Inner Work Notes

Tag: Winnicott

  • The Child Who Was No Trouble at All

    She waits until the adults have finished before she asks for anything. She takes her plate to the sink without it being mentioned. She has never once had to be told twice, and she does not cut into a conversation, and when the visitors are here she sits where she is put and stays there.

    Nobody in the house finds this strange. She is the one person there who never makes any extra work.

    What state are we in when we are born?

    We are born in pieces.

    What is in pieces is the self. By ‘self’ I don’t mean a name or an age or a list of things you’re good at. I mean the bare sense that you are here at all. And that sense does not come pre-assembled.

    A newborn has sensations and states — hunger, warmth, fear, relief — but does not yet experience them as parts of one continuous self. The sense of “I am the same person across all these moments” develops later.

    At first, the person caring for the baby holds the pieces together for her. When the baby cries, that person finds out why; when she is startled, that person calms her down. Because this happens in the same way, time after time, the baby gets from hunger to being fed, or from a fright to calm, without the hunger or the fright ever becoming more than she can bear.

    We usually picture a baby as a complete person who only needs to grow bigger. The body is complete. The sense of being one person is not. At birth, that sense is like a pot whose pieces have been set in place but not yet glued. A loud noise or a sudden jolt, and the pieces come apart. What glues them, little by little, is care repeated day after day.

    What joins the pieces?

    The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a name for what the caregiver does here: holding. The caregiver shields the baby from what is too much for someone so small — the loud noise, the sudden jolt — and responds reliably enough that separate moments of hunger, distress and comfort start to join up into the experience of being one person.

    Holding has two sides. One is physical: the baby is picked up and carried, and while she is very small, that side matters more. But the emotional side is there from the start too, and that is the side I want to look at here.

    Holding a child emotionally means welcoming her: accepting her as she is, paying attention to her, and letting her see that you are amazed by her.

    Consider the fuss a parent can make over a full diaper. An adult who is otherwise a serious person will pitch her voice up half an octave and announce that this is the most remarkable thing she has seen: “Look at that! Would you look at what you did!” Somebody else is called in to look.

    Now measure the reaction against the event. The baby has not achieved anything. She has not tried. She could not have done otherwise, and she has no idea what the fuss is about. The reaction is wildly, comically out of proportion to what happened — and the very size of the reaction is the message. What it says is not well done. What it says is: what comes out of you is welcome here, and you did not have to earn that.

    And then it happens again, the next day and the day after that, and in between there are a thousand smaller versions of it — the face that lights up when she wakes, the voice that changes register the moment she is picked up. To the adults, these are small, everyday things. Nobody in the house would remember any of them afterward.

    No single moment builds the self. What glues the pieces, one at a time, is the repetition: the baby shows a need, someone notices, and nobody pulls away. Over time, she learns that she can let out what is inside her and still keep the people she depends on.

    The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called the result a cohesive self: a self whose pieces have joined and now hold together.

    None of this means giving a baby everything she wants. It means staying close, in ways she can predict, until whatever she is feeling has come out and she has settled again.

    Growing up in pieces

    Now picture the same scene with a parent who is irritated from the start. The full diaper gets a scolding instead: “You wouldn’t go when I told you to, and now you go in your diaper?”

    Not a cruel parent. An impatient one. The necessary things get done — she is fed, she is changed — but with an air of getting it over with. Later, once she can talk, this parent is already answering before she has finished her sentence, and meets her second question by asking why she is still asking. She is looked after, but never once welcomed.

    In a house like that, the glue never sets. The pieces stay pieces.

    A child whose pieces never joined has to spend her attention holding herself together. Anything new that is asked of her, any strong feeling, even someone coming close, can be too much, so she pushes people away before they can knock the pieces loose. From outside this looks cold or difficult. From inside it is protection against falling apart.

    Where does your attention go when your hand is cut?

    Cut your hand and every bit of your attention goes to that hand. You will find yourself carrying it slightly raised. Walking down an ordinary street you curl it in, in case somebody knocks it. Somebody comes toward you and your whole body turns a few degrees to put the hand on the far side.

    Nobody has touched your hand. You’ve flinched in advance, repeatedly, at nothing.

    You are also, for the duration, extremely poor company. Someone is telling you about their week and you are tracking a stranger’s shoulder at the edge of your vision. You are not being self-absorbed. You are guarding something, and guarding takes everything.

    To anyone else in the room, though, it just looks as if you only care about yourself. A self that is still in pieces is like that hand: guarding it takes all the attention a person has. So when someone seems to think only of themselves, it may be that they are hurting.

    The child who watches the adults

    A small child is entitled to think only of herself. At that age, every child’s self is still fragile, like that cut hand, so all her attention goes to herself. Where would she find any left over for anybody else?

    So when a small child starts paying attention to the grown-ups instead of to herself, something has gone the wrong way round. It can happen, for example, when a parent often blows up or is often depressed. Then the child has to manage the mood of the house, because she is only safe when the parent is calm. Here is what she does.

