The sadomasochistic contract goes like this. The sadist says, I can do whatever I want to you, because I know you won’t leave me. The masochist says, You can do whatever you want to me, as long as you don’t leave me.

In the kink world, “masochism” means getting pleasure from pain. But in the mental health world, it refers to something very different: a chronic, unconscious need for punishment, and all the things a person does to indulge that need—unconsciously motivated mistakes, losses, self-defeating behaviors, regrettable remarks, anything that will trigger an authoritarian response from within, and/or a retaliation from without.

Kink is not to be pathologized, and people who enjoy it don’t have to fear that therapy will take their kinks away. But kink should be a free choice, an informed and deliberate selection among the options for a healthy sex life. Your submissiveness or sexual masochism might be an unchosen temperament that you discover inside yourself, but the erotic exercise of it ought to be a free choice.

Masochism outside the sexual sphere—an ongoing, dynamic need for punitive suffering—generally has no redeeming value. You might suppose it serves as a spur to achievement, but that’s just compulsion, not the voluntary embrace of work for work’s own intrinsic goodness. You might use it to assuage guilt, but that reinforces the guilt without addressing its irrational roots and its basic injustice. You might use punishment to stay connected to a parent whose love was autocratic and severe in a way that felt reassuringly firm and unmistakably present, but that prevents a healthier form of love from developing in its place. The need for punishment is a relic of old defenses that have come to cost more than they’re worth.

The way out involves correctly labeling the masochism as an old solution to an old problem, reinforcing its connection to the past that explains it. That was then; this is now. So there’s a new opportunity to settle things differently, in a less moralistic way, geared to the facts at hand, not to the old situation and its more primitive world of tyranny and hierarchy. Long ago, that world taught you that a cosmic balance would only be maintained if you contributed sacrifices to it, in the form of large chunks of your personal pain. This has long since turned out not to be true, but the masochism somehow got locked-in by a hidden contract that runs on misguided loyalty to the child parts-of-self that first signed onto it. It may also be enforced by an equally unconscious hope of eventual rescue-from-outside, so that breaking the contract (giving up the need for punishment) is linked to despair about rescue and guilt about disloyalty.

The present masochism gets dissolved by reaching for the past, where the explanation lies, and the future, where the possibilities are. In the future, I will one day die—and my renewed awareness of this finitude wakes me to the fact that I might-as-well let go of the old need for suffering. Also in the future, but closer to the present, are all the nights and days I still might enjoy if I can dissolve the masochistic pact in a solvent stronger than fear, which is love. I am more loyal to my child self, not less loyal, if I dissolve the contract I signed as a little kid and replace it with loving nurturance and protection, the free gift from my adult self to this terrified inner kid. The long-awaited rescue from outside is really a rescue from inside, because it’s from a part of me—but it is from outside the child part, as its source is the grown-up self I have become in the long meantime. Therapy helps to direct resources to this loving adult self, rather than let those current resources get routinely burned-up in the service of the old masochistic machinery. The well-resourced adult self is better able to bestow those resources, as loving-kindness, onto the child parts of you that need it most.

At the job interview, the people asking the questions are usually searching for a particular experience they want to have with an applicant in the interview itself. The one who can give them that experience usually gets the job. What they want is an interaction, but it’s also a display. They want to have a conversation in which their specific, actual questions really reach the new person (that’s the interaction part). The questions evoke answers presented with a calm exuberance that’s a pleasure to watch (that’s the display). In music, the Italian phrase con brio means “with spirit, with vigor.” This kind of animated, engaged demeanor arises when the applicant has both confidence and expertise—a combination that usually comes from work experience, so it tends to count as evidence of work experience. Resumes, too, are evidence of work experience, but not everyone who has done a job has also learned from it, internalized its procedures and its ethos, and achieved good feelings about their ability to do it well in the future. Those are what the people doing the hiring are looking for in the interview, and the best evidence for it are answers that match the interviewers’ questions; that are focused on the concrete content of the job’s actual entailments (rather than abstractions about what kind of job it is), but aren’t entirely limited to that; and that show some degree of enjoyment from the applicant that springs from the pleasure of being both interested in something and good at it.

Applicants for teaching jobs are often advised, wisely, to treat the interview like a lesson, and to teach the interviewers about the way the job works and how to do it well. But this advice can apply to many other kinds of work, too—not just jobs in education. The teaching frame of mind, the Teacher role, can take you out of your ego-driven worry about how you’re being perceived, because it helps you to focus on the material at hand and the communication process. Value judgments and the fear of embarrassment, imaginary comparisons of yourself to others, worry about rejection or failure—these should be crowded-out by the enjoyable business of sharing what you know. One of the best indicators of your likely success is that the interview was fun. If it wasn’t, you might not like the job itself, either, in which case you’ve “dodged a bullet” by not getting it. The capacity to enjoy the interview not only bespeaks a confidence that comes from competence, it also suggests you’ll enjoy the work itself, which is associated with better performance. A hiring is a contract between employer and employee, and the enjoyment of an interview is a good sign that both parties may well benefit. If you feel qualified, stay in touch with your desire for the job, with your knowledge of the field, and with the pleasure you take in excelling at this particular type of work. It will probably show.

