Ten Thousand Behaviors (Kim Hyung-kyung's Psychological Working-Through Essay)
Byun Chan-woo
I came across a book called Ten Thousand Behaviors by chance.
I read it bit by bit, and I'm gathering up here the passages I had folded corners on and underlined.
Because they are passages I need so badly these days..
I mean to take them as teachings for myself, and come back to read them often.
There were rather a lot of things I'd marked.. no, a lot of things about myself I need to fix.
So I'm going to split it into two posts. Of course I don't know how quickly those two blog posts will actually get written,
but in any case, I'm going to try once more at making an attempt toward change.
To borrow the book's language,
there are clear traces of "automatic, compulsive, repetitive pursuit" — lots of parts folded down and written over in the effort to mark and remember so many passages —
and as I tidy them up, I want to distinguish between the id and the ego inside me, and to let that ego soothe its own id well.
- Not doing what I've been doing
Life is elsewhere (change and working-through)
Psychoanalytic insight
develops the feeling we have about a person into stages — resentment, gratitude, awe, respect, and so on.
Each time insight uncovers distorted perceptions, immature ideas, or old survival strategies that had taken root inside the psyche (that even I didn't know about), it arrives like a small volcanic eruption.
A representative trauma:
Being sent as a little child to my mother's family = "Mom abandoned me"
The cognitive distortion of an 18-month-old "inner child"
-> The psychological move of dumping one's own anger onto mom and turning her into the perpetrator
Working-through
(Freud: "Analysis Terminable and Interminable")
is the work of reclaiming what we've turned away from; it is the process of making whole what we've denied. It is also the process that lets what was almost buried in the past become present, so that we can experience it as our own.
(Mark Epstein, "The Psychology of the Buddha")
To work through means that a person's perspective changes. If you try to change emotion rather than perspective, you might gain some short-term results. But you end up staying bound to the very emotion you were trying to escape, by clinging to it or trying to avoid it.
First, the way you see yourself changes, and then the way you see others. Then the frame through which you see the world changes, and only after that is a new identity formed.
Only through the working-through process could I notice what I had truly been wanting each time I dreamed "I want to live differently."
It was the need for self-realization. When the old patterns no longer fit my body, when old habits no longer suited the changed role, I wanted to live differently.
It was the need to respond to life flexibly and efficiently, the need to live freely and fully, the need to integrate the inner pieces I'd fragmented and become my true self.
Change was not something you could get by changing the outward shape of life or your behaviors. It is achieved at the point where perception, perspective, and frames of thinking change — I could understand that through direct experience in working-through.
- That mind is my mind. (Not projecting, not externalizing)
During working-through, I completely changed my way of thinking. Before, when I saw someone behave selfishly, I would judge "that person is selfish" and easily pin the problem on their selfishness.
But "what is this mind of mine that feels uncomfortable while judging that person as selfish?" That was the first step of taking the problem as my own and looking for the solution inside.
"What is this mind of mine that feels uncomfortable in this situation?"
"What is this mind of mine that is uncomfortable with that person's aggressiveness?"
When I turned the lens this way, the emotion or inner tendency I saw in the other person was found inside me.
Even when a fierce reaction came up over someone's wrongdoing, it was "my anger", and even within a voice I felt to be just criticism, there was "my envy".
The discomfort I feel coming from the other person is my own shape. The same goes for behavior like feeling a sadistic pleasure by exerting power and control over the other.
First, before reflexively blaming someone else, try holding thoughts like "so what, I'm the same" or "I'm even worse",
or "that mind is my mind".
Also, instead of saying "I am angry" or "I am anxious", say "anger surged up inside me" or "anxiety came rolling in".
Externalization is like an emotion built on top of dualistic logic that judges things as right or wrong, and on top of the narcissism that believes "I am right".
Like a toddler who's just learning to walk falling down and smacking the floor saying "bad floor!", it's a leftover of the infant survival strategy from when one had no power to solve any problem oneself.
As the saying goes, "You have to come out of the dream to see the dream." Only after stepping out of projection and externalization did I realize that I had been living as if something that should take ten seconds was a big deal — getting angry at kimchi broth or a wet towel.
"The other person's fault is their share; my solution is my share."
From a Buddhist perspective, who knows — maybe the other person is taking on bad karma themselves in order to dissolve mine.
- Letting envy settle also took several stages.
The first stage was recognizing that my envy was an emotion with no real-world basis — one that came from infantile "penis envy" and was repressed into the unconscious. The second stage was recognizing that it's not that something is missing in me, but that there is something special given only to me.
- Rigidity is a property of a corpse. (Not defending, not controlling)
I was filling up my notebook with the information he was telling me. "Well then, what is it inside me that liked that tour guide so much?" Without question, it was the defense mechanism of intellectualization.
"Chung-tam-hae-pan" — looking like a four-character idiom — is a word made of the first syllables of advising, scouting, interpreting, and judging; and when you put them all together, you can see they're the language of defense.
Advising is projecting onto others the virtues we should be practicing in our own lives;
scouting is guarding against the danger factors that might exist in the other person;
interpreting is draping our own thoughts and values over other people;
and judging is the act of evaluating and sizing up others however we please.
None of us has the right to do any of this, yet we do it all the time — we can see that. Behind every one of these acts is anxiety, the feeling that we are only safe if we do them.
- "Automatic, compulsive, repetitive pursuit" was work addiction.
While I was absorbed in work, my mind was at ease; but after a deadline, or when I had no work, my mind got uncomfortable. It felt as though my existence only had meaning when I was working diligently, and I wanted to use time sparingly. I had similar tendencies around information. Believing that was the baseline attitude for living as a member of society, I would devour material, and when I stepped away I would worry about getting too disconnected.
I was an early adopter when it came to machine civilization as well. I believed that the better I used cutting-edge tech, the more capable and useful a person I was. But at that time I didn't know that such behavior is related to unconscious competitiveness, anxiety, and a sense of being left out.
"Automatic, compulsive, repetitive pursuit" is an impulse of the id, and Freud suggests that the ego must keep controlling it. When the ego fails to play that role and gets dragged along by the id, it becomes impulsive, and as the ego keeps an eye on the superego it begins to feel guilt. The repetition of impulsive acts and guilt is the nature of every addictive behavior, and it is a hard prison of the mind to escape.
(Suddenly — at the moment when conflict in the mind is felt. The point where one recognizes that superego determines whether something is an impulse.)
When I spent working-through time muttering "not living hard", watching the drive is like watching a baby playing beside a railroad track.
No matter how hard you live, if your mind feels empty or uncomfortable, it's compulsive drive; and even if you live slowly, if your mind is at ease and at home with itself, isn't that diligence? "Live diligently, but don't be attached to anything."
- In psychoanalytic terms, "separation"
is said to be the first psychology an infant acquires in the process of recognizing that it is not one body with its mother. To become a true adult, one has to psychologically separate from parents, family, and the like, and also dismantle the inner image one has built of them. That is why every myth in the world begins its story with the hero leaving his or her community.
Bearing the narcissistic rage of the one being rejected
As I revised old behavior patterns and separated from infantile dependence and boundary-crossing relationships, at first there was a kind of loneliness. Refusing things was uncomfortable, and I still had the urge to explain my position.
