Someone is explaining something to you, and the words keep arriving, but nothing is landing. You ask them to go through it once more, and they do, patiently — and you still have nothing.
Then you notice the heat coming up in your chest.
Which is strange, when you think about it. Not following someone costs you nothing at all, and nobody gets hurt. You could say “I’m not getting this” and the afternoon would carry on exactly as before. But your jaw sets, your voice comes out with an edge you never planned, and something in you has clearly taken offense.
That heat is worth a closer look, because what drives it began long before this conversation, when you were a baby.
Why do grown adults still throw tantrums?
In the first months of life, a baby’s mind works very differently from an adult’s.
A baby experiences hunger, cries, and is fed. Because the baby cannot yet understand that a separate caregiver heard the cry and chose to respond, the hunger and the feeding feel like one continuous event. At this stage, the baby cannot yet tell where he ends and the world begins.
Psychoanalysis calls this early state infantile narcissism. The baby is the center of his own world, and as far as he can tell, things happen the way he wants them to. It is a normal stage, not a fault.
As a child grows, that self-centered state has to change, slowly, until he can want something badly and still notice that the person fetching it is tired. The trouble starts when that change never happens. Then the baby’s expectation that things will go the way he wants is still at work at ten, at twenty, at fifty. You can see it at an airport gate when a flight is cancelled: a man at the counter, his voice climbing, talks to the agent as though she had grounded the plane herself. Some part of him still expects the world to rearrange itself the moment he asks.
For some people, this expectation is not just one part of them; it shapes their whole personality. Then it does not stay quietly in the background. It is strong, and it allows no exceptions: things have to go their way, every time. A no does not merely disappoint someone like that. It shakes them.
What does a baby learn when crying brings milk?
That early stage comes with a feeling of enormous power. It is not power over other people; the baby does not yet know other people are there. It is simpler and wider than that: I can do anything. Psychoanalysis calls it omnipotence, and the baby feels certain the power belongs to him.
He feels this because he cannot yet imagine that anything is coming to him from outside. There is hunger, there is crying, and then there is warmth and milk and fullness. From where the baby lies, that sequence can mean only one thing: I made that happen. I produced it myself.
The illusion holds because the milk arrives soon after the hunger — soon enough that the baby can feel he created it himself.
Meanwhile someone is awake at three in the morning, and someone’s back hurts, and the baby knows nothing about it — and at that age he shouldn’t have to.
He needs that illusion for a while because it creates the first sense that his actions affect the world. Gradually, small delays teach him that another person exists separately and that satisfaction does not always arrive on command. As he learns to bear those waits, the feeling that he can do anything slowly turns into a more realistic confidence. When that learning remains incomplete, the old expectation — whatever I need will come the moment I need it — carries on into adult life. And for an adult, what is needed is often not milk but an answer: “If I need an answer, an answer must exist, and I should be able to get it now.”
Where does “I have to know everything” come from?
When we picture that feeling of power, we usually think of the doing side of it: I can handle anything, I can fix anything, just hand it to me.
But that feeling has a twin, growing from the same root: I can know everything. Psychoanalysis calls this second one omniscience. In adult life it usually sounds like this: I have to know everything.
You will recognize it immediately if you carry it. Not being able to let a thing go until you work out why someone spoke to you in a certain tone. Reading every review on the internet before buying a kettle. Two in the morning, still searching your symptoms online. Sitting in a meeting where one word goes past you, and feeling something clench.
Curiosity looks identical from the outside, but curiosity can be put down. You get interested, you get distracted, you are perfectly fine. The need to know everything cannot be put down — it has to be finished.
And it can never be finished, because we are small and the world is not. Most of what happens near you will never be explained to your satisfaction. Why your neighbor moved. Why a friendship cooled. What your father was really thinking. A great deal will simply stay unexplained. Some people can’t accept that. The missing answer does no harm by itself; the harm comes from refusing to live without one. That refusal keeps them frustrated, and, as the next scene shows, the frustration turns into anger at other people.
What happens to your voice when you don’t follow?
Here is the scene where this belief shows itself. Two people are talking, and one of them is getting angry because he does not understand what the other is saying.
Look at it plainly and it makes no sense at all. The one who didn’t understand is the one who is angry. If that is you, why should missing the point put heat in your chest? “I’m not following you” is a complete sentence, and you are allowed to leave it there and go get a coffee.
Instead there is the sigh, the clipped tone, the “no, but what do you actually mean.” The temperature in the room climbs two degrees.
Underneath the sigh sits a sentence nobody ever says out loud: I am supposed to know this. And when the explanation will not go in, the frustration does not stay inside this one conversation. It spreads: this person makes no sense, the news makes no sense, nothing about the way the world works makes sense. There is an easy way out of all of it, one simple thought: there is something here I don’t know yet. And that is precisely the thought that will not come.
Why does the blame end up on the other person?
When you do not understand something but believe you should, confusion quickly becomes shame: “If I cannot follow this, there must be something wrong with me.”
Because that conclusion is painful, the mind looks for another explanation. Anger provides one: the problem is no longer that you do not understand; the problem is that the other person is explaining badly.
Then that thought comes out as blame.
Psychoanalysis calls this move projection. When you cannot bear to feel confused or inadequate, you experience your own shame and frustration as something the other person is doing to you. You may even feel they are making it difficult on purpose, or looking down on you. So instead of saying, “I do not understand,” you say, “You are not explaining this properly. You are not making any sense. Anyone would be lost.” The accusation protects you from the shame of not knowing. But from then on, the conversation is no longer about what they meant. It is about what they did wrong.
Sometimes the complaint is fair. Some people genuinely do explain badly. So use the heat as a signal. When you hear yourself say, hotly, “You’re not making any sense,” stop before you argue any further and ask yourself: am I ashamed, right now, that I don’t know?
Why is “I don’t know” so expensive to say?
For most people, most of the time, it costs very little. You say the three words, someone explains, and the world carries on turning.
But if your self-worth depends on being the person who understands, those three words feel like a threat to who you are. Admitting confusion makes you feel exposed or inferior. Anger feels safer: it lets you keep feeling like the person who understands, and it puts the failure on someone else.
It all happens very quickly. You miss the meaning. You take that as proof that something is wrong with you. You push that shame away and get annoyed at the speaker instead. By the time you notice you are angry, the earlier steps are already over.
Have you ever said “I don’t know” and left it there?
Nobody has ever read a paragraph like this one and thought, right then, I’ll stop needing to know things. The belief does not give way to reasoning, because it formed in infancy, long before you could reason at all.
It gives way instead to experience, gathered slowly. You didn’t understand, and you said so, and nothing fell apart. You sat with a question that stayed open, and an hour later you were still yourself. Enough of those and the old belief loosens its grip. It never gets defeated — it gets outgrown.
That means the change comes in very small steps. So start with one small step.
The next time somebody loses you completely, say it out loud — I don’t know what you mean — and then stop there. Don’t ask them to explain it again, and don’t tell them they’ve explained it badly. Don’t turn it into a joke, and don’t attach a reason about being tired or the room being loud. Just the sentence, and then quiet.
Then watch what your body does with the quiet. Maybe nothing much. Maybe a small squirm, an urge to fill the silence, or to give the excuse you promised yourself you wouldn’t give. If discomfort turns up, don’t argue with it, because the discomfort is the useful part. It shows you that the oldest part of you, the part formed in infancy, is still at work, still expecting the world to explain itself to you.
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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