    She knows which evenings not to ask for anything. She can tell from the sound of the front door how the next hour is going to go, and she adjusts before anyone has spoken. When someone asks one of the adults an awkward question, she answers it before they have to. She never lets other people see her wanting anything.

    Adults are delighted by her. “She’s so grown up,” they say.

    I do not see maturity here. I see a symptom: a sign that this child has been deeply hurt. She has learned that she is safe only if she keeps watch on the adults, so she reads their faces before she has even noticed what she herself needs. She makes sure she is no trouble, because asking, interrupting or wanting might irritate an adult, or cost her the care she depends on.

    The praise covered the wound

    A child who throws tantrums wears the adults out. She is inconvenient, and inconvenience gets investigated — somebody eventually sits down and asks what is going on with her.

    The child who is no trouble is never inconvenient, so nobody investigates. She gets compliments instead. People tell her parents they have done a lovely job. Teachers write that she is a pleasure to have in class. Relatives compare her, out loud and in front of her, to the cousin who is a handful.

    So nobody finds out that she is hurting, and she never gets the chance to find out either. There is praise lying over the sore place, and praise is not a thing anybody thinks to look underneath.

    Worse, the praise teaches her to go on being no trouble. Asking for nothing is what earns her warmth and approval, so, to keep them coming, she holds back more and more of what she needs. She comes to feel that the moment she says “this is hard,” she will let her parents down. And the better she gets at looking as if she needs no one, the less likely any adult is to notice that she is anxious, lonely, or afraid to need anyone.

    If you were a child like this, you may still be hearing the same praise today. That you’re no trouble. That you never need anything. That you always manage. That praise is no proof that you were safe. It is worth asking what you had to hold back to earn it.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — holding.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In Winnicott (1965), listed above. — the child who fits herself to what the adults need.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — the cohesive self.

    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

  • Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From

    Some of the people who come to see me for therapy lie down and, before long, fall asleep. I don’t wake them. I don’t clear my throat to move things along. I let them sleep a long while, and when the time is up I say one thing: “Time’s up.”

    Nothing got produced in that hour, and the hour was not wasted. If you learned that your worth depends on what you get done, resting without getting anything done will feel wrong, even when your body needs the rest.

    Rest also gives something back. While you rest somewhere safe, your body lets go of tension and you start to feel like yourself again. Sometimes a person needs that first, before they can use their own drive: the force to say no, to choose, to start something, and to keep at it. Push someone who hasn’t had enough rest to keep going, and what they do no longer comes from that drive. It becomes one more duty, done to meet someone else’s demands.

    Anger may seem to have nothing to do with rest, but it is part of that same force. So when you press anger down the moment it rises, you weaken your drive along with it.

    Resting where nobody can poke you

    No part of me is thinking we ought to be getting somewhere. The person lying there is doing something that matters. They’re resting in a spot where nobody is going to reach over and poke them.

    They are not working on themselves. They are experiencing a relationship in which they can stop performing and still be welcome. In a sense, the room is a mother’s arms. A small child in its mother’s arms doesn’t have to do anything to stay there, and the room holds the person lying there in the same way, without asking them to produce anything.

    Being comes before doing

    Therapy is not an hour you have to fill. We talk, of course. But the bigger thing on offer is simpler than talking. In the therapy room you get to stop. You get to simply be there without having to justify it to anyone.

    The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it plainly: being comes before doing. Being able simply to exist, without having to get anything done, is the ground a person grows from. Doing is built on top of it.

    That may sound strange, because most of your week runs the other way. You earn your place by getting things done — inbox cleared, everyone fed, a weekend that somehow arrives with its own to-do list. When there is nothing to get done, something in you starts to fidget. That restlessness is worth noticing. It comes from the belief that you are worth only what you get done.

    The silence I leave alone

    So when a client goes quiet, I don’t fill the silence. This is not a technique. The quiet itself is that experience of simply being, without having to do anything. Whatever is going on inside the person during it does not need my voice to make it better.

    Sitting in silence with another person is harder than it sounds. Think of the last time a conversation went quiet on you, and how fast you reached for your phone or a joke or the weather. That reflex is so quick it passes for good manners.

    Two silences I do step into. One is the silence of digging in: “I don’t want to say it, so I won’t.” The other belongs to someone who wants to speak and can’t get the words out. I work with both of those. The rest I leave alone.

    What’s left is two people sitting together, doing nothing for each other. No performance, no service, no progress report. Winnicott had a name for this experience when nothing interrupts it: the continuity of being. You simply go on existing, without having to react to anyone’s demands. He stressed it above everything else, because a person needs it first in order to grow into a whole person. When it is interrupted too often, that growth gets hard. Instead you become whoever the person in front of you needs you to be — quick with an answer for anyone who asks, and blank when somebody asks what you want for dinner.

