Self-Understanding

The Label That Loves You Back

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

Twenty to midnight, one lamp on, and Neve is further into this book than she has been into anything in two years.

She reaches a list. Six words, a paragraph under each, read the way you read a horoscope for somebody else.

The fourth one stops her.

It says the container is where a family puts what it cannot hold, and gets called unflappable in speeches, warmly. It says nobody asks what is in it, because that is not what containers are for.

Neve is crying before she has decided anything about it, the quiet kind, where the page goes soft and you keep reading anyway.

She was nine when she learned to read her father’s car door from inside the house. She has been thanked, plenty, in the thirty-two years since. She has never been described.

She says it out loud in the empty room, feels ridiculous, says it again.

I’m the Container.

It fits like something tailored. She sleeps better that night than she has in months, and that has to be said first, because it is true and because it matters.

The hunger was never for a category

Take that relief seriously, or everything after it is somebody in a chair telling a crying woman that her word is a problem.

The hunger underneath a label is not for a category. It is for evidence that you exist emotionally.

Some people get it in ordinary supply. An adult crouches to eye level and says you’re really angry about that, and the child learns three things at once: there is something in here, it has a name, and it cost nothing to have.

Others get a house where closeness ran on a meter. Attention was available and it was purchased: with usefulness, with being easy, with not needing much. Nobody announced the price; you worked out which coins went in.

What Kohut called the gleam

Heinz Kohut, who founded the strand of psychoanalysis called self psychology, named what goes missing in that house. A self is not issued at the factory; it gets built out of responses, and one of them is mirroring: a child’s need to be looked at with recognition, to find their own existence confirmed in somebody’s face. He wrote about the gleam in the mother’s eye, and as with Winnicott’s “good-enough mother,” the phrase is of its period and the finding is not.

Kohut also gave us selfobject: another person experienced not as a separate someone but as a function of one’s own self. In some houses the arrow reverses, the child becomes the thing that steadies, and nobody is looking back the other way.

That child does not grow up starved of love. They grow up starved of reflection, a different nutrient, and the deficit is specific. Not am I loved. Am I in here at all.

Fawning is shapeshifting. A label is the shapeshifting made permanent.

Pete Walker, a therapist who has written extensively about complex trauma, put a fourth response into circulation alongside fight, flight and freeze: fawn. Fawning is getting safe by being useful and agreeable to whoever might hurt you. You become pleasing, fast, in the shape the room wants.

Arjun says yes a beat before the sentence has finished arriving. Easygoing here, competent and cool there, seventeen years old at his mother’s, and under it a dread of the friendly party question: so what are you like?

Which is where the label makes its offer. Instead of becoming a different thing in every room, you settle on one shape and call it a self. The improvising stops, and so does the dread.

It feels like progress. It is the same move in better packaging.

Borrowed interiority

There is a name for what the hunger reaches for. Borrowed interiority: the attempt to locate your own emotional existence inside somebody else’s — inside a label, a diagnosis, a community, a type — because you were never given the confidence that your own counts.

It feels like connection. It works like a loan.

What makes it fit so beautifully is the trouble with it. That paragraph was cut to fit thousands of people, of whom Neve is one. That is why it was there for her at twenty to midnight, and why it cannot be her.

You have published a job description

A person who announces what they are has pre-negotiated their own use.

Nobody has to flatten them. The flattening arrived pre-installed, with their own signature at the bottom, and everyone nearby accepts it, which is not villainy but manners. When somebody tells you what they are, the polite thing is to believe them.

Two effects follow. The first: it makes you easier to objectify and harder to disappoint at once, because whether you will absorb this is no longer a live question, absorbing is not something you do. It is something you are.

The second curdles. It turns every act of care from a gift into an obligation you volunteered for. Gratitude answers a choice, and nobody thanks anyone for a fact. Neve noticed months later: the thanking had stopped, the way you stop thanking the floor.

The same compression, pointed inward

Emotional objectification is compression: a living, particular interior squeezed into a general-purpose function. Nobody has ever felt what you feel, in the way you feel it, for the reasons you feel it. Anyone can be the calm one. Only you are you.

Self-objectification is that same compression, performed by you on yourself. You press your unrepeatable experience into the category, and whatever does not fit gets filed as noise. Most of it, because most of what it is like to be you has never been described by anybody.

Without softening it: the self-objectifier denies the uniqueness of their own interior, does it personally, and calls the result self-knowledge. Somebody doing it to you at least has the excuse of standing outside. You were inside.

Mine was low-maintenance. An adult I admired said it about me when I was fifteen, in a voice I was not meant to hear, and I wore it for twenty-two years. It meant being looked after made me itch, which I understood as independence, and it cost the people who loved me the ordinary pleasure of doing something for me.

One note on the word somebody will bring up

Codependency started narrow and useful, in alcoholism treatment, and Melody Beattie’s work gave a great many people the first accurate description of their own household they had read. Then it spread to cover nearly any investment in somebody’s wellbeing, and critics in family therapy and feminist scholarship have argued that it pathologizes ordinary care, aimed disproportionately at women.

So none of this is an argument against care. It is an argument about a description being adopted as an identity.

Verbs have to be carried out again tomorrow

The repair is not a vow of silence. It is grammatical, and more irritating than you want it to be.

I anchor things sometimes. Not I am the Anchor. I held things for people that winter. Not I’m the Container.

A noun just sits there being the case. A verb has to be carried out again tomorrow, which means it can go uncarried-out, which means there is a person in there making a call. Behavior can change. Identity has to be defended, and you will defend it with your Sundays.

And the first week of this feels like losing something, because it is. I hold things for people sometimes is worse than I’m the Container in every respect except accuracy. It leaves open the question that has been open since you were nine — what am I — and the leaving-open is the whole intervention.

So grieve it. It was the closest thing to being seen that anyone had offered.

Neve and Arjun were assembled out of patterns rather than out of anybody’s actual life, which is also why they will seem familiar.

One care note. If reading about fawning or about a childhood spent steadying other people brings up more than an article can hold, that is worth taking to a licensed therapist rather than to another page of this site. Naming a pattern is not the same as having somewhere to put it.