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What pulls you out of your equilibrium? What makes you so angry that you can’t control yourself?
One of my students has fits of anger. Her life is going from anger to anger, with no chance for a break.
Now, I could be condescending, I could be unsympathetic, or helpful and compassionate. But I find it more beneficial for everyone involved, including you, if I share with you what I have done.
As a rule, I use my own life, my own experiences, as a laboratory, a test laboratory, to shed light to what happens to people when they are angry, resistant, unwilling, or any one of the frequent ways of being.
I don’t choose what to deal with, and I don’t choose when to deal with it. In real laboratories they need to create life-like circumstances, and 90% of research money is spent on creating that, and 90% of errors come from the same source.
Instead, I use MY life, my experiences, but I look at them through the eyes of a researcher, with the tools of a researcher.
Today, I had the good fortune to deal with anger. The mad dog.
The ‘foaming by the mouth, out of control, wanting to kill, feel shame afterwards’ type of anger.
At present, there are only two people who can, predictably, reliably, every time, push the trigger that sends me to that ugly place. My mother lived at that place while she lived. At least when I was around. I was a trigger for her, or better said, I pushed some trigger, unconscious to me, unconscious to her. She beat me to pulp, every time.
Today, with my landlord, and last night with an ex-employee of mine. I managed to stay conscious, and watched the events that unfolded from the sideways, the Observer’s position. I watched the screaming, watched the words, watched the emotions, even heard some of the thoughts. Powerful.
If you can go through any upheaval, any emotional journey with your eyes open ‘bilocating’, being in your head AND in the Observer’s position, then the journey will be useful. Thereafter if you can forgo justifying yourself and your behavior, you have taken the first step towards self-control, self-determination.
And if you can forgo beating yourself up, feeling shame, or saying ‘here I go again’ then you are on the path to becoming a human being.
Having observed the thoughts, the emotions, the behavior, you now have a lot of information, that may be sufficient for you to find your trigger.
I have found that the trigger, in all MY angry episodes. is a thought: ‘I don’t matter. I am inconsequential, I don’t count.’
Now, as painful as that thought may be…
…the truth is that you don’t matter. That you are inconsequential, and you don’t count. Never have, never will… count in the eyes of others.
Never have, or almost never have. And never will.
The whole Universe is based on the rule that living things should have a number one priority: their own survival, number two: the survival of the species.
Only humans have a pretense that this should be different. This is mainly lip service. Religious standard, etc.
People only care about as much as it is in their self-interest.
I like the joke that is says this the best:
‘The gypsy kid falls into the latrine. The mother is ready to jump after him to get him out. The father says: just let it go… we’ll make another one.’
I know it flies in the face of all the fake morals of humanity, but that joke is in harmony with the law of the Universe.
Now, if you can accept that you don’t matter to others, then comes the second issue:
That you don’t matter to others doesn’t mean that you should not matter to you. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t matter to existence, whatever existence is.
Which means, now, that you have given up trying to live through others, to matter to others, to try to please others, you can turn to where you have some power, and declare that you matter to you.
Once you do that, life magically and dramatically changes. You experience the peace of being. You can count on yourself, on what you do, and that’s what you can count on. No promises, no obligations, no expectations from others.
And you don’t owe anyone anything either.
You need to take care of yourself.
And if AFTER that you want to help someone, or care about others, be my guest. But not before and not instead, unless, of course, you are knowingly committing to being miserable.
Most of us grew up with this affliction: the people who adopted us, or gave birth to us didn’t seem to care much. Or at all. Or, as we said it, Not enough.
No one had the courage and honesty to tell us that they are not obliged to care. They never promised to, and even if they did, it was counter to the law of the Universe, where their job was to take care of themselves.
When there is a choice, the mandatory choice is to stay alive, even if it means the death of your offspring or the death of your charge.
All fables, movies, heroic stories are created to dupe you into being miserable, angry, disappointed, all the time.
Start mattering to yourself. Everything else is a lie… fake… fraud… trap… give it up.
PS: we all have that same trigger. Some of us react with anger. Some of us have issues with trust, patience, or defiance and belligerence. I’ll show it to you that I matter… wrongful pride.
These issues are stuck. And releasing them, so you can have a choice how you’ll be when the trigger is pushed gives you choice for your entire life.
The 3rd phase activators can deal with these stuck ways or reacting.
Release your trigger finger