    Why does the whole world look like it’s coming at you?

    Besides this experience of simply being, Winnicott insisted on a second thing, and it is harder to hear. You have to recognize the aggression in yourself: your anger, and your own wishes to attack, humiliate, or destroy. He was firm that denying these feelings does not get rid of them. If you learned that getting angry ruins relationships, you may not admit, even to yourself, that you are angry. Then you start seeing that anger in other people instead.

    The neighbor’s tone. The email with no greeting. The driver who didn’t wave a thank-you. All of it starts reading as aimed at you, and your week fills up with the work of deciding what people meant. You catch yourself thinking, “He looked at me a certain way,” or “She left me out on purpose,” and you get defensive or back off first. When you are that busy finding hostility in other people, some of the hostility you find is your own.

    Then one day you admit to yourself: “I have wanted to break something. I have wanted someone to get hurt.” Once you can recognize those wishes as your own, you no longer have to see all the hostility as coming from neighbors, coworkers, or strangers. The world stops looking threatening everywhere you turn, even though nobody out there has changed.

    Admitting your own anger does not mean the person who upset you did nothing wrong. Once you can say “I was angry too,” you can look at two things separately: how much of a threat that person really is, and how strong your own feeling is. Then there is room to show your anger by saying no or keeping your distance, instead of through insults or violence.

    A lion runs down a lamb. Where is the evil in it?

    This is where the word aggression misleads. When Winnicott talks about aggression, he does not mean only what you’re picturing — the fist, the shouting, the wreckage afterward. He means energy: the force that moves you toward what you want, pushes obstacles out of the way, and protects you. The wish to hurt someone is one form that energy can take, but only one.

    Picture a lion running flat out and taking down a lamb in front of the lamb’s own mother. Ask yourself honestly: is the lion evil? The body driving forward, the claws, the teeth, the whole act — every part of that is aggression.

    And nobody watching calls the lion bad. We say it’s nature, and we mean it. We know what we are looking at: not evil, but the force of a living thing.

    But when the same force rises in you, you don’t see it that way. You call it a bad feeling and press it down the moment it appears. Same force, worse name, harsher judgment.

    Creativity is aggression that found somewhere to go

    When you accept aggression as part of yourself, you can steer its energy instead of blowing up or pressing it down. Love is what gives the force a direction. You can be angry with someone close to you and still love them. When you can feel both at once, you don’t have to attack the whole person with “I hate you.” You can say, “Stop doing that.” Held together with love like this, the force no longer has to attack anyone. You can use it to take on a problem, protect a boundary, or keep working until something is made.

    Creativity comes out of aggression.

    You probably don’t believe that yet, so stay with it a minute before you argue back. Think of the things we value most: wisdom, insight, recovery, love, gratitude, happiness, plain enjoyment. Every one of them grows out of this same force. None of them shows up in a person who has no force left.

    Think of something you finished that mattered. If there was a stretch in the middle where you were half furious — at the problem, at yourself, at how slowly it moved — that heat was doing work. Take the heat out and you’re left with a nice idea that never got built.

    Winnicott kept coming back to zest. The buzz. The fun of a thing. It’s what has you starting a project on a Saturday morning for no good reason, and it runs on the same force.

    If aggression looks only destructive, what you are seeing is the force without love or responsibility. When the same force is joined to love, it appears as protection, persistence, creativity, and the determination to recover.

    Getting better takes force too

    Think about what getting better actually takes. There is nothing soft about it.

    “I’m going to get through this.” “I’m going to live differently.” “I’m having this treated, whatever it takes out of me.” When a thought like that rises in you, that is force — aggression working on your side.

    And right behind it comes a second voice: “Don’t bother.” “Stay put.” “Who do you think you are?” The push back against that voice is force as well, and so is the whole struggle between the two.

    You can see what happens when this force runs short in people who have spent years swallowing their anger to keep things pleasant at work or at home. They never snap, never argue, never make anyone uncomfortable — and they also can’t get a single day started. Almost nobody, including them, sees that the two are connected: the force they press down to keep the peace is the same force they would need to get going.

    This force is what keeps a life moving. Without it, a life comes to a stop. Nothing appeals. Nothing pulls at you. Nothing gets going in the first place.

    Feeling aggression and attacking someone are not the same act. The feeling is energy inside you, and it carries information: it tells you where your limits are. Turning it on another person is an action, and whether you take that action is your choice. Being angry does not give you the right to hurt anyone. Violence and threats have to stop, and if it is hard to keep yourself under control, step away and get help.

    Before you press your anger back down

    Something will flare up in you today: irritation, the sting of being treated unfairly, an “Oh, come on” that lands in your chest.

    You already know your reflex: press it down, smile, move along. Give it three seconds first. While the feeling is still warm in your chest, ask it: What is this protecting? What does it want to get done?