People cheat when they feel cheated. They lie when they feel lied to, and they steal when they feel robbed. Some of that springs from a need for cosmic balance, where I pay-forward whatever I suffered that should not have been my fate. But some of it is a communication, where my behavior is meant to inscribe on the walls of the universe: this thing I do to others, is what was done to me.

Compulsive shoplifting, for example, can be a kind of broadcast to the world, silently announcing that I have been deprived of my due. Typically, the stolen good was not a material object but a form of experience, some crucial, human relational need that I now despair of ever meeting. Why the despair? Because of too many failed attempts to get hold of that primal good, and because the critical period has passed, in which the needful thing could have found its mark, by meaning just what I needed it to mean: that I am a good-enough person, in a good-enough world. If I can believe this belief, then a good-enough life-of-my-own can feel both permissible (fate will allow it) and feasible (I can manage it). If I doubt my own goodness and/or the goodness of people in general, it will be much harder for me to build an ongoing good experience of being myself. So, whence comes this necessary faith in the human good?

According to Heinz Kohut, what children need are parents who can supply two crucial developmental resources: first, a mother (figure) who mirrors our childhood grandiosity and affirms it for us, and second, a father (figure) whom we can idealize and look up to, identifying with him in an aspirational way. Kohut saw these two needs as ordered, both chronologically and in their relative importance. He also saw childhood and youth as eras that often afford us second chances to get what we need, or, if things go poorly, a new round of trauma (from deprivation or other emotional injury). A step-parent, say, can step in and make things much better, or much worse.

In the 1970’s, psychologist Urie Brofenbrenner made an observation which has often been quoted, and deserves even more notice today: “In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody’s got to be crazy about that kid.” This Somebody need not be the original parent (biological or adoptive) or a step-parent; it can be, say, a relative, a guidance counselor, or a teacher — often an art teacher, perhaps because art is nearer to the emotions than most other subject areas taught in schools. But the changes in institutional culture of the past two decades have made it more risky and difficult for teachers to show special interest in troubled students who may need it. Among the religious, clergy can be well placed to show this kind of individualized interest, but they, too, have become understandably risk-averse as the stakes of being misunderstood have sharply risen. Librarians sometimes took on this kind of role in children’s lives, with often wonderful results, but smartphones and the internet have so fully replaced books that librarians are fading from view.

If a community is in sufficiently rough shape, an idealistic nonprofit might come along and offer a program that pairs at-risk youth with ethically ambitious adults who help them along in caring ways. But those programs don’t always appear, and not all childhood neglect or abuse happens in poorer cities and towns that are in obvious trouble. Much of American literature is about the family traumas of the middle class, and even the wealthy are often very desperate people — in part because they already have the money that everyone else assumes is the solution to every problem, yet their pain continues. “Spoiled,” remember, does not just mean “pampered.” It means a kid has been given everything except what’s most important: wholesome loving care. It is, after all, a metaphor about rancid milk — because material abundance paired with emotional scarcity can spoil a person’s capacity to believe that real love (which psychoanalytic language symbolizes as the breast milk of a loving Mother) exists anywhere.

Some kids who are deprived of one or more of Kohut’s two essential relational supplies (a mirroring mother figure and an idealizable father figure) become hyper-competent, fiercely independent adolescents. Later in life, they can have trouble coupling-up, because romance involves giving what they never received, and because the offer of love feels strange and dangerous to them. By contrast, some other deprived kids remain dependent for decades, relentlessly hoping the caregivers they need will come along, or indeed, that their own feelings and behaviors will eventually transform the attachment figures they do have into the wise and generous ones they still crave. Then there are those who combine elements of each, presenting as adults with impressive professional success while remaining lonely and emotionally entangled with their withholding parents. These people are ahead of their peers in the outside world, but behind them on the inside.

Much trouble can be avoided if several afflicted kids find each other in time to form a group, where they can do their best to raise one another. But this is hard, because independent kids are reluctant to depend on anyone, including peers; dependent kids may welcome fellowship, but their resentments can get displaced and wreck the very friendships they have loaded with meaning and value. An adolescent friend group, with its intense attachments, passions, and impulses, can work wonders or exacerbate personal trouble, depending which personality elements get validated within it, and how the larger world responds. Plenty of movies are about the various storylines that such a group can be found living through, though it’s rare that a clique of teenagers manages to learn, from a film, how to avoid the pitfalls in its path. Art might seem to promise lessons of useful prudence, but it mainly offers us a deeper understanding of those losses and mistakes we’ve already endured.

