Waiting on Pet Peeves

I think most of us probably have at least a few "pet peeves." You know, those things that...just...get...under...your...skin and drive you up a wall.

One of my pet peeves is when I have to wait because of technology. It drives me nuts. For example, I get really annoyed when a computer I'm working on suddenly freezes up, even if it's only for five or ten seconds. Or, if my phone crashes, or is simply unresponsive for a few seconds. Or, if the batteries run out of my cordless mouse at work.

Those things might seem petty. Actually, they ARE petty -- none of those things is a Big Deal, but they annoy the crap out of me nonetheless.

On one hand, the fact that I get annoyed about certain inconsequential things is not a big deal. As I mentioned, I think most of us probably have our list of otherwise silly little things that tick us off. On the other hand, I feel like it's a pretty big waste of my energy to get all upset over these things. Aside from that, I don't do anything good for myself by letting those annoyances get the best of me: I'm pretty sure my blood pressure goes up, cortisol is released into my bloodstream, and my bad habit of getting angry gets reinforced. And to top it all off, it's really unpleasant for those around me.

Thus, I've decided it's something I can pay some attention to -- I can work to change my response to these annoyances.

My back is bothering me, and so I'm working from home today on my laptop, which is a few years old. It hadn't been booted up in a week or so, and it took some time to finish configuring, because oh yeah, I forgot it had to install those Windows updates, and then it did this weird loop back into reconfiguring itself, and then...I could feel myself getting pissed off about it: THIS IS SO ANNOYING!!

Then I noticed myself having that response, and it was like letting air out of an overly full balloon. Instant relaxation. Then, on cue, a simple thought passed through my mind: "Maybe try just sitting and waiting for the computer to finish doing what it needs to do."

So I did. I folded my hands and waited. That was it. There was no anger, no frustration...just...waiting. It was strange to feel the absence of anger in the face of such a familiar, negative stimulus, but there I was. I had freed myself from my self-imposed prison of anger.

I know I'll have to focus on letting myself out of prison over and over again before it becomes second nature, but I'll get there. And for the time being, anyway, it was progress!

And progress felt great.

"Always Stay in Your Own Movie"

"Always stay in your own movie," a statement uttered by the late Ken Kesey, is one of my favorites. Like all good nuggets of wisdom, it's a gift that keeps on giving: it's continuously instructive; it can be applied to any number of situations; and it speaks to many aspects of our personhood.

What does it mean to you?

To me, it means a lot. It reminds me that I, and I alone, am responsible for my actions. It's empowering: it reminds me that I choose my actions, whether I'm aware of it or not. It's scary: it reminds me that I am the captain of my own ship, so to speak, and am ultimately the only person in charge of my life's direction. If I'm not satisfied with something, the onus is on me, and no one else, to change it.

Most of all, perhaps, it reminds me to be mindful of the degree to which I am ensnared by other people's actions and opinions.

I recently posted a Carl Jung quote on Facebook that said, "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves." I've worked and spoken with quite a few people whose chief complaints include "other people" being annoying, ungrateful, shallow, self-centered, etc. You probably see it, too. There are memes all over the Internet, humorous enough, which echo the sentiment, "Other People Are The Worst."

LOL.

I agree that other people can be very annoying (haha), for a million different reasons. But I think such annoyances are also, as Mr. Jung implied, an important opportunity to turn one's focus back on oneself, and get curious about the annoyance. (This isn't always necessary, of course, because annoyance is usually just a fleeting experience. But if it's persistent, or if it compounds into frustration and anger and preoccupation, well, that's a lot of energy to be giving to something.) Get specific with yourself: "What is it exactly that is frustrating about this, as opposed to something I can just ignore or leave alone? Why is it exactly that I'm having a hard time just letting it be?"

I've posed these (and similar) questions to my clients, my acquaintances, and myself, and the responses have invariably opened up new and interesting avenues of discussion. A common theme among the responses, however, has been a heightened sense of Justice, i.e., what is Fair and Unfair.

"It isn't fair..."
"I can't believe..."
"Why would she say that..."
"How could he do that..."
"What was I supposed to do..?"
"People always take advantage of me..."
"People are so ungrateful..."

Et cetera.

Okay, folks, it's "tough love" time. I may lose some readers over this, but that's okay. I'm going to say this, because it's not anything I haven't had said to me -- and because it's true:

Most of the time, no one can do anything to you, or make you feel anything, without your permission. Most of the time, you are a willing participant in the experiences of your life. 

For some people, those words will feel empowering. For others, those words will feel like an attack.

Listen, I am not discounting the fact that horrible things can and do happen to us. They do. What I AM saying, though, is that many of us become all-too-easily attached to the Victim Mentality. The Victim Mentality represents a kind of fatalism, because at its core are the assumptions, "my life is hard; people always treat me badly; bad things always happen to me; I never got the opportunity to do what I wanted to do; there is no way I can now live my life the way I want to..." Again, 'et cetera.'

The Victim Mentality is a thief. It steals your ability to perceive your own power.

Victim Mentality statements are nothing more than a systematic giving away of power. I'm here to assert there is always a choice. If something is lousy in your life, you can change it. I don't know how, because I don't know you, and I don't know your life. But what I DO know is this:

You have the power to walk away from anything that hurts you, diminishes you, or otherwise makes you unhappy. You have the power to make manifest what you want. 

