    Praise, on the other hand, has to get past that habit of mind first. On the way in, you answer it in your head: “They are just being polite. They want something. They have not seen the real me.” Long before the praise can reach you, it has been written off.

    Criticism does not have to get past anything, because it fits what you already believe: “Something is wrong with me.” So it goes straight in and is remembered in detail.

    So the problem is not simply a poor memory that lets only the good things slip away. There is a place ready for the bad words, and none for the good ones.

    Maturity does not come with age alone

    Here, maturity means one specific ability: taking in what is actually in front of you as it is, instead of through the habits of mind formed when you were small, like the one that expects criticism. The more mature a person is, the more they can take in this way.

    This ability does not come automatically with age. A person of sixty or seventy who has not grown up on the inside still sees the people around them the way they learned to see people in the family home they left fifty years ago. If they were criticized in that home, they feel criticized by the people around them now. A colleague’s compliment does not come through as a compliment; the old habit of mind gets to it first and colors it on the way in.

    There is a simple way to tell how much of this ability you have, and it is not whether you believe the good thing someone said. It is whether you can let it stand for one day, just as it was said, without adding your own “yes, but.”

    Where the water comes from

    If the problem is how much good there is next to the bad, then the answer is not to attack the ink. Most people have already spent years trying to argue their bad picture of themselves down to size, and it has not shrunk. The work is adding water.

    The water comes from real relationships, not only from encouraging things you tell yourself. One compliment is easily brushed off. What makes the difference is hundreds of ordinary hours with people in which nothing bad happens: you make a mistake and no one humiliates you; you turn down a request and the relationship does not end. Slowly those hours add up to evidence against the old picture you have of yourself. As that evidence builds, a criticism can be heard as a comment on one thing you did, not as proof that you are bad through and through.

    So the next time something kind is said and slides straight off, you have not failed at receiving it, and there was no technique you were meant to apply. Your glass is just small for now. More clear water comes from outside, slowly — mostly from staying a little longer with people when you would rather get up and leave.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — splitting, and what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position: the baby’s earliest state of mind, in which good and bad are kept apart.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — what Klein called the depressive position (not depression in the everyday sense): the later state of mind in which good and bad can be held together in one person.
    • Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson. — the inner pictures of a good and a bad self and of good and bad others (self and object representations).

    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

  • “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack

    The day is done and you go back over it. The meeting. The message you sent too fast. The thing you meant to say and didn’t. By the end of it you are smaller than when you started. Somewhere in the middle a sentence arrived on its own: “Of course I got it wrong. That’s just me.” It arrived so smoothly it sounded like the truth. You would call all of that looking at yourself honestly. But when you look at yourself honestly, you don’t usually come away bruised.

    There is no reason to dislike yourself this much

    Is there really a reason to dislike yourself that much? There isn’t.

    You keep running yourself down anyway. The criticism doesn’t ask your permission, and it doesn’t stop just because you decided there was no reason for it. It is still going when you turn off the light.

    So the first step is to notice it while it is happening. Catch the moment when looking back at what you did turns into an attack on who you are: “I sent the message too quickly” becomes “I ruin everything, because this is just who I am.” Once you can say to yourself, “I am attacking myself right now,” you can say the next thing too: “There is no reason for this.”

    That is what it really means to tell yourself “it’s okay.” It does not mean you did nothing wrong. It keeps what you did separate from who you are. One careless remark may call for an apology, but the world doesn’t end because you said it, and saying it doesn’t make you a careless or worthless person. That is true, and that is why you can say “it’s okay” and mean it.

    Looking back is only looking back

    Reflection sounds like a big, serious word. It means one simple thing: you look back.

    Most of the day runs without much thinking. Then you stop for a minute and look into your own mind. “Why did I cut in like that at the meeting?” Sometimes an answer comes up on its own: “Oh — I wanted them to notice my idea first.”

    That’s it. That is all reflection is. You wanted something, or you didn’t want to do something, and now you see it. The answer ends there.

    Look at what an answer like that leaves out. It doesn’t grade you. It doesn’t say what kind of person you are. You wanted something, you can see that you wanted it, and seeing it is the result.

    Transactional analysis, one school of psychology, has a name for the part of you that looks back like this: the Adult. The Adult simply notes what happened, what you wanted and what followed. It says, “I avoided calling her because I didn’t want an argument,” and does not add, “Therefore I am a coward.”