    You may not get an answer. Ask anyway and let the day go on. Looking at your anger even once, instead of pressing it down, makes more of a difference than you might think. A person with no anger left is not calm. That person has run out of force, and nothing gets started anymore.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock. — being and doing.
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958).

    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

  • Why the Fear of Making Mistakes Is Really Fear of Being Seen

    You reread the email ten times before you send it. Someone offers you a project you could probably handle, and you find yourself taking a small step back. From the outside this looks like caution, or maybe modesty. But sit with it honestly for a moment and you may find that the fear of making mistakes isn’t really about the mistake at all. What frightens you is what comes after — the pause, the shift in someone’s face, the moment people see that you got it wrong. Being afraid of the mistake itself and being afraid of being seen can sound like almost the same thing. But the difference explains where the fear comes from, why hiding your mistakes makes it stronger, and what can loosen it.

    Why is the person in your head so much more capable than the person who has to do the work?

    Most of us carry two selves at once: an ideal self, the one we picture in our heads, and an actual self, the one who is really here today. The ideal one is impressive. When you describe your plans out loud, they sound convincing, and you can see clearly how everything will turn out. In your mind the work is already finished — the article written, the difficult conversation handled with grace. The actual self is the one who has to sit down on a Tuesday afternoon, with limited energy and no clear next step, and it can’t yet do everything the ideal self has already done in your imagination.

    So you hesitate before beginning. It can look like laziness, but something else is going on: the moment you start, the distance between the finished person in your mind and the learner you are today becomes visible. If you do not write the first page, nobody can see that it is awkward. If you decline the project, nobody can discover what you do not yet know. Putting things off protects that ideal self, because as long as you never start, reality never gets to test it. The cost is that each time you put it off, you also lose a chance to get better.

    Were you ever allowed to get something wrong and find out you were still all right?

    What helps a person mature is usually not success. It’s mistakes. When we get something wrong and come through it, we learn what reality is actually like: what a mistake really costs, and how much smaller that cost turns out to be than we had imagined.

    In the first months of life, a baby does need care that is close to perfect: for a while, food and comfort really do need to come the moment they are needed. But only at first. Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, said a caregiver does not need to be perfect, only good enough: closely in tune with the baby at the start, and then, little by little, slightly late or slightly off. These small lapses, coming gradually as the baby grows, are not a flaw in the care. They are how a child finds out that the bottle does not always arrive the instant the crying starts, and that it still arrives.

    After infancy, a child grows partly through disappointments small enough to live through: a trip is cancelled, the answer tonight is no, a parent is busy until seven but comes back as promised. Each time, the child finds out that something can go wrong, the feeling can be borne, and life goes on. A child who does not get enough of these experiences can grow into an adult who has never learned from experience that the bad feeling after a failure passes. Then one mistake does not feel like something to fix. It feels as if the whole person they were trying to be is collapsing.

    Can care that blocks every fall become its own kind of harm?

    Some parents always get there first: they clear the obstacle before the child reaches it and fix the mess before the child has even felt it as a mess. The intention is almost always love. But protection that never eases off as the child grows can work against the child: it takes away the very experiences in which a child learns that a bad thing can happen and then be over.

    Stepping in completely is exactly right at the beginning; a newborn can do nothing for themselves. What matters is what comes after: a slow handing-over, in which the parent steps back a little each year and the child carries a slightly larger share of the consequences. When that handover is skipped, the child never gets the practice of getting something wrong and recovering, so a mistake keeps feeling like a disaster. The child grows up still believing in the impressive self in their head, because reality has never been allowed to test it. For someone who was never allowed to trip, a small stone in the path can feel like the edge of a cliff.

    Was it a failure you could bear, or one you couldn’t?

    Two questions are worth taking slowly:

    • Were you allowed to experiment, and to get things wrong, often enough?
    • Were those failures kept to a size you could actually carry?

    Picture a child who makes a mistake while someone is nearby. That person helps put things right, shields the child from the worst of it, and then says something like it’s all right, here’s what we do next. The mistake shrinks to a size the child can bear. It becomes information: this went wrong, and here is what to do. The mistake is followed by repair, and the child learns that getting something wrong does not cost them the person who looks after them.

    Now picture the same mistake with no one there, or with someone who points out the failure but never shows a way forward. The event is the same, but it lands very differently. The child is left alone with more feeling than they can handle, and the mistake stops being something that happened and becomes a verdict on who they are: “I’m someone who can’t even get this right.” This may be part of why one person treats an error as useful information and is done with it by lunch, while another is still awake at three in the morning going over it. It isn’t that the one lying awake cares more about getting things right. One of them may simply have been helped, early on, to keep failure at a size they could survive.

    A mistake becomes bearable when someone stays and points to the next step. Left alone with it, you are likely to take the same mistake as proof that something is wrong with you.

    Is perfectionism about doing well — or about not being found out?