All it takes is a willingness to accept the responsibility implicit in these statements, and the determination to take back the reigns of your life from the Victim Mentality.

Boxing Jello

When I was younger and having a really hard time, I would try to change the way I felt through sheer, willful force. I would perform mental gymnastics that would make a Russian Olympian jealous in my futile attempts at retooling my savage emotional life. Initially, I didn't realize my efforts were just that -- futile. And now that I've learned the lesson, I've come to think of that process as being akin to punching a giant cube of jello: it might yield at first, but it just coagulates around your fist and reforms after you pull back; and all you, the puncher-in-earnest, are left with is your frustration: the jello remains.

The first step for me was to realize that hey, maybe I should just let myself feel however I happen to feel at any given moment. That, in turn, opened the door to the important realization that negative feelings, even powerful ones such as anger, are not intrinsically bad. I had affixed a lot of meaning to anger in particular; I believed -- very strongly -- it was just that: bad. When you believe something to be bad, you generally try to avoid it; and I had practiced a lifetime of avoiding anger and other negative feelings -- to deleterious effects, as it turned out.

The problem with attempts to outright reject, change, or avoid thoughts and feelings is that it doesn't really work. The harder you push, the harder they push back; your efforts just amplify their force. Avoidance seems to do the trick, because you sort of don't have to experience the feeling for awhile. But instead of going away, the feeling gathers strength, becomes toxic, and forces its way out, one way or the other -- maybe as explosive, uncontrolled rage, or passive-aggressiveness, or drug abuse, or overeating, or under eating, or self-harm, etc.

And that's the tragic thing, folks: when you try to avoid, reject, or otherwise forcefully control your feelings, they gather strength and seize control of you.

So what's a person to do? To be sure, it's an uphill battle, for a couple reasons. The first is that the behavior pattern I described above is complicated, and can be difficult to change; it can take time, effort, and patience. The other reason is that our society reinforces and encourages those behaviors. For example, men are supposed to square their jaw and "lock it up." Traditionally, in many cultures, men aren't supposed to talk about their feelings. They're supposed to be dominant, stoic. And if they fly into the occasional rage, punch a wall, scream at their partner, get into a fight, etc., well, then, boys will be boys, right? Drink a six pack on a Tuesday, and all is right with the world. Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be emotional. As a result of their "emotional dispositions," tradition holds, women are supposed to be irrational, manipulative, passive-aggressive, and have hidden agendas. As long as they're deferential, obsessed with their appearance, modest, into gossip, and really interested in shopping, what's the problem?

My view is that there's a big problem there. These roles, these "supposed to's," destroy people. These roles and rules render behaviors taboo which might otherwise promote clarity, calm, and health. God forbid, right? Not everyone fits into those tidy little buckets. I'd venture to say that, given the problems those roles create, no one actually fits into those tidy little buckets.

Our thoughts and feelings are part of us, but they are not our entire person, any more than our hands, feet, eyes, or nose are our entire person. When we get a head cold, our body lets us know what's happening; we get achy, we get a sore throat, we get tired. These "symptoms" are messages from our body, saying, "Hey! I need you to rest, drink lots of water, and dial it back a notch or two!" Our thoughts and feelings are messengers, too, and they operate in a similar manner. Instead of seeking to change or reject them, it's helpful, in my experience, to get curious about them: "Hey, I'm really sad, and I don't know why. What's that sadness trying to 'tell' me?"

That's it: acceptance, curiosity, and compassion. Have a good day, folks!

Anger

(Image from Google Images search of "anger." Subtitle: "A Rant on Anger & Ranting: Robots Don't Rant" comedyrants.com)

I have some disjointed thoughts on anger that I'd like to share.

Anger can be a very useful experience. Most of the time, anger incites us to action; that is, when we get angry about something, we usually feel impulses and think thoughts that involve us doing something about the situation about which we are angry. So in that regard, anger is adaptive and normal, you know? After all, sometimes we need to feel all fired up about something that isn't working for us before we can do something to change it.

Anger can be a very destructive force. There's a saying that goes something like, "Anger is like a hot coal: the only person who gets hurt by it is the one who holds onto it." And that's true. Anger that isn't somehow released gets sublimated into any variety of negative, even destructive (as I said) experiences. One of the laws of physics and nature is that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Similarly, buried anger (and buried emotions of any kind, for that matter) always find a way to the surface, whether it manifests as passive-aggressive behaviors, muddled thinking, or explosive, disproportional responses to frustrations, for example.

The habit of suppressing anger has a particularly destructive potential. Folks who don't know how to release their anger oftentimes exhibit frightening, abusive, or otherwise dysfunctional behavior. Such behavior can be directed outward to others, or inward toward themselves, and create all sorts of problems, issues, and heartache.

Anger is a powerful force, and is to be respected.

Anger, by my way of looking at it, is a "secondary emotion." That is, anger is usually an automatic response to an internal or external experience which leaves a person feeling powerless, vulnerable, helpless, confused, or sad. It is important to recognize and assume ownership of these more "primary" feelings, because they are usually the key to the anger's release.

More on this another time. Thanks for reading.