Inner Work Notes

Tag: sense of self

  • 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

  • Stay Until I Fall Asleep: The Fear That Never Grew Up

    “Stay with me until I fall asleep. That’s all.” I hear some version of that constantly from people who keep falling in love too hard, too fast. It sounds like a small ask, and on the surface it is. A few minutes. A warm body in the room. Nothing promised, nothing signed.

    Then the light goes off. You lie down and, for no reason you can name, something behind your ribs turns cold. It feels as if you would be all right if only someone were with you, so you reach for the phone and scroll for anyone still awake. You stop on the name of a person you know abuses you. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Tonight none of that matters. If that person will only come and be with you, the night becomes bearable.

    This isn’t poor judgment. It isn’t judgment at all. What is making the choice is a fear from infancy, from long before you could judge anyone.

    Grown on the outside, unfinished on the inside

    Here is how I understand falling in love too hard, too fast, over and over. Psychologically, someone who loves like this has not yet been fully born as a person. Their body was born, but inside they never finished separating from their mother (or whoever first cared for them) and standing on their own as a separate self.

    After physical birth, a child gradually learns, “I am a separate person, and I remain myself even when my caregiver is not beside me.” This is not one event. It grows out of an experience repeated many times: the child moves a little away, gets upset, comes back to the caregiver, and finds that nothing has been lost. The caregiver is still there, and the child is still the same child.

    When that process is left unfinished, the body still grows up and the person learns to do adult things, but being apart from someone can still feel like a danger to life itself. When a partner is away, it doesn’t feel like ordinary distance. It brings back the old terror of a small child left without the one person who keeps them alive.

    I kept wondering what that would feel like from the inside. What is it actually like in the mind of an adult who was never fully born as a self?

    Fairbairn, a psychoanalyst who laid the groundwork for object relations theory (the study of how our earliest relationships go on shaping the way we relate to people), described how the self splits when a child’s early needs keep going unmet. One part functions: it goes to work, keeps appointments, and talks normally at lunch. Another part is still waiting for what it needed as a child and never got. Split like this, the self never comes together as one whole “me.” That is why a capable adult can still feel unsure who they are and live in constant fear of being left.

    If you never developed a stable inner sense of being held and protected, you have no memory of safety to draw on when someone leaves. You may know in your head that you can cope, but your body has never learned, through experience, that people who go away come back.

    And life does what life does: it doesn’t go your way, and it doesn’t tell you what’s coming. You have to live in it day after day, not knowing who you are, empty inside, afraid underneath, with nothing solid at your back.

    Everyone fears being left. This is not that.

    A bit of worry about being dropped is normal, and everyone has some. Do they actually like me, or are they just being polite? Nobody gets through a month without a version of that thought, and it means nothing.

    What I’m describing is a different animal. Anxiety is far too small a word for it. This is closer to terror, and at some moments it becomes panic, a state you simply cannot get through on your own.

    That terror is what sits under the late-night call to the person who hurts you.

    Letting go costs more than staying

    When being apart from someone sets off terror, stopping the terror becomes more urgent than judging the other person’s character. That is why you may call someone who has abused you even while knowing exactly what they will do.

    So it stops mattering to you that this person abuses you, or that they have no love to give you. If they will be there beside you, that is enough. Who they are, and how they treat you, stops being the question. The people who love you look on and cannot understand why you stay. But you are not holding on because the person is good. You are holding on because the moment you let go, the full terror comes down on you at once.

    Out of sight, gone

    A second problem is tangled up with this fear of being left.

    Somewhere in a decent childhood, a child builds a quiet certainty that the people they love do not stop existing when they leave the room: “Mom is in the kitchen. I can’t see her, but she’s still there.” Psychoanalysts call this object constancy; in their language, an “object” is a person we are attached to. Once you have it, you never notice you have it.