    Now suppose that happened to you again and again as a child: no one was there, or someone only pointed out what went wrong. Then having a mistake noticed can come to feel like being attacked. As an adult, the moment an error comes to light, it can seem as if the whole room has turned toward you. Your body reacts before you have time to think: heat in the face, a drop in the stomach, an urgent wish that it weren’t true. In that state, only one option seems to be left: hide it.

    So you may organise your life not around avoiding mistakes, which is impossible, but around making sure no one sees them. You rewrite the email ten times, cover up an oversight, or turn down work that would make you visible. This is also why perfectionism, the need to get everything exactly right, is so hard to loosen. Each time you hide a mistake successfully, you feel relief, and the relief strengthens the belief that being found out would have been a disaster. And because the mistake stays hidden, you never get the experience that could change that belief: someone sees the mistake, you fix it, and afterwards the relationship is still there and you are worth no less than before. So the real aim of all that effort to be perfect may not be to do well. It may be not to be found out.

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called the face we show the world the persona: the public self that lets us play our part at work and among other people. He didn’t treat it as a fault; everyone needs a persona. The trouble starts when a person takes that face to be all they are. Then there is nothing behind it to fall back on, and the polished self they show others is no longer one part of their life but the whole of it. Any crack in that face, even one small mistake that someone else can see, then feels like an emergency, because the face is the only thing holding them together.

    When did you start reading everyone else’s signals instead of your own?

    An infant signals constantly: hunger, discomfort, the need to be picked up, or left alone. When those signals are read reasonably well, the child learns that what they feel and want matters and is worth showing. If the signals mostly go unnoticed, the direction turns around: instead of the adult reading the child, the child starts reading the adult — tracking their mood, anticipating their irritation, adjusting to whatever the room seems to require.

    Once this becomes a habit, it carries on into adult life. You notice a manager’s irritation before you notice your own exhaustion, agree before asking yourself whether you want to, and provide what others need before they ask. You may become very good at reading the room while losing track of what you yourself want. Winnicott called this the false self: a self you build to keep your relationships going by fitting in with what other people want. The attention that could have gone to your own feelings goes, all the time, to watching other people and keeping them satisfied.

    This habit of fitting yourself to what others want, often called people-pleasing, is also what makes a small mistake feel so dangerous. If you’ve never lived by a standard of your own, someone else’s standard is the only ground you have to stand on. Falling short of it doesn’t feel like “we just see this differently.” It feels like losing the only place you had to stand. No wonder a small mistake can feel like a threat to your very existence rather than one ordinary thing that went wrong this week.

    What is one small thing you could try today?

    Pick one minor mistake — genuinely minor. Something you’d normally play down, make excuses for in advance, or quietly fix before anyone notices. This time, say it plainly to the person it affects, in a single sentence: I missed this; here’s how I’ll correct it. No preamble. No self-criticism attached, no string of apologies.

    Then add one more line, this time silently to yourself: It’s all right. Here’s what we do next. These are the same words spoken by the person who stayed with the child in the scene above: the sentence that shrinks a mistake back to a size a person can carry. It may be the one nobody said to you when you were a child. It can still be said now. It counts even when you’re the one saying it. Little by little, each time you admit a small mistake like this and it passes, you learn from experience that being seen is not the disaster you expected.

    None of this replaces help from another person. If the pattern runs deep, or if being seen at all has started to feel unsafe, it’s worth exploring in therapy, with a professional who can stay beside you while you practise. But loosening this fear can begin here, with one small mistake you did not hide, said out loud.

    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 Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting

    Have you ever rewritten a simple request four or five times before sending it? You soften the wording, add an apology, remove it, and then add it again. While editing the message, you are no longer thinking only about what you need. You are trying to prevent the other person from becoming uncomfortable, disappointed, or angry. Sometimes you never send the request at all. And oddly, the more carefully you ask, the more likely you are to be turned down. Why does that happen? This article starts there and works toward a bigger question: what makes a parent good? D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst best known for the phrase the good enough mother, helps answer both.

    Why do the requests you agonize over get refused?

    Winnicott used the term true self for the real you — not dressed up, not performed, not edited for someone else’s comfort. He didn’t think this part of a person develops on its own. It grows out of a belief a child takes in long before they have words for it: what I show and ask for will be accepted.

    When that belief holds, asking for something feels light. You say what you need and you expect, without really thinking about it, that the other person will say yes. That isn’t confidence in the motivational-poster sense. It’s closer to ease: the anxiety simply isn’t there.

    When you expect a yes, you state the request directly and leave the other person free to answer. When you expect a no, you may apologize repeatedly, overexplain, or make the request so vague that the other person cannot tell what you want. Your fear changes your tone and wording before they respond. So the request carries two messages at once: what you need, and your expectation that it will not be welcome. People respond to the feeling underneath the words before they respond to the words themselves. The other person picks up that second message, your expectation of a no, and reacts to it more than to what you actually asked. That is why a no becomes more likely. The reverse is also true: when you ask expecting a yes, it is easier for them to give one.