    The Adult works like this all day long. The milk is finished. The train is late. You didn’t enjoy that dinner as much as you expected to. You handle facts like these without adding anything to them.

    Then a second voice says, “Right, you’re so greedy”

    Now take the same small want: “Oh — I wanted them to notice my idea first.” Sometimes, before you have even finished looking, a different line gets there first: “Right, you’re so greedy.”

    That is not reflection. It is what transactional analysis calls the Parent: the part of you that repeats judgments you heard over and over as a child, from your parents or teachers. Nobody has to say them to you anymore; you say them to yourself. And because the criticism now comes in your own voice, it sounds like the truth about you rather than an old judgment.

    But look at what that voice is reacting to. Wanting something is not greed. Wanting is a plain, innocent thing. You wanted them to notice your idea first. You wanted one evening with nothing owed to anyone. You didn’t want to call her and have an argument. Those sentences say what you wanted, and nothing more.

    Then a line gets stapled on the end: “You only ever think about yourself. You’re so selfish.” You call the whole thing self-reflection and go to bed.

    A moral word turns looking into scoring

    What gets stapled on the end is a verdict on what kind of person you are: greedy, selfish. These are moral words — they rate you as a good or bad person. The moment one of them attaches itself, the Parent has taken over.

    “You didn’t want to do it.” That is still looking back. “You didn’t want to do it, so you’re selfish” is something else entirely. The first sentence only watches. The second puts a score on you.

    Observing and judging can feel alike, because both involve thinking about yourself. The difference shows in what you are left with. Observing gives you something specific you can use: “I agreed because I was afraid of disappointing her.” Judging gives you a verdict on your whole self: “I am weak.” Once you have that verdict, there is nothing left to look into.

    So check what you are left with afterward. If you understand why you did it, and you can see what you might do differently next time, you were reflecting. If you only feel smaller and more hopeless, the reflection turned into punishment.

    “I really am selfish” isn’t always a judgment

    Sometimes “I really am selfish” sounds like a judgment and isn’t one. It isn’t reflection either, because it is not about one thing you wanted; it is about who you are. It is a third thing: a realization.

    But isn’t that the same kind of verdict as “You’re so selfish”? The word is the same. What is different is what it is for. A realization isn’t there to blame you or punish you. You simply see a fact — “I really am selfish” — and instead of arguing with it, you accept it.

    Picture a mother or father who has told their children for years, “Everything I did, I did for you.” Then one day they realize what was really going on: “I used them. I used my children for my own sake. I really did live a selfish life.”

    What happens next shows that this was a realization and not an attack. They go to their children and apologize: “I never thought about what was going on inside you. I only thought about myself.” The realization hurts, but it doesn’t end with them beating themselves up. They start listening to their children and treating them differently.

    So the same words, “I really am selfish,” can do two different jobs. Said as an attack, they end in pain, and nothing changes. Said as a realization, they lead you to take responsibility and do something concrete: apologize, or respond differently next time.

    “It’s okay” only works in the right order

    If you learn to say “it’s okay” before you can notice the attack while it is happening, you will slap it on everything. It’s okay, it’s okay — like a bandage you keep in your pocket for every scratch. Underneath, nothing changes, because you never saw the attack in the first place.

    Knowing something in your head and experiencing it yourself are two different things. You could read about “it’s okay” many times, in many places, and it would still only get you as far as “Ah, I see.” That is getting to know the idea. It has not yet become yours.

    It becomes yours on the day you go through the steps yourself, with nobody pushing you: you catch the attack mid-swing, you see there is no reason for it, and “it’s okay” comes out of that — in that order. An “it’s okay” that comes this way carries weight. You can hear the difference in your own voice when you say it.

    Cross out the moral word and read what’s left

    Find one moral word you used against yourself today, one that left you feeling smaller. Greedy. Selfish. Lazy. Then write down the whole sentence it came in.

    Now cross that word out, ask yourself what you actually wanted right then, and write the answer in its place. What you wanted is what is left once the moral word is gone. “I was so greedy today” becomes “I wanted them to notice my idea first.” “I’m so lazy” becomes “I wanted to rest.” “Why am I this selfish?” might become “I wanted someone to look after me a little today.”

    Read the new sentence out loud, once. Then check one thing and nothing else. Is it less savage toward you than the first version was? That is all tonight asks of you. You are not deciding whether it is true, and you are not deciding what to do about it.

    That new sentence is the Adult talking. It tells you what you wanted, and then it stops. Nothing in it is asking you to be sorry.

    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