    Without object constancy, a person who is out of sight feels gone. Your adult mind may know that they still exist and may come back tomorrow, but your feelings react as though the relationship has ended for good. That is why facts like “they’ll be back tomorrow” often do nothing to calm the body.

    Because what you can’t see feels gone, the request I began with comes out so specific, and so small. While someone is in the room, you can see that they are still there. Just stay until I fall asleep — that’s the whole thing. Not forever, not a promise, not a ring. Stay in the room until my eyes close.

    The dark is not the problem

    I hear this one constantly, too: “I can’t sleep by myself. Lying there alone is unbearable.”

    Ask who that fear belongs to. It belongs to a baby alone in a dark room, when the one person keeping it alive is not there. It is not the dark that frightens the baby; it is being alone in it. For something that small, that is the end of the world — and there’s nothing irrational about it. A baby has no reasoning to fall back on, only the bare fact of being alone.

    Some adults still feel exactly this fear, at full strength, in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. Picture a woman in her forties lying alone in the dark and feeling what that baby feels. The fear never grew up with the rest of her.

    So the people around her are baffled. “Just go to sleep,” they say, not unkindly. But for her, those hours alone in the dark come close to panic. What she wants isn’t complicated: somebody warm, with their arms around her.

    Auditioning people to fill a hole

    One person to be there with you. That is the entire requirement, so you go looking, and you will use whatever works.

    You fish for attention in places you don’t even want it. You post something you know will get a reply. You answer the message from someone you’d already written off. You leave a door open to a person you would never pick in daylight. If someone seems likely to accept you and stay by your side, who they are stops mattering.

    It shapes the big decisions too. Most people choosing a partner to build a life with ask about the life they would share. What do we both want? Could I stand to grow old next to this person? When this fear is in charge, those questions never get asked. Only one question counts: can this person take away the empty, low feeling of being alone? Somebody can fail every other test and still pass that one.

    The child on the station floor

    There is also a flat, emptied-out feeling that comes over you when you are alone. It comes from the same place as the terror: the separation from your first caregiver that was never finished. Your sense of who you are never came together as one whole. Without a stable sense that you are still yourself when nobody else is there, being alone can feel like losing yourself. Having someone beside you can make a night of terror bearable, but it does not make this feeling go away, because what is missing is inside you.

    Here’s the picture I keep coming back to. A packed station at rush hour. A very small child has lost the adult they came in with. They’re sitting on the floor screaming while strangers step around them.

    The child can’t reason it out. All the child knows is that the one person who keeps them alive is not here. From down there on the floor, the world has ended, and it stays ended.

    That child’s despair and fear are what fill these nights. The station scene is more than a comparison. The same despair and fear are carried whole into a grown body that gets up and goes to work in the morning.

    The fear belongs to a baby, not to the adult you are now

    Tonight the light will go off and the cold feeling in your chest will arrive on schedule. Before your hand finds the phone, stay where you are for a moment and ask what is really frightening you. It is not that there is no one to hold on to. It is that a small child who was once left alone is still sitting inside you.

    This fear comes from a very early stage of life, so adult reasoning does not reach it. Telling yourself, “This is ridiculous; I should be able to sleep alone,” only adds shame; it does not make you any safer. Instead, respond the way you would to a frightened child. Put into words what is happening. Notice the fear in your body and let it be there, without running from it. And do not put your safety in the hands of whoever answers the phone first.

    If these nights have started to bring thoughts of hurting yourself, tell a doctor instead of carrying that alone.

    The station is still loud, the child is still down on the floor, and strangers keep stepping around them. That child is the one sitting inside you. Instead of going out to find just anyone, sit down on the floor beside that child.

    References

    • Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock. — the central ego (the part of the self that goes on functioning) and the splitting of the self.
    • Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books. — separation from the first caregiver, and object constancy.
    • Masterson, J. F. (1976). Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult. New York: Brunner/Mazel. — abandonment depression: the flat, emptied-out feeling that comes when you are alone.

    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