    There’s a second thing worth noticing. People who can ask easily also tend to ask realistically. They have a feel for what the other person can actually spare, so they rarely ask for something that would cost too much, and they don’t pressure the other person into saying yes. A request sized to what someone can give leaves both people comfortable — the one who asked and the one who said yes. The ease and the realism come from the same place. If you aren’t braced for a no, your attention is free to go to the other person instead of to your own worry — so you can see what they actually have to spare, and you size the request to fit.

    Now to parents, and a harder question. If the true self grows out of being accepted, what happens when a parent tries to give a child everything and never lets them down?

    What does a child lose when a parent is too good?

    No child can be protected from every disappointment, and in Winnicott’s view complete protection would not be good for the child anyway: it would keep them from growing. A child needs manageable experiences of waiting, hearing no, becoming angry, and discovering that the frustration passes and the relationship survives.

    Winnicott made a claim that can sound almost scandalous the first time you hear it: parents have to make mistakes. Not disastrous or cruel ones, but real, ordinary ones, often enough for the child to notice. A parent’s mistake gives the child something to be angry at, and Winnicott thought a child badly needs somewhere to put anger.

    When a parent gets something wrong and the child pushes back, Winnicott called that push aggression. He did not mean violence, and he meant more than anger. He meant a child’s own will going out into the world: the force behind reaching, grabbing, refusing, insisting, behind “No!” and “I want to do it my way!” In his account the child needs to try that force out on their mother — to shout that they hate her, refuse to come to the table, slam a door — and then find her still there at bedtime, neither wrecked by it nor getting even. What the child learns in that moment is that their own strong wants and feelings are not dangerous: wanting something badly, pushing hard, and being furious do not have the power to destroy the people they depend on.

    When a parent seems flawless — endlessly patient, never getting anything wrong — the child still gets angry and disappointed at times, since no child can be spared every frustration. But the child cannot connect those feelings to anything the parent did. The child then concludes, If my parent has done nothing wrong, my anger must mean that something is wrong with me. The child hides the reactions that seem unacceptable and shows only the ones the parent seems able to accept. This is one way a false self begins. “False self” is Winnicott’s term for the opposite of the true self: a way of living in which you watch what others expect and fit yourself to it, while your real feelings stay out of sight.

    How is “good enough” different from perfect?

    The idea that parents have to make mistakes lies behind Winnicott’s most quoted phrase: the good enough mother. Not the perfect mother. Not the excellent one. The one who is enough: she slips up, some days she doesn’t respond well to what her child needs, and that is all right.

    In the first weeks after birth, Winnicott thought, a mother is almost completely absorbed in her baby and meets the baby’s needs nearly the moment they arise. Then, little by little, she starts to fall short. She doesn’t do it on purpose: she’s tired, she doesn’t come right away, she misreads what the crying means. Winnicott’s point was that this gradual falling short is not an unfortunate side effect of good care. It is how good care works. Each small failure hands the child one true piece of how things are — you have to wait, the milk does not come the second you cry for it, the person you need is sometimes busy — in a size they can survive.

    So a good-enough parent isn’t one who anticipates every need and takes care of everything perfectly. In fact, the wish to do everything perfectly takes something from the child. A parent driven by it tries to clear away, ahead of time, every moment in which the child might bump into a limit, be disappointed by it, get angry about it, and discover that the relationship holds anyway.

    If you’re a parent reading this and feeling something tighten: the point isn’t to start failing more deliberately. You will fail without any help from me. The point is what you do with the failures you already have — whether you read them as evidence of your inadequacy, or as the ordinary texture of a real relationship.

    Where does the drive to be perfect come from?

    Most people repeat parts of the parenting they received, even when they consciously disagree with them. Under stress, you fall back on the way you yourself were raised before you have time to think of another way. A parent may hear themselves using the same critical sentence they once hated hearing from their own parent.

    But perfectionist parenting usually has a more specific origin than habit. The constant push to get everything flawless — the checking, the anticipating, the inability to let a small thing stay small — has a compulsive quality: you cannot relax until everything is right. That kind of compulsion is rarely just a personality trait. More often it’s a scar.

    A person who cannot tolerate mistakes has often spent years, starting in childhood, learning that being unsure, messy, or ordinary brought criticism or made people pull away. Perfection then becomes a way to prevent rejection. If every detail is correct, nobody can expose the uncertain part of you or use a mistake against you.

    Winnicott would call this the false self at work. You answer an email at eleven at night, check every detail twice, and show other people only the capable version of yourself. “False” here does not mean fake or dishonest. The false self is a form of protection: it keeps the unsure part of you from being criticized or rejected. Because it works, you may not notice what it costs until your child makes a mistake and you find yourself holding them to the same standard that has been controlling you.