The benefits of therapy derive from insight on the one hand, and the therapeutic relationship on the other. Between the two, it’s usually the relationship that does the most good — but it’s a relationship built on a series of conversations whose main ingredients are the patient’s stories of the past and the recent past, expressions of feelings in the present, and interpretations that come from the therapist or from the patient (in other words, insight). Some of what gets illuminated and reframed is the experience of not-getting what we needed. It might seem like a waste of painful effort, to recount what you already know about old yearnings and losses. But it often turns out that the telling is itself a healing process, when someone is listening with consistently reliable respect and empathy. The teller and the listener can then reshape what the story means, shifting control of that meaning from the outside world of the past into the inner world of the present.

I don’t believe in laziness. Instead, I believe in internal conflict. For me, there’s no perverse trait that makes people avoid necessary work. Instead there are, as Freud taught, various parts of the self, some younger and more primitive, others older and more developed, and these want different things that conflict with each other. I’ve discussed the issue in this blog before, but I want to explore another side of it now.

Perhaps there are tasks you’ve been avoiding, even though you believe they would do you a lot of good—maybe you keep not-doing some prescribed physical therapy, or postponing a consultation with a psychiatrist, or putting off a reckoning with some career decision that keeps knocking at the door. Why aren’t you making the moves you wish you would make?

Well, check whether there’s any hidden rage that might be in the way. Are you more pissed off than you tend to suppose? If you take a look underneath your de facto boycott of what ought to come next, do you find some smoldering archaic anger blocking your progress? Maybe, maybe not—but anger can be hard to recognize in yourself if you disapprove of it, because you want to avoid any self-critical shame that might come from realizing you’re mad without having a rock-solid justification. If your anger is big, irrational, daunting, primal, disproportionate, scary—it may have those characteristics because it’s coming from a primitive part of self that has big feelings, big enough to be overwhelming. That’s why it’s repressed: the rageful child part of you is afraid its own anger would vaporize the world if you were to feel it in full; the more adult parts are ashamed because this same anger is so unreasonable, so savage, so… childlike.

Wounded child parts of self tend to feel that they live in a broken world, a cosmos cracked in half by the injustice of not getting the perfect parents that they needed (and sometimes, not even the good-enough parents). They feel cheated. Their rage is a cry for justice—that is the beautiful aspect of it, which should be respected. The downside is that feeling cheated by life tends to stop us from making necessary improvements. If I am stuck in the bitterness of feeling screwed-over, I may be living inside the misconception that any progress I dare to make would be a betrayal of the wounded child inside me. Adults boycott their own lives, they flounder and self-sabotage and procrastinate, because of a beautiful, bittersweet, tragic loyalty to their own grievances from long, long ago. The unwritten law of such a life is: If I go ahead and start building my own life for myself, it will mean that I approve of all the wrongs that were done to me in the past.

But the inner child is not actually gratified by the adult’s refusal to live a full, open-hearted life. The inner child is simply afraid that such a life would erase forever her claim to some eventual cosmic justice. So the way to get free of this prison-house is deliberately to seek out the inner child, and provide the necessary loving nurturance directly from your adult self, with reassuring words of warmth and dignity and tenderness. Don’t be a tough guy. Stop identifying with your Spartan high standards for a few minutes and give that kid some wholesome generous attention, because somebody has to, and you’re the only one who is in there deep enough to do the job. Remember a time when you were hurt or scared, and your parent either stayed away, or made it worse. Now watch yourself in your mind’s eye, the grownup you’ve become, walking onto the stage set and going straight to the suffering child and holding that child, saying soothing words of commitment and connection and safety. For example: “This stuff that happened was not fair. But I am here now, and I got you. I can’t betray you, because I am you; I’m you all grown up. And I’m with you, and I always will be. I love you.”

Now, watch the kid go to sleep at last, all done crying, inside your heart, where there’s a bed with a night-light and a teddy bear and all the good stuff kids need. Now walk quietly out of the room. Now turn back toward the current moment, your adult life, your present opportunities to build and to repair and to explore.

Action and learning and success are no longer stained with the implication that you have somehow capitulated to a corrupt world-order. You may have thought growth would require more cynicism, a devil’s bargain you persistently refused. It turns out, however, that less cynicism is what did the trick—not getting colder and more jaded (which is what scoffers mean when they yell ‘Grow up!’), but the opposite: giving that furious sulking inner infant your heartfelt affection, without scorn, without shame, without despair. Forward movement is your own prerogative, an exploration of what the environment affords and what your own gifts and experiences can equip you to attempt. You are free to live as best you can, knowing that though you will someday die, you do at least get to find out who you are, and to see what feels worthwhile, by earnest trial-and-error. It is time for that serious form of play we call work.