    The harsh words you say to your child — who heard them first?

    Parents experience their children as extensions of themselves — less like a separate person, more like part of their own body. So when your child falls short, what decides how you respond is rarely parenting technique. It is how far you can accept your own shortcomings. You can usually put up with about as much weakness in your child as you can put up with in yourself. Rarely more.

    The less you can accept in yourself, the harder you come down on your child. Words like You can’t even manage this? start coming out. Corrections come faster and land harder, and they land on whatever in your child resembles the part of yourself you have never forgiven.

    The voice behind those words is often not new. It was running long before you had a child to aim it at. It was aimed at you, inside your own head — sometimes in your own words, sometimes in the voice of the person who first said it to you. Having a child doesn’t invent the voice. It gives the voice a new target.

    So being able to love your child, flaws and all, isn’t really a skill you apply to them. It depends on something closer to home: whether you can love yourself, go easy on yourself, and let your own shortcomings simply exist without putting them on trial.

    Could you try changing one sentence today?

    Here’s something small to try.

    Think of one correction you made today — to your child, or to a partner, a colleague, anyone close. Recall the exact words. Then change the subject of the sentence to I — “You can’t even manage this?” becomes “I can’t even manage this?” — and read it silently to yourself.

    Notice how it feels. If it doesn’t feel strange at all — if it slides on like a coat you’ve worn for years — you may have just found who heard that sentence first: you did. It is not something new you came up with for your child. You have been saying it to yourself for a long time.

    You don’t have to fix it today. You don’t have to say anything to anyone, or resolve to do better tomorrow. Noticing the sentence is enough.

    Written as educational reflection, not as parenting advice or clinical guidance, and not tailored to any particular family. If reading this has stirred up something about your own childhood, or about how you are parenting now, that is worth taking to a qualified professional where you live rather than carrying alone.

    References

    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press.

    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

  • Why Setting Boundaries Causes Conflict Almost Every Time

    Have you ever wanted to say no, heard yourself agree instead, and then spent the evening replaying the conversation? You knew you didn’t want to do what was being asked of you, but the other person’s disappointment felt more urgent than your own answer. By the time you noticed what you wanted, you had already promised to help.

    This is not mainly a problem of finding the right words. The trouble starts earlier, with whether you can tell your own feeling apart from the other person’s. A boundary is what lets you say to yourself: their disappointment belongs to them; my decision belongs to me. When that distinction is unclear, saying no feels less like making a choice and more like harming someone. So you keep handing over your time and energy to protect their mood.

    What do psychological boundaries actually mean?

    In psychoanalytic thinking, a boundary isn’t a matter of manners. It isn’t the polite distance you keep at a dinner party, and it isn’t the same thing as being assertive. It is the line in your mind that says: up to here is me, and beyond here is not me. When that line blurs, what you feel inside starts to pass for what is actually happening outside. So a boundary is less about politeness than about keeping hold of what is real.

    In everyday life, the line comes down to a simple distinction: this feeling is mine, and that reaction belongs to the other person. With that distinction, you can see that someone is upset and still ask, as a separate question, whether you actually did anything wrong. Without it, you start treating feelings as facts. If you feel guilty, you assume you must have done something wrong. If someone becomes quiet, you assume they are angry with you. If you feel anxious about saying no, you conclude that saying no is dangerous.

    That’s why boundaries matter so much for emotional health. Without a clear boundary, you start to lose track of what is real, including what is going on inside you. People who can’t say no often say they are unsure what they want and what they think, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re feeling until someone else names it for them.

    Why does a self need an outline?

    Think of a country on a map. You recognize it by its outline. Without the border line there would be no shape to recognize, only blank paper. A person is the same. Only when a line is drawn around you does the shape of who you are appear, so that you can say, “This is the kind of person I am.” In daily life, you draw that line through small distinctions like these: I like this and dislike that. I can help with this but cannot take responsibility for that. I understand why you are upset, but I do not agree with your conclusion. Each one marks something as yours — your taste, your limit, your view — and so shows where you end and another person begins.

    Without those distinctions, you can feel many things without knowing which feeling should guide your decision. You notice the other person’s anger before your own exhaustion. You can explain what everyone else needs but cannot answer a simple question about what you want. A boundary is what lets you know which feelings and which choices are yours.

    When does the “I” first appear?

    You are not born with boundaries. They form slowly as you grow up, and they begin at the moment you realize that another person is truly separate from you. A small child first learns this from their caregiver, the person who looks after them. The child may be hungry while the caregiver wants to rest. The child may want something, and the caregiver may say no. A boundary develops as the child learns to bear this: the person they depend on is separate from them and has wants of their own.

    This realization comes through small discoveries about someone close to you. Their temperament isn’t yours. What makes them laugh isn’t what makes you laugh. They are someone other than you, and they will not become you. Noticing this is where the line begins.

    Notice the order, because it is the opposite of what we usually assume. We imagine that a fully formed “I” exists first and then learns to recognize other people. It actually works the other way around: only when you realize that someone over there is not you does the outline of your own “I” begin to appear.

    Saying no is often hardest with the people who matter most to you, because with them you most fear that their anger could end the relationship. When someone close to you is upset, you stop checking your own response and start arranging yourself around their reaction. So it is not only that you are afraid to speak. For the moment, you have lost track of what your own answer even is.

    What happens inside when the line goes blurry?

    When a boundary is weak, what is inside you and what is outside you get mixed up. A feeling that rose up in you feels as if it came at you from outside, from another person.

    Most of us know this in mild, everyday forms. You are actually unhappy with yourself, but it feels like this: “I feel bad because that person dislikes me.” Or a harsh thing you have been telling yourself for years suddenly seems to come from someone else: you catch it in their tone of voice, the look on their face, the wording of their text message. Psychoanalysis calls this projection: you feel as if a feeling came from someone else when it actually started in you.

    This is why checking with the other person may not bring relief. You ask, “Are you upset with me?” They say no, but twenty minutes later you want to ask again. Their answer cannot settle the fear, because the fear did not start with them. It started in you, in your own expectation of being rejected. Until you recognize the fear as yours, you will keep asking the other person to remove it.

    Why does setting boundaries cause conflict almost every time?

    Here’s the part almost nobody is warned about. When you start holding a boundary, conflict follows. Not occasionally. Close to always.

    Looked at plainly, this makes complete sense. The other person was used to getting a yes from you, and now they’ve met a “no.” Of course there’s friction. Say you have always done what someone asked, and one day you tell them for the first time, “I don’t think I can this time.” They may be more than disappointed: they may be caught off guard and ask why you have suddenly changed. The longer your yes had been taken for granted, the louder the reaction. A boundary changes the terms of a relationship, and terms don’t get renegotiated quietly.

    At that point most people back down. They take the conflict as proof: I’ve handled this badly. I’ve hurt them. I’ve broken something. So they quietly erase the line, the peace returns, and the old pattern stays in place, ready to repeat the next time.

    But there is another way to read the conflict. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described one of the ways we come to experience another person as truly separate from us, a person in their own right: they survive our anger or attack, neither striking back nor falling apart. Saying no for the first time can feel, to you, like exactly that kind of attack, as if you were hurting them. Surviving it does not mean the other person stays calm; they may well be upset. It means they do not insult you or threaten to end the relationship, and they do not collapse. Then you learn that your no did not destroy them, and that choosing differently from them does not make you a bad person. A relationship that can take a “no” and still stand has become a relationship between two separate people. If you have been keeping the peace in order to stay close, this is hard to accept, because it means the friction you have been avoiding may not be an obstacle on the road to closeness. It may be part of what closeness is built from.

    So the conflict that flares up may not mean the relationship is damaged. It may mean that a line now exists where there was never one before.

    None of this promises that every relationship will survive the change. Nor is it a reason to force a confrontation you aren’t ready for. It is an invitation to look carefully at the friction before you decide what it says about you.

    What if you keep erasing the line to keep the peace?

    So what happens if you don’t hold the line — if fear of conflict wins, as it understandably might for a while?

    The relationship becomes quiet, which is why giving in can feel like success. But every time you agree before checking what you want, you practice ignoring your own answer. Over time you get better at making other people comfortable and worse at knowing what you like, where your limits are, and what you yourself want to do.

    Winnicott used the term true self for your spontaneous reactions: what you feel and want before you adjust it to win someone’s approval. A genuine no comes from this part of you. But when agreeing has become automatic, “Sure, that works” comes out before you have checked whether it actually works for you. The problem is not only that you lacked courage. You agreed so quickly that you did not have time to hear your own answer.

    Growing as a person has an order, and the first step can’t be skipped. People often want to jump straight to the later steps: opening up to others, giving generously. But first there has to be a clear “I”, with its outline drawn. Opening up and giving come after that.

    So if you are uncomfortable right now because you are drawing a line you have never drawn before, that discomfort is not necessarily a step backward. It may be the step you have to take in order to move forward.

    One small thing to try today, if you’d like. Bring to mind the moment from the past day that bothered you most. Then ask yourself one question and write the answer on paper in a single line: Where did this feeling start? If it started in you, write that it’s yours. If it was really the other person’s feeling — their disappointment, their anger — write that it’s theirs. It’s fine if you can’t tell for sure. You’re not solving anything, and not deciding what to do about it. You’re stopping for a moment to tell your feeling apart from theirs and putting one mark on the paper — and that’s how an outline gets drawn.

    This is educational writing about a psychological idea, not guidance for your particular situation. Drawing a boundary is not equally safe in every relationship — if holding one in your own relationship could put you at risk, please talk it through with someone qualified who knows your circumstances before you act on anything here.

    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